«Et nuestro señor dios [...] Fizo commo el buen amigo»: The XLVIII Exemplary Tale of Count Lucanor and its equivalents (a re-reading)

Abstract

The narrative nucleus of the XLVIII Exemplary Tale of Count Lucanor, which is dedicated to friendship, is the result of a complex intertextual montage. It may be linked to the rst short story of the Disciplina clericalis (De dimidio amico) and its re-elaborated versions (i.e. the versions which were handed down by the Castigos y documentos del rey don Sancho and the Libro del caballero Zifar). Yet it was also integrated with some diegetic components from the second complementary short story by Pedro Alfonso (De integro amico), which was also functional to the typological reading proposed by Juan Manuel through Patronio in the comments. This latter expedient may be regarded as a result of another encounter with the narrative tradition related to friendly faith represented by the example of the «tres amigos». The example was handed down in Castilian in the Barlaam e Josaphat, which together with a series of rewritings of the three types of story in Medieval Latin exemplary literature offered a Christian allegorical interpretative model of the «proof of friendship» topos.