«El buen saber es la llaue»: difusión y uso pedagógico de una redondilla religiosa atribuida a Juan Álvarez Gato

In his Quinquagenas de la nobleza de España (1555), Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) recalls a few verses his teacher provided him as a model for learning to write: “En esta vida burlada / el buen saber es la llave, / y aquel que se salva sabe / que el otro no sabe nada”. This article aims to reconstruct the textual transmission of this doctrinal redondilla, whose earliest manuscript evidence is preserved in the personal songbook of Juan Álvarez Gato (MH2-87, fol. 66v). Starting from a courtly literary framework, the investigation traces the widespread dissemination and reception of the stanza throughout the Hispanic world, from its circulation in peninsular manuscripts and printed Golden Age sources to its survival in the oral traditions of Latin America, with docu- mented variants ranging from Puerto Rico to Argentina. Drawing upon this textual trajectory, the article proposes the hypothesis that these verses were used in educational contexts as part of a well-established pedagogical practice between the 15th and 16th centuries: the incorporation of short stanza forms –couplets, redondillas and quintillas– as mnemonic resources to support catechetical teaching for children.