Un sermón disimulado: el Razonamiento del monge con el cavallero de fray Gauberte

The Cancionero de Llavia, or de Llabiá (86*RL), is the only surviving example of Fray Gauberte’s Razonamiento del monge con el cavallero (ID6006), according to the heading of the incunabulum that precedes the poem in question. Following the prevailing opinion of critics, it is proposed that the author be identified as Fray Gauberte de Vagad, a Cistercian monk and chronicler of King Ferdinand the Catholic, also author of the famous Crónica de Aragón (1499). In addition to his historiographical work, the Benedictine was also a poet, leaving us half a dozen works in verse, distributed in both manuscript and printed sources. Such is the case of our Razonamiento, in which religious and moral themes are developed in a contrast between the monk himself and another character, a knight who embodies the courtly ideal in its most worldly dimension. Rather than engaging in a dialogue with his interlocutor, Fray Gauberte uses the knight as a counterpoint or pretext to introduce the issues he wishes to address, at the heart of which is free will, the true foundation of human behaviour. Thus, the Razonamiento becomes a kind of sermon in verse, since its content and rhetorical structure are more akin to the cultured homiletics of the courtly sphere than to the pre-Renaissance treatise in the form of dialogue. After briefly introducing our author and his poem, this work provides a critical edition of the Razonamiento.