Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor was arguably one of the great masterworks of early modern Spain. Although the work appears in five very different manuscript versions from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, most modern editions of El Conde Lucanor have neglected to account for the fact that it was part of a manuscript tradition, and that its meaning is substantially affected when its original forms are not taken in to account.

With Manuscript Diversity, Meaning, and Variance in Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor, Laurence de Looze demonstrates how the meaning of Juan...