Cognitive Economy and Vernacular Labor in Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Proverbios morales

Scouring Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Proverbios morales for its insights into caste, class, and poetic practice in the fourteenth century, I argue that his wisdom poem attests to an emerging cognitive economy and the politicization of the Romance vernacular from its author’s unique perspective as a middle-class courtier writing at a time of great historical dynamism for Castilian Jewry. Drawing inspiration from Raymond William’s sociology of forms I home in on the pm’s bumptiously Hebraized soundscapes as a locus of penetrating social commentary on medieval ethnorace and the commodification of language.