By Julian Weiss
Within the 13th century, profound adjustments in Spanish society drove the discovery of clean poetic varieties by way of the hot clerical category. The time period mester de clerec?a (clerical ministry or provider) applies to a gaggle of narrative poems (epics, hagiography, romances) composed via university-trained clerics for the edification and leisure of the predominantly illiterate laity. those clerics, like Gonzalo de Berceo, understood themselves as cultural intermediaries, transmitting knowledge and values from the previous; whilst, they have been deeply fascinated with the most contentious and far-reaching adjustments in lay piety, and in financial and social buildings. the writer demanding situations the predominantly didactic method of the verse, in an try to historicize the class of the highbrow, as an individual stuck within the duality of the worlds of contingency and absolute values. The e-book may have a wide attract medievalists, partly as a result of issues lined (feudalism, gender, nationhood, and religion), partly simply because many poems are both variations from French and Latin or have opposite numbers in different literatures (e.g., the romances or Alexander and Apollonius, the miracles of the Virgin Mary). JULIAN WEISS is Professor of Medieval and Early glossy Spanish at King's university London.
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Extra resources for The 'Mester de Clerecia': Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile (Monografias A)
Sample text
Berceo’s Latin source is characteristically succinct and direct: the clerics ‘scientes eum satis irreligiosam vitam duxisse decreverunt extra cimiterium sepeliri debere’ (226). 19 In characteristically more theatrical style, Gautier has us imagine the gossiping clerics giving free rein to their moral revulsion and sense of institutional honour: Lors fu assez qui mesparla, lors fu assez qui dist dou pis. ‘C’est a bon droit qu’il est ocis, ce dit chascuns. ’ Del clergié fu li conseus telz qu’il distrent que telz menestrelz en leur aitre ja ne giroit: leurs aitres trop en empieroit et reprové seroit adez ce qu’il estoit mors desconfez.
84) Significantly, Berceo restructures the narrative at this point. He places the moment of discovery earlier than in the Latin, before the debate between the Virgin and the devils, so that it occurs before we know that the man has, for the moment at least, been saved from Hell. Yet the monks’ shame indicates a 4 The Latin text starts with the monk already in post, and already corrupt: ‘Erat quidam monachus in quodam cenobio secretarii functus officio. Hic ergo valde erat lubricus et demoniacho instinctu aliquociens libidinis urebatur estibus’ (224).
Physically, on the inside of the monastery he is good, and on the outside he is corrupt. Morally (despite his saving grace) on the inside he is corrupt, and on the outside he is good. His main narrative action is to pass to and fro over a threshold that is both literal and moral. That he dies crossing a river is a basic part of the inherited plot, but Berceo exploits the liminality of the moment to raise questions about the definition and practice of sin. These questions entail problems of perception, and in this regard the river location offers a natural symbolic space.
