The 'Mester de Clerecia': Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile (Monografias A)

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Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 231

THE MESTER DE CLERECÍA INTELLECTUALS AND IDEOLOGIES IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CASTILE Profound changes in thirteenth-century Spanish society drove the invention of fresh poetic forms by the new clerical class. The term mester de clerecía (clerical ministry or service) applies to a group of narrative poems (epics, hagiography, romances) composed by university-trained clerics for the edification and entertainment of the predominantly illiterate laity. These clerics, like Gonzalo de Berceo, understood themselves as cultural intermediaries, transmitting wisdom and values from the past; at the same time, they were deeply involved in some of the most contentious and farreaching changes in lay piety, and in economic and social structures. The author challenges the predominantly didactic approach to the verse, in an attempt to historicize the category of the ‘intellectual’, as someone caught in the duality of the worlds of contingency and absolute values. This volume has relevance for a wide range of medievalists, in part because of the topics covered (feudalism, gender, nationhood, and religion), in part because many poems are either adaptations from French and Latin or have counterparts in other literatures (e.g., the romances of Alexander and Apollonius, the miracles of the Virgin Mary). JULIAN WEISS is Reader in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish at King’s College London.

Tamesis

Founding Editor J. E. Varey General Editor Stephen M. Hart Editorial Board Alan Deyermond Julian Weiss Charles Davis

JULIAN WEISS

THE MESTER DE CLERECÍA INTELLECTUALS AND IDEOLOGIES IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CASTILE

TAMESIS

© Julian Weiss 2006 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Julian Weiss to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2006 by Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN 1 85566 135 7

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall

CONTENTS Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction The movement Didacticism Intellectuals Ideologies A marvellous reality 1

2

Pollution and Perception in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora Finding an angle ‘El sacristán fornicario’ ‘El clérigo y la flor’ ‘El labrador avaro’ ‘El pleito de Teófilo’ ‘El judezno’ and ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ The overarching miracle Female Associations: Three Encounters with Holy Women Writing, Sanctity, and Gender in Berceo’s ‘Poema de Santa Oria’ The Polluting Body in the ‘Vida de Santa María Egipciaca’ The Authority of Berceo’s ‘Abadesa prenãda’

viii ix 1 1 4 8 11 14 26 26 29 35 42 48 55 65 67 68 82 95

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Dreaming of Empire in El libro de Alexandre Measured by time ‘A single sovereign authority’ The cleric and the Jews, inside and out

109 112 123 132

4

The Birth of a Nation: Feudal Fictions in El poema de Fernán González Structures of freedom Homeland security Feudal logic Symbolic violence: the horse and the hawk

143 143 149 159 172

vi

CONTENTS

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The Cleric, in Between Between Church and Court: Allegory or ‘Othered Speech’ in ‘Elena y María’ Between Court and Town: The Mercantile Morality of ‘El libro de Apolonio’ Between Town and Church: Berceo’s ‘El mercader fiado’

Afterword Works Cited Index

179 180 198 209 226 231 251

For Clare, Jacob, and Cora ‘. . . bien valdrá, como creo, un vaso de bon vino’

Acknowledgements In the course of researching and writing this book I have incurred a variety of debts. Over the years, a number of people have provided moral support or practical guidance, responding to queries, providing bibliographical information, or reading draft chapters, and I would like to express my gratitude to them here: Robert Archer, Olivier Biaggini, Simon Gaunt, Michael Gerli, Louise Haywood, Clare Lees, Nieves Romero Díaz, and Dorothy Severin. In its final stages, the manuscript benefited from Alan Deyermond’s meticulous copyediting and comments on matters of style and content. The ideas explored in this book have been tried out in numerous conference and seminar papers, as well as in the classroom. Even though I cannot name them here, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the contributions of those many colleagues and students who have helped me clarify my ideas in lectures and seminars. I would also like to thank the institutions that provided material help: the research for this book has been supported by a University of Oregon Summer Research Award (1999) and, more recently, by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2004–05) held while on sabbatical leave from King’s College London. Chapters 2 and 5 include revised versions of two previously published articles: ‘Writing, Sanctity, and Gender in Berceo’s Poema de Santa Oria’, Hispanic Review, 64 (1996): 1–19; ‘Apolonio’s Mercantile Morality and the Ideology of Courtliness’, in The Medieval Mind: Medieval Iberian Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, ed. Ralph Penny and Ian Macpherson (London: Tamesis, 1997), pp. 501–16. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint.

List of Abbreviations AEM BHR BHS C CCa CHE CN CSIC CT HR HSMS JHP KRQ LH MLR NCSRLL NRFH PMHRS RF RPh Sp VR

Anuario de Estudios Medievales Biblioteca Románica Hispánica Bulletin of Hispanic Studies La Corónica Clásicos Castalia Cuadernos de Historia Española Cultura Neolatina Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Colección Tamesis Hispanic Review Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies Journal of Hispanic Philology Kentucky Romance Quarterly Letras Hispánicas Modern Language Review North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar Romanische Forschungen Romance Philology Speculum Vox Romanica

Introduction The movement The Spanish mester de clerecía was a literary mode that would produce about thirty vernacular poems over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and thus become one of the most significant bodies of clerical narrative verse in Western Europe. Though its roots were in Castile, it was inextricably bound up in the profound social, religious, and political changes of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe. According to many scholars, it is these changes that provide the earlier works of the mester – those written between, say, 1210 and 1280 – with a certain unity. The newly formed University of Palencia trained clerics to cater for the expanding administrative needs of Church and State, and produced an initial group of writers with an acute sense of their own worth and collective identity. The learned esthetics of the mester de clerecía, as well as the movement’s esprit de corps, are summed up right at the start of the earliest poem of the movement, the Libro de Alexandre, whose author proudly announces: Mester traigo fermoso, non es de joglaría, mester es sin pecado, ca es de clerezía fablar curso rimado por la quaderna vía, a sílabas contadas, ca es grant maestría.1

Their ‘great mastery’ of the ‘fourfold way’ – monorhymed alexandrine quatrains – enabled these clerics both to affirm their learned cultural traditions and to disseminate them to a wider audience. Working primarily in hagiography, romance, and epic, they adopted the role of intermediaries between the lay world of the unlettered and the secular wisdom and spriritual values which they had acquired through the privilege of their literacy (their ‘clerecía’ or clerisy), adapting material from written Latin and French sources, but also from popular oral legend. Theirs was an inherently didactic mode. This ‘empeño didáctico’, as Francisco Rico (1985: 23) termed it, was not limited to transmitting a cultural heritage and its associated secular values. Under the 1 I quote from the ed. by Jesús Cañas (Libro de Alexandre 1988: 2); throughout, all references to cuaderna vía poetry will be by stanza number.

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THE MESTER DE CLERECÍA: INTELLECTUALS AND IDEOLOGIES

influence of the IV Lateran Council (1215), they promoted religious reform, provided liturgical instruction, and inspired Catholic faith, for the benefit of laity and the uneducated churchmen. And beyond this, didacticism could modulate into overt propaganda, as clerics such as Gonzalo de Berceo and the author of the epic Poema de Fernán González promoted the tomb-cults associated with their local monasteries. These are the main outlines of the thirteenth-century mester de clerecía as they might be sketched in a student manual of literary history.2 Those already familiar with the movement and the scholarship on it will immediately notice that my synopsis skirts one important area of disagreement: whether the mester is a unified school composed only of the poems written in cuaderna vía or a broader and looser literary movement which also embraced clerical narratives in rhyming couplets, or pareados. My own view needs to be stated clearly at the outset. I feel that a social reading of the cuaderna vía poems (which is what this book is about) acquires greater depth and meaning by setting them in the wider context of clerical narrative, and that the broad social and didactic impulses that drive the poems in pareados, such as the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca and the debate poem Elena y María, are the same as those that motivate the more formally sophisticated poems. The two positions are not incompatible. One can talk of a ‘taller’ or school centred around the University of Palencia in the early decades of the thirteenth century, without minimizing the larger and to my mind more formative cultural context to which it belongs.3

2 For general guidance to the movement, with ample bibliographies, see Deyermond (1973: 108–09; 1979: 127–65; 1991), Gómez Moreno (1988, esp. 79–82 for the size of the corpus), and Uría Maqua (2000). The meaning of the phrase mester de clerecía has been the subject of much discussion; see (in addition to the general treatments just mentioned), Willis (1956–57), Deyermond (1965), López Estrada (1978–79), and Rico (1985). In spite of many valid observations, Salvador Miguel’s attempt to classify the mester as a genre is not persuasive (1979); on this point see Gómez Moreno (1988: 83–84). For a survey of lost texts see Walsh (1999). 3 For the idea that the early works were part of a ‘taller’, see Menéndez Peláez (1984: 39). However, the staunchest defender of the idea that the mester is a unified school is Uría Maqua, whose latest views on the subject include a review of those scholars who, like me, adopt a broader definition (2000: 17–51). Given that I do not believe that the two positions are mutually exclusive, I am not going to rehearse the arguments here. I would point out, however, that Uría Maqua’s survey of previous scholarship, though valuable and accurate in most respects, is flawed by a certain circularity in its argument, and by a failure to give due weight to the positions of those she disagrees with. For example, she criticizes Gómez Moreno for dispensing with the term ‘school’, but does not acknowledge why this scholar includes pareados within the movement, and thus she suppresses his main point about the panromanic nature of clerical verse (1988: 78–79, 89, 157–63). As I mention below, she also takes a surprisingly literal view of the term ‘escuela’ in connection with Berceo’s Milagros.

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That issue aside, my opening synopsis characterizes the main critical consensus about the subject. More importantly, however, it represents the terms upon which critical debate is currently conducted. This book intervenes in the discussion precisely at the points where the terms themselves are most open to question. Simply put, general responses to the mester as a cultural phenomenon cluster around three issues, each with its corresponding, though overlapping, set of problems. First, the poetics of mester de clerecía has been viewed as what one might call a poetics of cultural agency: research into the highly formalized metre of cuaderna vía, the interplay of orality and textuality, of learned and popular elements, the adaptation of French and Latin sources – studies into all these features focus attention upon the cleric as cultural intermediary, an agent in the transmission of knowledge.4 Second, the perceived didactic function of their works encourages scholars to abstract from the texts the message which the poet wished to imprint upon his audience’s mind, or to privilege those passages in which the author intervenes with moral or spiritual commentary. And third, the fundamentally social nature of the texts requires historical analysis of the most significant social, political, religious, and economic developments of the period. In addition to the rise of the universities, scholars have drawn special attention to the connections between the mester and the ecclesiastical reforms of the IV Lateran council of 1215. Under the direction of Innocent III, this ecumenical council renewed the work of Gregory VII, who, in the late eleventh century, strove to increase papal power and reform the perceived moral laxity and ignorance of the Church.5 However, it is my contention that we need to place far greater emphasis upon exploring the connections between the poetics of clerisy, the nature of the message, and historical conditions. Drawing these connections means reexamining some of the basic premises that have governed scholarship to date, and posing some more complex conceptual and methodological problems. These were committed writers, and with a literature as self-consciously engaged as theirs it is imperative to clarify their commitments and affiliations on a conceptual level as well as in practical analysis.

4 Uría Maqua’s work on the esthetics of the cuaderna vía stanza has been foundational (in particular, 1981; see also 2000: 69–126, with ample bibliography). Various scholars emphasize the idea of the cleric as intermediary, among them Garcia (1989), to whose article I return below. 5 For the connections between the mester, the Lateran reforms, and the University of Palencia, see Lomax (1969), Menéndez Peláez (1984), Uría Maqua (1987 & 2000: 57–69), Cátedra (1992), and Franchini (1997). The difficulties encountered by the papal legates in carrying out the Lateran reforms are documented by Linehan (1971), and I return to this issue in chapter 1. For examples of scholars who set the movement in the broader context of the cultural and territorial expansion of the thirteenth century, see Deyermond (1973), Gumbrecht (1974), and Rico (1985). The influence of the French pilgrimage routes is also widely recognized, thanks in large part to the work of Dutton (1973).

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Didacticism The most obvious starting point for this discussion is what might be called the functionalist approach to mester de clerecía: the view, so widely held that it needs no documentation, that it is an inherently didactic mode.6 In his excellent introductory survey of the corpus, Ángel Gómez Moreno observes that although clerical narrative verse embraces a variety of modes, written in both cuaderna vía and rhyming couplets, it is valid to say that it is ‘de corte moralizante en su conjunto’ (1988: 73). This moralizing tone is most conspicuous in the case of poems composed in cuaderna vía, which was the metrical form reserved for ‘obras de corte básicamente moral o didáctico’ (73). It is certainly not my intention to question the centrality of ethical poetics within medieval textual culture. However much it was problematized and parodied (Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor is exemplary here), ethical poetics provided some of the dominant theories of authorship and interpretative paradigms until well into the early modern period.7 But though he stresses the didactic, Gómez Moreno’s account of a form that is ‘básicamente moral o didáctico’ slides too easily between ethics and didacticism. The slippage, though a minor detail, is symptomatic of a larger problem. Though they overlap, the two categories are not coterminous, just as ‘moral’ is not the same as ‘moralizing’. To explain the difference simply in formal terms (such as an explicit narratorial presence, and a range of narrative techniques and voices that help stage the lesson as it were before our eyes) is merely to postpone the problem of how to read the social relationships that are inscribed in the deployment of any formal devices. The failure adequately to conceptualize what questions are raised by the term ‘didactic’ is symptomatic of a deeper failure to explore the possibilities of difference and dissent both within the clerical estate and within medieval culture as a whole. It is as if, through such easy recourse to the generalization ‘didactic’, we are excused the need of questioning that well-known caricature of the Middle Ages as an age of dogma, seamless belief, and unquestioning acceptance of authority. It is not that the concept of didacticism itself has to be consigned to the dustbin. Rather, the issues it raises need to be unpacked. In this respect, studies on the mester de clerecía could benefit from recent work done on prose fiction of this period, namely the traditions and operations of exemplary discourse. Eloísa Palafox, in a particularly thought-provoking study, has sketched out some of the theoretical problems associated with the terms 6 I adapt the term functionalist from Menéndez Peláez, who underscores ‘la dimensión funcional o pragmática’ of medieval literary texts, most of which was written ‘en función de los intereses de la cultura dominante de la época, esto es, del estamento clerical’ (1984: 27). I return to the dominant ideology thesis below. 7 The bibliography on ethical poetics is vast, but see Allen (1982) and Dagenais (1994).

INTRODUCTION

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didacticism and exemplarity (1998: 9–32).8 Like other scholars, such as José Antonio Maravall (1983d), María Jesús Lacarra (1979: 99–131), and Marta Haro Cortés (1995: 141–45), she emphasizes how didacticism has to be set within the epistemologies of traditional societies (1998: 11–12, 26). In this context, teaching – the acquisition and transmission of knowledge – is understood to be one of the essential means by which knowledge itself is preserved and saved from oblivion. The point is worth stressing at this early stage, because although one of the central arguments of this book is that didacticism cannot be divorced from questions of power and cultural authority, its ideological operations and effects need to be carefully construed. As I shall explain, it would be a gross oversimplification to reduce didacticism to a crude attempt by one social formation, the clerical estate, to establish dominance over others by imposing from above a particular set of beliefs, an ‘ideology’ according to one definition. The didacticism of the mester, like that of wisdom literature in general, is determined in a fundamental way by a traditional epistemology according to which the very survival of knowledge depends upon it being continuously taught and put into practice. Although man’s understanding may be refined, the basic parameters of knowledge are preordained and static. The ideological implications that underlie this have caught the attention of various scholars. In her discussion of the subject, Palafox quotes Salvatore Battaglia, who argues: Nella tela dell’esempio l’esistenza degli uomini si colloca in una sua costanza paradigmatica. L’aneddoto ‘esemplare’ presuppone una visione dell’esperienza che non ammete impensati sviluppi o precarie soluzioni. Tutto è preciso, stabilito, perpetuo. (Palafox 1998: 11–12, at p. 12).

An identical emphasis on inmovilismo may be found in Maravall’s interpretation of the concept of knowledge that characterizes a traditional society, by which he means one based on a theory of estates (1983d). I shall return in due course to the problems of such a reading, but for the moment I would simply suggest that there is a danger of confusing ideological function with social reality. If exemplary discourse imagines a world in which ‘Tutto è preciso, stabilito, perpetuo’ it is precisely to compensate for the fact that such a world

8 Didacticism is the more general term, embracing ‘una serie de temas y recursos comunes a todo discurso ejemplar’; exemplarity is a particular mode of the didactic, being less explicit in its operations and less predictable in its effects. It is made up of ‘aquellos elementos textuales que remiten a la razón (mucho menos explícita) por la cual un autor, compilador o predicador en particular decidió recurrir al uso del discurso ejemplar. A diferencia del didactismo, esta razón es algo que sólo llega a notarse a raíz de una lectura detenida del texto’ (26). As such it will be open to interpretation, and the results will not be definitive, ‘especialmente cuando se trata de obras que poseen una elevada riqueza lingüística y poética’ (27).

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does not in fact exist, at least not on this earth. In other words (to revise Battaglia), the exemplum offers a vision of experience which presupposes the unpredictable and the precarious.9 To return to tradition: the importance of handing down knowledge cannot be fully appreciated without some reference to the available material means of communication, and this raises the issue of the interplay between the written and the oral, and the role of the juglar. I am not entering here into a debate over whether the texts that make up the corpus were written to be read to small elite groups or performed before a wider audience in what Richard Kinkade called ‘a sermon in the round’.10 The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and in either case reading would mean reading aloud and would entail a performance. As Palafox has pointed out, exemplarity is essentially theatrical (1998: 19–20). However much the cultural authority of these poems derives from their display of textuality, the epistemological basis of didacticism is shaped by the conditions of a predominantly oral society. For example, given their frequently commonplace moral currency, it might be argued that these didactic texts preach to the converted. El libro de Alexandre teaches a lesson whose basic message about the dangers of pride would hardly have come as a surprise to its audience. On one level, this and other poems enact a didactic rehearsal of what is already known, and in doing so they fulfill a need within predominantly oral cultures to preserve knowledge in a ritual of commemoration that is inherently performative and participatory.11 If this didactic ritual is essential to the reproduction of knowledge, it also reproduces the values and beliefs that define and integrate a community within particular relations of power, as well as the authority of the intellectual caste who have assumed control of the process. In operation, therefore, didacticism is cognitive and rhetorical: cognitive, because it purports to distinguish true from false beliefs, practices, and values; rhetorical, because it demands strategies which create a position of authority from which to teach those distinctions. Authority does not necessarily have to be construed in terms of intellectual

9 For an approach to the exemplum that recognizes the dialectic between certainty and doubt, see Diz’s analysis of Conde Lucanor (1984). For reasons that will become clearer, I believe that her reading of Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros (1995) would have benefited immensely from the methods she applies to Juan Manuel. Maravall’s approach to the exemplum has the same strengths and weaknesses as his work on Baroque culture. He effectively outlines the contours of an overarching historical or cultural structure, but makes each cultural product a mere manifestation of the larger paradigm. He lacks a flexible theory of determination; on which see Weiss (1997–98). 10 On the relation between the oral and the textual, see Gybbon-Monypenny (1965), Kinkade (1986), and López Estrada (1983: 309–10, 315–26, esp. 320–26) who is particularly effective at dismantling facile binarisms between mester de clerecía and mester de juglaría. 11 On the psychodynamics of orality, see Ong (1982: 31–77).

INTRODUCTION

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superiority and stern sermonizing: the didactic voice can adopt the humble tones of the unlettered, speak in joyful celebration of allegedly shared truths, or draw attention to its own flawed humanity (for all this, witness the dynamic shifts and modulations in the narrative voice of the great religious poet Gonzalo de Berceo). However, the main ostensible characteristic of the didactic mode is the conscious desire to effect a change in the audience by providing knowledge, values, and beliefs which it would otherwise not possess, or possess only in distorted fashion. As I have already mentioned, the mere fact that a text contains a more or less explicit message, whether moral or doctrinal, does not make it didactic. If the term is not to become so generalized as to be void of meaning, certain conditions must apply. Whether the emphasis is on knowledge gained or knowledge saved from loss, the desire to transmit wisdom has to be set within a particular relationship between writer and public, a relationship predicated upon the assumption that the truth is present, here and now, in the text being read or performed; the truth is not hovering vaguely ‘out there’ as in some postmodern paranoid fantasy. The participatory, theatrical nature of didacticism – the way it acknowledges the role of the audience in producing and reproducing meaning and effect – is in part a drama of repression. The perceived need to correct or reform presupposes the existence of other competing values, beliefs, and practices; thus, with varying degrees of explicitness the teaching is set in relation to its other(s). The ultimate objective of the didactic text, however, is to eradicate the relational quality of its message – the assumption that it originates alongside other competing and incorrect values, beliefs, and practices – and to present itself as the sole representative of unmediated truth. And yet the repressed, as Freud would say, has the habit of returning. It does this often in a grotesque, distorted form, to trouble the purity and security of the performed truth, and some of the ways in which this happens will be illustrated in the course of this study. The obvious need to focus upon the product of teaching – the message itself and most importantly its enactment in the present – could often entail drawing attention in more explicit fashion to the process of teaching and acquiring understanding. This meant making the dynamics of the relationship between master and pupil a more obvious thematic component. Indeed, the implications and difficulties of this relationship are precisely what attracted the attention of Juan Ruiz in the fourteenth century and before him scholastic writers such as Abelard, John of Salisbury, and Andreas Capellanus, as Catherine Brown has argued (1998). Although there is nothing in the corpus of the thirteenth-century mester de clerecía that compares to the games Juan Ruiz plays with this audience and their expectations of exemplarity, the earlier works constitute the fundamental context for El libro de buen amor. John K. Walsh (1979–80) mapped out Juan Ruiz’s parodic engagement with the earlier cuaderna vía poems, and I would add that his own protean and elusive persona itself develops a potential contradiction inherent in the narratorial presence of

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the earlier didactic texts.12 Like Gonzalo de Berceo, who in his Milagros is both Everyman and historical character, the didactic author speaks from the contingent moment, the here and now, but he also aspires to a position outside time, to a realm of transcendent values. The location of the authorial voice is not, indeed cannot be, stable.13

Intellectuals The idea that the didacticism of the mester is structured by this double perspective is not, of course, entirely new. As Francisco Rico has observed, the mester is characterized by its ‘dualidad constitutiva’ (1985: 23), a duality that is enshrined in one scholastic definition of clerics as men who have their feet planted on the ground and their minds set on the heavens: ‘qui pedem tenent in mundo et mentem in celo’ (Rico 1985: 7). The phrase is especially relevant: it comes from the Planeta, a rich compendium of clerical learning compiled in 1218 by Alfonso VIII’s chancellor, Diego García de Campos, one of the candidates for authorship of the foundational cuaderna vía text, El libro de Alexandre.14 I would argue, however, that the implications of this constitutive duality, as well as the limitations of the concept itself, have yet to be fully explored, either on theoretical or on practical levels. In large measure, the concept of duality overlaps with the well-established idea of the cleric as a cultural mediator, a transmitter of knowledge who is characterized by his in-betweenness. As Michel Garcia points out, effective cultural mediation entails a ‘double souci’ (1988: 52): fidelity to the source text needs to be balanced by fidelity to the needs of the new public. In this respect, Garcia argues, the mester ‘constituerait un bon exemple d’échec dans le domaine de la médiation littéraire’ (1988: 53). This is because the clerics guarded their cultural heritage too zealously, and failed to adapt it to the tastes and abilities of their potential audience: ‘une certaine raideur formaliste rendait déjà la communication difficile’ (1988: 54). The agents of mediation cannot simply market a product without following ‘les lois d’un certain

12 For a critique of Walsh’s analysis, see Joset (1988: 74–76). Joset disagrees (often in rather peremptory fashion) with Walsh’s reading of particular episodes in the Libro. These matters of detail, though important, do not concern me here: Walsh’s basic thesis seems to me irrefutable. 13 Modern readers’ distaste for the overtly didactic is one of the ironies of literary history, given that our modern notions of ‘author’, ‘classic’, and ‘literature’ have a deep investment in the pedagogic, and in the encounter between the contingent and the eternal. 14 For the attribution, see Hernando Pérez (1992). This scholar subsequently argued (Poema 2001) that Diego García was also the author of the Poema de Fernán González. The works undoubtedly belong to the same cultural milieu, but I am not persuaded by the attributions.

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marché’ and the right market conditions did not exist (1988: 54). Although I do not agree that the mester needs to be judged a failure, Garcia’s theoretical point is an important one.15 However, I would rephrase his argument. If he finds that the theoretical function of the writer as intermediary failed, this is a symptom of the problems inherent in the theoretical function itself. The idea of the cleric as an intermediary is too easily conflated with the idea that clerical poets wrote from a clearly definable vantage point, defending the interests of the dominant culture. The notion of cultural mediation thus succumbs to the pressures of a conceptual emphasis on ideological unity, cultural coherence, and single perspectives. It is not that clerical authors could not set out to write from a single vantage point, rather that the task of identifying this location too often means sifting it out from a much more complex web of social processes, relationships, and affiliations. In this respect, Antonio Gramsci’s question about the intellectual as a social category is fundamental: ‘Are intellectuals,’ he asks, ‘an autonomous and independent social group, or does every social group have its own particular specialized category of intellectuals?’ (1988: 301). As he sketches an answer to this question, Gramsci distinguishes between those intellectuals who emerge organically from a new class (‘organic intellectuals’), and what he terms ‘traditional intellectuals’, a category already in existence who serve the interests of a particular social class. In reality, however, this distinction between organic and traditional is far from watertight, as Gramsci himself realized. Speaking of traditional intellectuals, he suggests that their allegiances are already fractured, since they are torn between corporate loyalty and fidelity to their immediate patrons and paymasters. In other words, he writes, because they ‘experience through an “esprit de corps” their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group’ to which they have become attached (1988: 101). Written in the 1920s, Gramsci’s reflections on medieval clerics are brief and schematic, but his Prison Notebooks identified a fundamental uncertainty about the clerical caste which has been amply corroborated by recent work.16 This is a notoriously amorphous group, whose members could variously be classified as traditional intellectuals, who from generation to generation served the needs of the established ecclesiastical order, and as organic intellectuals, who especially from the twelfth century onward were employed to organize and promote the interests of the increasingly powerful landed 15 Garcia judges failure on the slender manuscript tradition of the earlier corpus, which survives in copies from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The same argument could be applied to many other literary works that have survived from the thirteenth century: the Galician-Portuguese lyric is a notorious example. 16 See, for example, Le Goff (1986) or the collection of essays edited by Copeland (1996).

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aristocracies and monarchies. It is not my intention to slot the individual clerical authors studied in this book into one or other category. What interests me more is the way in which the didactic commitment of the mester can be explored using Gramsci’s idea that those who carry out the intellectual function withing society can be attached to a particular social group yet at the same time experience a higher loyalty and a sense of autonomy. An emphatic defence of independence as the defining quality of the intellectual was made by another writer in the 1920s, Julien Benda. His famous barrage against ‘la trahison des clercs’ was provoked by the conviction that the intellectual class should not sell out to the dominant powers of society. Glossing the work of Gramsci and Benda, Edward Said argued that the intellectual’s critical consciousness should override his or her solidarity with a particular cause or social group (1983: 1–30; 1994: 3–17). For him, the intellectual is a profoundly worldly figure, who should be positioned critically, ironically, between two kinds of pressure: ‘one is the culture to which critics are bound filiatively (by birth, nationality, profession); the other is a method or system acquired affiliatively (by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed deliberation)’ (1983: 25). If I use the term intellectual in the title of this book, it is not because I believe that the clerical authors studied here are intellectuals avant la lettre, but because it is worth keeping modern definitions of the term in mind when thinking about their didactic intent. As used by Said, and by Gramsci before him, the term reminds us that the medieval cleric could be bound, whether by filiation or by affiliation, to the cause of a particular institution but also recognize a higher loyalty, or be subject to pressures from a different quarter. Berceo wrote monastic propaganda, but he did not write as a monk; he composed doctrinal poems that promoted the cause of the reformist Church, but they cannot be reduced to the mere articulation of a prevailing orthodoxy.17 Indeed, when we turn to the first cuaderna vía poem, we will see that El libro de Alexandre is foundational in more than one sense. Its confident opening stanzas mark the start of a cultural movement; its final stanzas betray (the word’s significance will become clearer in chapter 3) a sense of split loyalties. As Amaia Arizaleta rightly remarked, this poem displays ‘une certaine idée du pouvoir, mais il ne constitue pas l’oeuvre d’un commis écrivain de la royauté’ (1999: 261). The Spanish Alexander legend is a profoundly European work, but as William Chester Jordan (2002) has pointed out, the idea of Europe in the high Middle Ages (as now) was characterized by a tension between cosmopolitanism and localism, the universal and the parochial. This creative tension plays itself out in a variety of ways in El libro.

17 At least not the two poems studied here, the Milagros and the Vida de Santa Oria. His doctrinal poem El sacrificio de la Misa has a more straightforward pedagogical character.

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My readings of the mester, in short, are governed by an interest in exploring the range of perpectives embedded in the texts. Not all of these perpectives, of course, are the result of a willed deliberation on the author’s part. For although we need to understand how the cleric situates his writing, it is equally important to consider how he himself is situated and to weigh up the competing pressures of freedom and constraint (Williams 1989). As I have mentioned, these works do not simply advance one set of ideas which are shaped, as if in a vacuum, by the dominant social group; the particular conformation of the ideas they espouse is determined dialectally, in the process of repressing, displacing, or mystifying opposing beliefs and interests. Besides abstracting from the text a unified set of explicit commitments and alignments, we also have to explain the complex and contradictory matrix of material pressures and limits which determine the very terms of that conscious position, its grounds of possibility. And to do this, we need to turn to theories of ideology.

Ideologies Although the concept of ideology is far more complex and polemical than the concept of didacticism, it has also lent itself to particularly reductive applications. In one of its uses, it might appear similar to didacticism: like the didactic text, ideology imposes or propagates a set of beliefs characteristic of the dominant class. Indeed, on the occasions when the term ideology crops up in studies of the mester, it is invariably employed in this narrow sense. Jesús Cañas, for instance, describes the didactic content of the Alexander romance as ‘esta ideología’ (Libro de Alexandre 77), and on a much more general level Jesús Menéndez Peláez characterizes the didacticism of the movement as a whole as being governed by the desire to create ‘una mentalidad de acuerdo con la ideología cristiana de la época’ (1984: 36). Examples could be multiplied. It is true, however, that some scholars use the word in a potentially more supple fashion. In her discussion of exemplary discourse, Palafox maintains that exempla were adapted in such a way as to turn them into ‘instrumentos útiles para la transmisión de determinados moldes ideológicos’ (20; see also 24, where the phrase ‘moldes ideológicos’ is repeated). Although her formulation registers an important shift in emphasis from a set of beliefs to instrumentality, to all intents and purposes the term still denotes the deliberate imposition of values or objectives which ‘se busca inculcar en la mente del receptor’ (25). Similarly, Arizaleta characterizes El libro de Alexandre as ‘un instrument idéologique’ (1999: 256), which ‘a pu tenir lieu de texte de propagande’ (258) in the service of royalty and the crusading spirit. However, in an intriguing, though unexplored, nuance she also writes that the poem offers us ‘une métaphore de l’idéologie régnante’ (261; my emphasis). It would have been worth pursuing the implications of this remark. The idea that the poem

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is not identical with its sponsoring ideology is especially relevant to her passing insight into the poet’s ambivalent relationship with his royal and aristocratic audience. Another subtle and historically informed reader of the mester is Marta Diz, whose important monograph on Berceo’s Milagros (1995) is predicated on the assumption that Berceo’s miracles are inscribed with a continuous encomium of the values of the clerical caste, more specifically with the authority of an increasingly institutionalized Church. Diz conceptualizes this process not as propaganda but as what she terms the propagation of an ideology (1995: 33–43). Although my debt to Diz’s ideological readings of the Milagros will be apparent in the pages that follow, I find her conceptualization of ideology ultimately flawed by its over-reliance on a process of abstraction which reconstructs a stable system of ideas and beliefs. From the poems an orthodox religious meaning is condensed, and then presented to the readers as something closed, self-coherent, formed a priori and divested of all doubt, anxiety, and surprise, released from the affective context created by the miracle. My differences with Diz may appear to be largely a question of emphasis, but the emphasis is important if the full implications and value of ideological analysis are to be realized. Ideology, like so many of the terms we take for granted in literary and cultural analysis (not least the terms ‘literature’ and ‘culture’ themselves), has a particularly chequered and complex history. It needs to be recognized that there are those who argue that there is no such thing as a pre-bourgeois ideology, and that it would be anachronistic to use the term in connection with the Middle Ages. As David McLellan, for example, would have it, ideology is the product of the social, political and intellectual upheavals that accompanied the Industrial Revolution: the spread of democratic ideals, the politics of mass movements, the idea that, since we have made the world, we can also remake it [. . .]. The organizing myths of past societies were inherited and constituted a given framework that transcended the social world; ideologies are typically our own creation drawn from painstaking investigations of our own societies. (1995: 2–3)

In support of his view, he quotes the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who contends that ideologies ‘emerge from the critique of dogmatism of traditional interpretations of the world and claim a scientific character. [. . .] They replace traditional legitimations of power by appearing in the mantle of modern science and by deriving their justification from the critique of ideology. Ideologies are coeval with the critique of ideology. In this sense there can be no pre-bourgeois ideologies’ (1995: 2; quoting Towards a Rational Society). Other thinkers push the boundaries back somewhat further, so that depending upon your perspective – or more accurately perhaps, whether you are a modernist or early modernist – ideology dates from the Renaissance or the eighteenth century.

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Although I do not wish to diminish the importance of historicizing the concept of ideology, the problem entails too many issues to unpack within the space of this introduction – issues ranging from the specific (the distinction between myth and ideology) to the impossibly general (our assumptions about the Middle Ages as such). In brief, however, there are two basic flaws in erecting ideology as one of those boundaries separating the modern from the premodern. One of these returns us to the idea that the Middle Ages lacked a spirit of critique; the other is that ideology operates primarily in a rational, scientific manner, being the result of ‘painstaking investigations of our own societies’. As Terry Eagleton and John B. Thompson have argued, such an approach overlooks the continued pressure upon modern political life of mythic, religious, or metaphysical, and the fact that ideology itself does not have to operate in such an obviously rational manner.18 Ideology cannot be reduced to a belief system, because it also embraces ‘lived, habitual social practice [. . .] the unconscious, inarticulate dimensions of social experience as well as the workings of formal institutions’ (Eagleton 1991: 115). My own approach is more in line with those who adopt a wider historical perspective, for whom studying ideology means studying how ‘power-struggles are fought out at the level of signification’ (Eagleton 1991: 113; see also 5, and Thompson 1984: 4). This general definition leaves some questions unanswered, as Eagleton points out (1991: 6–10), because the way in which meaning serves to sustain relations of domination can be properly understood only when the process is located within ‘the material structure of society as a whole’ (Eagleton 1991: 30). Ideology’s legitimating effects entail a variety of strategies, such as rationalization or universalization, which will promote certain beliefs, denigrate others, and resolve social contradictions at an imaginary level (Eagleton 1991: 33–61). Some of the ways in which this happens will be illustrated in the course of the following chapters. What will be less explicit, though the debt is no less real, is the influence on my approach of the work of Raymond Williams (1977). Williams was sceptical about the term ideology because of its associations with a formal system of meanings and values which has been abstracted from a whole social process. As he puts it, ‘the relatively mixed, confused, incomplete, or inarticulate consciousness [. . .] is thus overridden [or] procedurally excluded’ (1977: 109). The word ‘process’ is a crucial part of Williams’s lexicon because he resists the analysis of history as a series of self-contained epochs, because this approach offers too static a model of historical change. Instead, he prefers to emphasize the complex interaction of dominant values, beliefs, and practices with those that were residues from the past or in the process of emerging (1977: 121–27). No dominant social order, he argues, ever includes or exhausts every human

18

See Thompson (1984: 25–26, 34–35), Eagleton (1991: 45–47, 223).

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practice, energy, and intention (125). Because of this, he is especially interested in the idea of the emergent, and he developed the concept of ‘structures of feeling’ to avoid describing culture and society in a habitual past tense, and to try to capture the way in which values and practices were in a state of continuous creation (128–35). A structure of feeling encapsulates the practical consciousness of what is actually being lived, ‘not only what is thought is being lived’; what exists ‘in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate’; ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt [. . .] affective elements of consciousness and relationships’ (131). Such practical consciousness is not totally inchoate, because it possesses a characteristic structured impulse or tone. The discrepancy between the received interpretation of the world and one’s practical experience of it will often manifest itself as ‘an unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency’ (130), which leaves a recognizable imprint in the structure of a text. Methodologically, it is especially relevant to the study of art and literature ‘where the true social content is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind, which cannot without loss be reduced to belief systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships’ (132–33). For these reasons, Williams prefers Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which is not an abstract totalization, but a lived process of domination which operates in a state of continuous flux, of renewal and modification, and which is actively formed through its engagement with emerging oppositional or alternative values and meanings. Although I retain the use of the term ideology (it is so widely used that it would be pointless to try to dispense with it), I employ it in the light of Williams’s desire for more flexible concept that enables one to capture that ‘sense of movement within what is habitually abstracted as a system’ (1977: 143), and to recognize that there are experiences and feelings ‘which do not need to wait for a definition, a classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressure’ on a text. The didacticism of the mester de clerecía, therefore, needs to be seen as one element in a hegemonic process, and as such the corpus needs to be read as a palimpsest. The poems are not written out, so to speak, upon a blank page, but over an erasure. However faint they are, those erased meanings – beliefs, values, contradictions, or anxieties – need to be restored, if we are to understand how these clerics constructed their narratives of a marvellous, changing world.

A marvellous reality Lo maravilloso comienza a serlo de manera inequívoca cuando surge de una inesperada alteración de la realidad (el milagro), de una revelación privilegiada de la realidad, de una iluminación inhabitual o singularmente favorecedora de las inadvertidas riquezas de la realidad, de una ampliación de las escalas y categorías de la realidad, percibidas con particular intensidad en virtud de una exaltación del espíritu que lo conduce a un modo de ‘estado

INTRODUCTION

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límite’. Para empezar, la sensación de lo maravilloso presupone una fe. Los que no creen en santos no pueden curarse con milagros de santos.

These are the words of Alejo Carpentier, in his famous description of lo real maravilloso, first published in 1949 as the prologue to his Reino de este mundo, but revised years later in a collection of essays entitled Tientos y diferencias (1976: 96). Elsewhere, in an essay on ‘Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso’ (1981), Carpentier elaborates his ideas and identifies other characteristics of the phenomenon. First, writing the marvellous reality of Latin America means writing an identity, both personal and collective, and therefore it presupposes political engagement, since defining reality is always a political act. Second, the writer has constantly to be on the alert for change, for difference (since ‘todo lo insólito es maravilloso’, 127). He must not lose sight of the everyday miracles that lie in the world around him ‘en estado bruto, latente, omnipresente’, otherwise he will become one of those bureaucrats of the marvellous – the tiresome surrealists – who fabricate marvels in a wholly calculated way, like conjuring tricks, ‘trucos de prestidigitación’. Third, and as a corollary to this, since the duty of the writer is to reveal and interpret this new world, ‘hacía falta un vocabulario nuevo al hombre, pero además – porque sin el uno no existe el otro – una óptica nueva’ (131). Fourth, this new language is forged by studying the names, the forms, and the very texture of that new reality, and this training entails the contemplation of what Carpentier called ‘nuestros clásicos, nuestros autores, nuestra historia’. In this way, he concludes, ‘seremos los clásicos de un enorme mundo barroco que aún nos reserva, y reserva al mundo, las más extraordinarias sorpresas’ (135). Obvious differences aside, a useful analogy can be made between the underlying impulses of Carpentier’s manifesto and those that propelled the mester de clerecía. There is a shared fascination for the wondrous and the fantastic, which derives its poetic energy from the impetus to promote the idea of new reality, and to lend structure and meaning to a world of dynamic change.19 The marvellous manifests itself not only on the level of content (such as the prodigious feats of the poems’ protagonists, whether they be Alexander the Great, Fernán González, Apollonius of Tyre, or the Virgin Mary), but also on the level of form. In its day, the novelty of the monorhymed alexandrine stanzas of cuaderna vía, with its peculiar rhythmic cursus,

19 The spirit of newness pervades contemporary Latin writing, as Rico points out, quoting Diego de Campos’s pride in the ‘novitas loquendi’, and the ‘grata [. . .] recencia’ of the ‘stilus novus’ (1985: 6–7). More broadly, it also finds expression in the classical topos of antiqui et moderni that was revived during the twelfth century to convey the idea of cultural renaissance. As Curtius puts it, the phrase encapsulates ‘a clear consciousness of the turn of an era [. . .]. The new era is an ideological upwelling, accompanied by an upwelling of the very springs of life [. . .]’ (1953: 251–55, at p. 255); see also Le Goff (1986: 29–31).

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constituted a surprise and a challenge; at its core, ‘la rigurosa proscripción de la sinalefa [. . .] suponía y supone ejercer una irremediable violencia contra el oído castellano’ (Rico 1985: 21). As they listened to what Berceo famously, and disingenuously, called this ‘román paladino / en qual suele el pueblo fablar con so vecino’, the listeners found themselves walking a tightrope, balancing precariously between the familiarity of the vernacular and a verse form, syntax, and frequently a vocabulary that would have appeared quite wondrous, invented by those who laid claim to what Carpentier would call an ‘óptica nueva’, which was the result of their ‘revelación privilegiada de la realidad’.20 Like Carpentier, the writers of the mester were also motivated by the desire to capture and direct a new reality, but the process cannot be understood as a simple translatio studii of their clerical learning into the vernacular terrain. They certainly attempted to create Culture (with a capital ‘C’, ‘culture’ in its broad descriptive sense as the values, beliefs, and practices that define a whole way of life) based upon their own culture (that is ‘culture’ with a lower-case ‘c’, in its more specialized sense as the culture of a particular group, in this case that of an expanding clerical caste). But as in any act of cultural translation the materials they were adapting, as well as their associated values, beliefs, and practices, were transformed by the creative encounter with a new audience and circumstance. The result was a body of work that advertises its own novelty even as it anchors it in tradition. If these clerics attempted to appropriate the authority of the classics it is because they understood that this allowed them to adopt a dual perspective upon the world, since a classic has not only a supposedly universal meaning, but also a very particular one: it entails a to-and-fro movement between a here and now which is historically contingent and an allegedly transcendental vision of the human condition.21 Of course, it is not necessary to resort to Carpentier in order explain the mester. Even so, within the current state of scholarship the analogy between the works of the mester and lo real maravilloso is strategically useful for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it helps to counter a tendency in recent criticism which I believe reduces Berceo’s verse to the articulation of a dogma for the education of a monastic elite. The most extreme example of this trend is Isabel Uría Maqua’s recent book, Panorama crítico del mester de clerecía, where the following general observation on Berceo’s mariological poetry may be found: Si la doctrina religiosa que Berceo incluye en sus poemas está tan velada que sólo un detenido estudio de quien domina el tema es capaz de ponerla al descubierto, tenemos que pensar que esos poemas no fueron escritos para ser, simplemente, leídos, y aun menos para ser recitados a los peregrinos,

The quotation is from the Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, 2ab (Berceo 1992b). As Frank Kermode puts it, the perspective entails ‘a just estimation of the permanent relations between the enduring and the transient, the essence and the disposition. That, at bottom, is the problem of the classic’ (1983: 44). 20 21

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como recreo y solaz. [. . .] Por eso creo [. . .] que los poemas de Berceo servían de ‘lecciones’, en el sentido de ‘lecturas de enseñanza’, y, como tales, serían leídos por un maestro, seguramente por el propio Berceo, y ampliamente comentados por él o por un suplente. (2000, 308–09)

Uría Maqua here runs the risk of turning Berceo into one of those bureaucrats of the marvellous so despised by Carpentier; situating the Milagros in an academic context (a mirror, or rather mirage, of the academic context in which the poems circulate today), she fails to explain either the tone or the ideological complexities of this miracle collection. Although she is correct to question, as others have done, the critical commonplaces of earlier generations of scholars, for whom Berceo was a primitive or populist poet transcribing miracles with naive religious candour, her vision of a learned poet expounding dogma is equally one-sided. We still have something to learn, for example, from the subtle linguistic analyses of the poet Jorge Guillén (1969) who studied Berceo’s skill in recreating in his verse a sense of lived immediacy and material reality. The earlier critical topoi are errors only in so far as they confuse the poet’s persona with his historical self, and ignore the many other voices and perspectives that are woven together in the course of the collection. Carpentier’s account of lo real maravilloso is also valuable because through its very imprecision it raises some important theoretical and ideological issues that to my knowledge have not been considered by hispanomedievalists in their discussions of the marvellous or the related concept of the fantastic.22 Consider, for example, the arbitrariness of Carpentier’s distinction between cultural movements that are supposedly transcendental (namely the baroque, which is less a style than a ‘creative impulse’ or ‘pulsión creadora’ which reappears on a cyclical basis) and styles that are rooted in, and hence limited by, their historical conditions (the romanesque or gothic: no one would think of building a gothic cathedral in the 1970s, he remarks at one stage). There is little point taking issue with Carpentier on an empirical basis. What matters is his desire to locate the transcendental within the historically specific, and to outline the contours of a specifically Latin-American cultural identity that can then be aligned with, but not collapsed into, a transhistorical human condition. This tension between the universal and the local, between stasis and flux, also lies at the core of the mester de clerecía. In the light of Rico’s observation that the mester is characterized by a ‘dualidad constitutiva’, this may not seem a particularly original claim to make. But its implications have yet to be fully worked out, either in the analysis of specific texts or on a broader ideological level, because of the tendency to collapse the historically specific – the immediate, the ‘real’, that which is subject to change – into the transcendental,

22 For representative examples, see the two recent collections of essays edited by Beltrán (2002) and Salvador Miguel et al. (2004).

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whether by abstracting orthodox dogma from the poems, or by privileging a fixed perspective and ideological position. In the following chapters, I argue that this tension needs to be maintained if we are to understand the ways in which these clerical texts engage with social, political, religious, and economic change. As we shall see, the marvellous elements in the stories very often provide the moments of greatest drama, which record the ‘inadvertidas riquezas de la realidad’ and the ‘ampliación de las escalas y categorías de la realidad’. They are also moments of ideological uncertainty, when there is an intense pressure to identify those transcendental values and beliefs that might endow those new categories of reality with a sense of stability, order, and coherence. In this respect, the question of perspective is fundamental. The arbitrariness of Carpentier’s use of cultural terms such as the baroque is symptomatic of a generalized imprecision concerning the writer’s alignment. If every attempt to define reality has political implications, as Carpentier maintains, the easy vagueness with which he talks of ‘nuestros clásicos, nuestros autores, nuestra historia’ is surprising: what differences and contradictions are assimilated into that possessive adjective? From whose perspective, exactly, is that reality marvellous? This difficulty throws into relief the nuances in the marvellous reality that informs the poems of the mester de clerecía. In these works, the marvellous is not always the result of the unexpected disruption of the quotidian, viewed from a fixed perspective. Particularly in Berceo’s Milagros, there is also a fascination for the marvellous understood as the wonder caused by the act of contemplating an event from multiple perspectives, a point of view which produces the sense of a reality that is mobile, ephemeral, mysterious, and difficult to apprehend in its totality. To mix Carpentier with Borges, one might say that in the kingdom of this world there is no Aleph – that metaphysical place where an event can be contemplated from all possible angles at once. As I have suggested, the Milagros de Nuestra Señora offer the most vibrant and consistent illustration of the underlying issues raised by thinking about the mester as narratives of a marvellous reality. And for this reason, the book begins with an analysis of selected tales from this anthology of twenty-five Marian miracles, compiled around 1250 on the basis of a twelfth-century Latin collection. Other stories are included in chapters 2 and 5. In brief, I shall be arguing that although the Milagros advocate a particular form of piety, in the process eliciting respect for Church authority and confirming points of dogma, this poet’s particular representation of the Virgin Mary reveals much more.23 His adaptations promote the sense of a new world, teeming with marvels and contradictions, which are apprehended, though never fully understood,

23 For overviews of the history of the Marian cult and its development in the Peninsula, see Gerli’s introduction to his edition of the Milagros (Berceo 1987: 19–24), García de la Concha (1992), and more generally Warner (1976) and Carroll (1986).

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through acts of faith and shifts in perspective. Although it is true that the Milagros are, to borrow the title of Diz’s book, ‘historias de certidumbre’, in which human beings find security in the repetitive rituals of faith, it is no less true that Berceo represents humanity in a state of constant movement. Michael Gerli (1992) calls attention to this dynamic representation of mankind in motion in his analysis of the implied public of the collection, and a similar idea underlies Gaudioso Giménez Resano’s view that ‘la impresión que deja la forma de narrar de Berceo es la de un continuo fluir, estar haciéndose, de la misma materia’ (1976: 105). The poetic power of Berceo’s miracle stories derives in large measure from the fact that they operate in a paradoxical zone, where certainty and doubt coexist. As Virgin Mother, Mary herself is of course the archetypical paradox. In her analysis of the metaphors employed to describe Mary’s power, Jane Ackerman describes her as a model of ‘fruitful integrity’ (1983–84: 24). The phrase is suggestive. Berceo’s representation of Mary may be read as the embodiment of a process whereby change is generated without compromising the boundaries of an apparent established order. She embodies all the transgressions, or boundary crossings, that one finds in this collection: boundaries between secular and spiritual, between normative and aberrant conduct, between the spoken and the written word, between Jew and Christian. Berceo’s adaptation of his Latin source emphasizes Mary’s liminality: she opens up a miraculous space where the contradictions arising from the very the act itself of defining norms and categories can find their ideological resolution. To explore this hypothesis, I have chosen six stories which illustrate a few of the key concerns of the reformist Church. The ambiguities I identify in ‘El sacristán fornicario’ and ‘El clérigo y la flor’ (miracles 2 and 3) are symptomatic of a period that saw a concerted attempt to define and classify sin itself, a process that had implications for the notion of selfhood and the distinction between inner and outer identities. The fear of pollution that pervades these two tales takes on a different form and ideological function in the miracle of ‘El labrador avaro’ (miracle 11). This miracle performs some of the most basic moves of medieval discourses on peasantry, which, as Paul Freedman has shown (1999), was riven with contradictions. The very earthiness of the peasant rendered him both loathsome and closer to God; his spiritual salvation is predicated upon his economic servility. This story, then, illustrates the intersection of religious belief and secular power. The same is true of the legend of Theophilus (miracle 25), the oldest documented Marian miracle. Berceo’s version refocusses the inherited theme of ambition by dramatizing the conflict between the demands of apostolic humility and ecclesiastical authority. It achieves its ideological effect in large measure by drawing on stereotypical images of the Jew. In spite of its apparent conventionality, Berceo’s Jew baiting reveals the struggle to reconcile competing visions of the Christian category ‘Jew’ at a time of shifting ecclesiastical agendas. In ‘El judezno’ and ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ (miracles 16 and 18) the Jew appears in various guises:

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as an irrational, bestial object of fear and loathing, the Devil’s agent, and at the same a flawed relation of Christianity, whose basic humanity is worth saving through conversion. However, as in the tales of the avaricious peasant and the ambitious Theophilus, these stories of religious conflict have plots that are implicated in other social, economic, and political dramas. The interrelation between the social and the religious comes to the fore in a particular way in chapter 2. Here I offer three perspectives on the clerical representation of female holiness, by examining Berceo’s Vida de Santa Oria, his version of the popular miracle of the pregnant abbess (miracle 21), and the anonymous Vida de Santa María Egipciaca. My analyses of these two hagiographical poems and the miracle are connected by two main concerns, both of which have been the subject of a great deal of research over the past few decades. First, these poems illustrate the ways in which spiritual conduct and its written representation both shape and are shaped by the social construction of gender. The portrayals of their female protagonists are heavily influenced by medieval notions of the female body and the symbolic feminine, which acted together to offer an especially contradictory mixture of beliefs about purity and pollution. Given her particularly fleshly nature, female spirituality was commonly understood to be a more carnal experience than a man’s. By the same token, however, woman’s struggle to tame the flesh offered a supremely powerful model of penitential asceticism for mankind at large. And yet there were limits to the extent to which men would be able, or willing, to identify with these privileged examples of female spirituality. This constitutes the second connecting thread of this chapter, which is the ambivalent relation between the male cleric and the female religious. The relationship between female saints and their confessors and confidants has also been the subject of considerable research, which has drawn attention to the tension between the need to maintain masculine ecclesiastical authority and the desire to associate with women who embodied a more direct presence of the divine. On a general level, my analyses of these three poems do not constitute an original contribution either to medieval notions of gender and spirituality or to the relationship between cleric and saint. Apart from what they reveal about the poems themselves, these case studies acquire greater value when read in the context of the broader themes of this book. Berceo’s life of St Oria sheds light on the complex relation between the spoken and the written word, and thus offers a different perspective on the relation between orality and textuality in the mester de clerecía as a whole. His adaptation of the tale of the pregnant abbess reveals, like the story of Theophilus, an underlying concern with the nature of ecclesiastical authority during a period of reform. Similarly, although it is an ancient tale with numerous European versions, the life of Mary of Egypt acquires a special resonance in the context of the social upheavals of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One of the most powerful indicators of change during this period is the way the boundaries of sanctity were broadened to include more urban and female saints, which was a

INTRODUCTION

21

response to changing patterns of lay piety.24 Though the stories themselves predate these changes, their adaptations are testimony to the pressures they brought to bear and the ways in which the clerics responded. In the secular sphere, a concern with the process and effects of shifting boundaries also influences the representation of empire in El libro de Alexandre and of nationhood in El poema de Fernán González, poems that I study in chapters 3 and 4 respectively. If I introduce these works together it is in part because they raise the same terminological and conceptual problem, namely the meaning of the term feudalism. Although it belongs to the basic currency of medieval studies, the meaning of the word as well as its relevance to the Iberian Peninsula have long been the subject of controversy. No one would argue that a single model of feudalism could possibly cover all the variants and complexities of juridical institutions and social relations of medieval Europe. Although most Spanish historians accept that the term can usefully be applied to the Peninsula, it has now come under renewed attack by historians working on English, French, and German societies, who decry what Elizabeth A. R. Brown once called ‘the tyranny of a construct’ (1974).25 The most recent advocate against this construct is Susan Reynolds, whose richly documented study of English and French political communities and juridical practices leads her to argue that the notion of feudalism tells us more about the values and structures of the liberal Enlightenment that coined the term than it does about the Middle Ages. As it is most often used, she maintains, the word distorts the fluidity of medieval social relations and legal practices: Medieval society in most areas and at most times looks like one of infinite gradations or layers rather than one of wide social gulfs. [. . .] The layers of society were more like those of a trifle than those of a cake: its layers were blurred, and the sherry of accepted values soaked through. [. . .] One has to see it as a very rich and deep trifle with a lot of layers. Similes and metaphors are dangerous because they are not falsifiable. This one is simply meant to illustrate and emphasize the point that the boundaries between nobles and peasants, or between free and unfree, were less clear than most discussions of fiefs and vassals imply. (1994: 39–40)

24 For a concise account of the evolution of lay piety, see Vauchez (1991); for changing definitions of sanctity, see Weinstein & Bell (1982: esp. 201–05 & 220–25), and Goodich (1982). 25 The bibliography on feudalism, and on the debates surrounding its definition and scope, is too vast to be summarized here. For surveys of regional and chronological variants, valuable methodological discussion, and further reading, see Bonnassie et al. (1984: esp. 21–65), García de Cortázar et al. (1985: esp. 27–32), and, from a Marxist perspective, Anderson (1974) and Hilton (1990b). Linehan (1993:192–200), on the other hand, believes feudalism to be a vacuous generalization, arguing that recent Spanish historians aped their counterparts north of the Pyrenees in order to prove their European credentials.

22


Leaving aside the irony of a historian using an eighteenth-century confection as a substitute for an eighteenth-century historical category, Reynolds offers a salutary reminder of the dangers inherent in the crude application of broad generalizations. Several points need to be made here. She is right to emphasize the complexities of social relationships, and to suggest that social order is held in place not only by the interpersonal bonds of vassalage, but also by coercion from above and by legitimation from below (see also 476). However, her metaphor of the ‘sherry of accepted values’ presents a rather collegial view of social relationships, and it obscures the extent to which these values underpinned what she later called ‘the extremely unequal and authoritarian’ nature of medieval societies (476). What were these shared values? ‘Medieval values’, she explains, ‘laid great stress on authority and especially on the authority of kings’ (476). Noblemen bonded in their admiration for courage and loyalty. ‘What held noble society together therefore, so far as it was held together, was the same values that held the rest of society together, reinforced by the need of solidarity against inferiors and outsiders’ (476). This is not a particularly helpful formulation: ‘the rest of society’ includes those who were, in reality and in ideological terms, constructed as inferiors and outsiders. Moreover, her account fails to acknowledge how these allegedly shared values could themselves be both contradictory and contested. As we shall see, in El poema de Fernán González the ideological representation of social order was predicated upon the subjugation of the peasantry and the establishment of very real boundaries, indeed a ‘wide social gulf’, between them and their military and ecclesiastical rulers. In El libro de Alexandre the authority of kings is, from a variety of angles, the subject of real concern. Reynolds’s argument is resolutely with non-Marxist historians. Within the Marxist tradition, feudalism is defined not according to the juridical, interpersonal relationship between lord and vassal, but as a mode of economic production, based on the extraction of surplus value from the peasants by extra-economic coercion (law, custom, and violence), and characterized at the political level by the fragmentation of power and authority (Hilton 1990b). How this impinges upon the representation of the peasant will be seen in chapter 4, on the epic of Fernán González, but it is also relevant to Berceo’s miracle of the greedy peasant, discussed in chapter 1. As for the the fragmentation of sovereignty under feudalism, given its centrality to my analysis of the legends of both Fernán González and Alexander, it is worth quoting at length Perry Anderson’s summary. He writes: There was thus an inbuilt contradiction within feudalism, between its own rigorous tendency to a decomposition of sovereignty and the absolute exigencies of a final centre of authority in which a practical recomposition could occur. Feudal monarchy, therefore, was never wholly reducible to a royal suzerainty: it always existed to some extent in an ideological and juridical realm beyond that of those vassal relationships whose summit could otherwise be ducal or comital potentates, and possessed rights to

INTRODUCTION

23

which the latter could not aspire. At the same time, actual royal power always had to be asserted and extended against the spontaneous grain of the feudal polity as a whole, in a constant struggle to establish a ‘public’ authority outside the compact web of private jurisdictions. The feudal mode of production in the West thus originally specified in its very structure a dynamic tension and contradiction with the centrifugal State which it organically produced and reproduced. (Anderson 1974: 152; emphasis original)

El libro de Alexandre dramatizes this dynamic tension in particularly interesting ways. The representation of Alexander’s conquests is coloured by an obsession with fragmentation at the very centre of political power. This obsession emerges on a variety of levels: for example, in the narrative patterns of departure and return which structure the poem; or in the way the poet raises, only to dismiss, fears that Alexander, the empire’s centre of authority, and the prime mover of its expansion, was a bastard. The poem demonstrates that the political centre is not an ontological but an ideological category. And yet, it was written before the ideological foundations for centralized monarchical authority were laid by jurists and political philosophers in the course of the thirteenth century. The poem illustrates Raymond Williams’s categories of the emergent and structures of feeling: its structures and affective tone register an ideological need that as yet lacked the language and conceptual resources to be expressed in systematic, articulate fashion. A concern with political fragmentation emerges with a different emphasis in El poema de Fernán González. This poem attempts to resolve a potential paradox. It needs to represent Castile’s separation from León as politically, morally, and spiritually legitimate, not as rebellion but as the realization of manifest destiny. The rightful fragmentation of political integrity at one level needs to be represented as politically, morally, and spiritually wrong at another. Thus, the freedom of the emergent nation, Castile, is predicated upon the degree to which its members can arrest further fragmentation of the polity and subordinate their interests to the central authority of the count.26

26 Concepts of nationhood, like ideology, are various and controversial. Some, like Hobsbawm (1992), would minimize the significance of nationhood before the modern period, even though they accept that nationalist ideologies precede nation states. For the applicability to the Middle Ages of the term nation, and for its range of meanings, see Forde (1995). Even in the modern period there is no single, uncontested idea of national identity (Mar-Molinero & Smith 1996: esp. 1–30), and we should not expect to find coherence in the medieval period, as a browse through Maravall’s monumental tome on the concepts of Spain will demonstrate (1997; see also 1983c). In chapter 4, my interest is not in nationhood as such, so much as in the uses of nationhood in the ideological legitimation of political power. For an earlier study of national sentiment in this poem, see Davis (1948).

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Neither El libro de Alexandre nor El poema de Fernán González can be dated with absolute precision.27 Yet the problems of fragmentation and centralization are not specific to the reign of any one monarch from around the turn of the thirteenth century onwards. The Spanish Alexander legend could have been written either towards the end of the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158–1214) or at the beginning of that of Fernando III (1217–52). It is shaped by a concern for unity in diversity that is relevant to both monarchs; indeed a dialectic of expansion and consolidation characterizes the political agendas of other contemporary European monarchies, belonging to the Plantagenet, the Capetian, and the Hohenstaufen dynasties, as Ana Rodríguez López has shown (1994). She points out how the process of territorial expansion was accompanied by a process of political centralization, but in a particularly paradoxical way. The delegation of power to nobles strengthened the crown’s ability to organize its territories, because these nobles were – in theory – tied by bonds of fidelity to the crown, but at the same time this increased the power of the landed aristocracy (see also Álvarez Borge 1993: 6, 203–07). In El libro de Alexandre, it is perhaps not a coincidence that Alexander is poisoned on a throne set up in the middle of the market square of Babylon; the agents of his death are sent from Hell, a place described as a city (Arizaleta 1993). Even so, during this period the principal resistance and challenge to feudalism came from the country, not the towns, which has not prevented scholars from seeing a nascent bourgeois ideology at work in the two clerical texts I discuss in chapter 5, El libro de Apolonio and the debate poem Elena y María. It worth quoting here the remarks of Rodney Hilton, who comments on: the puzzling phenomenon of ‘the rise of the middle classes’ (associated of course with the growth of trade), which seems to start so early, to go on for so long, and to be the explanation of so many different historical movements and events. For although the urban middle class of medieval Europe is said to have begun its notorious career as early as the 10th century, the teacher is faced with the problem of explaining why it was not until the 17th and 18th centuries that this class became the dominant force in society. Why did it take more than 700 years to reach this position if during the whole period it was ‘rising’? (1976: 146)

27 For the debate over the dating of El libro de Alexandre, see Uría Maqua (2000: 197–99), who argues for the second decade of the thirteenth century, largely on the grounds of connections with the newly founded University of Palencia. Arizaleta, quite reasonably in my view, suggests that the first decade of the century is also plausible (1999: 213–15). There have been three dates suggested for the composition of the Poema. For a long time, the accepted date was c. 1250; Lacarra (1979) argued for c. 1275; Jean Paul Keller for 1280–95 (1990: 92–99). The internal evidence on which these hypotheses rests has been cautiously reviewed by Hook (1996: 86). I incline towards the traditional view of mid-thirteenth century, which is held by recent editors (summarized by Uría Maqua 2000: 323–25).

INTRODUCTION

25

It is not a question of denying the importance of the urban expansion and commercial revolution of the late twelfth and thirteenth century, so much as striving for an appropriate understanding of the ways in which they make their troubling presence felt.28 For the purposes of this book, I decided to organize the subject in a particular way. Rather than devote a specific chapter to a study of the urban space in the mester, I look at the way in which the clerical author tries to negotiate between the conflicting interests and values of urban, ecclesiastical, and court spaces. In other words I conclude my survey by returning to the conceptual problem of viewing the cleric as an intermediary. Beginning with Elena y María, I move on to El libro de Apolonio, and from there to Berceo’s version of the tale of the Byzantine merchant (miracle 23). In the process, I follow clerical writers moving between church and court, court and town, and back from town to church, in a circular trajectory that marks the range of their commitments as well as the lure of their traditional home.

28 Bibliography on the urban expansion of the high Middle Ages in Iberia is substantial; for basic introductions, see Valdeavellano (1969) and Gautier Dalché (1979).

1

Pollution and Perception in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora Finding an angle As Berceo goes along his pilgrimage of life, he stumbles across a meadow: ‘caecí en un prado’ (2a). Although modern editors unanimously remind us that the verb is an apocopated form of ‘acaecer’, ‘to happen (upon)’, which derives from the Latin cadere, ‘to fall’, in this context Berceo’s word choice is surely telling. As an allegory of the Virgin, this meadow is the space of redemption, and as such there is always an implied fall. Indeed, the fact of original sin underlies the entire allegorical introduction, which, as Michael Gerli has shown, plots ‘la Historia Universal del Hombre [y] traza un ejemplo de pecado y redención dentro de un marco claramente bíblico y mítico’ (Berceo 1987: 33–48, at pp. 45–46).1 What concerns me here is not so much the link Berceo establishes between sin and redemption – which is straightforward enough – as the way the connection is made: not the theological fact, in other words, but its ideological mode. Having reaching this garden, the pilgrim takes refuge in the shade of some trees, removes his ‘ropiella’, and, refreshed, exclaims: ‘Perdí todos cuidados / [. . .] oblidé toda cuita e lazerio passado: / ¡Qui allí se morasse serié bienventurado!’ (7a & 12cd). In this spiritual locus amoenus, original sin, and the toil and corruption that it brought into the world, are there only as a receding memory; they are there to be forgotten. There is of course an obvious logic to this in a poem displaying such optimistic faith in the Virgin’s redemptive powers. As Gerli suggests, the scene stages a return to innocence and a rejection of shame (Berceo 1987: 41–43). I would add that this process of forgetting, and the return to innocence, are played out in representational terms. For within this allegorical garden sin makes its presence felt only through verbal echo (‘caecí’; ‘ropiella’ as the clothing of sin, Berceo 1987: 42), or through an act of association. ‘Semeja esti prado’, writes Berceo, ‘egual de Paraíso’ (14a) and the comparison brings forth the inevitable allusion to Adam and Eve:

1 The idea was extended by Ruiz Domínguez (1990), who views the miracle collection as a historia salutatis.

POLLUTION AND PERCEPTION IN BERCEO’S MILAGROS

27

El fructo de los árbores era dulz e sabrido, si don Adám oviesse de tal fructo comido, de tan mala manera non serié decibido, ni tomarién tal danno Eva nin so marido. (15)

As he tries to imagine a history that did not happen, Berceo veers away from the actual forbidden fruit plucked from the Tree of Knowledge. Consequently, we think of them only indirectly, as the objects of illicit choices and regretted desires, supplanted by the fruits and trees that signify Mary’s miraculous redemptive powers. But sin and corruption are inescapably there. However much the clerical writer may wish to keep sin at bay and protect the purity of this allegorical sacred space, his poetic world cannot be purged of corruption: in part, because it is impossible to represent redemption without it; in part, because the Virgin (like the clerics with whom she is often associated), moves constantly between a world of spiritual perfection and a world of human frailty. Herein lies another connection between the allegorical introduction and the tales that follow. In the very act of representing the process of redemption, Berceo is drawn ineluctably back to the very sins he aspires to forget. Indeed, except in the most general terms – pride, avarice, and so forth – we cannot look on these sins as ready-made, stable and unalloyed categories. During a period of reform and social change, the frontiers between sin and virtue were shifting. If, in the Garden of Eden, eating the forbidden fruit brought knowledge of sin, which in turn introduced shame, fear, and guilt, so did the reformers’ attempts to determine the difference between right and wrong. In this world, there can be no return to innocence. Read in this light, the doctrinal messages exemplified by these miracles acquire deeper meaning. As I hope to show in this and subsequent chapters, in representing this historia salutatis guilt, fear, and shame can never be forgotten: they leave their narrative mark in ways that betray often very anxious concerns over the precise reach and boundaries of sin, understood not just as an abstract category, but as a way of structuring social relationships in some very specific contexts. In the penultimate stanza of this introduction, Berceo expresses his desire to ascend into the trees that signify Mary’s miracles: ‘Quiero en estos árbores un ratiello sobir / e de los sos miraclos algunos escrivir’ (45a). And ultimately, although the move endows Berceo with an authoritative vantage point (Biaggini 2002a: 144–45), the ascent is only temporary, it is only for ‘un ratiello’. Berceo climbs up in the knowledge that he will, after a time, have to climb down again. The fact is inscribed into the narrative perspective: ‘estos árbores’ and ‘esti prado’ are moments of immediacy in a point of view that is largely constituted by past tenses and distant locative adverbs (‘allí’). Overall, the writer places himself firmly in the here and now, looking back upon a temporary moment of illumination, and hoping to recreate it for himself and his fellows. In one respect, the detail acknowledges the precariousness of purity – for living humans at least – and it echoes an earlier longing, ‘qui allí se morasse

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serié bienventurado’ (12d). Yet the passage in and out of the meadow and up and down the tree is also the cleric’s lot, his mester; as a go-between, he moves to and fro between worlds of purity and pollution. If this movement, with its shifts of perspective, defines his knowledge, it also brings with it the fear of temptation – just as confessors feared contamination by the many permutations and circumstances of evil, which they so assiduously compiled in their expansive repertoires of sin. The opportunity to explore human experience from different vantage points was offered, above all, by miracles. In telling these tales, clerical writers hovered on the boundaries separating the natural from the unnatural, and at times the distinction was not always clear-cut. This dilemma had already been acknowledged by Augustine, whose ideas on the marvellous and the miraculous (two categories that are associated but not identical) were re-elaborated by Aquinas in the thirteenth century.2 In spite of their differences, both theologians emphasize how for mankind miracles are, in large measure, a problem of perception. On the one hand, for the wise man all of divine creation is a marvel, but, as Augustine observes in De Trinitate (III, vi, 11), ‘when [. . .] things happen in a continuous kind of river of ever-flowing succession, passing by a regular and beaten track, then they are called natural; when, for the admonishment of men, they are thrust in by an unusual changeableness, then they are called miracles’ (quoted from Houston 1994: 9). Note the metaphors of flowing river and beaten track: I shall come back to them in my comments on Berceo’s miracle of the fornicating sacristan. Moreover, Augustine, and especially Aquinas, both stress the difficulty of always distinguishing between marvels produced in the regular course of Nature and miracles proper, which are the result of God directly intervening in the world in order to recall mankind to the contemplation of Divine Truth. Perception is important, but it is not the only difficulty. Put simply, miracles do not always work. Both theologians accept, often in very explicit fashion, that there are different ways of bearing witness to the marvellous reality of Divine Creation: in some, miracles can lead to a sophisticated theological understanding of the relation between man and God, and of the process of sin, redemption, and salvation; in others, to an ingenuous, fervent faith in God’s goodness; and in others still, to a continued, wilful ignorance. As we shall see towards the end of this chapter, for Berceo, as for so many others, the most problematic witnesses are the Jews. And the stories that Berceo

2 On medieval concepts of the miracle, see Ward (1987: especially 3–32); for the theories of Augustine and Aquinas, see Houston (1994: 8–20: 21–32); for Berceo’s notion of the miraculous, see Diz (1995: 9–22); for an overview of Marian miracles, see Ward (1987: 132–65) and Montoya (1981), who also offers a basic comparative study of selected tales by Berceo, Alfonso X and Gautier de Coinci. Berceo drew his inspiration from a collection of Latin miracles whose sole extant witness is Copenhague Ms. Thott 128. They have now been edited and translated into Spanish by Avelina and Fátima Carrera de la Red (Miracula 2000), who also provide brief notes on how Berceo adapted his source.


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tells of the Jews, full as they are of stereotypes, raise fundamental methodological problems which, though particularly acute in their case, are applicable to each and every miracle in the collection. These miracles are commonplaces, in some cases with very long literary traditions. How do we, as readers, juggle the historically specific (Berceo’s text itself) with the transhistorical (the tradition)? It is a question of balance. To over-emphasize the larger paradigm is to treat the stories as Augustine’s ‘river that never ceases to flow’ or as a narrative ‘beaten track’, and thus submit historically specific conflicts to an ideological process of naturalization; conversely, although historicizing means respecting particular nuances and emphases, we cannot simply cast off the stereotypical, or the habitual. Convention provides a narrative framework that lends a sense of stability and tradition to the social and religious issues that trouble the here and now. Acknowledging this gives us a longer ideological perspective.

‘El sacristán fornicario’ This tale is found in more than twenty Latin collections and in numerous vernacular versions.3 It relates the story of a licentious monk who, while crossing a river on one of his daily outings for sex, slips and drowns. He dies unconfessed and in a state of sin, and the devils are prevented from dragging him off to hell only by the miraculous intercession of the Virgin Mary, for whom the monk had a special devotion. The Virgin intercedes with Christ, the theological niceties are circumvented through compassion, and the monk’s soul is returned to his body, allowing him to confess, be absolved and lead a reformed, albeit brief, life. Berceo’s adaptation of this tale displays some of his basic ideological trademarks. He casts no doubt on the existence of the moral categories of right and wrong, but his poetry displays a fascination for their point of contact, when the values and ideals that govern actual existence can co-exist or overlap. Individuals have secrets; who they appear to be will depend upon perspective and circumstance, and the overarching view is open solely to God. In fact, creating a secret identity is the very first move Berceo makes. Whereas the Latin monk is already announced as being lubricious and influenced by the Devil,

3 For the Latin, I quote from Gerli’s edition (224–25); the text was previously published by Dutton, who also summarizes, without comment, where Berceo departs from his source (1971: 57–58; see also Montoya 1981: 130–44). The tale’s tradition is summarized by Rankka (Gautier de Coinci 1955: 8–21) and Montoya (1981: 128–30). For Spanish vernacular examples, see Alfonso X, cantiga 11 (1986–89, I: 85–88; for the prose version, see 329–30); there is also a brief fourteenth-century version in the Libro de enxemplos (Gautier de Coinci 1955: 20), and the fifteenth-century Dança general de la muerte also alludes to the stereotype of the sacristan as a licentious ‘saltaparedes’ (Dança, st. 80).

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Berceo takes this ready-made sinner, and transforms him into someone who is first perceived as so devout, ‘cuerdo e quito de follía’, that his abbot entrusts him with the duties of the sacristan (77). Having established the monk’s spiritual, moral, and administrative virtues, Berceo sets the Devil to work (78).4 He thus opens up a dual perspective on the man, created by the discrepancy between the assumptions of the monk’s brethren and our knowledge of his sin. Indeed, a sense of duality pervades not only the sacristan’s performance of his job but also its very nature; for it seems that Berceo has fastened on to the symbolic potential of the sacristan’s position. It is only when he has been given the job of protecting the physical fabric of the monastery and guarding its entrances and exits that the Devil corrupts him. As gargoyles remind us, evil lurks on the very edges of sacred space. Moreover, Berceo specifies the sacristan’s duties with unique detail, describing him as a ‘clavero’ (83b), a ‘key-keeper’ or guardian.5 As the person charged with opening and closing the doors of the monastery, this monk is the perfect symbol of the liminal. 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. When the monks discover the drowned sacristan, they hesitate, confounded by doubt and shame: Qué podrié seer esto no lo podién asmar, si⭈s murió o⭈l mataron no lo sabién judgar; era muy grand la basca e mayor el pesar, ca cadié en mal precio por esto el logar. (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). It then goes on to concede that he was devoted to the Virgin. Berceo reverses this characterization to create a more dynamic model of virtue corrupted. The difference, though not the effects, was noted by Dutton (Berceo 1971: 58). 5 For ‘clavero’, see also miracle 13 where García Turza glosses the word figuratively as ‘ “defensor”, propiamente “dignidad de las órdenes militares encargada de la defensa de un castillo o convento” ’ (note to 309d); and miracle 7, where Berceo describes St Peter as the ‘clavero celestial’ (179b), a point to which I return below.


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quick presumption of guilt that betrays a collective anxiety over human vulnerability to pollution. Given that the audience does not yet know the outcome, the monks and the audience are aligned in their presumptions and shame; and aligned not only with each other, but also – at least as far as the presumption of guilt is concerned – with the devils. The legal tussle between the devils and the Virgin (86–94) pits the letter of the law against the virtue of compassion. The scene thus echoes the way St Paul repeatedly contrasts the law (the Old Testament) with grace (the New Testament). Moreover, it corresponds to the broad practical goals of medieval catechesis, in which, as García de la Concha puts it ‘no se proponía tanto enseñar como moralizar. Buscaba, por ello, sobre todo, la eficacia, despreocupándose de matices doctrinales’ (1992: 64). Indeed, as an advocate, Mary is supremely cavalier with doctrinal nuance.6 Sweeping aside the devils’ prosecution of the sinner, Mary counters with the claim that ‘quando ixió de casa, de mí priso licencia, / del peccado que fizo yo⭈l daré penitencia’ (92bc). In a period of reform, and in a text read (by some) as an expression of the certainties of dogma, it is worth dwelling on the way Berceo represents this tension between law and compassion, in order to refine the broad conclusion (e.g., Ackerman 1983–84) that Mary lends humanity to an increasingly hierarchical church. Ideologically, the compassion that Mary wins from God is symptomatic of more particular issues that emerged in the course of reform. In the second half of the twelfth century, Pope Alexander III, influenced by Peter Abelard’s intentionist ethics, distinguished two formal strategies for combating deviance: the external or public forum (Church courts) and the internal forum (confessional penance). In the process, the definition of sin itself was called into question, particularly in sexual affairs, which for the most part take place in private.7 Whether a crime was committed wilfully, by accident, sorrowfully and so forth, depended heavily upon the ability to judge intent. Since this was the domain of the internal forum of confession, canon lawyers, who were keen to promote recourse to Church courts, set about lowering standards of proof and admitted as evidence the defendant’s fame or notoriety – to the consternation of some who feared conviction by mere rumour. This story, however, even in the earlier Latin version, gives precedence to the internal forum. There are no witnesses to a crime (though the monks’ shame may imply rumour), so the question of intent is fundamental. Although the issue is clouded by the simultaneity of sin and devotion, we also learn that Mary had given the sacristan her secret ‘licencia’ (92a). Although Berceo takes this detail directly from his source (‘a me licenciam accipiebat’, 225), he adds the significant rider that she 6 On Berceo’s depiction of Mary’s advocatory powers, its analogues and implications, see Howe (1979–80), Ackerman (1983–84), and García de la Concha (1992: especially 76–83). 7 On intentionist ethics, its problems and implications, see Brundage (1996: 25–30) and Elliott (1999: 72, 76–80).

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had also assumed responsibility for dictating his penance (92b). In this way, Berceo strengthens the implied confessional relationship between sinner and Virgin, which in his hands seems to take precedence over the judgments of the formal courts, whose role in combating perceived deviance had substantially increased since the Latin tale first began to circulate. Berceo’s characterization of one prosecution lawyer as ‘un savidor dïablo, sotil e muy puntero’ (90b) may be a satirical glancing blow at the proliferating ranks of hairsplitting canon lawyers who were the instruments of thirteenth-century reform.8 In the final analysis, however, neither confession nor the courts resolve the uncertainty surrounding the sacristan’s sin; the problem is displaced, since God defers definitive ruling by giving the sinner a second chance. Though this second chance appears theologically scandalous to some, it follows the basic impulses of Berceo’s treatment of a tale that portrays the uncertainty of judgment moving from the monks (84b), through the metaphysical debate, and into the unfathomable mind of the Almighty. As I mentioned, these problems of identifying the boundary between right and wrong in human action are staged within the spatial symbolism of a river that, running alongside the monastery, marks a frontier zone between good and evil. But the river helps convey the story’s interest not just in the definition but also in the practice and experience of sin. Following his well-beaten path towards sin, the monk crosses this river and one day he slips and drowns. In the Latin, the monk falls ‘impulsus a diabolo’ (225); whether he is wading or crossing a bridge is not clear. Latching onto the possibilities of this scene, which he amplifies imaginatively, Gautier de Coinci has the sacristan use a boat to cross the river, which he transforms into a diabolical symbol of the unknown (1955: 120; ll. 63–81). For Berceo, on the other hand, the danger lies not in the unknown, but in quite the reverse, in the habitual. There is a river, and the monk slips, perfectly naturally: the Devil had already done his work in corrupting the monk (78).9 And at the risk of finding theological influences where there is nothing more – and nothing less – than poetry, one might say that this well-trodden path and this river are the Augustinian metaphors for a way of life that had been turned by force of habit into something that appears natural. In the context of contemporary religious reform, this point is fundamental. It is not enough to teach that fornication is sinful; for the teaching to work, it has to operate not only on a rational but also on an affective, experiential level: sexual desire has to be naturalized and experienced as a sin in order to break the force of custom. Commenting on the difficulties of 8 What Brundage calls the ‘fine doctrinal hairlines’ (1996: 30) produced the occasional satire of zealous archdeacons (31–34). 9 Berceo’s omission of the Devil was noted by Dutton (1971: 58) and Montoya (1981: 134). Whereas Alfonso merely mentions a slip (ll. 32–34), the author of the prose version explicitly reintroduces diabolic intervention (329). Gautier has the Devil capsize the sacristan’s boat (1955: 120; ll. 80–81).


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enforcing of clerical celibacy, Brundage writes: ‘While direct overt resistance to the new rules about clerical celibacy concocted in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries was relatively short-lived, passive resistance persisted throughout the high Middle Ages’ (1996: 24–25).10 In short, the miracle carries out one of its basic operations, which is to awaken the fornicating cleric from the ‘river of habit’, what at the start of the story Berceo uniquely, albeit more prosaically, called the sacristan’s ‘mal uso’ (79a). Representing the doctrinal and experiential aspects of sin requires the interplay of perspectives on human action, and this is also noticeable in the verbal texture of the poem. When the sacristan is reunited with his fellow monks, he tells them what had happened: ‘contólis por su lengua toda su ledanía’ (97a). The sinner’s ‘litany’ embraces both his sexual misdemeanours and his spiritual salvation. In glossing ‘ledanía’ with terms such as ‘retahíla’, modern editors gloss over the fact that liturgical language is appropriated for comic effect, which allows Berceo, through laughter, to situate the flesh and the spirit on the same plane.11 Though a minor point, it accords with Berceo’s reminder that the sacristan is, after all, a ‘clavero’ or key-keeper (83b). The detail prompts us to think, first, of St Peter (elsewhere described as ‘el clavero celestial’, 179b) and through him of the spiritual implications of the custodian’s position. But locks and doors could also be read as sexual euphemisms (Adams 1982: 89) which reminds us that this man’s ‘key’ was being used for quite different purposes. In oral delivery, the hint could be conveyed through accompanying gestures and intonation, and in this respect, Berceo’s representation of space and movement makes it easy for the performer. No translation or silent reading could do justice to the rhythms of his verse: Querié de corazón bien a Sancta María, facié a la su statua el enclín cada día. Facié a la su statua el enclín cada día, fincava los enojos, dicié ‘Ave María’. (76cd–77ab) [. . .] Siquier a la exida, siquier a la entrada [. . .] el enclín e la Ave teniéla bien usada. (80a & c)

10 On perceptions of sexual immorality amongst the Spanish clergy, see Hillgarth (1976, I: 111–14). In 1228, John of Abbeville, the papal legate sent to oversee the Lateran reforms in Spain, remarked on the incontinence of the Spanish clergy; ‘in their fondness for women they were a class apart’ according to Linehan (1971: 29–30, at p. 30), who goes on to argue that ecclesiastical authorities were forced to ‘soft-pedal’ on the question of clerical concubinage (66–67). 11 Berceo’s pun is thrown into relief by the Alfonsine versions: in the poem, the monks read a ‘ledanía’ over the corpse in order to protect it from the Devil (ll. 90–95); this episode is cut in the prose adaptation, which transfers the term to the celebratory hymns that accompany the body back to the monastery (330). In both cases, they retain the purity of the religious term.

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Of course, the motif of the genuflection and salutation (‘el enclín e la Ave’) is not original, but Berceo’s version calls attention not only to the repetitive rituals of the monk’s faith, but also – perhaps – to that physical movement that characterizes his favourite vice, as the monk spends his days going in and out, up and down, impelled along his habitual path by what one might call the rhythms of luxuria.12 The conjunction of flesh and spirit extends all the way to the poem’s denouement, where we encounter one of Berceo’s most striking narrative variants: Confessóse el monge e fizo penitencia, mejoróse de toda su mala contenencia, sirvió a la Gloriosa mientre ovo potencia, finó quando Dios quiso sin mala repindencia, requiescat in pace cum divina clemencia. (99)

Of the versions that contain similar commentaries, Berceo’s stands out. If the Spanish poet breaks here the rigorous metrical scheme of cuaderna vía and adds a fifth line to the stanza, it is because he wants to give a particular twist to the story of this fornicating monk’s redemption. Even as he stresses the importance of confession and penitence, he manages to suggest, with his characteristic irony, how hard it was for this monk to free himself completely from the past and to discover inner peace.13 Even after his spiritual purging, one can still hear like a distant memory the echoes of his earlier life: he dies ‘sin mala repindencia’, ‘without wrong repentance’, or ‘he does not repent having repented’: the English ‘with proper repentance’ would not do justice to the force of the double negative, for the phrase teaches a particular Christian message even while it evokes its practical difficulties on an affective level. Moreover, the seemingly neutral phrase ‘sirvió a la Gloriosa’ is in one respect merely lifted from his source (‘Deo et Sancte Marie [. . .] ferventius servivit’, 225), and thus appears to be quite conventional. On the other hand, Berceo eliminates what in the Latin was a generalized and diffuse service to God, the Virgin, and mankind at large (enacted through his good works ‘in bonis actibus vitam suam consummans’, 225), and concentrates exclusively on the sinner’s devotion to his female saviour. Then, in the second hemistich, he allows this ‘servicio’ to take on a more interesting dimension: ‘sirvió a la Gloriosa mientre ovo potencia’, and the phrase recalls his insatiable sexual appetite which, once repressed, now returns transfigured into a divine courtly love. In this way, Berceo does not produce a total rupture between past and present and does not offer two states (sin and For ‘path’ as a euphemism for the female genitalia, see Adams (1982: 89). As García Turza (Berceo 1992a, note to 99b) observes, there are two other anomalous stanzas, 219e and 911e. I return to the point below. The most striking contrast to Berceo’s approach is provided by Gautier, who concludes his version with a long excursus on the nausea provoked by luxuria, which (all too predictably) then modulates into a diatribe against women as the source of pollution. 12 13


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redemption) rigidly opposed, but he narrates the redemption of this man from a more complex perspective. He focusses our attention on a liminal state, and upon a metamorphosis that evokes the continued pressure of desire and the tense co-existence of the carnal and the spiritual. In this final stanza, we have a synthesis of the existential condition that had been explored in the story itself. Not for nothing does it end with Berceo’s parting blessing –‘requiescat in pace cum divina clemencia’ – issued not just upon a soul in turmoil but upon the larger conflicts that the man represents. And how symptomatic it is that Berceo should inscribe this desire for peace in esthetically disruptive terms!

‘El clérigo y la flor’ Although Berceo removes the narrative link which in his source connects this miracle to the previous one, the second and third tales have much in common.14 They both exemplify the power of active devotion, expressed physically, through ritualized word and deed. Many other miracles, of course, convey an individual’s piety by making explicit reference to the devotional act itself, such as genuflection, prayers, respect for an image or a statue (see miracles 4, 6, 9, etc). Both ‘El sacristán fornicario’ and ‘El clérigo y la flor’, however, are especially notable examples, because they both stage dramas of discovery in which the veil of public perception is lifted to reveal a hidden personal truth. In this respect, they remind us that insistence on outward show is determined in large measure by the demands of oral poetry, where abstract ideas – in this case belief – are represented in concrete terms. These gestures are equivalent to the ‘physical phrases’ of epic verse. As such, they do not necessarily undermine the interiority of the belief, but offer a means of thinking about inner and outer self at a time when the modern vocabulary of ‘public’ and ‘private’ had not developed.15 Although the relation between private belief and public behaviour is one of the central themes of the collection, this third miracle brings the issue to the fore since the symbolic act of devotion is performed in a private space beyond public knowledge. A wayward cleric suffers a mysterious and sudden death, and since he dies unconfessed, he is buried in unconsecrated ground. Because of his special devotion to Mary, she appears before one of his brethren and demands reburial. When clerics and townsfolk open his grave they find no signs of physical corruption (though the body has been dead for a month); instead, they see a 14 Comparing the two men’s piety, he eliminates ‘sicut supra de altero retulimus’ (226), probably for the sake of variety, since he starts the next miracle with ‘D’un clérigo otro nos diz la escriptura’ (116a), which renders ‘Alter quoque quidam clericus in quodam loco commorabatur’ (226). 15 For the importance of devotional literature in the history of the subject, and a critique of early modernists’ monopoly of concepts of ‘selfhood’ and ‘interiority’, see Aers (1992).

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sweet-smelling flower growing from his mouth, and his tongue seems as fresh as an apple. Recognizing a miracle, they re-bury him with honour inside the grounds of the church. Although this story follows the common pattern of immorality redeemed by Marian devotion, it also engages with the ideological tension between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ selves, or the individual and the social. As I shall explain, much of this tension is played out on a figurative level: the flower is the visible symbol of Mary, but its roots are concealed within the sinner’s mouth; the tongue gives man a public voice, but it is usually hidden from view, enclosed by the cheeks; and the metaphorical apple, which evokes the deception at the centre of man’s Fall, transforms this individual story into a paradigm of the larger social condition. It is not hard to understand the ideological power of this tale when one considers it in the context of the Western Church’s attempts to systematize the methods of confession and penance. The reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council consolidated a model whereby secret confession between sinner and priest should be followed by private penance rather than public reconciliation (McNeill & Gamer 1990: 29). Moreover, the reforms stipulated that confession and penance should take place regularly, at least once a year, otherwise the sinner shall ‘be deprived of Christian burial when he dies’ (McNeill & Gamer 1990: 413). As far as one’s salvation is concerned, however, the spiritual consequences of one’s moral conduct are not a matter for public judgement. Though a secret, confession and penance are far from being personal in any absolute sense, because through the mediation of the priest the process ties the individual to the Church. In this respect, it is curious that Berceo should begin by removing the story from its specific location in Chartres.16 In part, eliminating this centre of ecclesiastical authority may be determined by a sensitivity on Berceo’s part towards an ideological problem, caused by the fact that this story circumvents confession through a direct relationship with a divine, rather than an earthly, mediator. The change also shifts our perspective away from the historical context and moves it on to a more general plane, thus paving the way for the final allegory which makes the tale address the universal human condition in more obvious ways. We note a similar move in Berceo’s treatment of the cleric, which is less specific and less overtly judgmental. Although the Latin text describes the protagonist as ‘worldly’ (‘seculi curis deditus’), at the same time it specifies his moral laxity and carnality: ‘erat levis moribus [. . .] carnalibus eciam desideriis ultra modum subiectus’ (226).17 Berceo avoids such obvious

16 The story is located in Chartres in the Latin source (226), in Gautier’s Miracles (1955–70, II: 109, l. 1), and in Alfonso X’s cantiga 24 and its later prosification (1986–89, I: 115–17 & 342–43). For a summary of the basic narrative differences between these versions, see Montoya (1981: 144–52). 17 For Alfonso, the sins of choice are deceit and thievery (l. 10).


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specificity, preferring instead to set up a contrast between general immorality or ‘madness’ (conveyed by the terms ‘tiestherido’ and ‘locco’, 101a & 101c), and devotion to the Virgin or ‘buen sentido’ (101c).18 And where the Latin points directly at the priest’s luxuria, Berceo is content with a playful hint, embedding the euphemism ‘ál’ in an otherwise bland allusion to the man’s weak morals: ‘en ál malcostumnado’, 102a; my emphasis). These moves are even more striking when one contrasts his poem with the version of Gautier de Coinci, who begins by dwelling explicitly and at some length upon the protagonist’s moral faults. His cleric is arrogant, worldly, wilful, licentious, and fails to respect religious festivals (1955–70, II: 110; ll. 33–34), and his outrageous conduct provokes scandal and gossip in the cathedral close (ll. 28–40). When the cleric is murdered, suddenly, and with no opportunity for confession, those who know him have clear evidence of his turpitude but none of his piety. Does he deserve salvation, which would be publicly acknowledged by burying him in consecrated ground? Each version of the tale poses the same question, but approaches it with quite different emphases. Berceo’s Latin source is characteristically succinct and direct: the clerics ‘scientes eum satis irreligiosam vitam duxisse decreverunt extra cimiterium sepeliri debere’ (226). The narrator then briefly intervenes with a value judgement (‘non ut tale decebat virum sepelierunt’, 226), which is later echoed by the Virgin herself, who is angry that her follower has been buried in an ‘indecenti loco’.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. Toute sa vie a il usee em puterie.’ 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. (ll. 30–40)

They then throw the whoring cleric into ditch, ‘com un larron’ (l. 42). No such moral outrage is to be found in the Spanish text. In contrast, Berceo is 18 For the common analogy between madness and sin both in this tale and the collection as a whole, see Saugnieux (1982: 21–22). However, the neologism, ‘tiestherido’, may also be an instance of the frequent connections Berceo draws between a character’s moral condition and the events that befall him in life. In this case, the word hints at the manner of his eventual murder. 19 Lack of confession is the motive offered by the Alfonsine version (ll. 21–27) and its prosification (1986–89, I: 342).

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more interested in thinking about the uncertainties that surround this sudden death: Dezir no lo sabría sobre quál ocasión ca nos no lo sabemos si lo buscó o non, diéronli enemigos salto a est varón, ovieron a matarlo: ‘¡Domne Dios lo perdón!’ (103)

Overall, these lines convey the narrator’s point of view, suggesting that his doubts stem in part from the gaps in the written source he alluded to in the very first word of the tale (‘Leemos de un clérigo [. . .]’, 101a). But the final prayer – with the Latinism ‘Domne’ lending an air of ecclesiastical authority – moves the hesitancy away from the textual and into a moral and spiritual domain, and encourages the audience to refrain from hasty or preconceived value judgments.20 Moreover, Berceo then shifts perspective and, this time from the viewpoint of the fictional characters, once again gives voice to doubt: Los omnes de la villa e los sus companneros esto cómo cuntiera com non eran certeros, defuera de la villa entre unos riberos, allá lo soterraron, non entre los dezmeros. (104)

Unlike the French version, Berceo’s narrative does not introduce ecclesiastical shame as an explicit motive for burying the sinner’s corpse outside the church grounds (though, as I shall explain, the idea of shame emerges later in the poem). Indeed, the Spanish poet broadens the social context of the narrative by giving the laity much greater prominence than Gautier, in the reference to ‘Los omnes de la villa’, ‘defuera de la villa’, and ‘los dezmeros’.21 This final reference to the payment of tithes is doubly significant, because it not only keeps our focus on the laity, but also reminds us of the way in which personal devotion is recorded and institutionalized through public action. In addition, Berceo develops the spatial symbolism by having the body buried ‘entre unos riberos’ (104c), an apparently obscure term which probably means ‘ribazo’ or ‘orilla’. The word is not ‘ilógica [. . .] según el contexto’, according to Gerli’s footnote, since it possesses a symbolic logic, indicating that the body is buried in a boundary zone between certainty and suspicion. The symbolic space is analogous to the river in which the licentious sacristan drowns, or the crossroads where, as we shall see, Theophilus signs his pact with the Devil. Other narrative details are symptomatic of Berceo’s interest in combining clarity with doubt and clouded perception. In his Latin source, a simple ‘hic 20 I return to the problem of preconception in my analysis of ‘La abadesa preñada’, in chapter 2. 21 Gautier makes only passing reference to the ‘clerc et lai’ who rush off to find the corpse (l. 83). The laity are excluded in the Latin and by Alfonso X.


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tamen’ suffices to contrast the account of the priest’s immorality with his Marian devotion, and Gautier structures his introduction around a similar, though more extended single binarism. Berceo heightens the rhetorical effect by doubling the opening concessive clause across two stanzas: ‘Peroque era locco [. . .] amava la Gloriosa’ (101bc) is repeated by ‘Comoquiere que era en ál malcostumnado, / en saludar a ella era bien acordado’ (102ab). Later, when the Virgin first enters the scene, in the Latin she merely ‘appears before a certain cleric’ (‘apparuit cuidam clerico’, 226), and both the French and the Alfonsine versions repeat this anonymity (ll. 49 & 31 respectively). In the Spanish, however, this anonymous cleric becomes ‘un clérigo de buen entendimiento’ (105c), but one whose understanding is befuddled by sleep: ‘yazié dormitado’ (108a). It is not just the dramatic possibilities of the scene that catch Berceo’s eye, but the thematic ones as well. For when this wise but perplexed cleric asks the Virgin his hesitant question, ‘who are you, and who are you talking about?’, he is partly motivated by anxiety over what other people might say: ‘Dime de ti mandado, / ca quando lo dissiero seráme demandado’ (108bc). Whatever his private experience and conviction, he knows he is going to be called to public account. There are, then, two trends in Berceo’s adaptation of this story which pit the personal against the public: he generalizes its significance and, refraining from being explicitly judgmental, he highlights the problem of perception. Both trends are developed in the climactic moment of discovery. As in his source, Berceo moves rapidly from the appearance of the Virgin to the opening of the coffin with its miraculous contents. But there are tonal and structural differences that distinguish him from the other Latin and vernacular authors. Whereas these writers recreate a mood of awe and the miraculous before the discovery of the body, Berceo crafts a dramatic sequence that maps a gradual process of understanding. The crowd rushes to the grave (their speed, not wonder, is described; 111ab), opens the coffin lid and witnesses ‘un miraclo non simple ca doblado, / el uno e el otro fue luego notado’ (111cd). Again, Berceo focusses not on reaction but on perception. After he relates what they saw, he turns back to the onlookers who now understand the cause of the miracle (114ab), and only at this point does he mention their celebrations, as they carry the redeemed sinner’s body back to the church (114cd). In this way, Berceo draws to a close a cycle of events that traced the initial uncertainty of the clerics and townspeople, the confusion of the wise cleric, the act of witnessing, the moment of understanding, and the public celebration of a truth finally revealed. Sensory perception is fundamental to Berceo’s treatment of this particular miracle. Uniquely, he describes it as a ‘double miracle’ because it is experienced through two faculties, sight and smell: Issiéle por la boca una fermosa flor de muy grand fermosura, de muy fresca color; inchié toda la plaza de sabrosa olor, que non sentién del cuerpo un punto de pudor. (112)

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Berceo elaborates upon the basic motif of the beautiful flower, which symbolizes the continuous and redeeming presence of the Virgin on the sinner’s tongue. This symbolism is pointed up by Alfonso, who names the flower as a lily (ll. 55–57), and by Gautier who compares the freshness of the tongue to a young rose in May (l. 91): both flowers are common features of Marian iconography. But Berceo reaches the Virgin through a more indirect, but ultimately more profound, route. Coupled to the visual beauty of the flower is the effect of its wondrous scent, and the combination takes us back to Berceo’s own allegorical garden, ‘de flores bien poblado’ (2c). The refreshing power of these flowers, which we later learn stand for the names of the Virgin (31), comes not from their visual beauty but from their perfume: ‘la olor de las flores / [. . .] resfrescáronme todo e perdí los sudores: / podrié vevir el omne con aquellos olores’ (5).22 The allegorical significance of this ‘sabrosa olor’ emerges with greater force in the final line of stanza 112: such was the power of this pervasive scent that ‘non sentién del cuerpo un punto de pudor’. Modern editors all gloss ‘pudor’ as ‘stench’, which is a perfectly plausible reading in the context, not only because of the ideological nexus linking the sense of smell with disgust and shame, but also because Berceo – alone among the authors considered here – makes Mary warn that after thirty days underground the body might have begun to rot: ‘en término tan luengo podié seer dannado’ (106b). Allegorically, therefore, the stench of bodily death is overcome by the odour of sanctity and spiritual life.23 However, the significance of this final line extends further, because the etymological meaning of ‘pudor’ cannot be ignored. In Latin, it means ‘a sense of shame’ or ‘decency’, and by transference, ‘a cause for shame’.24 The second meaning applies here, and in two ways. The dead man is no longer the object of shame which caused him to be buried in unconsecrated ground. And more importantly, the idea of bodily shame evokes the deeper guilt of original sin, when Adam and Eve first became aware of their nakedness.25 Spiritual salvation has eradicated mankind’s bodily shame inherited from the Garden of Eden. The evocation of Eden in the final word of stanza 112 is developed in the following stanza, which describes the sinner’s tongue, the instrument of his salvation:

22 See also ‘Davan olor sovejo las flores bien olientes, / refrescavan en omne las carnes e las mientes’ (3ab); ‘Nunqua trobé en sieglo [. . .] olor tan sabroso’ (6ab). 23 This meaning had been anticipated by the allegorical introduction: the perfume of the flowers ‘refrescavan en omne las carnes e las mientes’ (3b, my emphasis). 24 According to Corominas, the Latinism ‘pudor’ is not recorded by Covarrubias or Nebrija, and Palencia appears to use it only as a Latin word (1980–91, s.v). 25 ‘The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame’ (Genesis 2: 25); the shame of nakedness is subsequently implied in Genesis 3: 6, 10 & 21.


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Trobáronli la lengua tan fresca e tan sana qual parece de dentro la fermosa mazana; no la tenié más fresca a la meredïana quando sedié fablando en media la quintana. (113)

The Latin version and French versions describe the tongue as if it were caught in the very act of praising the Virgin: ‘invenerunt [. . .] linguam eius integram et sanam quasi ad laudandum Deum paratam’ – Gautier even suggests that the tongue was not frozen (‘paratam’) in praise but still moving: ‘Chascun sambloit et ert avis / qu’encore un peu se remuast’ (ll. 94–95). Berceo’s move is more original and more challenging. While his Latin source and Gautier link the cleric’s tongue with his devotion to God and the Virgin Mary, Berceo moves, at least initially, in the opposite direction, back towards pleasures of the man’s sensual and worldly life. His tongue is as fresh as an apple, and still as voluble as when he sat, idly chatting away, in the midday heat of the orchard. On a literal level, the passage implies that he was a chatterbox; allegorically, Berceo introduces the apple to remind us, first, of the garden which was the scene of original sin, but since he does so in the context of salvation, by an associative chain reaction the allusion then evokes the hortus conclusus which is the Virgin Mary. Of course, the link between sin and redemption was established as the basic paradigm for all the tales in Berceo’s own allegorical introduction, and we have already noted some of the textual reminiscences of that passage. Now, in addition to the flower with its perfumed scent, we have orchard trees which provide shade from the noon-time sun, and the repetition of the adjective ‘fresca’ (112b, 113a & c) which combine to recall the pilgrim’s refreshment (3b and 5c) provided by the allegorical locus amoenus described in the collection’s opening stanzas. If the image of a loquacious cleric, sitting in the middle of a garden, hints that an unbridled tongue played a part in his personal downfall, it also reminds us that deceptive speech was a prime cause of the Fall of mankind. For medieval theologians Eden was, as Eric Jager put it, ‘a garden of eloquence’, a scenario of rhetorical abuse (1993: 99–142). Planted at the centre of this garden was the forbidden tree, which was frequently glossed as the ‘Tree of Eloquence’, whose seductive fruit symbolized verbal dissimulation. And here, ‘en media la quintana’, is precisely where the cleric sits, both literally and figuratively. Speech, however, is also his salvation – and what a distinctly logocentric notion of speech it is, since the man’s very tongue makes the Virgin blossom forth. Berceo thus fuses sin and redemption in such a way that it impossible to think of one without the other. Theologically, the two categories may be clearly separated; experientially, the distinction is harder to perceive. The final stanza reinforces the point: Todo omne del mundo fará grand cortesía qui fiziere servicio a la Virgo María;

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mientre que fuere vivo verá plazentería, e salvará la alma al postremero día. (115)

Here, courtly devotion to the Virgin is presented in terms of the feudal gift economy, as an exchange, whereby ‘servicio’ will buy ‘plazentería’ in this life and salvation in the next.26 The term ‘plazentería’ should be read not as an apologia for sin, but as an attempt to meld earthly delight with the joy of spiritual revelation. Structurally, the word points back towards the allegorical introduction and the clerics who are the Virgin’s ‘rossennoles de grand placentería’ (30d). But it also points forwards, acting as one of those bridging words or ideas with which Berceo occasionally connects two miracles. The very next tale, ‘El galardón de la Virgen’, opens with the portrayal of the pious priest whose continuous repetition of the five ‘gozos de la virgen’ gave Mary so much joy: ‘avié ella con ellos muy grand placentería’ (118d). Between these two spiritual uses, there lies the ‘placentería’ of ‘El clérigo y la flor’, where the narrative context modulates the meaning of the term; for here it not only evokes joyful praise of the Virgin, but it also recalls the cleric’s carefree hedonism as well. The word thus embraces, as it were, both poles of the paradox of ‘felix culpa’ and thus holds out the tantalizing prospect of an earthly pleasure free of shame.27 ‘El clérigo y la flor’ ends on the same note as ‘El sacristán fornicario’, with an undercurrent of tension between the longing for purity and the continued lure of life. The tension surfaces dramatically in the very next miracle, ‘El galardón de la Virgen’, where a mortally sick monk believes he has been cured by the Virgin, and struggles to get out of bed to dance and cavort with his friends. Indeed, he has been healed – but spiritually, not physically. Yet again, human perception and perspective are placed centre stage, this time dramatized with comic poignancy as we smile at the picture of a man whose dying encounter with Mary encourages him to believe that living a joyful life has the sanction of the divine. He is mistaken, but his error is no cause for shame.

‘El labrador avaro’ Like ‘El sacristán fornicario’ and ‘El clérigo y la flor’, this eleventh miracle is one of those tales in which moral and spiritual practice conflict; and like

26 For Montoya (1985b), spiritualized courtly love provides one of the unifying themes of the Milagros. For another particularly explicit expression, see Berceo’s conclusion to his Loores (232). The economic implications of cortesía will be examined in chapter 5. 27 The contrast with Gautier de Coinci could not be more pronounced. His emphasis is on affective piety, whereby devotion is inseparable from lachrymose repentance. Even as the cleric sins, he repents (e.g., he genuflects, ‘face moillie’, l. 21; according to the Virgin, ‘A chaudes larmes doucement / me saluoit et jor et nuit’, ll. 66–67; in the conclusion, the faces of the clerical witnesses are bathed in tears, ll. 98–99).


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the tale of the fornicating sacristan, it includes a juridical battle between the forces of heaven and hell over a dead man’s soul. The peasant, a devotee of the Virgin, is guilty of moving the boundary stones that mark out his plot, ploughing up his neighbours’ land and then claiming it as his own ‘eredat’ (271b). When he dies, devils appear to have a cast-iron claim on his soul and he is saved from hell only by the testimony of one angel who reveals his pious devotion to the Virgin Mary, and on hearing her name the devils vanish like the morning mist.28 Poetically, this is one of Berceo’s most carefully crafted adaptations, and it illustrates to perfection his ability to use words to layer meanings and combine perspectives. Its richness and force do not derive simply from Berceo’s creative reworking of the Latin, which has been analysed by Giménez Resano (1978). The way in which Berceo adapted his immediate source is itself symptomatic of his engagement with the larger ideological traditions that lay beyond it: the flourishing discourse on peasantry. Paul Freedman’s comprehensive survey (1999) demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of written and visual representations of medieval peasants. These images cluster around certain themes, peasant types, and ideological concerns, which are often related in contradictory ways. So, for example, contempt for peasants’ greed and religious ignorance is counterbalanced by praise for their virtue and piety; disgust at their bestial earthiness jostles with admiration for their life of rustic simplicity; their productivity and toil elicit respect as well as the desire to keep them properly subjugated. Rather than simply provide a catalogue of representational types, however, Freedman argues that negative and positive images: could be combined or held simultaneously in a certain tension to deal with a vast segment of society regarded as ‘other’ but also as immediately necessary. [. . .] I contend that language concerning the peasant was not simply a collection of positive and negative representations. The vocabulary describing peasants formed itself into a variegated discourse, a grammar, by which peasants could be regarded both as degraded and as exemplary, as justly subordinated yet as close to God. (1999: 3; emphasis original)

This interaction between positive and negative images had a variety of ideological effects, and one of them was to legitimize the present subjugation of the peasant by holding out the prospect of their future reward in heaven, a

28 See also Gautier de Coinci (1955–70, IV: 154–74). This story was not collected by Alfonso el Sabio, although his fascination for peasant miracles is attested by cantigas 22, 31, 128, 147, and 289, which display many of the negative peasant stereotypes compiled by Paul Freedman in the study discussed below. For a later Spanish example of the peasant who ploughs his neighbour’s land, see the Dança general de la muerte (st. 70).

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move supported by the biblical authority of Matthew 19:24 (a rich man entering heaven is like a camel passing through the eye of a needle). Although Freedman does not discuss the Latin tale inherited by Berceo, this ideology of reversal is already implicit: we distrust and condemn the greedy and scheming peasant even as we acknowledge that his piety will earn him salvation. Berceo’s version of the peasant narrative develops the representation of these stereotypical images in particularly interesting ways. First, the greed and cunning of the peasant acquire sharper focus, and in the process a greater symbolic resonance. In the Latin, the protagonist is ‘quidam vir secularis rurali opere deditus’, a most worldly man who evidently leads a life of petty crime (‘aliis mundanis studiis occupatus [. . .] multis pravis actibus [. . .] intentus’, 234). In Berceo’s hands, the man is shaped with greater precision from the very first stanza: Era en una tierra un omne labrador que usavaja la reja más que otra lavor; más amava la tierra que non al Criador, era de muchas guisas omne revolvedor. (270)

Berceo’s peasant is a ploughman, and as such he takes on a complex set of associations. As the pun in the final line suggests, he sows contention in his community, and in this way Berceo alludes to the notion that peasants were descended from Cain, the first man to till the earth, the ‘ur-peasant’ (Freedman 1999: 91–93). And yet, as Freedman has noted (1999: 33–35, 223–29), the ploughman could possess positive as well as negative connotations, and be associated typologically with Christ; although this particular peasant is not represented in this way, his plough also symbolizes the spiritual labour that will be his ultimate salvation. This opening stanza introduces another peasant stereotype: his literal and metaphorical earthiness. The repetition of ‘tierra’ (270a & c) anticipates the playfully ironic vision of the peasant’s death: ‘finó el rastrapaja de tierra bien cargado’ (273a). In burial, the peasant is clearly loaded with more earth than he bargained for when he set out ploughing up his neighbours’ fields.29 The association with dirt expresses much more than moral condemnation of his ‘nemiga suziela’ (271a), since his ‘love of earth’ also calls to mind the filth of peasant life (Freedman 1999: 53–54, 143–44, 151–54). The conflation of moral and physical degradation may also underpin the poem’s dramatic climax, when the vanquished devils abandon the peasant’s soul and ‘derramáronse todos como una neblina’ (278c). For Giménez Resano (1978: 23 & 27), the comparison illustrates how Berceo uses ‘realism’ to breathe life into

29 For García Turza (Berceo 1992a, note to 273a), the phrase means ‘rico en bienes raíces’, which would add another layer of irony to the line. Peasant ‘bestiality’ is a keynote of Gautier’s version (e.g., ll. 12, 89, 355).


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an otherwise arid narrative. I would argue that the comparison also naturalizes as evil the common conditions of peasant life, which are overcome only by an act of faith and a miracle. Indeed, the miraculous nature of the story is heightened by the fact that the faith it describes does not belong to either of what Freedman calls ‘the two basic and opposing images of peasant piety: that of the armed peasant who struggles for an idea of Christian liberty and that of the oppressed rustic labourer who will be rewarded by God for his quiescent suffering on earth’ (1999: 202; the variants are illustrated on 201–03, 208–13, 216–35). In spite of these two positive models, the rural world was for the most part perceived as a world of superstition and religious negligence. Paganus originally meant peasant or rustic, and even though from the late twelfth century onwards saints were drawn from a broader social spectrum, when Berceo was writing there were proportionally very few peasant saints.30 Consequently, even though in the context of the collection this story shows the peasant sharing a religious practice common – potentially – to all humanity, in the larger context of discourse about peasants, his piety appears all the more exceptional. These two contexts lend a certain ambivalence to a curious textual detail. When Berceo first characterizes the peasant’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, he endows it with a trait that is unique within the collection: Querié, peroque malo, bien a Sancta María, udié los sus miráculos, dávalos acogía; saludávala siempre, diciéli cada día: ‘Ave gratia plena que parist a Messía.’ (272, my emphasis)

The protagonists of the other tales display their piety either through prayer, as here, or, in nine cases, such as the tale of the fornicating sacristan, through their devotion to a particular image (Biaggini 2001a). This is the only protagonist whose faith in the Virgin is demonstrated not only verbally but also by his keen belief in miracles. On one level, this detail betrays the widespread assumption that peasant faith is more akin to superstition and love of the supernatural. Aron Gurevich has argued that this form of belief is evidence that miracles were valued more for their magical power than as proof of divine mercy and compassion (1988: 39–77).31 Whereas I believe that Berceo was, if only intuitively,

30 One of the exceptions was St Isidore (d. 1130), the patron saint of Madrid, who was the object of a considerable cult before his canonization in 1622. For paganus, see Freedman (1999: 137–39), and the caveat that contempt for peasant religiosity was not based on allegations not of paganism but of irreverence and ignorance, vices which Gautier de Coinci castigates at length (e.g., ll. 90, 137–64, 200, 356–76). 31 Also relevant, though less subtle, is Saugnieux (1982: 9–43); but see also his second thoughts in the article cited in the next note. For an Alfonsine example of peasant belief in sorcery, see cantiga 128.

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distinguishing peasant piety from that of the other protagonists (who are mainly clerics), this would be too narrow an explanation. After all, the collection as a whole aimed at encouraging belief in the miraculous power of the Virgin, and it did this by depicting people witnessing, then believing, miracles. So in this respect, the peasant represents the ideal response. In other words, the peasant’s willingness to believe miracles is not so much a representation of popular practice as a symptom of the interaction between popular and officially sanctioned modes of belief. Berceo’s characterization of the peasant operates in the blurred boundary zone separating paganism from the cult of the saints, sorcery from prayer, sanctity from thaumaturgy. The peasant, alone among the characters that populate the collection, already believes in miracles, and his love of the supernatural is brought within the authority of the Church. The poem thus typifies one of the basic ideological processes of the collection as a whole, which, as García de la Concha puts it, displays ‘la voluntad del clérigo de salir al encuentro de la cultura popular religiosa’ (1992: 84).32 Berceo’s treatment of this miracle, however, shows that this encounter with peasant religious belief could never be entirely separated from the conditions in which that belief was practised. It is significant that this tale, more than any other, typifies Berceo’s fondness for describing the spiritual fate of the characters in terms derived from their own secular activities. The technique is in part responsible for the descriptive vitality of the poems, but it also weaves into the very fabric of the narrative the idea of poetic justice. Thus, the peasant’s territorial disputes with his neighbours are counterbalanced by the altercation between angels and devils. In life, there were only witnesses for the prosecution, but in death there was a witness for the defence: the phrase ‘avié mal testimonio entre su vecindat’ (271d) is echoed by the angel who was the ‘testigo’ of his piety (276a) and claimed his soul as an ‘alma [. . .] vecina’ (274c). Similarly, Berceo describes the devils’ torments in terms that recall the way he exploited his community: ‘pechavánli a duplo el pan que dio mudado’ (273d). Whether this means that he received in punishment double the cost of the bread he stole or usuriously lent, the language of reversal is clear.33 And this bread image is then taken up when the angels vainly attempt to find convincing arguments for his redemption: ‘pora fer tal pasta menguávalis farina’ (274d). The most powerful set of imagery that fuses life, sin, and redemption has to do with the language of dragging and binding. To describe this man, Berceo coins the term ‘rastrapaja’ (273a) to conjure up the comically despised image

32 García de la Concha is endorsing Saugnieux’s speculative revisions to his earlier work (1982: 103–19; first published in French in 1978). For a broader treatment of the ecclesiastical encounter with popular religion, with full bibliography, see Gurevich (1988: 39–77). 33 Beltrán glosses line 274d as ‘le pagaron pues el doble de lo que había robado’ (Berceo 1983: 54); Dutton (1971: 104), followed by Gerli (1987: 118), introduce the idea of usury, glossing ‘mudado’ as ‘el trigo dado en préstamo usuario’.


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of a bumpkin covered in the very straw that he gathers and hauls off. In the following lines, the image of dragging continues but in modulated form: ‘en soga de diablos, fue luego cativado/, rastrávanlo por tienllas, de cozes bien sovado’ (273bc). It is as if the ploughman, who harnesses oxen to pull his plough, is himself harnessed and driven along by kicks and blows, secured by what is later described as ‘tan mala cadena’ (277d). Then, in the denouement, a final metamorphosis takes place when the angels discover the soul abandoned by the devils, ‘de piedes e de manos con sogas bien atada; / sedié como oveja que yaze ensarzada’ (279bc). Here is the peasant transformed into the proverbial lost sheep of the Bible. Although figurative uses of sheep abound in the Old and New Testaments (e.g. Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’), the most obvious allusion is to the parable related by Matthew (18: 11–13) and Luke (15: 4–7). But Berceo’s reference to the ‘oveja [. . .] ensarzada’ suggests another allusion, this time to Genesis 22: 13: And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.

Berceo’s combination of the lost sheep with the sacrificial ram conveys the most elemental of medieval discourses on peasantry, which was that the peasant was destined to expiate Adam’s sin, condemned to a life of toil. For although the angels return this lost sheep to the fold (the ‘majada’ of 279d), our lasting visual image is of the peasant in fetters and entangled in a thicket, almost literally tied to the land. For Dutton, this is ‘una descripción graciosa’ (1971: 105), and it probably amused many in the medieval audience, though with the laughter of ridicule. But for the third estate, their bondage – a naturalized serfdom – was their salvation. Given the regional and chronological variations in socioeconomic conditions, as well as the heterogeneity of the peasantry as a social class, it would be rash to map Berceo’s version of this miracle too closely onto a specific moment or circumstance during the first half of the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, it does give voice to the anxieties of noble, urban, and monastic landlords who, during this period, developed the juridical and economic practices designed to limit peasant movement and to enforce their subjection to a particular lord and territory.34 Given the feeble trace that peasant voices have left in the historical record, it is entirely apt that this is the only miracle in the whole collection

34 The restructuring of rural society during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has been traced by García de Cortázar (1988: 55–178, esp. 111–12, 128–29). See also Martín Cea, who remarks on the ‘progresiva degradación del campesinado castellano’ from the midthirteenth century onwards (1986: 119–24, at p. 123). Both historians stress the importance of recognizing the variety of the peasantry as a social and economic group.

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which lacks an earthly witness, which goes unreported, and which has no material or spiritual effect on others.35

‘El pleito de Teófilo’ This is the oldest documented Marian miracle, as well as being the last and by far the longest tale in the whole collection.36 Its structural position and length are an indication of its religious and moral significance, for the tale provides the most striking proof of not only the depth of Mary’s compassion but also her strength, for she is pitted in a battle against the Devil himself. In brief, Theophilus, a scrupulous and peace-loving man who serves as the secular administrator of a powerful bishop, humbly turns down the bishopric when his master dies. But when he is supplanted by another man appointed by the new bishop, he falls victim to bitterness and jealousy. To recover his former position, he is encouraged by a Jew to sign a pact with the Devil and exchange his soul for temporal power. Having enjoyed a few days of renewed ‘grand privança’ (791b), he is pricked by his conscience and, realizing his arrogance and error, prays in desperation to the Virgin. With considerable misgivings, Mary agrees to intercede and she recovers the pact from the putrid recesses of Hell. A reformed and contrite Theophilus rushes to mass, pact in hand, where he reveals all. The document is ceremoniously burned, the sinner confesses, does public penance, is reconciled with the community, and three days later, dies in a state of beatitude. Even as the story offers a mighty image of Mary’s power – stating (though not showing) that she herself descends to Hell to recover the contract – it also emphasizes that redemption through her mediation can never be taken for granted. The doctrinal points are spelled out in unambiguous terms, as Ruiz Domínguez (1990), Uría Maqua (2000: 298–311, especially 299–30), and others have shown. The exemplum provides the final stamp of authority for

35 For an ‘essay in compassionate history’, which attempts to recover the ‘tormented voices’ of twelfth-century Catalonian peasants, see Bisson (1998). The comic elements in Berceo’s miracles warrant further study, whether in connection with the humanizing joca sanctorum described by Ward (1987: 211–13), or as the derision and mockery that make up the ‘disciplining actions’ in the dynamics of shame (Miller 1997: 34). 36 The story goes back to sixth-century Cilicia, part of the Eastern Church (for the implications of this, see below). In Gautier de Coinci’s compilation it is the very first miracle, and over 2,000 lines long (1955–70, I: 50–176). Alfonso makes it his second narrative (cantiga 3), after a cantiga de loor and the tale of San Ildefonso (1986–89, I: 61–62, for prosification, see 315–17). The Latin version is reproduced by Gerli (1987: 253–62) and Dutton (1971: 235–41, with basic commentary on 243–47); for a comparison of the narrative differences between these three versions, see Montoya (1974). As before, my page references are to Gerli’s ed. For the illustrations that occasionally accompany the tale, see Schreckenberg (1996: 253–54).


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the collection’s pervasive emphasis on the need for true confession and, especially, penance (the message is hammered home in the final sermonizing lines, 906–08). These concerns are all in Berceo’s Latin source, but his version imbues them with a dramatic eloquence that is especially effective when Mary first enters the scene. In the Latin, Mary chides Theophilus, asking him how she expects him to intercede with Christ on his behalf unless he has shown true penitence: ‘Qua propter multo certamine et labore cordisque contricione necesse est, ut eius implores pietatem’ (258). After hearing Theophilus’s confession and assertion of faith (Credo), she is somewhat mollified (‘tamquam aliquam ab eo satisfaccionem suscipiens’, 260) and she then agrees to intercede on his behalf. In Berceo’s hands, winning Mary’s favour is a much more fraught affair. Mary is initially far more abrupt, and her anger more energetically portrayed, as she rejects the man’s pleas for help (823–24). Following his repentance (826–31), Mary still objects (832), and even after he reaffirms his Christian credentials with the Credo (835–45) her anger is still apparent (846a). Finally, she is placated with one last desperate plea, and, accepting that he is truly contrite (‘Finca en paz, Teófilo, véote bien lazrado’, 850b), she departs on her mission to Hell. Like the other versions, Berceo’s dramatic retelling brings out Mary’s temperament as well as her humanity. In part, this characterization is conditioned by doctrinal objectives, because Mary’s reluctance immediately to forgive underscores the belief that redemption should involve, as the Latin source put it, ‘multo certamine et labore cordisque’. Theophilus’s appeal for mercy is certainly not uttered, as Saugnieux argued, ‘con la certidumbre de obtenerlo’ as a form of moral blackmail (1982: 19). The whole encounter between sinner and Virgin may be read as a confrontation between the reform movement and the more formulaic features of popular piety, which were, it should be said, inscribed in many of the earlier miracles themselves. The final tale, therefore, is another instance of the Church’s engagement with the wider world. Popular religion is not denied, but acknowledged and ultimately assimilated into more controlled forms of religious practice. A minor, but wonderfully eloquent, detail (which is unique to Berceo) illustrates the point. When Mary returns from Hell, she throws the contract in Theophilus’s lap as he sleeps: ‘echógela de suso, dióli una ferida’ (868b). Her final parting slap as she throws down the contract is more than residual irritation, it is an allegory; this is the blow that shakes man, slumbering in complacent ritual, and awakens him to true understanding of the processes of redemption.37 37 The contrast with Gautier de Coinci is instructive. Although the French poet portrays (at extravagant length) Theophilus’s desperate attempts to gain Mary’s favour, the Virgin’s indignation is balanced by a greater emphasis on her compassion, which is most noticeable in the passages that frame the long exchanges between sinner and saviour. Her compassion inspires his change of heart in the first place, and when she returns from Hell, she hands the letter over ‘mout doucement’ (1955–70, I: 88–89 & 132; ll. 627–50 & 1357).

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With this blow, a hand is implied. In fact, Berceo’s version is shot through with references to hands, carrying out a variety of actions, and invested with various figurative meanings. There is the ‘hand of seduction’, as the Jew leads Theophilus by the hand (778a and 780a) towards his rendezvous with the Devil, whose retinue in turn arrives ‘con ciriales en manos’ (779b). There is the ‘hand of guilt’, as Theophilus, realizing his error, exclaims, ‘matéme con mis manos’ (798b), and ‘devríame yo misme con mis manos matar’ (805d). There is the ‘hand of self-mortification’ as the sinner beats himself with his fists: ‘sus punnos en sus pechos davan colpes capdales’ (853c). But hands also reach out in acts of mercy and penitent gratitude. We see the Virgin returning from Hell ‘con su carta en mano’ (867d), and then watch the contract pass once again into the possession of the sinner (‘la cartiella tornada en su mano’, 869b), who ‘apretó bien la carta’ (869), and rushes back to the church, ‘con su carta en mano’ (878b). At this point, it becomes ‘the hand of proof’, as Theophilus shows the document to the bishop (‘Demostróli la carta que en punno tenié’, 882a), who then relates the story to the assembled congregation, declaring, ‘Yo la tengo en punno, podédesla veer’ (890a). Following confession and penance, we next witness the ‘hand of absolution’, as the bishop blesses Theophilus ‘con su mano sagrada’ (883c).38 The various meanings invested in these symbolic hands and gestures converge – as they would in Juan Ruiz’s tale of the Greeks and the Romans – upon the related categories of power and will, whether human or divine. In particular, they highlight the question of human responsibility: the hand of God may be omnipotent, but the desire for salvation must ultimately lie in our hands. The point surfaces time and again in the collection, and it provides the basic theme which will be glossed in this final miracle, which, as the very first stanza announces, illustrates ‘qué vale la Gloriosa qui la sabe rogar’ (748d, my emphasis). However, the gestures that I have just described are framed by two references to hands that evoke another symbolic domain, that of ecclesiastical power and authority. The very first reference to hands is a figure of speech that occurs when the people and the clergy implore the Archbishop to give Theophilus the late bishop’s post: ‘Embïaron sos cartas al metropolitano / por Dios que de Teófilo non mudasse la mano’ (758ab). The phrase is repeated by Theophilus himself, when he humbly refuses their pleas: ‘Recudiólis Teófilo con grand simplicidat: “Sennores, mudat mano por Dios e caridat” ’ (760ab).39 This is the hand of Church favour, invested with the power to

38 For the imposition of hands in absolution, see McNeill & Gamer (1990: 16). To this list, we may add two implicit references to manual acts: the writing of the pact and its seal. 39 García Turza glosses ‘mudasse la mano’ (758b) as ‘mudase la resolución, cambiase de opinión’; while satisfactory, the gloss elides the passage’s ritualistic connotations. In an earlier miracle, Berceo uses a similar phrase, ‘meter por mano’ (653b) to denote the ceremonial sealing of a pact (on which see García Turza’s note).


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appoint, and Theophilus’s very last act on earth is to kiss this hand, in a final ceremony of contrite submission to ecclesiastical authority: ‘besó mano al bispo, fizo grand onestat / finó al tercer día, fizo⭈l Dios pïadat’ (901cd). The framing device reminds us that this particular story of redemption is mapped onto a tale of ecclesiastical ambition, and the intrigues and jealousies that stem from it. Given Berceo’s well-known involvement in the economic and administrative affairs of the Church, as well as in the reforms promoted by the visit of the papal legate John of Abbeville in 1228 (Cátedra 1992: 939–42), it is especially apt that the protagonist of this final tale is a vicario, invested with considerable delegated power as intermediary between the Church authorities and the people (751–55). Through his extraordinary efficiency the bishop, relieved of all administrative tasks, can concentrate exclusively on spiritual concerns: ‘fuera cantar su misa e rezar so salterio, / elli lo escusava de todo ministerio’ (754bc). Not surprisingly, these qualities inspired love in his master and his flock: Amávalo el bispo mucho de grand manera, porque lo escusava de toda facendera; los pueblos e las gentes aviénlo por lumnera, que él era de todos cabdiello e carrera. (755)

In short, Theophilus is a beacon of wisdom, goodness, and charity, and his light shines brightest when he refuses the bishopric offered him upon his master’s death. Here is power without ambition, and it would not be too cynical to suggest that this in itself is one of the most miraculous parts of the tale.40 The point is highlighted by the drama that sets the narrative in motion. Theophilus refuses ambition when invested with considerable power; it is when he lacks power that ambition and jealousy take hold. He is marginalized from the administration of the bishopric by the appointment of a new vicario, a pushy ‘donzel’ who becomes the bishop’s closest retainer: Corrién los pleitos todos al vicario novel, serviénlo a Teófilo, mas plus servién a él; cogió zelo Teófilo, cempelló el donzel, cambióse en Caín el que fuera Avel. En casa del obispo non era tan privado, [. . .] aviélo la envidia de su siesto sacado. (763–64)

40 Contrast Gautier de Coinci, who dwells at length on the protagonist’s humility, incorruptibility, and charitable works, and makes no mention of his administrative efficiency (ll. 25–43). This Theophilus knows that power corrupts (ll. 64–68).

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Wealth and status are certainly at stake here, but particularly power.41 As Theophilus later confesses, even after he had been supplanted, he remained well off and respected: Yo non avía mengua nin andava mendigo, todos me fazién onrra e plaziélis comigo; mas fui demandar mejor de pan de trigo. [. . .] Avía qué vistir, avía qué calzar, avía pora mí, avía pora dar. (804–05)

The Spanish version avoids the rather obvious moral observation that power and ambition go hand in hand, or that with increased honour come pride and vainglory. By transforming Theophilus from Abel into Cain (an added touch), Berceo shifts our perspective, and makes us think more carefully about the nature of this man’s corruption. Theophilus offered a model of humble power which, as the narrative unfolds, we now see as a very precarious combination of attributes. Berceo hints at the potential complacency of those favoured by a higher authority, and suggests that there are those whose perceived goodness depends not simply upon their innate qualities but also upon their material position. The material basis of goodness is reinforced through the depiction of the relationship between the bishop and Theophilus. The administrator’s ‘ministerio’ (754c) – his everyday management of the Church’s material affairs – provides the indispensable underpinning to his master’s spirituality. The poem is thus structured around the potentially conflicting interests between the secular and spiritual roles of the Church. If we jump to the conclusion, how – if at all – is this tension resolved? At the start of the narrative, Theophilus was a ‘lumnera’ or metaphorical beacon of goodness and efficiency; by the end of it, he has become a literal beacon, as his face miraculously radiates with the light of divine favour (895–98). The earlier metaphor anticipates the final miracle, and encourages us to compare and contrast the two states. Theophilus remains a central figure in the community, and a middleman: but he is no longer admired and sought out as the intermediary between the bishop and his flock, because his earthly authority, power, and honour have now been translated into spiritual terms. A saintly figure, he is now a spiritual intermediary between man and God. The contrasting parallel is further strengthened by the emphasis, in both Latin and Spanish, on the fact that sin and final redemption occur in the same space: the confines of Church whose business he once administered (899c, 902c). Mary’s miraculous intervention appears to have resolved not only Theophilus’s plight, but also the conflict of interests which he embodied. 41 The phrase ‘cempelló el donzel’ (763c) is ambiguous, since it could refer not to the new appointee, but to Theophilus himself (see the note on this line by García Turza, Berceo 1992a). Whichever reading one prefers, the choice of ‘doncel’ evokes a life of ecclesiastical nobility.


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To carry out this ideological operation, Mary can count on the support of a Jew.42 That this tale registers commonplace hatred and distrust of the Jew is self-evident. Running throughout the poem is a thread of references to ‘el trufán, él de la judería’ (803c; see also 767a, 768b, 772b, 777d, 780a, 811b, 880a, 886a). This Jew induces Theophilus to make a pact with the Devil and betray Christ: he is the personification of treachery, the archetypal Judas, and as such a ready-made category to help the audience think about the nature of the protagonist’s betrayal. Denying Christ and the Virgin (784–86), Theophilus himself will become a ‘Jew’. The grounds for this identification, however, are already laid before the pact. Both Christian and Jew are intermediaries in their respective domains – the Jew being a master of the black arts (767), the Devil’s middleman. Like Theophilus, the Jew is also a central figure in the community, constantly sought out by people with problems to solve who do not realize that he is the agent of the Devil (770–71). Though they are both go-betweens, they deal in quite different commodities: the Christian dispenses charity and moral advice; the Jew caters to greed and selfinterest.43 When Theophilus sins and crosses a clearly demarcated boundary between right and wrong, his moral transgression is represented in spatial terms. He is ‘seduced’, literally ‘led away’ by the Jew down a path of error to the moral and physical crossroads where he casts off his Christian identity. The stereotype of the treacherous, deceptive Jew together with the spatial representation of seduction are determined by a combination of ideological and discursive needs. In discursive terms, they perform various functions of what Walter Ong calls the ‘psychodynamics of orality’ (1982: 31–77, especially 49–57 and 69–71). Discourse with a heavy oral residue favours larger-than-life figures, and is situational rather than abstract, in part so as to ‘organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form’ (70). Since Ong also recognizes that ‘mnemonic serviceability’ is not the only determining factor, it is worth asking just what kind of ‘permanently memorable’ experience constructs, and is embodied by, the Jew. The Jew is so firmly embedded in the language of deceit and trickery that he almost becomes a scapegoat for the sinner’s ambition. The following passage from Theophilus’s confession is symptomatic. Reaffirming his faith in the Virgin Mary, he exclaims: ‘Maguer la denegué como loco sendío, / que fui engannado por un falso judío’ (811ab). I emphasize ‘almost’ a scapegoat, because there is absolutely no question of repudiating personal responsibility. Even so, running against the grain of the penitential discourse there is another concern that the poem finds it harder to acknowledge directly. 42 In the contemporary version by Rutebeuf (c. 1261), the Jew is replaced by a Muslim (see Rubin 1999: 201, n. 5). 43 See also the evocative rhyme: ‘matóme el trufán, él de la judería, / que mató otros muchos con mala maestría’ (803cd). Jewish ‘mala maestría’, the black magic that connects man with the Devil, contrasts with Christian knowledge and grace that, through the Virgin, connects man with God.

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It seems to me that the problem is not entirely about ethics; it also has to do with the management of ecclesiastical power and authority – politics in its broadest sense. In this respect, the story is marked with the same tension as one finds in El libro de Alexandre, where, as we shall see, the notorious ambivalence towards the hero’s death is the result of an unresolved disjunction between ethical and political discourses. To say that Theophilus was ‘deluded’, or more graphically, ‘drugged’ (‘embellinado’ 774a) by the Jew is on one level a way of representing in externalized, memorable terms, the idea that he has been polluted by self-delusion – the delusion that he could return to his ‘antigo estado’ (772d). But this would be merely to restate a deeper problem encapsulated by the paradox of self-effacing power. As I explained in the introduction, scholars have long emphasized the reforms promulgated by the IV Lateran Council (1215) as a prime impulse behind the doctrinal verse of the mester de clerecía. This council, however, was the capstone of a longer movement which stretched back to the reformist movement instigated by Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), and which spanned a period described by R. I. Moore as ‘the first European revolution’ (2000: especially 11, 65–111). As Moore observes, reform requires not just ideals of purity and doctrinal order, but also the authority and the means to enforce them, and this in turn demands increasing material resources, and displays of prestige and status. The inner contradiction produced another reformist movement, that of the mendicant friars who criticized the perceived excesses of ecclesiastical power and reasserted the vows of apostolic poverty. It is this contradiction that is embodied in the combined figures of Theophilus and the Jew. Theophilus chooses self-effacement over ambition, but the irrepressible desire for power returns, in disfigured form, in the person of the Jew. The Jew does not entirely vanish with Theophilus’s redemption. He is translated into another Jew who bore the marks of a different kind of disfigurement. In the closing miracle, Theophilus’s face is illumined by divine grace, ‘com la de Moïsés cuando la ley portava’ (897b). The reference, which is Berceo’s personal contribution, is to Exodus 34:29–35, a passage that also gave rise to the tradition that Moses was disfigured by this direct encounter with God. This is the origin of the ‘horned Moses’ myth (Melinkoff 1970). Moses, the bringer of law and the leader of spiritual and moral reform, was also a powerful and ambitious secular guide. Alongside him, Berceo places the humble apostle Andrew, whose face was also illumined ‘quando en la cruz estava’ (897c). Comparing Theophilus to Moses and Andrew, all three intermediaries between man and the law, offers ideological resolution for the conflicting demands of ecclesiastical power and apostolic humility.44 This is the oldest Marian miracle, and the oldest ideological conflict of the Catholic Church.

44 For further comments on the administrative aspects of this story, see Deyermond (2005).


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‘El judezno’ and ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ The miracle of Theophilus, like that of ‘El mercader fiado’, which I discuss in chapter 5, shows how the anxieties and contradictions of an increasingly militant and reformist Church are projected onto the confrontation between a single Christian and a single, though stereotypical, Jew. Although individuals figure in the miracles about the little Jewish boy and the Jews of Toledo, and crowds appear in the tales of Theophilus and the merchant, there is a definite shift in emphasis. Miracles 16 and, especially, 18 are about collective witnessing, collective fears, and collective violence. As such, they reformulate in starker terms a problem that is already implicit in the fact of representing an ‘individual’ Jew as a stereotype: what is the rationale, scope, and objective of hating Jews as a group? The question forces us to examine our terms, since post-medieval words like ‘tolerance’, ‘bigotry’, ‘prejudice’ have been coined in response to different stages in social and religious conflict. Although we should not be overly scrupulous and reduce the problem to one of historical semantics, the vocabulary that we use is important if we are to do justice to the complexities of Jewish-Christian relations in the high Middle Ages. Both miracles stage a conflict between two belief systems during a period in which the Augustinian tolerance towards the Jew displayed increasing signs of strain. Augustine rationalized the continued co-existence of Christian and Jew on the grounds that Jewish presence offered concrete testimony to the superior truth of Christianity; Jews were a reminder of divine history and also a warning of what Christians could become if, like Jews, they turned from God (Cohen 1982: 13–16, 19–22). Antisemitism arouses a different combination of responses, and attempts to mobilize disgust and revulsion at the physical presence of the Jews, and the threat they posed to Christian bloodlines. It may deploy the ideological strategy of rationalization (on which see Eagleton 1991: 51–54) but it does not allow philosophical debate between Christian and Jew. Antijudaism presupposes, though it may not encourage, the possibility of an answer; antisemitism condemns the Jew to silence.45 Antisemitism offers an all-purpose defence, which appeals to the senses more than to the mind, and thus has the added value of obfuscating the internal divisions among those doing the hating. While this was especially useful from the early modern period onwards, with the institutionalization of rival forms of Christianity, the ideological moves of antisemitism may be detected earlier, during periods in which the inner coherence of Catholicism was at stake. Although 45 For the appeal to reason and authoritative proof texts in antijudaic polemic, see Dahan (1998: 81–104), who points out that reason ceded to the authority of faith by the close of the thirteenth century (102). The bibliography on Christian hostility towards Jews in the high Middle Ages is substantial; for basic guidance and further reading, see Abulafia (1995), Cohen (1982, 1996 & 1999), Nirenberg (1996), and Moore (1987: 27–45 & 2000: 149–58). Other relevant works are cited below.

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over the long term one may note a move from antijudaism to antisemitism, this is more a matter of emphasis and the social context of debate than of the evolutionary development of two distinct categories.46 That there is a fine line separating the two is illustrated by the tale of the judezno. This miracle (number 16) tells how a young Jewish child is naturally drawn to follow his Christian playmates to Mass, where the statue of a beautiful woman encourages him to take holy communion. He returns home and innocently tells his father what he has done. His father flies into a devilish rage and throws his son into a furnace, to the horror of the Jewish and Christian bystanders. But the boy does not burn: as he explains, he is saved from the flames by the beautiful woman he had previously seen in the church. Realizing that this was a miracle performed by the Virgin, the bystanders throw the father into the flames, where he is burned to a cinder in a trice.47 This story has been convincingly analysed by Marta Ana Diz, who sees in it a trial by fire – an ordeal – between two competing religious systems and beliefs (1995: 128–40). She reads Berceo’s adaptation as an attempt to endow violence against the Jew with a sense of secular and sacred legitimacy, and thus to demonstrate ‘cómo el orden cristiano fue inequívocamente sancionado como el verdadero con todo el peso de la Ley’ (140). Diz’s emphasis on legal validation seems to me particularly valuable in that it situates the poem in the terrain of antijudaic polemic, which by implication allows for the possibility of conversion from an illegitimate to a sanctioned form of belief. Indeed, the killing of the Jewish father might seem to enact fictionally the Alfonsine decree that Jews who harm or kill one of their correligionists who wishes to convert should themselves be put to death by burning (Carpenter 1986: 33). However, as I shall explain, it is in the problem of conversion that we encounter some of the more complex ideological problems posed by Berceo’s version, which need to be addressed through a re-examination of narrative detail and context. This tale had an extraordinarily wide diffusion, with numerous variants, and on this broader scale Miri Rubin (1999: 7–39) has shown it to be part of a larger ‘narrative assault’ on late-medieval Jews (to borrow the subtitle of her book Gentile Tales). As Rubin observes, in spite of its apparent uniformity, ‘translation and interpretation could bring with it a noticeable change in the

46 Iconography provides convenient evidence for the co-existence of these two forms of hatred: for physical abhorrence of the Jew see the thirteenth-century caricatures in Schreckenberg (1996: 305) which are contemporary with the statues of Synagoga, blindfolded but beautiful. 47 For the Latin source, see Gerli (1987: 237–38) and Dutton (1971: 129; with comments 129–30); see also Gautier de Coinci (1955–70, II: 95–100); for Alfonso, see cantiga 4 (1986–89, I: 63–66; prose rendition, 317–19). For analyses of this tale, and Berceo’s hostility towards the Jews in general, see Diz (1995: 108–61), Saugnieux (1982: 73–102), and Boreland (1983: 16–21).


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tale’s register and mood’ (1999: 12). In the earlier versions circulating in monasteries, the story concluded with the celebratory conversion of all the Jewish bystanders, and it thus illustrated their traditional value as witnesses to Christian truth. But with broader dissemination, especially from the thirteenth century onwards, the tale betrayed a multiplicity of anxieties over Jewish-Christian relations in general, and attititudes towards the Eucharist and conversion in particular. Around 1260, for example, the ‘happy ending’ is absent in the version included in the popular Legenda aurea (Rubin 1999: 11), which thus undermines the Jew as witness and potential convert. With respect to the three versions that I am comparing, Rubin’s comments are fullest on Gautier de Coinci. Describing the author’s decidedly bitter and moralizing tone, she points out how even though some Jews join the mother and son in baptism, others choose not to, thereby supplying a convenient platform for the poet’s unambiguous hatred and disgust for the Jews (Rubin 1999: 12–15). Conversion and obduracy co-exist. Rubin’s discussion of the versions by Alfonso and Berceo is much more schematic – reasonably enough in a survey of this scope – though she does remark on the way Alfonso restores the traditional ‘happy ending’ with the conversion of mother and son (15–16). With regard to Berceo, she observes that ‘The eucharistic context is very thin, and the miracle and the conversion [sic] are simply and dramatically related’ (1999: 16). I shall return to the question of the Eucharist later, but overall her account of the evolution of this tale shows how the fracture lines of this narrative – the points at which the tale is most unstable – run precisely through the two key areas of conversion and witnessing. These are indeed the two issues that raise the most delicate problems of interpretation in Berceo’s treatment of the story, and illustrate the merging of antijudaism and antisemitism. These different forms of hatred are concentrated in the figure of the Jewish father, deranged and disfigured by the news that his son has taken holy communion: Pesóli esto mucho al malaventurado, como si lo toviesse muerto o degollado; non sabié con grand ira qué fer el dïablado, fazié figuras malas como demonïado. (361)

The common association between the Jew and the Devil can serve many ideological functions. Diz argues that the presence of the Devil does not make Berceo’s version more antisemitic than its Latin source (1995: 135).48 The

48 Much will depend, of course, upon whether one accepts a distinction between the respective targets, objectives, and ideological strategies of ‘antisemitism’ and ‘antijudaism’: Diz, at one point, distinguishes between ‘antisemitismo religioso [. . .] y el antisemitismo socio-económico’ (1995: 110). She also offers a salutary warning against quantifying antisemitism and applying the term in an a priori fashion (109–11).

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observation obscures the fact that Berceo’s representation of hatred is qualitatively different. The Spanish poet conflates the father with the Devil in part in order to underscore the opposition between Christianity, which is aligned with the natural, the loving, and the rational, and Judaism, which is aligned with the unnatural, the unforgiving, and the irrational.49 As Diz argues, the distinction is tested in a trial by fire, and while this quasi-juridical strategy invokes the authority of reason, it also denies it by situating the Law on the terrain of the miracle, beyond the rational. This is why, ideologically, the ordeal is so effective, even though as a legal mechanism it is an evident anachronism in the age of Roman law. It invokes reason, but avoids the question, whose rationality? That the confrontation between Jew and Christian hovers between the rational and the visceral is clear from other evidence. In a minor but telling detail, Berceo suggests that the Jewish father is not so demented that he cannot take the time to light the fire in his oven (in other versions the fire is already lit). It is not that he is completely devoid of reason, but that his logic is brutal and perverse. Other sinners in Berceo’s world may be tricked by the Devil, but here he actually inhabits the body of this particular Jew. As such, the Jewish father, like the Devil, represents a fallen nobility and a perverted order (but order nonetheless), but he also epitomizes all that is foul and physically repulsive – ‘fazié figuras malas’ – all that needs to be exorcized. The contamination of the larger social body requires the cleansing ritual slaughter of the symbolic Father. Jewish law is too perverse to be converted, it can only be cast into the flames. In short, Berceo’s Devil-father marks the outer limits of conversion, and poses the question whether the Jew is, in fact, amenable to reason, and thus worthy of toleration. The question is rendered more acute by the fact that Berceo’s account does not end in the conversion of the Jews. It is true that the conversion motif, while very common, does not provide a denouement to each and every retelling, but the fact that it was in Berceo’s source indicates that he consciously suppressed it. Berceo also seems to me to be very reticent when it comes to specifying the precise involvement of the Jews in the immolation of the Jewish father and their role as witnesses. His source, like other accounts, explicitly links Christian to Jew as witnesses to the miracle: the shrieks of the Jewish mother quickly drew together ‘multosque tam christianos quam iudeos’ (238). After the boy explained how a mysterious lady saved him from the flames, the Christians – the only ones empowered by their knowledge of her true identity – threw the father into the furnace. Then the Christians and the (now converted) Jews again unite in celebrating the Virgin: ‘tam iudei quam christiani Dominum et sanctam eius genitricem collaudaverunt et ex illa die in Dei fide ferventes 49 The Devil is absent from his source (Berceo 1987: 238) as well as from Alfonso’s fourth cantiga (1986–89, I: 65) and its prosification (318). For Gautier, the Jewish father is ‘l’enragié chien’ (1955–70, II: 98; l. 84). On Berceo’s representation of the Jew as Devil, see Diz (1995: 112–13 & 136) and, more broadly, Trachtenberg (1943).


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permanserunt’ (238). Although he reserves the right of vengeance for the Christians, the Latin writer frames his narrative with an emphasis on the continued presence and collaboration of the Jews: ‘tam christianos quam iudeos’, ‘tam iudei quam christiani’. This clear narrative framework is restructured by Berceo, and in the process his syntax renders somewhat ambiguous the precise agency attributed to the Jews. Berceo first describes the crowd that rushes to the scene in generalized, collective terms: the bystanders are merely ‘muchas de yentes’ (364c). Then, when the boy is asked to explain his miraculous survival, he specifies that these anonymous witnesses are both ‘judíos e christianos’ (368a). Following the boy’s account, Berceo again elides Christian and Jew into a collective agency in which he submerges religious difference: ‘tam iudei quam christiani’ becomes an anonymous third-person plural, the subject of the anaphoric list of verbs that structures and drives the denouement: ‘Entendieron [. . .] cantaron [. . .] metieron [. . .] prisieron [. . .] legáronli [. . .] dieron [. . .] non dizién [. . .]’ etc (370–73). To be sure, the closest antecedent of these verbs is the phrase ‘judíos e christianos’ of the previous stanza but one (368a). The fact that the subject phrase is separated from this urgent list of verbs, and not repeated (as in the source) is surely significant. Berceo blurs the distinction between Christian and Jew at the crucial moment of vengeance: do the Jews actually participate in the immolation of the father, and if so, on what grounds? Do they now share the Christians’ understanding of the truth, and act on it (as in the Latin), or are they motivated by a different category of response – a shared moral, or ‘human’ horror of the father’s atrocity? Berceo preserves the emotional response found in the original – the horror experienced by both Jewish and Christian witnesses – but concentrates it in the figure of the boy’s mother, a move that, according to Helen Boreland (1983: 20), strengthens the typological link between her and the Virgin Mary. As Rubin remarks, (1999: 27), this woman’s ‘maternal quality outstrips her quality as a Jew’. 50 In this way, Berceo seems to be offering two contradictory models of Jewish identity: they are human, and thus potentially redeemable through conversion (according to the Augustinian paradigm), and yet they remain unconverted. This final detail does not necessarily mean that Berceo has adapted his source in order to hint at Jewish obduracy (which would legitimize an increasingly aggressive Christian response, as in the case of Gautier de Coinci).51 In the context of the poem as a whole, it is one of the uncertainties that underpin this ‘historia de certidumbre’, and it

50 See also her comments on another tale, where the benign conversion of a Jewess is predicated on the fact that as a woman she is ‘less knowing, and in consequence less culpable’ (1999: 37). 51 See the analysis of Gautier’s conclusion by Rubin (1999: 13), who points out that the final lines are structured around the verbal play on ‘dur’ (1955–70, II: 100; ll. 131–42); in this respect, Jews and peasants are disturbingly similar: see his version of the peasant miracle, ‘Envers Dieu sont si endurci / que plus sont dur de ce mur ci’ (1955–70, IV: 168; ll. 361–62).

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points to an ambivalence towards the Jew that is produced not just by his actual status in Christian Spain – the inherent tensions of convivencia – but more profoundly by the fact that the categories used to define him (and by extension the Christian) were frayed at their edges. The absence of Jewish conversion can be analysed from another angle, because the silence is also determined by the broader needs of Berceo’s adaptation, expounded in the final four stanzas (374–77). Here, Berceo rewrites his source and, moving beyond the specific confrontation between Christian and Jew, moralizes the distinction between those who serve the Virgin and those who reject her: ‘los unos van en Gloria, los otros en cadena’ (374d). The language of enslavement, so frequently used to rationalize Jewish subordination to Christian rule, reminds us that although Berceo moves beyond it, religious conflict is never forgotten. Even so, what is interesting about this conclusion is that it ends with an attempt to forestall doubt about the moral function of ‘El judezno’: ‘por provar esta cosa’, he declares, let’s listen to the next tale, and ‘quando fuere contado mejor lo creeremos’ (377). Our belief in the lessons offered by Jewish conduct will be strengthened by another tale that relates not Jewish perfidy but Christian profanation. In ‘La iglesia de la Gloriosa profanada’ (miracle 17), three knights, who commit murder in a church dedicated to the Virgin, are punished for violating sacred space by being struck down by the metaphorical flames of ‘San Marzal’ (a possible reference to ergotism, or St Elmo’s fire). The connection between these two tales suggests that although the Jew may be the paradigmatic target, he is not the only one, and that the story is aimed at any element unassimilated into the new orthodoxy. However, unlike the Jewish father (and, as we shall see, the desecrating Jews of Toledo), these Christian knights escape the real cleansing flames by seeking forgiveness, which demonstrates the mercy Mary bestows upon ‘los convertidos’ (411c). The link between miracles 16 and 17 has been created by Berceo, and if we extend the sequence to include miracle 18, we have a triptych in which Berceo places Jews in a double bind: at the ideological level, his sequence sets them up as the paradigm of those who need conversion, while at the narrative level denying them the opportunity to benefit from it. ‘The story of the Jewish Boy’, Rubin remarks, ‘allowed the conflation of violence and compassion, powerful and contradictory sentiments which cannot but stir unease’ (1999: 24). And although compassion is hardly in evidence in the miracle of ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ (miracle 18), its violence is also marked by contradiction. The tale is a well-known variant on the so-called ‘blood libel’ legend.52 While Christians are gathered in Toledo Cathedral to 52 For discussion of Berceo’s version, see Diz (1995: 152–61). The Latin source is edited by Gerli (Berceo 1987: 240–41) and Dutton (Berceo 1971: 142); for Alfonso, see cantiga 12 (1986–89, I: 88–89; prose version, 330–31). The myth of ritual murder also appears in Alfonso’s Siete partidas, in VII, xxiv, 2, ‘de los judíos’ (Carpenter 1986: 29; with commentary, 64–65).


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hear a Mass held in celebration of the Virgin’s Assumption (15 August), Mary exclaims, in ‘una voz de grand tribulación’ (415c), that the local Jews are continuing to crucify her son. The Christians rush to the Jewish quarter, where they discover a wax statue of a crucified Christ in the house of the leading rabbi. The Jews are then slaughtered in revenge. There can be no doubt that even though the ideological process varies with each telling, the narrative nucleus of this very popular tale rationalizes hatred and active persecution of the Jew, and it does this on two levels, the affective and the juridical. On an affective level, the violence is legitimized by linking it to the pathos of a grieving mother; just as in the tale of ‘El judezno’ and in Berceo’s Duelo de la Virgen, Mary’s grief mobilizes moral disgust, indignation, and the desire for revenge. On the more rational juridical level, vengeance is represented as an act of natural justice, a proper punishment for past treachery that is being revived in the present (Diz 1995: 152–53). And as it is transposed to midthirteenth-century Spain, the tale acquires even greater emotive and institutional force, since the action now begins in the newly built cathedral in Toledo, a powerful symbol of the Church Militant confronting the threat in its midst. Even so, the basic story runs the risk of confusing past and present, reason and affect, making violence against the Jew a natural, pre-reflective response of Christian ‘humanity’ en masse, free from either ecclesiastical or secular control. In their different ways, the authors who adapted this tale are alert to the boundaries of Jew hatred and the limits of physical violence. For example, Alfonso X’s cantiga 12 shows that the violence of the vengeful crowd should be subject to ecclesiastical authority and justified by empirical proof, even though the slaughter is described with the peremptoriness of a pogrom: ‘por est’ ouveron todos de morrer’ (1986–89, I: 89). The contemporary prosifier of this poem, possibly influenced by Alfonso’s more legalistic approach to proof in his Siete partidas, adds that an ‘aguazil’ was summoned to verify the allegations.53 Berceo’s treatment of the tale also registers the desire to contain the potential for uncontrolled mass violence. The mob was valued in so far as it was instrumental; but the question was ‘whose instrument’? The answer may be broached through an analysis of the language of violence and the emotions it provokes, which reveals an underlying similarity between ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ and ‘El judezno’. In both stories, the Riojan poet’s treatment of violence is characterized by euphemism, a rhetorical strategy that paradoxically both makes violence more

53 In the título ‘de los judíos’, Alfonso stresses the importance of proof (Carpenter 1986: 29), implying that such accusations were hearsay, to be judged by the King himself. According to Carpenter, this statute provides, among other things, ‘judicial protection of the Jews from the capricious vulgus and envious nobility’ (1986: 65). I return to the underlying class conflict below.

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acceptable and also limits its scope.54 The euphemism of violence derives in part from the language of religious feasting, which ties this violence to a ritual, cyclical event in the Church calendar. In the case of ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ it is the Virgin’s feast day: Quanta fonta fizieron en el nuestro Sennor allí la fazién toda por nuestra desonor, recabdáronlos luego, mas non con grand savor, qual fazién tal prisieron, ¡grado al Criador! Fueron bien recabdados los que prender podieron, diéronlis yantar mala qual ellos merecieron, ý fizieron ‘Tu autem’, mala muerte prisieron, depués lo entendieron que mal seso ficieron. (428–29; my emphasis)55

Earlier, the Archbishop had urged on his congregation with the words, ‘Desemos las yantares, ca bien las cobraremos’ (425c); and the Christians duly transform their ritual feasting on Christ’s body – the Eucharist – into a bitter feast served up to the Jews. This grotesque symposium is truly the Jews’ last supper. In ‘El judezno’, the sacrificial banquet takes place on Easter day. As they throw the Jewish father into the flames, Diziénli mal oficio, faciénli mala ofrenda, dizién por ‘Pater noster’, ‘Qual fizo, atal prenda’. De la comunicanda Domni Dios nos defenda, pora’l diablo sea tan maleíta renda. (373; my emphasis)

But the language and context of both passages reveal that the violence is linked to a much more specific and frequent moment than an annual feast day: the taking of holy communion. The theory of transubstantiation was accepted as an article of faith only in 1215, and in the course of the thirteenth century the new emphasis on Christ’s body being physically present in the host gave rise to all sorts of fears about host desecration, especially though not uniquely by Jews. For their part, Jews themselves in their polemics with Christians focussed on the theory of transubstantiation in order to demonstrate their

54 Speaking of the tale of ‘El judezno’, Diz reaches a similar conclusion through a different route. By transferring the violence from the Jewish community to the father, ‘se detiene la cadena de violencia que de otro modo no tendría fin’, thus avoiding ‘una interminable sucesión de violencias’ (1995: 137). 55 The phrase ‘Tu autem’ is an allusion to the formula that signified the conclusion of readings in Benedictine refectories: ‘Tu autem, miserere nobis’. The meaning of this phrase, as well as the relation between the food imagery and the holy communion, have also been noted by Diz (1995: 154–57).


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abhorrence of Christian belief.56 In both poems, therefore, this grotesque feasting needs to understood as an attempt to allay fears about the perceived grotesqueness of the Eucharist, by forcing the mocking Jews to swallow their own disgust at ingesting Christ’s body, which is manifested symbolically by their torturing a waxen image of Christ and by sacrificing an only son. The centrality of the Eucharist is clear if we pause to examine the conflict from the viewpoint of the Jewish father. This man is transformed into a grotesque monster when he hears about a different kind of transformation that some Christians allege to take place during communion. The boy, having eaten the body of Christ, is now lost to him; by exaggerating his rage, Berceo decreases the legitimacy of his sorrow. It is worth pointing out that in taking communion, the boy has strayed across a boundary line imposed by religious not social difference. Berceo’s version, like others, makes co-existence in the secular world a perfectly natural fact: the opening stanzas describe the mutual pleasure taken by the children in each other’s company, and hint at a desire, shared by Jews and Christians alike, for the social advancement derived from learning (354–55).57 Although the Eucharist appears to be the most contentious borderline separating the two groups, it is not the only one. The language of violence reveals that another source of conflict lies in the economic domain. In ‘El judezno’, the Jewish father is burnt to a cinder ‘quanto contarié omne poccos de pipiones’ (372a), and at his death Berceo damns him to Hell as ‘tan maleíta renda’ (373d). In ‘Los judíos de Toledo’, slaughter is described using the verb ‘recaudar’ (428–29); although the word had a variety of usages, the phrasing and context evoke the Jews’ role as tax collectors – ‘recaudadores’ – for the Crown. However faint and stereotypical are these images of the Jew, counting small coins, gathering rents and taxes, they are an indelible trace of the very real conflicts of thirteenth-century towns, where the Jews were the instruments of the unpopular fiscal policies of the Crown. In this regard, Berceo’s versions of these stories, though one is set at Easter and the other in August, can both usefully be seen in the context of ecclesiastical anxieties over Jewish sacrilege and blasphemy, especially during Easter.

56 For Jewish attitudes towards the Eucharist, with representative samples of JewishChristian polemics, see Rubin (1999: 93–103). For a broader survey of polemical writing against the Jews, see Dahan (1998). 57 Whether the Jewish boy is actually enrolled in the school is unclear; playful companionship is what matters to Berceo. Contrast the Latin version, where the boy is portrayed as a school-fellow, who wanders into Easter Mass with his Christian companions (Berceo 1987: 238). Alfonso’s poem emphasizes the co-educational context (1986–89, I: 63, ll. 12–23), and its prosification brings out the parents’ desire to encourage the boy’s education by sending him to a Christian school (317–18). Quite distinct is the version by Gautier: here, the boy’s wisdom and beauty makes him an ideal companion for Christians, precisely because he is unlike other Jewish boys (1955–70, II: 95, ll. 5–11).

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Carpenter has already suggested that the events described in ‘Los judíos de Toledo’, which took place on August 15th, reflect the repeated attempts to ban Jews from the streets during Easter Sunday (1986: 65–66). However, the story can also be linked to the ritual violence of Holy Week, when Christians townsfolk would beat the bounds of the Jewish aljamas banging on the walls and doors with sticks, as well as beating up the occasional Jew. The ritual was about marking boundaries, and establishing identities, and it was a process fraught with contradictions. And although he is talking about fourteenthcentury Aragon, David Nirenberg’s eloquent analysis of these contradictions is applicable to the multilayered conflicts being played out in these poems: the world of Holy Week violence was one in which the sacred was physically experienced, relations of power were criticized, the past became the present, and urban space was transformed. In and through these transformations and extravagances, Holy Week violence argued for the continued existence of Jews in Christian society, while at the same time articulating the possibility of and conditions for their destruction. (1996: 201–02)

Nirenberg shows that these rituals were a site of confrontation between Church, urban, and monarchical authority, and in particular they could be exploited as a vehicle for clerical resentment against the fiscal policies of the Crown. As I have suggested, this resentment also leaves its mark in the vocabulary of the two miracles. As a result of the conjunction of the religious and economic language of violence, the anti-Jewish sentiment expressed in the poem takes on a rather complex hue. It is difficult to separate the layers of hate: violence spawned by moral indignation and the disgust at the inherently polluting presence of the Jew mingles with violence that is contained by the ritual acting out of a Christian identity in communion and religious festivals, and both are overlaid by the economic conflicts involving the towns, the Church, and the State. Emotions seldom exist, of course, in a pure state; but by way of conclusion it is worth pausing to disentangle the main components of the hostility towards the Jew. Most relevant, it seems to me, is that particular admixture of hate and disgust which, according to William Miller, goes under the name of loathing. ‘What disgust adds to hatred is its distinctive kind of embodiment, its way of being unpleasant to the senses. It also subjects hatred’s volatility to disgust’s slow rate of decay’ (Miller 1997: 35). This kind of loathing finds expression in the Jewish father’s physically nauseating appearance and in his rapid incineration. ‘Though slow to dissipate’, Miller continues, ‘disgust is quick in onset; hate bespeaks a history. Hate wishes harm and misfortune on the object of hatred but is very ambivalent about wishing the hated one gone; disgust merely wants the thing relocated and quickly’ (35). The observation encourages us to look at the hostility towards the Jew from a temporal perspective. In both tales, the speed of the vengeance is clear, but only in ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ does it suggest a history of conflict. What ‘El judezno’ dramatizes is


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the volatile interruption of an otherwise peaceful co-existence. And yet while the former story eradicates the entire Jewish community, the latter does not. Furthermore, both miracles use disgust to underwrite Christianity’s moral superiority, since, as Miller argues, ‘Disgust [. . .] creates and is witness to a claim of moral (and social) inequality’; yet both miracles are also coloured by hatred, which ‘tends to embody the resentment of an unwelcome admission of equality’ (35). In these tales, the ideological function of hatred is to keep at bay any admission of equality on social, religious, and moral grounds, a process that was especially important for the high Middle Ages, when, as Beryl Smalley reminds us, Christian biblical scholars such as Andrew of St Victor developed their greatest debt to Jewish commentators (1983: 149–52, 338–55, 360–65). Elsewhere, Berceo himself acknowledges the historical equality between these sibling religions.58 Finally, Miller suggests that ‘Hatred can be quite positively energizing; disgust, by contrast, sickens and often enervates’ (35). Thus, in both tales we have images of impotent mothers, human and divine, both physically immobilized by grief, alongside images of impassioned hatred in the active pursuit of ‘justice’. In short, although hatred and disgust may combine as loathing, the two emotions can pull in different directions. The tensions within the emotional category are symptomatic of a categorical uncertainty about the Jews themselves, produced in part by conflicting views about their future place in Christian society, in part by the conflicting interests that converge in their representation. Jeremy Cohen’s salutary comments on the portrayal of Christian-Jewish relations in some medieval biblical commentaries are equally valid here. He speaks of a world ‘whose nuances, complexities, and ambivalences militate against the neat generalizations of the retrospective historian, a world whose vitality demands our appreciation measure for measure, text by text, image by image’ (2004: 340).59

The overarching miracle It is always said that there are twenty-five miracles in this collection; but in reality there are twenty-six. There is an implicit framing miracle, which makes all the other miracles possible, the miracle of the composition of the collection itself: ‘Terrélo por miráculo que lo faz la Gloriosa / si guiarme quisiere a mí en esta cosa’ (46ab), prays Berceo at the end of his prologue. At the end of the collection, the miracle has taken place, thrown into relief by the 58 In El duelo de la Virgen, Mary addresses the Jews as ‘parientes e amigos, / una natura somos de los padres antigos’ (57ab); in his Loores, Christ’s ‘ermanos issieron enemigos’ (56c). 59 This implied critique of teleological historiography also underwrites Nirenberg’s study of persecution in the Middle Ages, especially those studies that map a neat progression from tolerance to intolerance (1996: particularly 3–13).

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shift in temporal perspective: ‘Madre, del tu Golzalvo seï remembrador / que de los tos miraclos fue enterpretador’ (911ab). In the act of compiling this collection, and acting as interpretor or intermediary, Berceo has produced something wondrous, which is then re-enacted in performance.60 To return to Carpentier’s definition of lo real maravilloso, which I discussed in the introduction, this literary marvel is an instance of ‘una iluminación inhabitual o singularmente favorecedora de las inadvertidas riquezas de la realidad, de una ampliación de las escalas y categorías de la realidad’ (1976: 96). And in the conclusion to his essay on ‘Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso’, Carpentier remarked à propos of the marvellous reality of Latin America that ‘sólo tenemos que alargar las manos para alcanzarlo’ (1981: 135). For Berceo, it is not the hand that one uses, but the tongue – if the sinner has to know how to pray, the poet has to know how to represent – and in this way he celebrates the marvellous reach of language, in particular the words wielded by the clerical caste (Diz 1995: 241). If clerical writers strove to identify themselves with the Virgin, this was not just a strategy to legitimize the authority of their caste, but an association born of the homologous situations. The Virgin’s power is autonomous and yet limited; she is a free subject, yet also subject to a higher authority. Similarly, the clerical writer was an intermediary, negotiating between increasingly institutionalized centres of ecclesiastical and secular power and the larger world which they attempted to control and organize. In Berceo’s versions of the Marian miracles, the Virgin Mary is a poetic trope that rationalizes anxieties about the delegated authority of those entrusted with the task of organizing and categorizing a world whose realities and perspectives were shifting, not least because the very categories being employed to define and view that new reality were themselves changing, and were not always clearly perceived.

60 On the miraculous composition of the poems, see Biaggini (2002a: 145; 2002b: 118); on the meaning of ‘enterpretador’, see Diz (1995: 224).

2

Female Associations: Three Encounters with Holy Women The ideological complexities of the cleric as intermediary between institutional authority and the world at large are particularly acute when it comes to the representation of female religious experience. The reformist Church placed increasing emphasis on clerics’ celibacy as a sign of their social and spiritual superiority, and this, in tandem with inherited discourses of misogyny, unleashed a host of unresolved anxieties over the pollution caused by Woman. As Dyan Elliott puts it: even though free of personal sin, [Woman] nevertheless becomes a compelling image for original sin and the fallen condition of the human body [. . .]; biologically and hence morally inferior, [she] represented a node of vulnerability for Christendom at large, and thus would continue to be viewed as especially susceptible to demonic influence. (1999: 4 & 7)

And yet, the symbolic feminine also possessed positive meanings and associations, such as humility, compassion, and the nurturing qualities of motherhood, which could be appropriated to represent the aspirations of Church and clerical writer alike. One example is the femininized subject position adopted by Bernard of Clairvaux in his commentary on the Song of Songs. David Damrosch shows how Bernard exploited the feminine as a powerful metaphor for both himself and the male monastic community as a whole (1991). Although Patricia Ranft (1998) has argued for a strong tradition of spiritual equality between the sexes, the evidence provided by male writers such as Bernard needs to be carefully evaluated. Damrosch, for example, pointedly observes: ‘As infused as Bernard wishes both his commentary and his monastery to be with these feminine qualities, he is very far from wanting to have any actual women around’ (1991: 186).1 A similar ambivalence can be found in the Dominican friars who from the thirteenth century on acted as confidants and confessors of such charismatic laywomen as Margaret of Ypres (d. 1237), Christine de Stommeln

1 See also Robertson (1990: 41–42) and Bynum (1992: 36). For a useful study of Bernard’s influence in a Hispanic context, and the various roles and identities attributed to him, see Beresford (2003).

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(1242–1312), and Catherine of Siena (1347–80). These relationships are often structured by a tension between male institutional and female spiritual authority. As John Coakley explains, these women’s symbolic and literal otherness exerted a powerful attraction upon the friars, since it represented a form of mystical religious experience denied them by their very office; nonetheless, their ‘mediation of the divine presence [. . .] presented a potential problem: how it was to be related to the men’s own priestly authority, which itself served as a mediation of the divine’ (1991: 225). In this chapter, the grounds and, perhaps more interestingly, the limits of male authority in the religious domain will be tested through detailed textual analyses of three narratives: Berceo’s life of the local eleventh-century saint known as Oria; his version of the well-known miracle of the pregnant abbess; and the anonymous Spanish adaptation of the popular legend of Mary of Egypt. In these tales the encounter between male clerical authority and female holiness is played out upon different social and institutional stages (the anchoress’s cell, the desert, the convent), and concerns different forms of religious experience (visions, penitential asceticism, life in the convent). Consequently, although they are held together by some common assumptions – notably to do with the female body – each story looks out onto its own particular ideological horizons. These attempts to get to grips with religious women (literally, in the case of the pregnant abbess) provoke anxieties about much broader issues, such as language, social order, and the nature of sin itself.

Writing, Sanctity, and Gender in Berceo’s ‘Poema de Santa Oria’ ‘In the final word Berceo is Oria.’ With these words, Anthony Perry (1968: 177) summarized the affective bond that tied Gonzalo de Berceo to the eleventh-century virgin saint Oria, when toward the end of his life he reworked the virgin’s Latin vita into one of the most moving expressions of clerical piety in the cuaderna vía corpus. And though Perry closes his pioneering monograph on the Poema de Santa Oria by attempting to show how ‘Berceo invades his poem in all of its parts’ (189), he does not ignore one of its more puzzling features: near the end of the work, when the virgin agonizes on her deathbed, Berceo’s narrative voice slips into the persona of Muño, Oria’s confessor and the author of the original vita. On both forms of identification – with the virgin and the cleric – Perry’s study provides a valuable point of departure.2 However, I do not follow him in order to capture ‘the basic

2 In spite of his many sensitive insights, few would nowadays accept Perry’s underlying assumptions about the historical Berceo’s personal presence in the work, nor his image of the Riojan poet as ‘humble’ cleric; see also the detailed review by Vasvari Fainberg and Lefkowitz (1974–75).

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intention, the “cry of the heart” that sponsors the poem in all of its parts’ (178); it is precisely the lack of uniformity in the ‘sponsoring’ voice that interests me. And nor do I wish to explain away the metamorphosis into Muño’s voice simply by invoking the protean nature of the medieval poetic ‘I’ (Spitzer 1946). My aim is to pose a different and I believe more fundamental problem concerning this dual association, which is brought to the fore by recent work on medieval hagiography and gender. Only two critics have explored a gendered approach to the Poema de Santa Oria. First, John K. Walsh (1986) drew on the studies of Bynum and others to show how Berceo’s representation of Oria is shaped largely by thirteenth-century concepts of female sanctity. More recently, Anthony Lappin, commenting on Oria’s adoption of monks’ garb (20c; XIX), has argued that Oria’s ascetic spirituality follows ‘a long and ancient tradition, that of the “femme déguisée en moine” ’ which refers to the ‘numerous women who had taken on male clothing as part of their monastic vocation, abandoning not only the world but to an extent, their own gender’ (Berceo 2000: 32; my emphasis).3 The extent to which Oria can abandon the ideological constraints of her gender is one of the issues I examine below; more relevant at this stage is the fact that the poetic representation of narrator and saint is shaped by both masculine and feminine attributes. In contrast to Walsh, Lappin believes that the poem ‘can be most fully understood as being the product of a visionary anchoress of the eleventh century. The message contained in the visions can be related to the woman’s own reading and theological understanding, a message whose invention by a male cleric would have been unlikely, if not impossible’ (Berceo 2000: 31). What concerns me, as will become clearer below, is not so much the ‘invention’ of the woman’s visionary experience, as the fact of its mediation, and in this respect Walsh’s general thesis is still persuasive.4 My principal purpose, however, is to examine the basis as well as the limits of the narrator’s association with Oria. Close analysis of the poem’s

3 Line references in arabic numerals are to Lappin’s edition, whose text I adopt. Roman numerals refer to the stanza order in Uría Maqua’s 1981 edition, which has been challenged by Walsh (1986: 305, n. 21, and 307, n. 30), and, more extensively, by Lappin (Berceo 2000: 5–26), who argues that the poem, once completed up to stanza 185, was subsequently revised and extended. The structural differences between the two editions affect my argument in only one regard, noted below. Ruffinatto suggests that the surviving text reflects an incomplete state of composition, a poem perhaps left unrevised by the author’s death (Berceo 1992b: 31 & 36). For another detailed study of the poem and its structure, see Gimeno Casalduero (1984). 4 Ruffinatto detects ‘una clara preeminencia del género feminino sobre el masculino’, and infers that ‘el poema de Oria apuntaba hacia un público feminino’ (Berceo 1992b: 20 & 22). As will be clear, my interpretation differs, being more in line with Diz’s view that male writers’ representation of female saints like Oria ‘puede [. . .] encarnar deseos de los hombres, que la sociedad les impide realizar’ (1995: 180).

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metaphors, symbols, structure, indeed its very verbal texture, reveals a series of complex tensions between male cleric and female saint. One obvious tension is inscribed in the text’s grammatical identification of the narrator Berceo with the monk Muño in stanzas 149–50 (CLII–CLIII) and 163 (CLXVI).5 However we explain it, this assimilation of his source epitomizes Berceo’s privileged position within the male world of clerical hagiography and also marks the outer limits of the narrator’s affective identification with the virgin Oria, since he is distanced from the saint by his very representation of her path – as woman – to sanctity. Although Berceo incorporates references to Oria’s liturgical readings, her access to the divine is primarily through her body. In this respect, Berceo follows models that are characteristic of medieval female spirituality, which as Bynum (1987: and 1992), Robertson (1990 and 1991) and numerous others have shown, was physical to a degree rare in representations of male spirituality. Moreover, Berceo’s representation of this physicality is determined by certain beliefs about the unstable nature of female flesh with which the male writer would be loathe to associate on a literal level.6 And yet in spite of these limits the association remains. Berceo identifies with Oria not just out of a desire to be saved through her mediation as surrogate: it is my contention that his representation of her attempts to tame wayward flesh are also related to Berceo’s own authorial interventions in the poem and to his frequent allusions to spoken language and the process of writing.7 To understand this, it is necessary to recall that unlike many other hagiographical poems, the Poema de Santa Oria does not develop its themes by depicting the saint’s miracles performed post mortem. It does so by focussing on the process of the ascetic visionary experience. Oria has three visions in which she learns of her assigned place in heaven: a glittering throne guarded by the allegorical ‘Vox Mea’. The poem conveys a dramatic sense of upward movement toward this point, and suggests an increasing distance from the earth-bound narrators and their public. And in large measure it achieves this by means of its narrative structure and point of view.8 Berceo’s representation of the three visions become progressively shorter and more fragmentary as Oria approaches the divine. And by the third vision the narrative perspective shifts from Oria to the witnesses of her experience, the mother, the confessor,

5 Bibliography on these two passages is cited below. For another shift in narratorial voice, see Berceo’s Duelo de la Virgen, towards the end of which the clerical voice that introduced the work blends with that of the Virgin. I return to the implications of this in the afterword to this book. 6 See Lochrie’s discussion of the concepts of ‘fissured flesh’ and the ‘sealed body’ (1991: 120–28). 7 For further discussion of Berceo’s treatment of the theme of language, both written and oral, see Kelley (1991 & 2004), Biaggini (2002b), and Bower (2003 and 2005). 8 For more details on structure see Burke (1973), Perry (1968: 14–17), the preface to Uría Maqua’s edition (1981a: 35–39), and Lappin (Berceo 2000: 31–44).

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and other women. The narrative style thus helps convey the idea that the cleric’s ability to capture and represent in writing the saint’s visions diminishes as her physical voice fails, and as she reaches her reserved silla. As Oria finds ‘vox mea’, Berceo loses his. When Oria dies, and her voice recovers the prelapsarian unity of body and spirit, there is a moment of dramatic anxiety: the poem dwells on the desire of Oria’s mother and confessor to recollect the saint, and to preserve women’s oral experience in the physicality of the clerical written word (172; LXXV). This anxiety, coupled with the poem’s structure and perspective, suggests that one previously unrecognized theme in this poem is a metaphoric relationship between Oria’s penitential asceticism and the male cleric’s desire to control language and return to the plenitude of the originary Word. In order to develop this point, I need to return to Perry’s analysis of the poem’s associative rhetoric; following that, I shall explain why, pace Perry, in the final word Berceo is not Oria: in other words the textual metaphor has its limits in material reality. The very opening of the poem sets up a parallel between Oria and Berceo. After invoking the Holy Trinity, Berceo states his purpose: ‘de una sancta virgen quiero versificar’ (1a; I). He continues: Quiero en mi vegez, maguer só ya cansado, de esta sancta virgen romançar su dictado; que dios por el su ruego sea de mí pagado e non quiera vengança tomar del mi peccado. (2; II)

Both saint and cleric are intermediaries: Oria between God and sinner, Berceo between the Latin vita and vernacular audience. And though it is the natural product of cuaderna vía syntax, the repetition in the first two stanzas of ‘quiero’ introduces what will constitute the main bond between Oria and her scribe: a rhetoric of desire. The urgency which infuses the poem derives principally from Oria’s desire to complete her allotted time on earth, and it is compounded by the narrator’s own desire to reach the end of his tale. Both desires are rendered more intense by being measured against a time frame over which they have no control: God’s will and liturgical time in the case of Oria, and old age, night, and the demands of rhetoric in the case of Berceo. The best-known example of Berceo’s anxiety is the concluding stanza of the prologue: Avemos en el prólogo nos mucho detardado, siguamos la estoria, esto es aguisado. Los días son non grandes, anochezrá privado: escrivir en tiniebra es un mester pesado. (10; X)

But the desire to finish before the onset of the real and figurative night needs to be reconciled with other demands. After having described the virgin’s passing into the other world, Berceo twice draws attention to the need to end the

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poem properly, before he himself can depart: ‘Aún non me querría, sennores, espedir, / [. . .] / la obra començada bien la quiero conplir’ (185ac; CLXXXVII). Like Oria’s life, the poem – and the narrator’s presence before the public – must run its allotted course.9 For the same reason, at the end of the poem Berceo claims that he cannot relate all the visions experienced by Oria’s mother, Amuña, because: ‘tengo otras priesas de fer mis cabazones. / Quiero alçarme desto fasta otras sazones’ (202cd; CCIV). Here the desire to reach the conclusion of his narrative, which is not unique to this poem, seems to be transformed into something more spiritual. His ‘priesas’ are ‘otras’: an urgency not just renewed, perhaps, but of a different order; he ends with the desire to rise from his desk (‘alçarme’) in a movement that evokes Oria’s spiritual ascent.10 The association with Oria’s spiritual ascent is in fact anticipated within the narration of the virgin’s third vision of the other world. While she lies on her death-bed, the monk Muño is summoned and his arrival prompts her to report her vision. Having done so, they exchange words whose syntax mirrors their shared desire: Díxo⭈l Munno a Oria, ‘¿Cobdiçias allá ir?’ Díxo⭈l a Munno Oria, ‘Yo sí, más que vivir. E tú non perdriés nada de comigo venir.’ Díxo⭈l Munno: ‘¡Quisiésselo esso dios consintir!’ (158; CLXI)

In the first two lines it is more easy to distinguish the speakers visually than aurally: oral performance heightens the sense of shared desire. Nonetheless, Muño holds Oria in check: ‘Oria, fuelga en tu logar: / ¡non es agora tiempo por en naves entrar!’ (159cd; CLXII). And at this point, the narrator intervenes in a curious way: En esta pleitesía non quiero detardar, si por bien lo tobierdes, quiérovos destaiar; a la fin de la duenna me quiero acostar, levarla a la siella, después ir a folgar. (160; CLXIII)

9 For Lappin (2000: 209) stanza 185 marks the poem where Berceo continued an alleged first version of the poem, a continuation ‘forced’ on him by audience expectation. Later (211) he more persuasively remarks on the formulaic nature of such passages. See also Berceo’s reference to the events which ‘nos finca de todo el sermón’ (187d; CLXXXIX); for the idea of the poem as a river that needs to run its course, see also ‘non me quiero en cabo del río enfogar’ (Vida de Santo Domingo, 387d; quoted from Berceo 1992b). For other parallels with Santo Domingo, and the biblical echoes of stanza 10, see Lappin’s commentary (Berceo 2000: 97) and Bower (2005). For Berceo’s use of writing as spiritual journey, see Kelley (2004: 74 & 76) and Gerli (1992). 10 For a more literal instance, see also ‘Aún no me semeja con esto me alçar, / unos pocos miraclos quiero aún contar’ (Vida de Santo Domingo, 387ab; see also 487; Berceo 1992b).

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The extent to which the narrator assimilates Oria’s desire is brought out in his reformulation of Muño’s language. Whereas Muño advises the virgin not to set sail on her spiritual journey, but to stay and ‘folgar’, Berceo, adapting the nautical imagery, writes: ‘I want to find land (acostar), and then rest’. As narrator, he assumes the urgency of the moment: he pushes on, leading the listeners to the end of the poem, and leading Oria to her seat, where she – and by extension Berceo – will find ‘Vox Mea’ in contemplative folgura. The narrator’s identification with the saint’s spiritual journey is also illustrated by stanzas 184 and 202. Lappin believes these are separate codas to two recensions of the poem, whereas for Uría Maqua they combine to form a general conclusion to the whole poem. Although the rhetorical effect differs according to whether one reads these stanzas separately or together, they both are inscribed with a progressive distancing of the narrative voice which mirrors the ascent and distancing of Oria. As I explained above, in stanza 202 (CCIV), the narrator writes in the present, in the first person singular (‘tengo otras priesas’, ‘quiero alçarme desto’) but implies the desire to move on and leave behind the physical labour of writing. In stanza 184 (CCV), the author appears even more distant, even as he names himself: Gonçalo li dixieron al versifficador, que en su portaleio fizo esta lavor. ¡Ponga en él su graçia dios, el nuestro Sennor que vea la su gloria en el regno mayor!

Rather than the first-person present of stanza 202, we have the third-person preterite (‘Gonçalo li dixieron’), and from here the human subject, ‘they called’, then passes into the divine Subject, ‘ponga en él su gracia’, with the verb moving into the realm of the timeless. This stanza contains contains an explicit example of the associative rhetoric linking Berceo and Oria. It is the parallel between Oria’s emparedación as anchoress and Berceo’s enclosure as writer, labouring in the doorway to the saint’s cell (‘su portaleio’).11 This image of the cleric toiling away within an enclosed space reinforces the bond with the virgin saint, especially when we consider the laborious physicality often associated with writing in the Middle Ages.12 As Färcas¸iu has remarked, ‘his artistic self-cloistering mirrors the

11 Dutton (Berceo 1981b: 131) records the following legend: ‘Al entrar en la iglesia de Suso hay un portalejo a la derecha que se considera el lugar donde Berceo escribía sus obras’. Although it is possible that this is the meaning of ‘su portaleio’, in the context it is more likely to refer to the entrance to the anchorhold. For discussion of the size of Oria’s cell, in the light of literary and other documentary evidence, see Beresford (2002). 12 According to Clanchy, ‘Writing was certainly seen as an act of endurance in which “the whole body labours”. As such it was an appropriate theme for sermons and homilies in monasteries’ (1979: 90; also cited and discussed by Ong 1982: 95). In the light of

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existential condition of his hagiographic subject’ (1986: 305). As I explain below, I think this ‘mirroring’ is highly problematic; but for the moment I simply wish to suggest that the bond between cleric and saint is not just affective, but metaphoric: Oria is a metaphor for the writer’s own desire to find ‘vox mea’, which inevitably entails a struggle with fallen, earth-bound language. Before their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the audible, corporeal language employed by Adam and Eve was complemented by what Eric Jager describes as ‘a direct knowledge of God through an “inner word” – an unmediated intellectual vision like that enjoyed by the angels themselves’ (1993: 52). However, as Jager’s summary of Augustinian sign theory demonstrates (52–64), after the Fall humans had to rely exclusively on indirect knowledge gained through fallible material signs, apprehended through the senses.13 Human language, with its inherent rupture between signified and signifier, became ‘a fallen medium subject to time’ (60). Exile brought mortality, and with it the need to combat death, fallible memory, and the passing of time with permanent written records. But because of its association with sin, writing produced feelings of ambivalence in patristic authors: in spite of its power, writing was essentially a copy of speech, signifying ‘absence not presence, illusion not reality, mimesis not logos’ (63). Whether or not the cuaderna vía poets as a whole were consciously attempting to compensate for the sinful origins of writing in their insistence that theirs was a mester sen pecado is impossible to say with certainty, though Deyermond is surely right to point up the moral dimension to the phrase (1965). Nonetheless, in this particular poem the fallen state of human language is a crucial theme. It is apparent in the authorial image of an old man writing against time, conscious of the very bodily nature of his act. The complaint that ‘escrivir en tiniebra es un mester pesado’ (10d; X) is shot through with an anxiety produced by both the temporal and the material conditions of writing. Though writing signifies absence from God, unmediated divine presence is not signified by human speech either, for this too – as embodied by Oria – exists in a fallen state. In so far as the poem traces Oria’s desire to recover ‘voice’ through a struggle with language and the flesh, one might conclude that on a philosophical level it is logocentric. But as we shall see, the primacy of spoken over written language is counterbalanced by the subordination of orality to the authority of the clerical written word. The preoccupation with fallen language is introduced early on; we are told that Oria ‘ovo con su carne baraia e contienda. / Por consentir al cuerpo nunca

Clanchy’s evidence, Berceo’s two allusions to the act of writing (10; X, and 184; CCV) may have more allegorical force than previously assumed. The idea of writer as labourer (‘obrero’) who offers his toil (‘lacerio’, ‘travajo’) as a service to God constitutes the narratorial framework to the Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos (4 and 756–59; Berceo 1992b). 13 For further discussion of prelapsarian language, see Kelley (2004: 71–73).

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soltó la rienda’ (15cd; XVI). But the virgin struggles to keep language and not just the body under tight rein: Con ambos sus labriellos apretava sus dientes, que non salliessen dende biervos desconvenientes. (16cd; XVIII)

Berceo’s phrasing here suggests that just as the flesh has a will of its own, words too have an independence that needs to be confined: recalcitrant language is caged by her teeth.14 The imagery of containment continues, as the figurative bars of her teeth are exchanged for the symbolic confines of her habit and the real confines of her cell: Desque mudó los dientes, luego a pocos annos, pagávase muy poco de los seglares pannos; vistió otros vestidos de los monges calaños. (20; XIX) [. . .] Desamparó el mundo Oria, toca negrada; en un rencón angosto entró emparedada. (21ab; XX)

Other metaphors of charity, humility, and patience, though conventional, develop the idea that Oria’s body is an enclosed space whose boundaries are protected from the intrusive and corrupting influence of worldly language: Era esta reclusa vaso de caridat, templo de paçïençia e de humilidat. Non amava palabras oír de vanidat. (22ac; XXV)

Oria is enclosed, but is also an enclosure – a vaso and templo for spiritual qualities that enable her to transcend her physical confines and act as penitential surrogate for the whole community: ‘luz era e confuerto de la su vezindat’ (22d; XXV). In the next stanza, Berceo develops the contrast between physical confinement and spiritual freedom (‘angosta’, ‘larga’, ‘foradar’), and suggests that Oria achieves a higher transcendance through prayer: Porque angosta era la enparedaçión, teniéla por muy larga el su buen coraçón. Siempre rezava psalmos e fazié oraçión, foradava los çielos la su devoçïón. (23; XXVI)

Following this, Berceo goes on to specify that Oria’s visionary experience derives from a combination of prayer (‘Tanto fue dios pagado de las sus 14 Both Kelley (2004: 70–71) and Lappin (2000: 103) point out that this passage echoes Berceo’s account of the childhood of Santo Domingo: ‘los labros de la boca teniélos bien cosidos, / por non decir follías, nin dichos corrompidos’ (12bc; Berceo 1992b). As a man, this saint also practises physical abstinence and fasting (41), though Oria’s struggle with her body is represented in more conflictive terms. For other parallels between Oria’s early years and those of Domingo, see Lappin’s notes (2000: 98–113).

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oraçiones’, 24a; XXVII); asceticism (‘el serviçio que fazes e la saya de lana’, 33d; XXXVI); and liturgical reading (‘Tú mucho te deleitas en las nuestras passiones; / de amor e de grado leyes nuestras razones’, 34ab; XXXVII).15 In short, what stands out in these introductory stanzas on Oria’s early life is the close association between language and asceticism. Controlling the flesh entails controlling language: there is a sense that language, like the body, has a ‘fleshliness’ that needs to be curbed. The point is well illustrated by the virgin Eulalia, who encourages Oria with the words: ‘Assí mandas tus carnes e assí las aguisas / que por sobir los çielos tú digna te predigas’ (36cd; XXXIX). Oria’s ability to subdue her flesh is described as a verbal utterance, a form of ‘preaching’. Oria’s visions come in exchange for her asceticism, prayer, and pious reading: this is to say, her command over flesh is coupled with command over the spoken and the written word. But this is no easy exchange. Berceo creates an intensely dramatic sense of the visionary process as frustrated desire and urgent struggle. He achieves this in a variety of ways: by creating, for example, semantic chains based on the repetition of the verbs ‘enbargar’ and ‘conplir’, which together convey the physical and affective obstacles in Oria’s path to fulfilment.16 Time is another theme that contributes towards the mood of urgency: there is a striking repetition of phrases that warn Oria that her time has not yet come (e.g. 102; CIV), an idea highlighted by the verbal play on ‘hora / Oria’ (e.g. 176; CLXXIX). But for our purposes, the most significant source of drama is the tense interplay established throughout the poem between Oria’s hearing and sight. This interplay further strengthens the hypothesis that Oria’s asceticism has a metaphoric function, since the tension between sight and sound, presence and absence, structures one medieval definition of writing: letters, according to John of Salisbury, ‘speak voicelessly the utterances of the absent’.17

15 Uría Maqua (Berceo 1981a: 102n) comments on her familiarity with the pasionario (‘colección ordenada cronológicamente de las singulares Pasiones’), which had a liturgical function distinct from the legendario (‘relatos de vidas y milagros de abades, obispos, monjes, etc., no mártires’) compiled for lay piety. I shall return to the implications of this detail below. For the importance of reading the martyrs’ passions in Western female monasticism, see Lappin (Berceo 2000: 126–27). 16 Among other references, see: ‘La niña que yazié en paredes çerrada / con esta visïón fue mucho enbargada’ (31ab; XXXIV). Here, ‘enbargada’ suggests the confusion caused by the contrast between the physical enclosure of her cell and the spiritual freedom of her vision. A similar use is ‘La az era muy luenga, esso la enbargava’ (76a; LXXIX). The yearning for fulfilment, expressed by the recurrent use of the word ‘conplir’, may be traced in such stanzas as 35d (XXXVIII), 41c (XLV), 45d (XLVIII). A particularly interesting use of the verb is when Oria asks after Urraca: ‘mujer buena conplida / enparedada visco una buena partida. / Era de la maestra Oria mucho querida’ (70bd; LXXII). The juxtaposition of female fulfilment and enclosure is telling. 17 ‘Littere [. . .] absentium dicta sine voce loquuntur.’ Quoted from the Metalogicon by Clanchy (1979: 202).

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It is not unusual for those undergoing religious transport to hear voices, as well as experience visions. But in Oria’s first vision, Berceo three times places special emphasis on how she hears a ‘disembodied’ voice: that of her former teacher Urraca (76; LXXIX), that of Christ, (88; CV), and that of God (101; CIII). At the same time, during this vision Oria sees her place in heaven: a bejewelled throne, ‘vazía e muy bien seellada’ (77d; LXXX), draped with a rich cloth and guarded by a ‘mançebiella’ called Vox Mea (79; LXXXII). Cherchi (1973) has traced the biblical and hagiographic traditions of this passage, and rightly observes that Berceo makes the empty throne the dramatic epicentre of the whole poem. More recently, Lappin has unpicked the various allegorical strands woven into this figure, and argued that Vox Mea represents the eschatological Church in Heaven, which speaks for Christ, though is not identical with him. The throne that she guards ‘refers to Oria’s sharing in the spiritual marriage with Christ at her death as one of the Church in heaven, one of those who are saved’ (2000: 36–41, at p. 39). Besides signifying Oria’s assigned place within the heavenly Church, the throne also plays an important part within the poem’s representation of language. It denotes the place where she recovers her voice in the presence of the divine. But at this point what is significant is that though she sees her throne, it is a symbolic place of silence and absence: until she dies, and joins ‘Vox Mea’, it remains empty, covered up, and mute. In short, she sees a ‘voiceless’ throne, just as she hears ‘disembodied’ voices. This episode marks an intermediate stage in the transformation of Oria’s voice. Because she has done much to tame flesh and word, she has advanced towards the time when language is no longer mediated, and when sight joins with sound in the plenitude of the Logos. Nonetheless, she still inhabits the world of fallen flesh. For this reason, she still needs to seal her body, and protect its boundaries: ‘Por estas visïones la reclusa don Oria / non dio en sí entrada a nulla vana gloria’ (111ab; CXIV). She continues to purge her flesh by fasting, vigils, and flagellation. But, as before, Berceo ties physical punishment to prayer: just before her third vision, when she is sick and unable to beat her breast, Oria still manages to pray ‘entre dientes’ (138b; CXLI). Though they evoke the physical pain of a dying woman, her clenched teeth also continue to symbolize control and containment of language. After the vision, with failing voice, the only words she could utter – and still ‘entre dientes’ – are the words ‘Monte Oliveti’ (147ab; CL). Although no one could make her words out, certain women ‘vedién que murmurava, mas no la entendién’ (148ab; CLI). Once again, though this time from a different perspective, we encounter an opposition between seeing and hearing, and the conflict between sight and sound is ideologically reinforced by being located in woman, a powerful symbol of the earth-bound (Diz 1995: 183). Later, Oria refuses her mother’s urgent request to communicate at least some of her vision so that it might be recorded: ‘más me pesa la lengua que un pesado canto’ (173d; CLXXVI). Oria can hardly form words (‘la palabra formar’), and though she has much to say, urging her to speak would have disastrous

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consequences: ‘ante de la mi hora me puedo enfogar’ (174d; CLXXVII). Intentionally or not, Berceo’s language is evocative here: the play on ‘canto’, as song and stone, underscores the theme of earth-bound v. divine speech. Oria would sink with the heaviness of her tongue, and ‘drown’ (‘enfogar’) in her attempts to shape words – ‘human’ language and the ‘human’ body are, like the sea, potentially formless and beyond control. (I place ‘human’ within quotation marks because the point is made through the female body, and is hence gendered.) The time of Oria’s death has a powerful metaphor: ‘boca de noch’ era’ (176b; CLXXIX), a phrase whose components are once again sight and sound. At this point, human words give way to signs, as Oria crosses herself and joins her hands in silent thanks. Oria ‘cerró ojos e boca’: sight and sound are, finally, no longer in opposition but united in the dark silence of physical death. Oria has entered the ‘mouth’ of earthly death and found heavenly speech. Oria’s death marks the closure of her struggle, and the sense of closure is emphasized in the passage devoted to her burial (stanzas 178–83; CLXXXI– CLXXXVI). Accompanied by the Abbot, monks and hermits, and wrapped ‘en sus paños de orden’, Oria’s body is sealed up ‘dentro en una cueba, so una piedra dura’ (181b; CLXXXIV). Her death brings victory in the struggle to contain the earth-bound body, to stop it up, and to prevent vainglorious words entering or leaving it. Oria’s body, finally sealed under a stone, is preserved with her mother’s as a relic (‘cuerpos son derecheros que sean adorados’, 183a; CLXXVI). The unity of mother and daughter in death represents womanhood itself, which for patriarchal discourse is the elemental symbol of recalcitrant flesh and language.18 Oria’s emparedación has been real, but it has also been a metaphor for the victory over disorderly fleshliness and the recovery of the transcendental unity of body and spirit. This is achieved in heaven, where Oria finds ‘vox mea’, a voice untainted by carnality. At the place where sight no longer stands in opposition to sound, she has recovered the plenitude of the originary Logos, and (as Lappin puts it) she has joined with ‘the voice which transmits the Word of God, and which allows that Word to be heard, God to be perceived’ (Berceo 2000: 37). As I have remarked before, one of the ways in which the narrator seems to associate himself with the enclosed body of Oria is by representing himself as also being enclosed within her ‘portaleio’, also engaged in a struggle with words, and also desiring God’s grace. This physical enclosure may provide the grounds for the metaphoric relation between writing and asceticism, but it also constitutes the material gulf that separates cleric and

18 Walsh has remarked that the bond between mother and daughter is further evidence that Berceo was writing under the influence of ‘new schemes of feminine sanctity that begin to flourish early in the thirteenth century’ (1988: 259). For other ‘relatively stereotyped’ hagiographic and romance burials, see Lappin (Berceo 2000: 207–08).

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virgin. From the perspective of gender, Berceo’s portaleio stands in stark contrast to what is signified by Oria’s emparedación. Sitting in her doorway, the cleric is doubly positioned, looking into the cell and out onto the world, which epitomizes one of the shaping concepts of mester de clerecía: the cleric’s ‘being-in-the-world’ and his duty as intermediary between learning and the laity. However much the male writer appropriates the struggle of the female ascetic as a metaphor for his own preoccupation with the Word, their material conditions were radically different because, amongst reasons, they stood in an entirely different relationship to the social privilege of literacy. For a poem that elevates the ascetic life, there is an intense preoccupation with companionship. The desire for company cuts across various forms of social grouping, such as youth and old age, pupil and teacher, the living and the dead, male and female. The theme of companionship underpins that poem’s broader message that we can all participate vicariously in the divine and achieve salvation through the saint’s personal suffering. As Weinstein and Bell point out (1982: 153–55), the ascetic life was suffused with a paradox, formed from the recluse’s desire for solitude and the community’s desire for contact with a penitential surrogate. But although the poem is participatory in tone, the companionship of men and women has its limits: within the religious community, there is not total community of interest. Both on heaven and earth the compannas break down along gender lines, each with their own modes of relationship with the divine. To summarize this briefly, Oria’s religious experience is mediated in three ways: through the body (through fasting, flagellation, Eucharistic devotion, as bride of Christ); through other women (her mother, Urraca, the Virgin Mary, and the child martyrs Agatha, Eulalia, and Cecilia); and through her spiritual readings.19 Oria herself has a powerful awareness that her access to God is distinctly female when, at the end of her first vision, she expresses the fear that if she returns to the confines of her body ‘non fallaré en mundo sennora nin madrina / por qui yo esto cobre’ (104cd; CVII). However, it is significant that God does not address either the physical or the female forms of mediation; instead, with the words ‘reza tu matinada’ (107d; CX), He draws her back to reading the liturgy. This divine command is symptomatic of Berceo’s engagement with popular piety as a whole; even as he promotes it, he tries to maintain official ecclesiastical authority represented by the liturgy.

19 Oria’s Eucharistic devotion does not reach the physical extremes of other female mystics discussed by Bynum (1987), Robertson (1991), and Lochrie (1991). But its intensity is well illustrated by her desire to return even in death to feast upon ‘el çevo spirital, / el cuerpo de don Christo, mi sennor natural’ (191cd; CXCIII). Similarly, unlike Catherine of Siena she does not dream of being wed to Christ with the ring of his foreskin; but her response to Vox Mea’s description of her heavenly throne, with its urgent phrasing and allusion to the bridal bed, acquires a distinctly physical edge: ‘luego en esti tálamo querría seer novia’ (97c; XCIX). For Oria’s emulation of female role-models, see Lappin (Berceo 2000: 31–35).

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In this way, Oria’s quasi-mystical religious experience, though potentially autonomous, is never wholly freed from institutional forms. Her visions are not just the product of her personal asceticism, they are also the reward for her liturgical devotion, such as her reading of the pasionario: indeed the first vision comes ‘Después de las matinas, leída la lectión / (escuchóla bien Oria con grant devocïón)’ (26ab; XXIX).20 As if to counterbalance the popular devotion to Oria which he both responds to and promotes, Berceo populates his poem densely with male authority figures – bishops, monks, martyrs, the apostles, the evangelists – whose relationship with the divine is institutionalized through their command of the sacrament and liturgy, and reinforced by their control of the written word. Concern for hierarchical balance sheds light upon Berceo’s grammatical identification with Muño in stanzas 149–50 (CLII–CLIII) and 163 (CLXVI). Scholars have examined this apparent slip from a variety of perspectives: as evidence for Berceo’s debt to Muño, as scribal error, and as an example of the way in which clerical narrators commonly associated with their sources in medieval hagiography. But they have not adequately considered what makes this slippage possible in the first place, nor why it should occur at this specific point in the narrative.21 Whether scribal or authorial, the switch in narratorial voice betrays the unconscious limit of the associative rhetoric linking Berceo to Oria, for it first occurs precisely at the point where Oria needs interpretation, where she need to be ‘read’. Berceo’s voice transforms into that of Muño at the point of privilege: the ‘buenas mugieres’ surrounding the dying virgin could not get her to recount her dream, nor determine whether she spoke ‘bien o mal’. It is the male narrator – the voice of clerical authority and tradition – who makes her speak, and who then transforms her vision into writing, thus rescuing it from the feminine realm of confusion and superstition. This transformation into writing is certainly prompted by an anxiety to participate in the divine by recollection of Oria’s sanctity. But we should note how written recollection (the domain of the cleric) takes precedence over oral

20 The second vision is the product of the same combination of asceticism, prayer and pious reading (‘ieiunios e vigilias e rezar el salterio: / querié a todas guisas seguir el evangelio’; 112cd; CXV). Uría Maqua has observed how Oria’s visions are timed against the liturgical calendar (Berceo 1981a: 24–26). For the connection between meditative reading and the visionary experience, see Lappin (Berceo 2000: 32–33). 21 Reviewing the earlier hypotheses of Dutton and Uría Maqua, Walsh argues that the problem may be explained by the fourteenth-century copyist’s ‘penchant for fixing and adjusting his text without fretting about the type of inconsistencies that would glare in recital’ (1986: 294–96, at p. 296); for Lappin, stanzas 149–50 are an esthetically successful passage, requiring no correction, since there is no danger that the audience would confuse Berceo with Muño. He draws an analogy with thirteenth-century French hagiographical practice, where the voices of clerical narrators, protagonists, and sources interweave to create a sense of continuing tradition (Berceo 2000: 193–94).

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memory (at this point in the narrative, the domain of women). We see this clearly when Berceo relates how Amuña took care not to forget the vision of her dead husband, but to recount it in its entirety (‘todo’) to Muño ‘su querido’ (one wonders whether the affective bond is forged through recognition of the confessor’s power of literacy?). The monk too learned it by heart: ‘él decorólo todo como bien entendido’ (170d; CLXXIII; my emphasis). The obsession with total recall continues: Bien lo decoró esso como todo lo ál. Bien gelo contó ella, no⭈l aprendió él mal; por end’ de la su vida fizo libro cavdal: yo end’ lo saqué esto de essi su missal. (171; CLXXIV; my emphasis)

However, accurate recollection inevitably moves ‘from memory to written record’, a process that is inscribed poetically in the text as the experience moves from ‘esso’ to ‘esto’.22 Note how the accuracy of the verbal transaction between mother and Muño is safeguarded by the monk’s learning ‘como bien entendido’; how there is an emphasis on ‘wholeness’ (‘todo’ becomes ‘libro cavdal’); how the vocabulary (‘aprender – sacar’) reinforces the movement from oral utterance to the physicality of the written word. And note finally how female experience, once transcribed into a ‘missal’, becomes an object of reverence tied to the male-authored liturgy: as in Berceo’s Milagro 19, ‘El parto maravilloso’, women’s experience when transformed into ecclesiastical cántico is alienated from her material conditions of existence.23 There is yet more evidence to illustrate the way in which the male privilege of literacy is inscribed in the text. For example, Oria’s response to the three virgins during her first vision is also validated by the metaphor of writing: if you remember me, she says to the virgin martyrs, ‘allá serié conplida toda la mi estoria’ (35d; XXXVIII). Her life and struggle are a book, the composition of which was entrusted to men. And the physical form that this book’s script might take is suggested towards the end of this same vision, when after reporting the illustrious congregation of hermits, martyrs, apostles, and evangelists, the narrator returns to the ‘siella’ and describes the robes of Vox Mea: ‘era sobresennada de buena escriptura. / Non cubrió omne vivo tan rica cobertura’ (91cd; XCIII). Copied out on the robes are the names of those whose very sanctity is symbolized by the quality of the script: 22 The same anxiety over oral memory motivates Amuña when, immediately after the above, she presses Oria to recount her visions, ‘o alguna istoria’, ‘de mientre avedes la memoria’ (172cd; CLXXV). 23 In other words, though she is the protagonist of the miracle, the pregnant woman is written out of the song that celebrates her salvation inside the Church walls (Berceo 1987: stanzas 453–60). On the meaning and implications of the term missal to describe the book in which Oria’s life was written, see Lappin (Berceo 2000: 201), who argues that ‘Muño wrote the life to be read during the liturgical celebration of the woman’s sanctity’.

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Las letras de los iustos de mayor sanctidat paresçién más leíbles, de mayor claridat; los otros más so rienda, de menor claridat, eran más tenebrosas, de grant obscuridat. (93; XCV)

The choice of script as symbol of saintliness is no accident: it reveals Berceo’s awareness that the construction and recollection of holiness depend upon a dynamic interplay between the power of oral memory and the power of those who wield the pen. Yet this relationship between oral and written memory is ideologically structured. Perhaps the most telling example of this occurs earlier in the first vision, when three angelic figures take Oria and the other virgins higher up in the heavens toward God: ‘Tomaron estas vírgines estos sanctos barones / como a sendas pénnolas en aquellos bordones’ (48ab; LI). Lappin has suggested that the dominant image here is of the feather as the pure soul floating up to heaven (Berceo 2000: 138). I would add that this ascent is ideologically connected to a secondary meaning of ‘pénnola’ as quill. The image of a quill mounted atop a pilgrim’s stave which is held in the firm grasp of a holy man is powerful and multifaceted. It celebrates female sanctity while making it dependent upon man’s own spiritual pilgrimage. But yet, though it tells of male privilege, the image should make us pause. The pen, the very means of recollecting sanctity, is feminized: a sure recognition of the essential otherness of writing.

The Polluting Body in the ‘Vida de Santa María Egipciaca’ Mary’s tale is familiar. It is the story of a penitent harlot, whose adolescence is spent whoring around the bustling cities of Alexandria and Jerusalem, and who then suffers a spiritual crisis which impels her to a life of penitent asceticism wandering for forty-seven years in the desert, where she miraculously survives on three loaves of bread and other mysterious angelic catering. She is found by the banks of the river Jordan by the monk Gozimás (the Zozimas of earlier versions) who gives her communion, before she finds final redemption in death. This is a multilayered legend. Since it was first put together in the seventh century by Sophronius, the bishop of Jerusalem, the story’s appeal and significance were shaped by numerous shifting agendas and anxieties. Over the centuries, the tale catered to expanding models of female spirituality, dramatized the rivalry between asceticism and monasticism, illustrated points of dogma (the power of prayer and Divine mercy, the nature of repentance), and provided an outlet for patriarchal attitudes towards women and the female body.24 24 The ideological range of the story is illustrated, with valuable bibliography, by Delgado (2003) as well as by the collection of essays in Poppe & Ross (1996), especially the introductory survey by Stevenson. For further details on the legend’s transmission, with particular reference to Iberian versions, see Craddock (1966) and Manuel Alvar (Vida 1970–72, I: 9–24), from which edition all subsequent quotations are taken.

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The version that concerns us here is the anonymous Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, which was composed in or around Rioja sometime in the first half of the thirteenth century.25 Adapted from a French poem, it extends into the Iberian Peninsula the network of vernacular versions of the Mary of Egypt legend in which the female saint herself becomes the central focus and driving impulse of the narrative, rather than being the pivotal component in the life of Zozimas, the monk who was the basis of the original hagiographic legend.26 The Spanish poem continues the trend first set by the French version contained in the Bodleian manuscript (B), in which, according to Simon Gaunt, Mary of Egypt’s life was ‘rewritten to become more charged with erotic and courtly overtones’ (1995: 221). The Vida belongs, in short, to a cluster of clerical texts whose new focus on the female saint registers the profound changes in the fabric of twelfth and thirteenth-century European society, even as they continue to transmit the ideological concerns of the early Church. On one level, the Vida can be understood in the context of changing patterns of lay piety, which are most succinctly illustrated by the dramatic increase in female saints around the turn of the thirteenth century (on which, see Introduction). A great deal of scholarship in recent years has been devoted to exploring the nature of this burgeoning female sanctity and its relation to dominant models of gender. As we have seen in the case of Santa Oria, one recurring feature of female sanctity was its corporeality: women’s access to the divine was frequently understood – by women as well as by men – to be mediated by or experienced through the body. The ideological significance of the body in representations of Mary of Egypt has been examined by numerous

25 Andrés Castellanos has proposed c. 1215 for the date of composition (Vida 1964), and her views are echoed by Cruz-Sáenz (1979: 115–15). A mid-century date is also widely accepted; see Fernando Baños’s entry in the Diccionario filológico (2002: 1010–12). 26 For Manuel Alvar the poem is for the most part a rather feeble translation, whose ‘servilismo’ is enlivened by touches of typical Spanish ‘realismo’ and human warmth which compensate for the Gallic frigidity of the original (Vida 1970–72, I: 29–43, at pp. 31 & 33). Grieve passes over some of the poem’s undoubted clumsiness, and pronounces it to be ‘well-developed, aesthetically pleasing’ (2000: 134) and, in parts, ‘subtle and sophisticated’ (142). The poem’s relation to its sources has also been discussed by Andrés Castellanos (Vida 1964: 75–93) and Cruz-Sáenz, who rightly views the work not as a translation but as ‘a re-elaboration of a French poem’ (1979: 115). This is an important shift in emphasis, not only because it avoids the inappropriate expectations raised by the term ‘translation’, but also because we do not know exactly what the actual base text was. The Spaniard modelled his poem very closely on the earliest Old French version written around the turn of the twelfth century, and whose manuscript is now in the Bodleian (hence it is called manuscript B). But he also included numerous passages which are not included in B, but which are to be found in various other French versions, which for our purposes are most conveniently consulted in the edition by Cruz-Sáenz (1979: 117–214).

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scholars working in different branches of the hagiographic tradition, and I shall return to some of their findings below. The emphasis on the body makes woman the ideal model for penitential asceticism, the main impulse of which was the rejection of those stereotypically ‘feminine’ sins of vanity, lust and frivolity. In this respect the narrative structure of the Mary of Egypt legend fulfills a similar ideological function to the life of Mary Magdalen. But its popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seems also to be connected to the spread of the cult of the Virgin Mary, and is perhaps a response to the impossible ideal of womanhood she represented. After all, the French and Spanish rewritings are careful to link Mary of Egypt with the Virgin on both narrative and ideological levels: the paradox of the Virgin Mother, who conceives without the taint of human sexuality, is complemented in the realm of the imaginary by the vision of sexuality tamed.27 On another level, however, the life of Mary of Egypt also fulfills the doctrinal needs of a reformist Church, which received added impetus after the IV Lateran Council of 1215 (Baños Vallejo 1990). As I noted in the previous chapter, this council attempted to consolidate centralized ecclesiastical authority by stipulating at least yearly confession and communion, on pain of being disbarred from entering Church. In addition, following a centuries-long trend embodied by penitential manuals, it promoted secret rather than public confession, with severe penalties laid down for confessors who divulged the secrets of the confessional. This trend produced a concomitant emphasis not just on repentance but on penance. The significance of these doctrines to the overt didacticism of the Spanish Vida will be apparent to anyone with the slightest familiarity with the main elements both of its narrative and its poetic style: the unconfessed Mary is barred by a vision of ferocious knights from entering Church with the other pilgrims in Jerusalem (440–53); in the desert, she yearns for confession (1144–55) and demonstrates Eucharistic devotion (638, 1200–18, 1259–74); her confessor Gozimás does not divulge her secrets, or even her existence, until after her death (1419–36); and stylistically, penance is linked to true Christian belief by the repeated and strategic rhyming of the key words penitencia and creencia (628–29, 682–83, 1128–29, 1415–16). Though a crucial indicator of contemporary ecclesiastical concerns, the direct influence of the IV Lateran Council on the Spanish Vida should not be overstated, and not just for chronological reasons (it was held after the composition of the French life that was the Spanish poem’s ultimate source, and its effects were slow in coming). For all its importance, the Council of 1215

27 For the legend of Mary Magdalen and its ideological connection to the cult of the Virgin, see Walsh and Thompson (1986: 6–7). In Mary of Egypt’s prayer to the Virgin, she compares and contrasts herself with the Virgin (533–43). For discussion of this aspect of the French poem, see Gaunt (1995: 214–16).

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was itself part of a much longer movement of papal reform, and it attempted to give doctrinal authority to much earlier ideas and practice, and some of the doctrines I have just referred to stretch back through the traditions of penitential handbooks. Their prescriptions for remedying sin, for instance, taught confessors and, through them, sinners that ‘contraries are cured by contraries’, a fundamental principle that underpins the very narrative organization and representational strategies of the poems in this tradition, which are structured by a rhetoric of reversal.28 According to McNeill and Gamer, confessors should aim to rehabilitate the sinner through ‘the reconstruction of personality’, enabling him or her to recover ‘harmonious relations with the Church, society, and God’, and, in short, to function once more ‘as a normal person’ (1990: 45–46; my emphasis). Needless to say ‘normality’ is a loaded term, and it is in the very problem of what constitutes a ‘normal person’ that we can find clues to the broader ideological issues raised by the Mary of Egypt legend in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is to say that rewriting the legend in such a way as to foreground the female saint in a more highly sexualized narrative of sin and redemption has a significance that goes beyond the changing patterns of lay piety and the doctrinal reforms I have just alluded to. Although this increased fascination for the reformed prostitute registers ecclesiastical and religious concerns, these concerns themselves need to be more broadly construed. I shall argue that whatever else it does, the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca expresses the male cleric’s fear of social pollution which is channelled through, and contained by, the representation of Mary as an exemplary figure. Since the notion of Mary’s exemplarity is central to my ideological reading, it is with this that we now begin. The idea that Mary offers an exemplum to mankind is highlighted at the moment of her death in a way that is unique to the Spanish poem: ‘Esta duenya da enxemplo / a todo omn’ que es en este sieglo’ (1339–40). Of course, calling Mary ‘Everyman’ raises the question of how the audience’s association with this exemplary saint is inflected by gender. The issue has already been noted by Grieve, who reminds us that, in common with Mary Magdalen and other harlot saints, the representation of Mary of Egypt is shaped by a set of misogynist assumptions which would make the story’s moral and spiritual lessons particularly pointed for women. Thus, she concludes, it is preferable to see Mary as ‘Everywoman, an Eve-figure rather than Everyman’ (2000: 137). In an important sense, this is true. One of the ideological strategies of the poem is to reinforce the negative associations of the female body conveyed by centuries of misogynist thought; a similar point has been made in connection

28 On the rhetoric of the Spanish poem, see Kassier (1973); since some of the basic rhetorical structures are inherited from the original version, also relevant are Coon (1997: 88–89) and Delgado (2003: 292–95).

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with the French version of the legend, as we shall see in a moment. However, to limit Mary to ‘Everywoman’ is also to limit the ideological effects of her exemplarity. A richer understanding of this aspect of the poem can be obtained by returning to the poem’s literal claim that Mary serves as a model for ‘todo omne’, and examining the ways in which men might read and identify with the life of the penitent harlot. This issue has been dealt with by Simon Gaunt in his study of one of the French texts, and because his arguments form the platform for my own they are worth quoting in some detail. Gaunt maintains that ‘the implied textual community of some vernacular saint’s lives devoted to female saints is heavily gendered and that in many texts it encompasses the male narrator and the men in the audience, but makes no appeal to women’ (1995: 213). The Mary of Egypt legend exemplifies how the representation of this female saint is eroticized in such a way as to offer ‘men the double pleasure of enjoying the spectacle of Marie’s beautiful body and her sexual adventures, then witnessing the disintegration of her beauty, the just reward for her debauchery’ (1995: 219). ‘The men reading this text’, continues Gaunt, can enjoy both the titillating spectacle of the adventures of the comely and sexy harlot, and then the physical degradation of that very same body as it is punished, largely for the desire it aroused in them. The text appeals to the libido of the men in the audience by playing on the desire of the male characters for Marie and by offering an erotic description of her body, but then it enables them to feel morally uplifted by the tale and in so doing it parallels the sadism of virgin-martyr narratives. The implied male audience has its cake and eats it: it watches a holy strip show in which the stripper is first allowed to do her act, and is then punished for her lack of shame, allowing the male audience to enjoy the show, then to feel righteous.

He concludes that although women could have been readers of these narratives, this would entail the internalization of an extremely contemptuous and negative view of the female body. Whereas the male poet and the men in the audience can displace sinful desires and anxieties onto women’s bodies in the Marie l’Egyptienne narratives, women readers are implicitly enjoined to contemplate their own bodies as the incarnation of sin and as a threat not only to their own spiritual well-being, but to that of all the men they encounter. Paradoxically, they are also invited to view their bodies as the source of their salvation if they are prepared to submit them to extreme punishment. (1995: 228)

While Gaunt’s emphasis on spectacle provides a valuable framework for analysis, his conclusions cannot be transferred to the Spanish version of the tale without some modification. For here, the positions from which men view the female body in both its sinful and redeemed state are, I feel, more

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complex. It is not a question of first ‘enjoying the show’ and then feeling ‘morally righteous’: these two attitudes run concurrently, albeit with different emphases, throughout the poem. The representation of Mary’s voracious sexual escapades in the first part of the poem is coloured with an obvious moralizing hue: any voyeuristic pleasure experienced by the male audience is inevitably tinged with guilt, which the Spanish adaptor seems rather keen to pick out and develop. This is especially noticeable when Mary arrives in Alexandria, and sets up with ‘las malas en la cal’ (150). This episode, which is quite freely adapted, reduces the French emphasis on the beauties of Mary’s body in order to dwell on her relations with ‘las meretrices’ (151) and ‘los fijos de los burzesses’ (155) or ‘los mancebos de la cibdat’ (171). These phrases, which lend a sharper urban specificity to the passage, are characteristic of a poet who seems especially concerned with the city as a place of corruption, a prejudice that affects his adaptation in another significant way. Whereas the French texts stress Mary’s physical desire and pleasure, the Spanish also brings out the willing debauchery of her customers: ‘Ellos de ella abién grant sabor’ (157; see also 162–63, and the interpolated lines 173–76). That the city and its depraved inhabitants are at the forefront of the Spanish poet’s mind is clear from his rhetorical amplificatio that concludes this episode. The rather general vocabulary of place common to the French versions, ‘la’, ‘li païs’ (145, 147; Cruz-Sáenz 1979: 118), gives way to the repetition of ‘Alexandria’ (195, 197) and ‘villa’ (200, 202; see also ‘las villas’, 203). The set-piece description of Mary’s youthful charms, which immediately follows (205–44), can hardly be read without a heavy dose of guilt and pity, which finds explicit expression in the moralizing conclusion: ‘¡qué domatge / d’esta fembra de paratge!’ (255–56). Guilt, pity, and also fear: the dread of pollution by an unfettered female sexuality which, as I shall argue, serves as a symbol for a generalized corruption of the body politic threatened by social disorder. Gaunt’s conclusions are based in large measure upon the contrast between the two rhetorical set-pieces that structure Mary’s life. The portrait of the beautiful but morally ugly adolescent hangs opposite the portrait of the hideous but spiritually beautiful penitent to form a diptych of sin and redemption.29 Gaunt is right to suggest that there is a ‘double pleasure’ in watching both the operations of female libido and its degrading consequences, and his point can be developed by resituating the portrait of physical degradation back into its full narrative context. This makes it plain that Mary’s body, even after it has become shrivelled, sunburnt, and emaciated, remains an object of a highly ambivalent male awe and desire.

29

On the relationship between these rhetorical set pieces, see Cortina (1980).

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The Spanish poet’s ambivalence towards the female body is clear from his adaptation of the first encounter between Gozimás and Mary (930–1218). This episode highlights the process of perception, and offers a variant on what Gaunt called the ‘holy strip show’.30 The body is not displayed to the monk all at once, but revealed little by little. Gozimás first sees a ‘sombra’ (931), which then, although not exactly ‘fleshed out’, at least becomes more recognizably human: ‘sombra vio que era / de omne ho de fembra’ (932–33). The poet then interpolates a passage (936–49) which describes how the holy man approaches the vision with a strange mix of confidence, uncertainty, and fear: El santo homne bien fue enssenyado: contra la sombra va privado; cuidó que fuese alguna antojança ho alguna espantança. Con la su mano se santiguó e a Dios se acomendó, quel deffendiesse del fellón e de mala tentación. (940–47)

After the prayer, he sees the body clearly (‘visiblemente’, 950), and although it is unclothed (‘sin nenguna cobertura’, 951), it is partially veiled by the old woman’s flowing white hair, which, as it moves in the breeze, allows glimpses of the scorched skin beneath (958–59). This tantalizing sight impels the monk to run, ‘allá va ha grant pressura’ (961), chasing after the naked old woman in relentless, almost comic pursuit (962–75). For her part, Mary flees, stopping only when she realizes that this was a holy man sent by God (976–82). In spite of the knowledge that this encounter was divinely ordained, a sense of insecurity prevails. It is created in part by shame: Mary’s shame at her nakedness (984, 993) and Gozimás’s shame at seeing her naked (1005–06). Refusing to turn and speak until Gozimás lends her part of his own clothing (995–96), the penitent confesses her life story only to be immersed in profound ‘vergüença’ (1155). The poem sets up a curious paradox: the haggard, naked body symbolizes a life of sin and redemption, a truth that needs to be unveiled. Yet Mary’s shameful life can be revealed to the monk only when the

30 The metaphor of striptease is not unique to Gaunt; see Lavery (1996: 135), speaking of Romance versions in general. In the Old English version, this encounter between monk and female penitent, with its gradual process of revelation, is a metaphor for the relation between seeing and knowing, according to Lees and Overing (2001: 132–48); see also Lees: Mary is ‘a figure of sight and for insight [. . .], a figure for the workings of the spirit in this world rendered comprehensible in part because she can be seen, and hence perceived by the spiritual intellect’ (2005: 62). In spite of the differences between the versions, the point could be applied to the later Romance texts. Scheil’s analysis of the relation between monk and penitent in the Old English version (2000) came to my attention too late for his conclusions to be taken into account here.

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most shameful parts of her body are clothed, and then related to the wider world only when she is dead and her entire body buried.31 Story-telling itself is thus implicated in the poem’s ideological process, and operates like the fig leaves that conceal the symbols of Adam and Eve’s sin, while signalling the fact of transgression and primal guilt. Similarly, even as this story covers the instruments and symbols of female shame, veiling them first by clerical cloth and then by desert sand, it continues to proclaim the eradicable stain of sin. In this way, the poem also works upon men’s sense of shame, including that of the narrator himself. Just as Gozimás turns his back on the naked sinner, so men avert their eyes from the full extent of the truth before them. Being confronted by Mary’s licentious past awakens men’s own guilt, which is mixed up with the shame and fear inspired by the presence of the divine.32 On a symbolic level, this episode is organized around the tension between the desire to see the whole ‘naked’ truth as well as the fear and shame men experience when actually confronted by it. Although this to and fro movement between attraction and repulsion is common to many different versions, the Spanish poem sets this affective pendulum in motion much earlier in the narrative. In the French versions, when the monks leave their monastery during Lent to wander for forty days in the desert, they take pains to avoid each other (MS B, 691–94, Cruz-Sáenz 1979: 124), but not necessarily to eschew all human company. Recalling the ascetic rivalry of earlier versions of the legend, Zozimas seeks out hermits with whom, one assumes, he could engage in competitive humility and asceticism: ‘Ermites i cuidat troveir, / a eaz voloit de Deu parler’ (745–46). The Spanish Gozimás, however, is impelled by a singular passion: instead of leaving the monastery in pursuit of hermits in general, he departs ‘pora fallar una ermitanya; / una hermitanya cuidó fallar / con qui de Dios pudiesse fablar’ (919–21; my emphasis). Later, when he first detects the as yet unidentifiable creature, he thinks it is some ‘antojança’ (942), a physical manifestion of his own desire; intuition then gives his desire more substance: ‘El cuer gelo dizié / que aquella fembra a Dios servié’ (968–69). Like a scribe jumping ahead in the text he is copying, the clerical writer eagerly anticipates the encounter between monk and Mary, betraying his awareness that access to the divine can take place outside male-dominated ecclesiastical structures, and can be mediated by the female ascetic, whose body is the sign of his own redeemed sinfulness, and that of humanity in

31 The association between nakedness and truth is explicit: ‘Pues que tú viste mi carne desnuda, / mi vida non te celaré nulla’ (1148–49). For Mary’s insistence that her life can be told only after her death, see lines 1177–78. For a discussion of Mary’s shame in the light of Kristeva’s theories of abjection, see Scarborough (1995); for a treatment of Mary’s body in the light of medieval medical theory, see Solomon (1995). 32 Although Gozimás overcomes his initial nervousness, fear is never far away. When Mary levitates, Gozimás turns back ‘con gran pavor’, thinking she is a ‘fantasma’ (1112–19).

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general. The Spanish poet is a spiritual version of one of the prostitute’s clients, drawn ineluctably not by her physical beauty but by the charisma of her grotesque body. This awareness of Mary’s privileged state takes concrete shape in the dramatic centrepiece of the first encounter, when Gozimás and Mary twice throw themselves at each other’s feet in acts of competitive humility (1021–85 & 1134–80). In essence, the competition is between the authority of the priestly caste, who administer the Eucharist and other sacraments, and the authority of charismatic women who enjoy the unmediated blessing of God. The scenes perform a theatrical enactment of the dilemma identified by John Coakley (1991) in his study of the ambivalent relationship between female saints and their male confessors, which I quoted at the start of this chapter. There was, of course, no easy resolution to the tension he describes, and indeed our poem continues to balance clerical reverence for Mary’s blessedness with Mary’s yearning to be brought back within the ecclesiastical fold through confession and, particularly, her Eucharistic devotion. That this was a difficult balance to strike is clear from the way the Spanish poet adapts his material. After the first desert encounter between monk and saint (908–1218), he compresses the narrative by about a third. There is no reason to explain this compression purely in terms of the poet suffering from translator’s fatigue.33 While there are signs of rush, it is equally possible, and in my view more likely, that it is a deliberate strategy. In any case, this restructuring not only affects matters of detail (which need not concern us here), it also produces an overall effect which is that our attention is far less focussed upon the emotional aspects of the relationship between Zozimas and his fellow monks. From the second encounter onwards, the role of the affect, especially weeping, is particularly pronounced in the French versions. The Spanish poet prunes the details of Zozimas’s report and the monks’ response to it so that the doctrinal message – the need for continuous penance and prayer – emerges if not with greater clarity then certainly more starkly. The adaptation also refocusses attention away from Zozimas and monastic life, and centres it squarely upon Mary herself, as mediatrix between the sinful audience and God. In other words, our reverence for Mary and our relationship with the divine are less mediated by weeping monks, as the redeemed female sinner assumes the primary role of intercessor: ‘e roguemos a esta María, / cada noche e cada día, / que ella ruegue al Criador / con qui ella hobo grant amor’ (1441–44).

33 The final 230 lines of the Vida appear substantially to abbreviate its main source. According to Alvar, the Spanish author felt that he was in danger of amplifying the poem far beyond the scope of the original, so he anxiously began cutting in order to speed up the translation process and avoid prolixity (Vida 1970–72, I: 39).

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On the other hand, Mary can be revered only once the carnal signs of her femininity – the symbol of shame – have been denied. Although they do it in different ways and with different emphases, the French and Spanish portraits of Mary’s body emphasize how the dangerously wayward and unstable female flesh has finally been tamed. The French poems not only describe how her nakedness is covered by long white hair, but also draw attention to a strange white fuzz all over her body (590; Cruz-Sáenz 1979: 123). For its part, the Spanish poem emphasizes through its characteristic verbal repetitions how her body has become desiccated: ‘En sus pechos non abiá tetas, / como yo cuido eran secas / [. . .] secos dedos / [. . .] el vientre abié seco mucho’ (738–744). Whether through excess of bodily hair or through dryness, Mary’s bodily complexion has become more like a man’s.34 As Jerome put it, if woman ‘wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man’ (quoted from Robertson 1990: 40). Though generations of moralists could encourage women to become, in the words of Jerome, ‘forgetful of their sex’ (Schulenburg 1998), the female body and the dangers it symbolized could not in fact ever entirely be forgotten. Just as shame remains throughout the initial encounter between monk and female ascetic, so in death Mary’s body is covered three times: by Mary herself, as she shrouds her face with her hair, folds her arms across her chest, closes her eyes and mouth, then clenches her teeth (1329–1332); then by the monk, as he drapes her body with ‘uno de sus pannyos’ (1366); then by the desert sands, as she is buried by Gozimás and the lion (1399–1410). There are some minor, but fascinating, differences in the way the Spanish and French texts portray Mary’s body as an object of fear and reverence: the Spanish poet, for example, appears more interested in Mary’s eventual silence, in a way that recalls Berceo’s portrayal of Santa Oria, whereas the French poems show a greater obsession with covering her nakedness and closing all of Mary’s bodily orifices.35 But in their different ways, all versions betray the same underlying

34 According to the well-known humoral theories, men are drier and hotter than women, and their greater heat produces more hair (Cadden 1993: 171, 181). On the ascetic transformation from woman to man, see Stevenson (1996: 38–39) and Delgado (2003: 286–87). 35 In the Spanish, Mary’s preparation for death ends by focussing on the mouth: ‘cerró su boca, cubrió sus dientes’ (1332); compare Berceo’s use of teeth as verbal bridle in the Poema de Santa Oria 15cd, 138b, 147ab. The image of the firmly closed mouth thus inverts the earlier erotic symbolism of Mary’s bird which ‘cada día canta d’amor’ (142–45 & 322–25), and is an original addition to the source. Some French versions include the nostrils among the apertures to be sealed up (noted by Cruz-Sáenz 1979: 89). When the monk and later the lion find Mary’s corpse, the French versions dwell more upon her nakedness, and thus throw into greater relief the monk’s desire to cover it (1218–24, Cruz-Sáenz 1979: 129). Zozimas kisses her feet, but dares not approach the remainder of her body (CruzSáenz 1979: 129).

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anxieties with the dangerous physiological instability of the female body, its so-called ‘fissured flesh’. For the male penitent, therefore, there is a certain contradiction in the model offered by Mary’s penitential asceticism: she becomes exemplary once the female body has been purged of the symbolically feminine traits which made it the model of supreme asceticism in the first place. After the interment of Mary’s body, Gozimás understands the meaning of her life, and vows to imitate her: Agora creyo en mi creyencia que santa cosa es penitencia; e penitencia prendré, piedat de mi cuerpo non habré. (1415–18)

The paradoxical dynamic that structures the male cleric’s desire to imitate Mary’s grotesque body recalls the contradictions that, according to R. I. Moore, underlay attitudes towards the leper, who was commonly regarded with a contradictory mix of admiration, envy, and terror. For like leprosy, Mary’s bodily depredations were caused by her sins, but they were also a living death, which appeared to grant her, like the leper, ‘the special grace of entering upon payment for [. . .] sins in this life [and] earlier redemption in the next’ (Moore 1987: 60). The work of Moore suggests the possibility of a broader ideological reading of the ambivalence that surrounds the clerical representation of Mary’s body. Such a reading would build upon one of the the basic religious meanings that underpins the monk’s – and by extension the male audience’s – identification with Mary. This penitent’s life offers men a mechanism with which to experience and express shame and, through this, humility. As Caroline Bynum and others have argued, when men identify with the female, they are often trying through a process of symbolic reversal to express their own sense of powerlessness and their renunciation of male power (Bynum 1987: 277–302). It is not the willed renunciation of power but the sense of powerlessness that concerns me, since it underpins my hypothesis that these sexualized rewritings of the Mary of Egypt legend are responses to a much broader concern with social disorder. This hypothesis is by no means limited to the Vida, but it seems to me particularly applicable in this case, largely because of the Spanish poet’s handling of the conclusion. This, as I have mentioned, foregrounds Mary at the expense of the monks, and represents a unique attempt to view her not only as mediatrix, but also as an exemplum of a general human condition. Even as her life holds out the hope of redemption, it generates a self-loathing that is rooted in the fear of a corruption that appears inevitable. In this regard, one of the more telling features of the Spanish and French versions is the contradictory image they offer of religious and secular communities. One the one hand, we learn that Gozimás inhabits a world of perfect monastic order (798–907); yet as he will later tell Mary, ‘Mas santa Eglesia es bien con razón / que tú la metas en oración’ (1100–01), and these fears are echoed by Mary

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herself, when she pleads for vigilance and reform within his monastery (1185–86). Similarly, Gozimás’s idealized vision of a world at peace, ruled by just kings (1097–99), sits ill at ease with the poem’s conclusion, which, as it asserts the need for collective reform (1439–40), takes us full circle back to the first half of the poem, with its image of an urban society brought to its knees by the joint lust of Mary and her eager male clients. As it hovers between utopia and chaos, the poem offers a doctrinal message – repent, reform! – that cannot be divorced from the continuing attempts of Church and State to exert increasing social control. In its revised vernacular versions, the Mary of Egpyt legend reinforces a process that began in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and which, according to Moore, saw what turned out to be a permanent change in Western society. Persecution became habitual. That is to say not simply that individuals were subject to violence, but that deliberate and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed, through established governmental, judicial and social institutions, against groups of people defined by general characteristics such as race, religion or way of life; and that membership of such groups in itself became to be regarded as justifying these attacks. (1987: 5; emphasis original)

Moore examines the fate primarily of Jews, lepers, and heretics, but also of homosexuals and prostitutes, who combined at an ideological level to produce ‘a common enemy’ (1987: 60–65). ‘For all imaginative purposes’, he concludes, ‘heretics, Jews and lepers were interchangeable. They had the same qualities, from the same source, and they presented the same threat: through them the Devil was at work to subvert the Christian order and bring the world to chaos’ (1987: 65). But the Christian order itself was undergoing a profound redefinition, and in the process it was classifying or making its enemies, as John Boswell (1980) amongst others has argued. On one level, the Mary of the first part of the poem is an archetype of one of the ‘enemies’ described by Moore: the prostitute. Subject to renewed classification, regulation, and expulsion to the ghettos of urban life, her treatment often resembled that of Jews and lepers in the thirteenth century. She served as a vehicle for anxieties over urban growth and the spread of a monetary economy which were thought to dissolve personal and family ties, as Moore and others have argued.36 The social and economic implications of Mary’s harlotry have been examined by Grieve (2000: especially 137–43), who argues that the second half of the poem, with its ascetic vision of redemption, provides a model of new kind 36 On this point see Moore (1987: 95), who draws primarily on research into prostitution in Languedoc by Otis (1985, esp. 154–55). For more details on the attitudes towards prostitution that shaped the representation of Mary, see Stevenson (1996: 48–49) and Lavery (1996: 140–42). For the figurative relation between the body and the city in late antiquity, see Peter Brown (1988).

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of society, held together by spiritual rather than carnal unions, and populated by ‘equal, gender-free human beings’ (150). Although, by and large, Grieve’s account of urban corruption is persuasive, much less so is her reading of Mary’s life in the desert, largely because of confusion over the nature and limitations of Mary’s exemplarity.37 This confusion lies, it must be said, partly in the text itself. It offers up Mary as an ‘enxemplo / a todo omn’ que es en este sieglo’ (1339–40), and in the final lines it claims that ‘mucho emendaron de la su vida / por enxiemplo d’esta María’ (1437–38). This emphasis smooths over the paradox of both sanctity and asceticism. Saints possess qualities to which humans may aspire, but to a degree that puts them in an entirely different realm from normal human beings; asceticism is, at bottom a social act, in that it enacts penance for an entire community, yet it is carried out in isolation. Thus, while Mary’s life teaches the Christian virtue of repentance, and promotes the sacraments of the Eucharist and confession, her extreme asceticism cannot provide a model for any kind of earthly society, at least if the words ‘asceticism’ and ‘society’ are to retain any meaning in this context. What are the social implications of saying that Mary’s transformation from a ‘carnal being into an almost purely spiritual one’ enables her to be ‘reintegrated into society’ if , as Grieve then explains, ‘her family, her society, and her “lineage” are those of the communion of saints in heaven’ (151)? Mary, from outside human society, acts as penitential surrogate for those who will never, like her, make the literal and metaphorical passage from city to desert, that asexual, asocial space (Delgado 2003: 284–86). Weinstein and Bell, commenting upon the rise in urban saints in the thirteenth century (1982: 201–05), remarked that penitential asceticism was ‘more emphatically an expression of the urban classes’ (211). Although Mary’s sanctity is hardly demonstrated in the city, its roots are there. She channels the aspirations and fears of an urban world perceived to be both vulnerable and self-destructive, and she offers security in denial and flight. Speaking of the way in which a sense of order could be ideologically constructed out of the persecution of minorities, Moore describes the accompanying fear of pollution in terms that could have been written specifically with Mary of Egypt in mind: 37 To say that the poem recreates a prelapsarian ‘Paradise’ on the basis of a ‘newlycreated society of two’ (Grieve 2000: 139) is to skirt the problem of what ‘society’ entails by employing the term in its archaic sense as ‘fellowship’. Nor do I share Grieve’s view that the Spanish version and the legend as a whole ‘go to great lengths to equalize the two characters [Mary and Gozimás]’ (138–39). For reasons I have suggested, the gender imbalances remain, and underpin the continued tension between the monastic and ascetic lives these characters represent. John Maier adopts a similar stance in his analysis of one of the fourteenth-century Spanish prose redactions, arguing (erroneously I think) that in the encounter between monk and penitent ‘The male/female duality [. . .] has been transcended’, and that Mary’s story ‘shows a very strong propensity towards a unitary view of maleness and femaleness’ (1983–84: 432).

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The threat which the victims present is omnipresent, and so highly contagious as to be virtually irresistible. It is contained especially in sexual menace and represented most vividly by it. [. . .] Less often stressed, but no less significant, is the habitual description of those who carry the threat as wandering and rootless people confined by no boundaries, subject to no restraint of custom or kin, without visible means of support or a settled place in society. This is the language of fear, and of the fear of social change. (1987: 100)

The Authority of Berceo’s ‘Abadesa preñada’ In this widely disseminated tale, the twenty-first miracle in Berceo’s collection, an abbess, who rules over her convent with moral and spiritual discipline, commits a sexual indiscretion and finds herself pregnant. On the point of giving birth, her guilty secret can no longer be hidden, and the nuns, many of whom resented her discipline, start to gossip. Faced with a looming scandal, the abbess prays to the Virgin Mary, who miraculously removes the infant from the womb and sends him to be brought up by a hermit. Meanwhile, the local bishop arrives to investigate. When he finally discovers that the abbess is not in fact pregnant, he threatens to punish the nuns instead. To prevent an injustice, the abbess confides her secret to him, and he promises to support her infant son, who will spend seven years in the care of the hermit, before eventually inheriting the bishop’s position and introducing a period of peace and spiritual order.38 Like other tales, such as the third miracle, ‘El clérigo y la flor’, this is a story of moral transgression, individual and collective shame, and the fear of polluting sacred space; and like the earlier story, it dramatizes a discrepancy between the inner and outer self that is finally reconciled by the miraculous revelation of a secret truth. Here, however, the status of that truth is more complex than it is in the case of the worldly, but inwardly spiritual, cleric or indeed in the case of Mary of Egypt, which as we have seen is also structured around the binarism of outward appearance and inner truth. The abbess does not, like the Egyptian harlot, undergo a reversal from utter depravity to absolute purity, born of ascetic withdrawal from the world; and nor is her secret a virtue, as in the case of the cleric. Hers is a sin of uncertain status, at once an occasion for guilt and scandal but also the means of revealing divine mercy.39 In this

38 For the Latin source, see Gerli’s ed. (1987: 245–48); for Berceo’s adaptation, see Dutton’s ed. (1971: 174–76); for other versions, see Gautier de Coinci (1955–70, II: 181–96), and Alfonso X’s cantiga 7 (1986–89, I: 75–77; with prose version 323–25). 39 For Kelley, this story is about the fallibility of postlapsarian language, in which ‘Berceo questions the reliability of evidence collected through the inadequate means of the human senses, and in addition he questions the absolute value of human truth and falsehood’ (2004: 83–85, at p. 85).

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respect, the story offers another variant on the paradox of felix culpa, for as the narrator himself suggests, the abbess ‘peccó en buen punto’ (505b). This last phrase is one of a series of typological associations examined by Helen Boreland. She shows how, through typology, the abbess combines the dual roles of Eve and Mary, and in this way graphically embodies the collection’s larger concern over the relation between sin and redemption (1983: 21–29). For her part, Marta Ana Diz examines the ideological underpinnings of the representation of the abbess and her fractious nuns (1995: 164–69). Her discussion points to patriarchy’s fears of the female body as the paradigm of human sinfulness and corruption, anxieties that are to some extent redressed in the desire to control – indeed eradicate – the negative associations of unruly womanhood: ‘Si el relato de Berceo insiste [. . .] en borrar todas las marcas físicas y psíquicas de la maternidad de la abadesa, el “epílogo” completa la tarea, oblitera a la protagonista’ (1995: 165; see also 168). What Diz calls the ‘epilogue’ are stanzas 575–81, which narrate the upbringing and subsequent ecclesiastical career of the abbess’s son. As Diz suggests, the episode’s relative length indicates a certain tension between female and male spiritual authority, which is resolved through a dual process of redemption and displacement. The abbess’s authority, once compromised, is first redeemed by the Virgin and then displaced onto her son, in a smooth translatio auctoritatis expedited and endorsed by three forms of religious power: the ascetic (the hermit), the ecclesiastical (the bishop), and the divine (the Virgin). This story, then, may be read as yet another entry in the long historical and literary record of patriarchy’s anxious fascination with wayward nuns.40 In this case, I would argue that the fascination stems from competing – though ultimately complementary – images of woman, as a ‘natural’ conduit for both the Devil and God. The tale provides a narrative framework in which to question the kind of religious authority that can be asserted by a woman, as archetypal sinner. The conjunction of the twin issues of authority and sin is unsurprising, and Berceo has the abbess herself make oblique reference to them in her prayer. As she desperately searches for historical precedents for her predicament, the abbess falls upon the legendary cases of Theophilus (520) and Mary of Egypt (521). Both references, it should be added, are unique to Berceo. While Theophilus’s pact with the Devil is motivated by his loss of religious power and authority (see chapter 1), the salvation of the penitent whore entails a ‘battle of humility’ with a monk over their relative spiritual purity. Indeed, as I shall explain, the final reconciliation between the abbess and her superior evokes the prostration of Gozimás before a charismatic female figure, the privileged manifestion of unmediated divine will. 40 For a broad survey, see Daichman (1986); for Berceo’s treatment, see Mendeloff (1975); for a fascinating historical analogy for this tale, with useful commentary on the sexual panic provoked by allegedly wanton nuns, see Venarde (1997: 165–68); still valuable in this regard is Power’s study of medieval English nunneries (1922).

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Diz is right to draw attention to the structural implications of the long conclusion which, as she puts it (surely too forcefully) ‘oblitera a la protagonista’ (1995: 165). From the viewpoint of narrative structure, the woman’s institutional authority, which is based in large measure on the supposition of moral purity, is questioned, then reinstated, and lastly pushed further back into the past; indeed, it is doubly distanced because the story itself is set within a faroff golden age. I return to the implications of this temporal perspective in my conclusion, but for the moment it is sufficient to point out that the powerful abbess is not ‘obliterated’, so much as recast as a lingering memory from a lost age. This narrative distancing is coupled with the poetic representation of her son, who bears the traces of the folkoric hero of mysterious rustic origins and is also a Christ-like spiritual leader. The impulse of this representation is to provide a final image of masculine ecclesiastical authority as a counterpoint to the spiritual charisma of the abbess. Although, as Diz notes (1995: 168), the narrative cuts the ties linking birth mother to son, this is to salvage the abbess’s spiritual rather than biological motherhood.41 For several reasons, it would be crass to argue for a simple dichotomy between a world of female disorder and male order. In spite of the ideological pressures to create this dichotomy, which I discuss below, the poem does not offer such a simple solution.42 Working backwards from the conclusion, although the abbess’s son ruled with peace and love, his newly ordered world could never eradicate ‘algunos foles que amavan follías’ (580d), a telling phrase that reveals Berceo’s ability to conjure up a poetic world constantly susceptible to change. Moreover, we should not forget that the man himself is a bastard, the product of ‘una follía’.43 Indeed, one of the basic ideological 41 For the typological association with Christ, see Boreland (1983: 26); for the notion of abbess as mother and its implications, see Wogan-Browne (1992: 19–21). 42 Diz suggests that ‘[el] motivo tópico de la disensión conventual, notablemente desarrollado cuando se trata de monjas, [es] silenciado con respecto a los clérigos’ (1995: 166). The observation needs to be substantially qualified. Diz takes her lead from a remark by Dutton, and by the work of Mendeloff (1975), but in fact the latter shows how envy is as widespread among monks as among nuns. While it is true that his examples of male envy come from the lives of San Millán and Santo Domingo, the Milagros do contain one fundamental example of clerical rivalry: Theophilus, who resented the power of his upstart replacement. Although, as we have seen in the case of ‘El clérigo y la flor’, Berceo refuses the obvious opportunity to embroider an image of backbiting clerics, his representation of nunnish gossip is fairly restrained (especially in comparison with that of Gautier de Coinci). Diz also states that in the Milagros as a whole, ‘los obispos no son fuente de conflicto sino figuras de consenso comunitario’ (1995: 4). The empirical evidence simply does not bear this out; see the unsympathetic portraits of bishops in the tales of Ildefonso and the simple cleric (miracles 1 & 9). Berceo was perfectly familiar with conflicts caused by bishops, including his superior, Juan Pérez, bishop of Calahorra; see Cátedra (1992: 937–38). 43 The irrepressible continuity of ‘follía’ is poetically underscored by the verbal link the word forges between the resolution and the exposition, which has the original bishop running to the convent suspecting that its occupants ‘avién contienda o fizieron follía’ (512b). As a general human drama, there is no closure.

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effects of the miracle is to invite us to imagine the possibility of an untainted male ecclesiastical authority. The typological associations linking abbess to the Virgin and son to Christ bring the question of illegitimate origins into the ideological orbit of the now dominant ideal of celibacy: although the new bishop was not conceived without sin, at least his birth was painless and a divine mystery. Ideologically, this mystifying strategy is complemented by the folkloric motif of the hero’s lowly upbringing. This myth obfuscates a leader’s inherited power and the institutional structures that legitimize him, and locates the source of his authority firmly within an allegedly pure self. In the final analysis, however, although the concluding stanzas recuperate male authority, they also resist any easy alignment between ecclesiastical order and the symbolic masculine. In this respect, the conclusion is entirely symptomatic of the tale as a whole. Throughout, the representation of ecclesiastical power and authority, whether male or female, is leavened by irony.44 The Latin original (245) begins by emphasizing the abbess’s rule as rigorous, but also fragile in that her spiritual discipline and goodness create resentment, envy, and spite.45 Berceo’s adaptation is more suggestive because he begins by emphasizing that she ruled not ‘pio rigore’ but with ‘mucha bondat’ and ‘grand caridad’ (506). Although there was such a thing as ‘the chastisements of charity’ (Newman 1987: 75–87), Berceo’s abbess appears in a much more sympathetic light. Only when the nuns notice her pregnancy and relish the chance to undermine her does Berceo portray her as a disciplinarian: ‘Apremiávalas mucho, teniélas encerradas, / e non lis consintié fer las cosas vedadas’ (510ab). A couple of points need to be made here. First, whereas the Latin author makes the abbess’s fall the cause of universal and increasingly spiteful glee (‘speciale gaudium universis’, 246), Berceo offers a more nuanced picture: ‘pesava a las unas que era mal caída, / mas placiélis sobejo a la otra partida’ (509cd). More importantly, Berceo’s version suggests an intriguing psychological dimension.

44 This is evident in a minor, but telling way, in the narratorial interventions. The remark that prelates are often undermined by gossip and envy (‘cunte a los prelados esto a las vegadas’, 510d) is demonstrated, a mere three stanzas later, by the insinuating narrator himself: ‘Dessemos al obispo folgar en su posada, / finque en paz e duerma elli con su mesnada’ (513ab). In the very act of introducing him, he undermines him with a veiled allegation of laziness (one of the stock commonplaces of ecclesiastical satire), and the word ‘mesnada’ hints at a mock-epic portrayal of his ecclesiastical cohort. This ironizing extends to female authority figures: the Virgin comforts the abbess by declaring that her promised salvation will be ‘mejor que non querrié la vuestra prioressa’ (531d). Finally, when the abbess’s son dies, his soul goes to a heaven ‘do ladrón nin merino nunqua puede entrar’ (581d). For Berceo’s antipathy towards the merino, the representative of royal authority, see Dutton (1960: 142). 45 Gautier de Coinci puts the same dynamic into operation (1955–70, II: 181, ll. 4–17); for examples of male monastic envy, see Berceo’s lives of San Millán (76–106) and Santo Domingo (especially 84–104), superficially summarized by Mendeloff (1975).

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Her prohibition of ‘las cosas vedadas’ recalls her own ‘locura [. . .] mucho vedada’ (507b) and implies, perhaps, that she has displaced her own sense of guilt upon the nuns, compensating for her own lack of self-control by increasing the constraints upon others.46 It is a nice touch, therefore, that when the inquisitorial bishop, having failed to discover any physical evidence of sexual corruption, furiously threatens to expel the nuns, Berceo’s abbess draws the man to one side ‘bien a quinze passadas’ and confesses: ‘Sennor – dixo – las duennas non son mucho culpadas’ (563cd, my emphasis). If, at the moment of truth, her attempt to sort out their relative guilt seems initially hesitant (her sisters still bear some blame) it is nonetheless a world apart from the simpler dichotomy of the Latin tale, which continues to stress the nuns’ criminal malevolence and their superior’s forgiving humility (248). Berceo, on the other hand, transforms pardon into penance, with the abbess going on to assume the burden of collective guilt: Sennor, si vos quisiéredes podédeslo provar: ¡Por caridat, non pierdan las duennas el logar! Más quiero yo sennera seer embergonzada que tanta buena duenna sea desamparada. Sennor, merced vos pido, parcid esta vegada, por todas a mí sea la penitencia dada. (565–66)

The mother’s desire to shoulder the sins of the entire community exemplifies the ‘caridad’ so typical of her conventual rule (506), as she offers to sacrifice herself to prevent the expulsion of ‘tanta buena duenna’ (an ironic epithet in the circumstances). As such, her submission evokes Christ’s self-sacrifice, carried out so that mankind might not be permanently exiled from his spiritual home. The scene is not strictly typological, but it does enact a form of imitatio Christi, of the kind that also led to the image, common enough in conventual circles, of Jesus as Mother.47 The spiritual empowerment that the abbess’s story and behaviour confer upon her is clear from the bishop’s fearful alarm, which in turn betrays her perceived closeness to Jesus, rather than the Virgin: Espantóse el bispo, fo todo demudado, disso: ‘Duenna, si esto puede seer provado,

46 Compare the less sharply defined motivation of the source text, in which the nuns grow increasingly rebellious even though the abbess continues to rule with her accustomed rigour: ‘Nec tamen destitit regulari rigore subditum sibi sororum gregem ad observanciam sacri ordinis coartare [. . .]. Unde factum est ut contra eam acriori livore murmurarent’ (246; my emphasis). 47 As I explain below, although there is a confession, Berceo prefers not to evoke the confessor / penitent relationship that structures the original encounter between the abbess and the bishop. For Jesus as mother figure, see Bynum (1982).

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veré don Jesu Christo que es vuestro pagado, yo mientre fuero vivo faré vuestro mandado.’ (567)

Then, after messengers bring word that the hermit corroborates the truth of her tale (570), the bishop prostrates himself at her feet and grovels (571). The repetition of ‘yerro’ and ‘errado’ (occurring four times in these two stanzas) suggests that guilt has now been transferred from abbess to bishop. But what exactly is his ‘yerro’? In part, his remorse stems from his misplaced inquisitorial zeal and evident presumption of the abbess’s guilt (a point to which I return below). More profoundly, he is now confronted by a woman who, as the embodiment of humanity’s redeemed sinfulness, inspires dread and reverence in equal measure. Casting ecclesiastical authority cast aside, he begs forgiveness as a man. To appreciate the full force of this encounter, it is worth retracing the narrative. As Dutton has noted (Berceo 1971: 175), the Spanish poet alters the reasons why the bishop visited the convent in the first place. The nuns do not summon him directly, but rather send him a letter apparently reminding him that he had not visited them for a while.48 Evidently, he is a man who knows nuns because the hint is more than sufficient: ‘Entendió el bispo enna mesagería / o que avién contienda o fizieron follía’ (512). Suspicious and authoritarian, he assumes the worst and when the abbess (who at this point thinks she has nothing to fear) welcomes him by falling at his feet and trying to kiss his hand, he treats her as if she were a convicted whore (547–49) and sends her away to be examined. Berceo’s bishop is also somewhat phony. His insistence on the need for proof (550d & 553ab) is merely lip-service to the idea of justice: as he explains to the nuns, who had empirical evidence of their superior’s pregnancy, the point of the physical examination is to humiliate the abbess (554ab). In a powerful image, Berceo suggests that kneaded into the nuns’ spite is one man’s furious hatred of women: ‘fizieron su cabillo la ira e el odio, / amasaron su massa de farina de ordio’ (552cd). And humiliation is indeed what the poem describes. The two clerics sent to examine the abbess partially undress her, ‘maguer que li pesava’ (555c); and when their probing fingers find her as dry as a board (555d), the bishop flies into a rage, and storms off to demonstrate personally what is in fact hidden under her clothes (‘otra quilma tiene de yuso los vestidos’, 558d).49 Turning his suspicions now

48 ‘Embïaron al bispo por su carta decir / que non las visitava e deviélo padir’ (511cd). Editors gloss ‘padir’ as ‘padecer’, although as García Turza points out, it means ‘más exactamente “tomarse la molestia de (visitarlas)” ’ (Berceo 1992a: 694). As is often the case, Berceo endows his latinisms with the semantic force of their etymon, in this case ‘patior’, which can mean to submit to another’s wish. As I suggest below, Berceo returns to this etymon and the idea of sufferance when the bishop finally leaves the convent. 49 In line 555d, the abbess is described as being ‘tan secca que tabla semejava’. This is a reference to humoral theory, being a sign that she is not pregnant, and has lost the moisture

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upon the clerics, he assumes that either they were bribed or were too ashamed (‘vergonçosos’) to examine her body properly (558–59). No such shame on his part – he wants to see her stripped before his very own eyes: ‘ “yo quiero esta cosa por mis ojos veer”, / [. . .] fízoli despujar la cogulla sin grado’ (559c & 560c). The combination of voyeurism, increasing frustration, and anger produces a farcical variation on the motif of ‘cherchez la femme’. Returning now to the moment of reconciliation, we can see a strange parallel between the two authority figures. The physical stripping of the abbess is matched by the metaphorical stripping of the bishop’s dignity, and the man’s abjection is underscored by the abbess’s incredulity: ¡Sennor – disso la duenna – por Dios e la Gloriosa, catat vuestra mesura, non fagades tal cosa! Vos sodes omne sancto, yo peccadriz doliosa, si en ál non tornades seré de vos sannosa. (572)

Just as she once lay at his feet, he now lies at hers, with the obvious difference that he is not rejected, but pardoned. The moment is not without its comic ambivalence, however. The abbess’s threat to lose her temper if he does not get up, pull himself together, and behave like a proper bishop is a threat to return his own rage, albeit in an ironic and more cutting mode. Moreover, to call herself ‘peccadriz doliosa’ is a display of contrition, but also – since the adjective could mean both ‘pained’ and ‘deceptive’ – a sign that the abbess is aware that she has managed to cheat justice.50 A glance at other versions of this scene casts Berceo’s treatment into relief. In the Latin, the abbess twice throws herself at the bishop’s feet: first, in response to his own prostration, and then again when she reveals her story. On the second occasion, hers is the prostration of the sinner before the confessor who is allowed unfettered access to the innermost secrets of the penitent heart. Gautier de Coinci at least allows the abbess to retain some degree of moral and spiritual authority: when the bishop begs forgiveness for the false accusations, she responds: ‘Tout vos pardoing, et Diex si face / par sa douceur et par sa grace’ (317–18). The Latin and French versions locate this scene before the discovery of the adopted son, the final proof of the abbess’s story. Berceo restructures and, by delaying the final reconciliation until after the full truth is revealed, creates a more dramatic climax. The structural change also disables the confessor / penitent relationship which implicitly underpins the Latin account, where the principal moral and spiritual authority remains with the bishop. Note, for example, how Berceo takes the abbess’s fearful reverence of the supine bishop (‘Expavescens illa tantam pontificis

that typified the female complexion; it does not mean, as García Turza (Berceo 1992a) suggests in his note on this line, that she is ‘flaca, de muy pocas carnes’. 50 For the semantic range of ‘doliosa’, see García Turza’s note to 572c.

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humilitatem’, 247) and transfers it to the man (‘Espantóse el bispo, fo todo demudado’ 567a). In the Latin, our final image of the abbess is of a prostrate and submissive penitent: ‘Itaque ad eum secreto accedens coram eo se humiliter prosternit eique omnem rei ordinem pandit’ (248).51 In the Spanish, the final image is radically different: La duenna con el bispo avié esta entencia, mas fináronlo todo en buena abenencia. Jamás ovieron ambos amor e bienquerencia, encerraron su vida en buena pacïencia. (573)

Here, we have a reconciliation not simply between two people, but between two kinds of religious authority: the charismatic authority of the abbess who is the direct recipient of divine grace, and the delegated authority of the bishop who is part of a chain of earthly intermediaries between man and God. This stanza and the one that follows convey two points. First, the reconciliation is based on mutual love and respect; secondly, the man’s ecclesiastical superiority is not undermined, for in the next stanza Berceo confirms that it was the bishop who ‘metió paz’ and ‘amató la contienda e la dissensión’ (574ab). Nonetheless, it is also true – and entirely characteristic of Berceo’s approach – that there are certain textual details that trouble facile resolutions. In stanza 573, the rhyme words trace an evolution from conflict (‘entencia’), to reconciliation (‘abenencia’) and mutual love (‘bienquerencia’); but the final word ‘pacïencia’ adds a twist, by suggesting a residue of uneasy tension between the two figures and the kinds of spiritual authority they represent. It is a reconciliation based on resignation and mutual sufferance, with the Latinism ‘pacïencia’ retaining the etymological force of ‘pati’, ‘to suffer’. Indeed, the bishop’s visit is framed by the idea of sufferance. He was brought to the convent by a letter reminding him that ‘non las visitava e deviélo padir’ (511d). The suggestion of grudging involvement with the convent resurfaces in the first hemistich of line 573d, with the curious but wonderfully evocative phrase ‘encerraron su vida’. ‘Encerrar’ implies narrative closure – the end of a life – but also perhaps that the protagonists draw back from each other and in upon themselves, reconciled, but not entirely compatible. The tussle over the location of authority is embedded in a conflict over the location of sin. In this respect, of course, the ideological scales are heavily weighted against woman. Diz has already alluded to the misogynist underpinnings of this tale, commenting, for example, on the implications of the nuns’ gossip: ‘Las monjas cizañeras, que se identifican con el diablo por

51 The implicitly confessional mode of the scene is reinforced by the moralising framework of the Latin version, which is based on the metaphor of spiritual medicine. Berceo eliminates this framework too.

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la risa, son, como la mujer en la tradición patrística, figuras de escisión y de discordia’ (1995: 166).52 Her remarks could be developed in the light of the work of Dyan Elliott, whose book I cited at the start of this chapter. Elliott makes the crucial point that although woman represented a ‘node of vulnerability for Christendom’ and appeared to be ‘especially susceptible to demonic influence’ (1999: 7), this pollution anxiety is never static, but subject to a dynamic process of repression and return: ‘This palpable dismissal, demurral, and ultimate reinstatement of pollution taboos in revised form [. . .] is a constant pulse in the history of Christianity’ (4–5). ‘Perhaps the most compelling measure’ both of the persistence and the inherently dynamic nature of pollution anxiety lies, paradoxically, in the continued attempts ‘to separate the Virgin Mary from all such sources of contamination’ (5).53 This approach reminds us that ideologies are never static, but constantly adjusting to changing needs and circumstances; it will also help us to appreciate the fluidity that characterizes Berceo’s representation of sin in this poem. Just as theologians freed Mary from the stain of human sin, so Berceo distances the abbess from her carnal desire and the shame that it will provoke. One powerful visual representation of this, which is unique to Berceo, is the portrayal of the physical symptoms of the pregnant abbess: Fo⭈l creciendo el vientre en contra las terniellas, fuéronseli faciendo peccas ennas masiellas, las unas eran grandes, las otras más poquiellas, ca ennas primerizas caen estas cosiellas. (508)

While Diz correctly remarks on the language of shame and affliction elsewhere used to describe this pregnancy, she unnecessarily attempts to characterize this as an unsympathetic portrayal (Diz 1995: 167). Nor is it, however, merely an instance of that ‘picturesque realism’ which commentators define as one of the distinguishing features of Berceo’s style (see García Turza’s note to this stanza, Berceo 1992a). The scene is part of a larger strategy to dissociate the abbess from the ideological implications of painful birth, the curse of Eve, and it anticipates the claim that the beautiful child was born ‘non sintiendo la madre de dolor nulla cosa’ (533b). The abbess, therefore, conjoins Eve and Mary, sin and redemption.

52 For the references to mocking laughter, see stanzas 511 & 543–44. Diz also argues that the representation of the abbess’s pregnancy is essentially negative, couched as it is in the language of shame and affliction: ‘porfazo’, ‘porfazada’ (564d), ‘embargada’ (507d & 513c), ‘embergonzada’ (566a). I qualify this reading below. 53 Symptomatic of these attempts was the question of Mary’s own immaculate conception, which ‘was to linger throughout the Middle Ages and to erupt into open controversy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, without achieving definitive formulation until the nineteenth century’ (Pelikan 1978: 72).

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The process of cleansing the abbess from the taint of bodily defilement begins at the very start of her story, when Berceo interjects that she ‘peccó en buen punto’ (505b). The paradox of felix culpa then shapes the description of her sin itself: ‘fizo una locura que es mucho vedada; / pisó por su ventura yerva fuert enconada’ 507bc). Berceo represents the sexual act as an ambivalent combination of irrational desire (‘fizo una locura’) and fortune (‘por su ventura’). The folkloric euphemism, whose history has been traced by Daniel Devoto (1974: 11–46), minimizes the role of human agency and volition. Unlike his Latin predecessor, Gautier de Coinci, and Alfonso X, Berceo eliminates any reference to her sexual partner and the temptations of the flesh.54 Her mysterious impregnation facilitates the parallel with the Virgin: even as the euphemism acknowledges that she sinned, it calls to mind another metaphor taken from the natural world that explained how the Virgin was impregnated without bodily defilement. Her impregnation was like a drop of dew on a blade of grass.55 Moreover, the ‘yerva [. . .] enconada’ sets up a mental association between her sin and the poisonous gossip of the nuns, whose attempts to bring the abbess down ‘no⭈l empedecieron valient una erveja’ (505d). Their accusations were like a stunted plant, and ultimately as futile as the ‘poisoned weed’ that symbolized her sin. This metaphoric association is a symptom of a larger process whereby our perceptions of guilt are refocussed onto the nuns. Another instance of figurative links between the protagonist and her charges is when Berceo resorts, as he often does, to flour imagery. In this poem, this happens on three occasions. The first is when the abbess is astonished to find that ‘fo el saco vacío de la mala farina’ (539b), an image then taken up in the Bishop’s insistence that ‘otra quilma tiene de yuso los vestidos’ (558d). There is a duality in the bag of flour hidden underneath the abbess’s habit. While it draws most obviously on the common sexual euphemism of milling and grinding, it also provokes the realization that the woman’s ‘saco’ and ‘quilma’ have carried the body of a new spiritual leader, typologically associated with Christ.56 Between these two references lies a depiction of the workings of rage and hate: ‘fizieron su cabillo la ira e el odio, / amasaron su massa de farina de ordio’ (552cd). By drawing on the same category of image, Berceo maintains a mental association between the abbess’s sexual misdemeanour and the nuns’ malice and gossip, a connection that facilitates the displacement of guilt from one to the other.

54 In the Latin, the abbess sins ‘cum dapifero suo’ (246); for Gautier, it is a ‘despenssier’ (1955–70, II: 182; l. 26); Alfonso, in order to make the rhyme, invents a man from Bologna (l. 17; 1986–89, I: 76). 55 See the antiphon for the Benedictus at Lauds of Christmas Eve, ‘descendet in uterum Virginis, sicut imber super gramen’. It was one Hildegard of Bingen’s favourite metaphors for the conception of Christ (Newman 1987: 168, and n. 35). 56 The duality of bread and flour imagery was famously exploited by Juan Ruiz, in his poem ‘Cruz, cruzada, panadera’ (Libro de buen amor, 115–22).

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Though it is handled differently in each version, this process of displacement constitutes the structural core of the narrative paradigm itself. In the Latin version, the Devil is explicitly at work, inspiring the malice and envy of the sisters, and laying siege to the abbess’s virginity: ‘Sociavit se livori earum insidiatoris antiqui semper infesta malignitas et eam, per quam sua sibi eripi vasa dolebat, a sanctitatis arce deicere modis omnibus festinabat’ (245–46). Having already emphasized the injustice of the nuns’ behaviour, the writer encourages us to regard them as the instruments of the Devil himself. He leaves us in no doubt that they are ‘criminatrices’ (246). Berceo, although he euphemizes the Devil almost out of existence, also shifts guilt onto the nuns.57 Interestingly, this process of displacement is concentrated in a particular context. When the inquisitorial Bishop discovers that the abbess is not in fact pregnant, he berates the nuns in the following terms: Esta cosa non puede sin justicia passar, la culpa que quissiestes vos a ella echar, el Decreto lo manda, en vos deve tornar, que devedes seer echadas d’est logar. (562)

It is not necessary to locate the particular passage in canon law to appreciate the juridical force of this outburst. The punishment for this false accusation is the same as the one the Bishop threatened to enact on the abbess, when he declared that if found guilty she would be ‘echada de la sociedat, / allá por do quisiere faga tal suciedat’ (549cd). The logic is that they themselves have been contaminated by the thoughts of the sexual incontinence they attributed to the abbess.58 In addition, however, the legal framework Berceo adds to the scene is also important in its own right. ‘La abadesa preñada’ shares the ideological concerns of ‘El sacristán fornicario’ and ‘El clérigo y la flor’ in that it also reflects the growing concerns over how best to prosecute corruption, especially sexual corruption, within the Church. In this story, we view the abbess’s sin primarily through other people’s eyes, and what we judge is not so much the sexual transgression itself, as other people’s assessment of it. As I explained in chapter 1, the problem of proving sin was compounded by a new emphasis on intentionality, and on this score, Berceo’s depiction of the abbess’s fall is ambivalent.

57 There is only one explicit reference to ‘el diablo’, when the nuns fear that if the abbess’s secret were known the devil would laugh at them (511b); elsewhere, Berceo has the abbess refer to Theophilus’s pact with ‘el Peccado’ (520), and then explain to the Bishop how ‘por sos graves peccados [. . .] fo engannada’ (564b), a phrase that recalls the original scene of temptation. 58 In this respect, Berceo may be developing an idea that was implicit in the Latin. There, the word used to describe the nuns’ hostility is ‘livor’ which covers both malice and envy. Once the abbess becomes pregnant, the nuns try to undermine her ‘acriori livore’ (246), resenting the denial of the very sexual licence she has allowed herself.

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Moreover, the nuns, in his version, do not actually denounce their superior or make a formal accusation, as they do in the Latin. In the terminology of canon lawyers, the abbess is prosecuted neither per accusationem, nor per denunciationem, but per inquisitionem, which according to Brundage constitutes a ‘radical break with past practice’, since an ecclesiastical judge could ‘initiate an en officio inquiry on his own authority when common belief or report ( fama) suggested to him that someone somewhere was having fun – breaking the law’ (1996: 28). The suspicions that draw the Bishop to the convent illustrate Innocent III’s ruling that in sexual matters, ‘the notoriety of the offence was all that was required’ (29). This was, Brundage continues, ‘a judicial bombshell’, which ‘placed formidable weapons in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities who wished to prosecute irregular sexual behaviour’ (29). Some proof, of course, was still required, but as I have suggested, the fictional Bishop begins his search in rather cynical fashion. As Berceo tells it, I believe this story performs a particular ideological move. There is no doubt that the abbess sinned (her emphatic contrition makes this plain), but through the intervention of the Virgin the social meaning of her sin is transformed. It confounds judicial investigation; it is not formally confessed (at least not to a human; Berceo eliminates the confessional relationship between Bishop and abbess); and it requires no penance. It becomes, in short, a matter of conscience.59 Berceo has thus extended the paradox that provided the crux of the original story; namely, that the abbess sinned, but was falsely accused. On a theological level, the story is a manifestion of the paradox of felix culpa; on an institutional level, Berceo’s version registers potential tensions within the systems and strategies for enforcing ecclesiastical authority. His tale dramatizes the conflict between what Brundage calls ‘the internal checks on conduct that sprang from conscience, shame, and fear’ (1996: 25) and the increasing reliance on more formal mechanisms of coercion, whether they took place in the external or public forum (Church courts) or in the internal forum of confessional penance. Herein lies one of the most striking ironies of Berceo’s adaptation. Commentators note that Berceo eliminates the homiletic framework of his source, which is structured around an extended metaphor: the compassionate Virgin saves sinners, just as medicine heals the sick.60 In its place, Berceo introduces a different preface, which transposes the action of the story to a ‘Golden Age’. In this idyllic world, truth reigns (502a), people do not lie (502b and 503c),

59 The abbess told the Bishop ‘su facienda’ (564a) and requests penance on behalf of everyone (566d), but the episode lacks the confessional tone of the Latin, in which the woman humbly prostrates herself before her superior: ‘se humiliter prosternit’ (248). 60 Although Berceo cuts the moralizing introduction and conclusion, he adopts its figurative language – ‘medecina’ (539d), ‘malatía’ (540d), ‘guarir’ (543c) – and concentrates it in the abbess’s prayer, thanking the Virgin for ‘delivering’ her of both child and sin.

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and if they do sin ‘fazién bien penitencia’ (504a). To exemplify this, Berceo tells a tale in which an abbess does not openly confess (her confession comes after a process of almost ritualized physical humiliation); the nuns’ letter to the Bishop is a coy hint, not an open invitation to investigate (much less a denunciation); the Virgin keeps the abbess’s secret (with the sly comment that her salvation is ‘mejor que non querrié la vuestra prioressa’, 531d); the abbess can ‘mislead the bishop without really lying’ (Kelley 2004: 85); and truth emerges only under the pressure of a greater evil. Not for nothing did Helen Boreland describe the nature of this Golden Age as ‘perplexing’ (1983: 21).61 This scholar goes on to say that By giving his story this almost magical, fairy-tale setting, Berceo both increases his listeners’ or readers’ wonderment and enjoyment, and skilfully avoids the danger of any of them expecting such a miracle to occur in their own time. (1983: 21–22)

If one were to push Boreland’s conclusions further, one might say that Berceo’s version of the tale poses an implicit question: if this is the Golden Age, what is the current state of female holiness in this Age of Reform? Ideologically, the fact that the question is posed indirectly is significant. It epitomizes how the story stands in an oblique relationship with misogynist ideas that influenced notions of female authority within the Church. The negative assumptions that govern the feminine are never entirely eliminated, but since they are viewed from a miraculous perspective, they are made the subject of perception. As a result, the basic ideological function of this story is to reconcile clerical fear of the feminine as the symbol of disorder and shame with acceptance of actual female holiness and religious authority. This story, particularly as Berceo tells it, thus connects with other historical evidence which reveals that while abbesses could exercise considerable jurisdictional power over their estates, they were still be hemmed in by patriarchal assumptions of feminine weakness, which, when codified in canon law, denied them an equivalent spiritual jurisdiction (e.g. by preventing them from preaching or reading the gospel in public or giving liturgical blessing). Their potentially ambivalent ‘motherhood’ is also illustrated in another way: knowing how to administer a convent required practical experience of the world, including sexual experience, and for this reason the Church preferred abbesses who were chaste rather than lifelong virgins (Wogan-Browne 1992: 14 & 18; Venarde 1997: 116). If we return to the paradox described at the start of this chapter by Dyan Elliott, we see how this miracle hovers on the intersection

61 Boreland suggests that for Berceo the Golden Age took place in the early centuries of Christianity. I do not share Mary Jane Kelley’s optimistic view that ‘The happy ending can be read as a renewal of the values of the golden age’ (2004: 83).

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between symbolic Woman as ‘compelling image for [. . .] the fallen condition of the human body’ (1999: 4) and a fictionalized woman of flesh and blood, whose sexual experience and religious devotion free her from personal sin and endow her with ecclesiastical authority. For the clerical writer, the Virgin Mary provides the ideal ideological mechanism with which to balance the respective claims of the symbolic and the real.

3

Dreaming of Empire in El libro de Alexandre In 1310, Henry VII, the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, crossed the Alps into Lombardy in order to enforce his sovereign rights within Italy. Henry’s arrival was fervently welcomed by Dante, who hoped that this ruler would fulfil his messianic hopes for the creation of a supranational State, with political powers and authority that were completely separate from the Church. Dante’s philosophical justification for the political views that underpinned his support for Henry were elaborated in his treatise De monarchia, probably written sometime between Henry’s arrival in Italy and his unexpected death in 1313, while laying siege to Naples. Early in this work, Dante, like a good scholastic, defines his terms: ‘Temporal monarchy, then, which men call “empire”, is a single sovereign authority set over all others in time [. . .] and over those things which are measured by time’ (I, ii, 2; Dante 1995: 5). He then proceeds to outline one of his basic arguments in favour of a universal monarchy: God created diversity in mankind because the specific potentiality of man – that which set him apart from beasts – was his ‘intellectual potentiality or faculty’ (I, iii, 8; Dante 1995: 9); and this collective intellectual capacity can be realized only when the human race, in all its diversity, has been brought together under the peaceful rule of a single monarchy or empire (I, iii–iv). And only a single monarch, or emperor, can establish the universal peace necessary for mankind to fulfil its divine function (I, v). Just as the excellence of the whole transcends the excellence of its constituent parts, only when the totality of mankind has been brought under the sway of a single ruling power can it achieve the earthly felicity assigned to it by God (I, vi–vii): ‘mankind is most like God when it is ruled by one ruler, and consequently is most in harmony with God’s intention’ (I, viii, 5; Dante 1995: 19). Dante caps a tradition of political treatises that were inspired by the longstanding debate over the relative power of Church and State.1 What concerns me here is not primarily that conflict as such, but Dante’s preoccupation with the nature and excercise of political power – questions of sovereignty and

1 For an overview of the conflict between Church and State, with an anthology of representative texts, see Tierney (1980); for a briefer synopsis, see Black (1992: 42–84). For general introductions to Dante’s political thought, its context and traditions, see Shaw’s introduction and bibliography (Dante 1995: xiii–xli & 151–59); Black (1992: 92–100); Kantorowicz (1957: 451–96).

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dominion – after the intellectual and territorial expansion of the thirteenth century. For Dante, the concept of empire as dominion in time (and hence subject to change), the relation between unity and diversity, and the emphasis upon realizing the full potential of man as a rational, intellectual being, are merely steps in a larger argument rather than independent problems. And although there are obvious differences in historical context, function, and argument between De monarchia and El libro de Alexandre, the themes of time, unity, and knowledge also thread their way through the Spanish poet’s representation of empire. Dante is also especially relevant because he argues at some length (I, xi–xiii), that the justice and peace that universal monarchy will bring about will happen only when and if the emperor manages to suppress his own greed. However, once the world is brought under his sway, he will no longer be subject to greed because there will be nothing left to conquer. In spite of the transformations taking place in the language and theory of politics during the high Middle Ages, his work illustrates how political, religious, and moral thinking remained closely intertwined until well into the early modern period. Human society, or universitas, was, in the language of the jurists, a corpus morale et politicum; indeed, ‘all rulers and political communities were thought to have been established precisely, indeed primarily, for moral purposes’ (Black 1992: 187). Similarly, José Manuel Nieto Soria’s survey of the ideological instruments of royal power begins with the basic point that ‘Lo religioso puede jugar un extraordinario papel como cauce de comunicación de un mensaje político. [. . .] El lenguaje propiamente político va a surgir en una parte significativa como una proyección del lenguaje religioso’ (1988: 47; my emphasis). The italicized words provide in many ways the crux of the problem posed by El libro de Alexandre. As we shall see, the poem establishes a particularly tense relation between the political, the religious, and the moral, in large part because although it cannot draw on a ‘properly political’ language it nonetheless articulates the conditions in which such a language might emerge.2 There can be no doubt that in this poem the hero exemplifies pride and the transitory and unstable nature of human achievements. Of course, moral meanings such as these had been attached to Alexander’s life from the very start of the biographical tradition. This exemplum of vanitas, however, is couched within the poet’s obsession with betrayal: Alexander (like Darius before him) is brought down by an individual act of treachery but he is also betrayed by his own desires. The first betrayal is political, but the second is moral and spiritual, and his downfall appears to us as an act of poetic and divine justice. Although for the purposes of analysis we can disentangle these various levels

2 It is worth repeating Nieto Soria’s salutary conclusion that the theological and juridical arguments for royal power helped to ‘fundamentar realidades de poder aún no factibles, por el estadio comparativamente más prematuro en que se halla la evolución política e institucional’ (1988: 219; my emphasis).

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of meaning – the political, the moral, and the religious – they are inextricably woven together in the narrative. As a result, the coupling of betrayal and justice is a major factor in the ambivalence that various scholars have noted in the poem.3 The political advantages for the monarchy of drawing on moral and religious discourses are straightforward enough (Nieto Soria 1988: 47, 49–107). However, I shall be arguing that the tension between justice and betrayal is a symptom of precisely the opposite: it reveals the difficulties of combining political, moral, and religious discourses when thinking about royal power during a process of territorial expansion and incipient centralization. As I have explained in the introduction, El libro cannot be dated with precision, yet belonging as it does to the early thirteenth century it corresponds to a period when European monarchies were beginning to consolidate the ideological justifications for the separation of their secular power from the authority of the Church. This was an uneven and contested process, in part because it required the creation of new conceptual and terminological tools: what Maurizio Viroli calls ‘the acquisition of the language of politics’ (1992: 11–70). Let me emphasize that if I stress the political it is not to refute established moral and religious readings of the work or to deny that the poem has moral and religious value: on the contrary, the political reading is predicated upon the poem’s metaphysical force. The ethical and religious lessons the narrator strives to put across are not a mere veil, to be lifted and discarded, in order to contemplate what is allegedly the ideological truth of the poem, which turns out to be political. But nor is the political some optional appendage to the work. What I offer here is, in part at least, an attempt to bridge what I believe to be a polarity in current approaches to the poem, created by moral readings on the one hand, and political readings on the other. For example, Amaia Arizaleta dedicates a fascinating section of her monograph, La Translation d’Alexandre, to a pioneering political interpretation. She argues that the poem offers ‘une métaphore de l’idéologie régnante’, an image of an absolutist Christian monarch whose

3 Moral readings of the poem have been summarized by Uría Maqua (2000: 203–06); see also Cañas’s preface to his edition (Libro de Alexandre 1988, 75–82), and Michael (1970: 278–86). Such readings do not necessarily discount a degree of ambivalence in the poem. Michael, for example, identifies an ‘inbuilt tension’ in a poem that is at once ‘an inspiration and a warning to contemporary rulers’ (1970: 286). In a more consistent application of this idea, Arizaleta argues that ambivalence constitutes a structural element, ‘une tension organisatrice’ (1999: 117; see also 123–24 & 264). See also Lida de Malkiel (1952: 167–97), who recognizes ‘que en la leyenda de Alejandro convergen dos puntos de vista: el mundano, que le admira como parangón de hazañas, y el ascético, que le condena como ejemplo de la vanidad y desmesura terrenales’ (1952: 173). However, she tries to resolve the ambivalence by implying that the poet’s moral didacticism is less truly felt (173 & 194), referring at one point to his ‘ingenua vocación didáctica’ (169). Lida de Malkiel’s reading was rebutted by Michael (1960). For different approaches to the question of ambivalence, see Brownlee (1983a), for whom it is the result of a tension between Christian and classicizing discourses.

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legitimacy derives from divine support (1999: 255–61, at p. 61). In her view, the poem was ‘un instrument idéologique’ (256) for the aspirations of royal and noble courts, and was quite possibly inspired by the political agenda and military achievements of Alfonso VIII. Her study constitutes a major advance in scholarship, and I shall return to her conclusions, but it comes at the cost of playing down the poet’s moral interventionism. The ethical dimension is certainly not overlooked, I should emphasize. In her conclusion she underlines the ambiguity of a poem that is torn between ‘deux pôles d’attraction: l’amour des choses humaines et l’amour de Dieu’ (1999: 264). While acknowledging the differences between her political analysis and the moral emphasis of Isabel Uría Maqua, she points out – correctly – that their views are not ‘irrémédiablement opposés’ (1999: 264n). Taking my cue from this insight, this chapter explores those features of the poem that are ‘opposed’ but not ‘irremediably’ so, and suggests that the reason why these ideological tensions might exist in the first place has as much to do with the ambiguities of the work’s conceptual and material conditions of production as it does with the author’s own consciously espoused viewpoint. The poem pre-dates the theorization of what Nieto Soria (1988) calls the ‘fundamentos ideológicos’ of royal power, which established the vocabulary and concepts to articulate the relation between religious and secular authority. But we should not forget that even when they were developed, these ideological postulates were themselves determined by more fundamental material needs and conditions. They were designed to counteract the forces of fragmentation that ran through the feudal political order, and provide it with a sense of continuity and coherence. El libro de Alexandre betrays the need as well as the practical impossibility of such an ideological project.

Measured by time As I have mentioned, Dante defines empire as ‘a single sovereign authority set over all others in time [. . .] and over those things which are measured by time’ (I, ii, 2; Dante 1995: 5). And in El libro de Alexandre, time lies at the very heart of the poem’s moral and political meanings. By means of his recurrent thematic emphasis on fame, Fortune, destiny, the vanity of human aspirations, as well as by means of specific narrative episodes, such as the digressions on Troy or Alexander’s tent, the poet forces the audience to view Alexander’s exploits from a temporal perspective. In this poem, the ‘secular’ retains the full etymological force of ‘saecularis’. It is true that scholars have had many important things to say about the individual strands of this thematic web, but no one has tried to explore in any depth how they might be interrelated on an ideological level. To do this, I have selected episodes that represent secular, or temporal, power in transition and which have to do with the genealogy of political power. The moments when monarchical power and the authority that underpins it are inherited and passed on are the moments of


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greatest instability, when legitimitizing appeals to origins and continuity become most urgent. As I shall argue, the poem’s ambivalence toward its hero is rooted in an inevitable and irreconcilable contradiction between two ideological uses of time: time as caducity and time as continuity. The former offers the perspective of Christian moral values and religious beliefs, enshrined in the topoi of vanitas and contemptus mundi; the latter is part of the emerging language of political power, which lent authority to noble families and political institutions by claiming that they possessed legitimate genealogies and historical continuity. Scholars working in a variety of domains have drawn attention to the ways in which vernacular writers, especially during late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, attached increased importance to genealogy as a means of acquiring status and asserting authority to wield power (e.g. Bloch 1983, Spiegel 1993, and Beceiro Pita & Córdoba de la Llave 1990). The quest for royal or noble origins and the establishment of an unbroken agnatic line of continuity lend an air of historical inevitability and rightness to the current male holders of power. But in El libro de Alexandre, the representation of genealogy is far from simple. In fact, the poet does everything he can to problematize lineage and disrupt the smooth dynastic transmission of power. There is certainly an air of inevitability about Alexander’s rise to power (references to fate and Fortune cluster around the topic), but the only inevitable thing about it is that it is a prime occasion for conflict, particularly oedipal conflict. Genealogy is omnipresent in the poem, but as a problem with two interrelated dimensions: can secular royal power in fact be inherited, and what is its source? And this question is posed right at the start of the poem, when doubts are raised about Alexander’s paternity. The episode occupies only two stanzas, which narrate how, because of his precocious intellectual brilliance, the rumour started that he was in fact the son of his tutor, Nectanabo: Por su sotil engeño que tant’ apoderava a maestre Nectánabo dizién que semejava, e que su fijo era grant roído andava, si lo era o non, tod’el pueblo pecava. El infante el roído nol pudo encobrir, pesól de coraçón, non lo pudo sofrir; despeñól d’una torre ond’ovo a morir. ‘Fijo’ – dixo su padre –, ‘Dios te dexe bevir.’ (19–20)

In spite of its brevity, this passages raises some intriguing interpretative issues: what is the meaning of the last line of each stanza? In line 19d, in what way do the people ‘sin’? The phrasing of this particular passage implies that Alexander was trying to stop an immoral rumour – a lie – but as we shall see the verb ‘encubrir’ becomes an important motif later in the poem, when Darius attempts to conceal an inescapable truth. Moreover, who is the father who blesses Alexander, Nectanabo or Philip? Equally plausible arguments could

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be made for either possibility, and resolving the literal dilemma would only postpone an answer to the underlying ideological problem.4 At this crucially dramatic moment, the text becomes elliptical and within the ellipsis there lies a concealed question. Killing the father, whether real or reputed, is about identifying and establishing a relationship with the source of royal power: arms or letters. The expanding feudal monarchies developed bureaucracies, offices, and legal systems as instruments to enforce their sovereignty and provide the ideological legitimacy for their centralizing aspirations. This passage introduces the idea of knowledge as an instrument of power, an idea that will be developed throughout the poem, in order to maintain a hierarchical distinction between the monarch and the clerical apparatus that supported and empowered him. Real monarchical power, the poet seems to be saying at this point, comes from the prince’s military identity, his strength, and his warrior’s ability to kill. The point is echoed in stanza 27, when Alexander again disclaims his affiliation with Nectanabo and says that he is more like Hercules, and it is taken up again when the hero begins to flex his military muscles. Challenged by ‘don Nicolao’, an arrogant potentate of a neighbouring territory, Alexander asserts his right to conquest: Dixo: ‘Yo só llamado por nombre Alexandre, Philipo, rey de Grecia, aquél es el mi padre, Olimpias, la reína, sepas que es mi madre; quien a mí con mal viene, de mí con mal se parte.’ (131)

This is the first of several occasions when lineage is introduced in connection with force. Soon after, for example, in a first effort to free the Greeks from their political and economic subservience to the Persians, he tries to intimidate Darius with an unambiguous declaration of his legitimate parentage.5 When Philip lacked an heir, ‘poniále ovos d’oro siempre una gallina’; but now he has a son (‘en la reina’, so no worries about bastardy), and ‘quando nació el fijo, morióse la gallina’ (143cd). Darius responds in similar face-threatening fashion: ‘Yo non ternía que só fijo d’Arsanio / sil non fago que prenda de mí

4 In his discussion of Alexander’s alleged illegitimacy, Michael recognizes that line 20d is ‘cryptic’ but argues that it is most plausibly uttered by Philip (1970: 32–34, at p. 33). Although rumours of Alexander’s bastardy are mentioned in the poem’s main source, Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis (c. 1178), the murder of Nectanabo derives from the French Alexander legends; see Willis (1934: 42 & 1935: 6–11). However, the Spanish poem handles the episode in a unique fashion. 5 Alexander’s conflict with Nicholas, his first confrontation with Darius, and the death of his father (see below), all derive from the Historia de preliis, a Latin account of Alexander’s battles first compiled in the tenth century, but with numerous recensions down to the late twelfth (Willis 1934: 42–43).


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un mal escarnio’ (146cd). It is not simply that military prowess is inherited; the causal logic works both ways: one kills in order to inherit. Lineage, then, which was increasingly being exploited as an ideological tool by European monarchies and noble families, lends some of the authority to exercise power; but Alexander’s killing of his alleged father Nectanabo reveals lineage to be something that is not self-evident. It is created, and it entails acts of real and symbolic violence, carried out amidst rumour and doubt, doubts that the poet clearly does not wish entirely to dispel, particularly (as we shall see) in connection with the relation between knowledge and force. The episode of Nectanabo’s murder concludes with Alexander’s father (whoever that is) blessing him with the words ‘Dios te dexe bevir’ (20d). A variant of this blessing, ‘Dios te faga durar’, is repeated by Darius’s messengers when Alexander refrains from stringing them up (797d), and then again by Alexander’s own men when he cuts the Gordian knot (837c). They are conventional expressions to be sure, but they form part of a broader web of explicit references to the Providential nature of Alexander’s rise to power. Amaia Arizaleta (1999: 234–50) has suggested that passages such as these are related to contemporary attempts to bolster the divine authority of the monarchy, with the King as ‘le subalterne de Dieu’ (236). At the start of his campaigns against Persia, for example, Alexander declares that he is descended from the God Ammon (798b).6 At the same time, the context of these statements and rhetorical patterns of the poem as a whole lend an ironic twist to such yearnings for perpetuity. The expression ‘The King is dead, long live the King’ did not form part of the coronation spectacle until much later, but the sentiment it conveys is tentatively adumbrated in this poem. According to Michael, the hereditary principal was firmly established in the Peninsula at this time and it leaves its mark here.7 But the point is that the poem represents succession in a particularly sceptical mode, not as an immutable law or unchallenged fact. In a broader European context, not all kingdoms and principalities were hereditary, and neither was the papacy. Moreover, the relative merits of election versus hereditary succession continued to be debated until the last quarter of the thirteenth century (Black 1992: 146–48). Kings may strive to claim authority by dint of the hereditary principle and divine sanction, but the poem dramatizes the fact that in reality both their power and their

6 On the deification of Alexander in medieval legends, see Cary (1956: 152–54), Michael (1970: 35–41). On Alexander as the epitome of an absolutist Christian monarch, acting with divine authority, see Arizaleta (1999: 237–50, esp. 236 & 249–50). The interpretation needs to be treated with a degree of caution. As Nieto Soria has pointed out, the divine character of royal power was asserted mainly in the second half of the thirteenth century (1988: 52). Moreover, other historians have questioned the extent of sacralization of royal power in Castile; see Ruiz (1985) and Linehan (1993: 123–27). 7 On the expression ‘The King is dead’, see Martín (1991). On the hereditary principle, see Arizaleta (1999: 234–35) following Ian Michael (1970: 34).

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authority need to be reasserted by force, and they are reproduced and lost through conflict: a reality that would have been perfectly apparent not only to the poem’s contemporary audience in whichever decade it happened to have been first composed, but also to audiences for centuries to come. The problems that I have sketched here are developed in the scene that narrates the betrayal and death of Philip (169–95), murdered by the traitor Pausonas whose lust for Olimpias impels him to attempt to usurp the patriarchal role. This episode reworks some of the motifs of stanzas 19–20. Assassination and revenge are a demonstration of virile manhood and its phallic accoutrements: Alexander returns in triumph from Armenia with ‘su barba much’hondrada’ (168b); after fatally wounding Philip, Pausonas enters the town to seduce Olimpias ‘con su pendón sangriento’ (177c); Alexander slays him ‘a guisa de varón’ (183a). As represented here, Philip’s death occurs in a struggle that is not primarily over territory, but over the transmission of royal power from father to son. And as in line 20d, divine blessing is invoked to sanction this process: Gualardón d’est servicio el Criador vos lo rienda; fijo, Él vos reciba en la su encomienda, Él vos sea pagado, e guíe vuestra fazienda; de mano de traidores, fijo, Él vos defienda. Fijo, yo vos bendigo, ¡sí faga el Criador!, Él vos dé sobre Dario victoria e onor, Él vos faga del mundo seer emperador, en tanto me despido, vom’ a la cort mayor. (192–93)

While it is true that Philip’s blessing is conflated with God’s, and his burial place, Corinth, is associated with the later arrival of Christianity in the person of Saint Paul, the poetic tone of this passage undermines the obvious divine sanction. Heavenly support is rendered in the optative mode: it is a wish, an aspiration – the ironies of which are too obvious to dwell upon – and its fragility is underscored by the uncertainty that shrouds the arrival of Alexander: ‘si vino en las nuves o lo aduxo ’l viento, / o l’aduxo la fada por su encantamiento’ (177ab). It is magic, not God (at least not explicitly), that brings Alexander to the scene to save his mother, protect his lineage, and occupy his father’s patriarchal role. As if to compensate, and to erase the potential for an oedipal reading of the transmission of power between father and son, the poet has the dying Philip hand over his kingdom as an act of worldly renunciation: ‘Yo, fijo, mucho cobdicié este día, / desaquí que yo muera una nuez no daría’ (190cd). This gesture is of course repeated, though in more explicit terms, when at the end of the poem Alexander lays dying and declares ‘arrenuncio el mundo’ (2645d).8

8 The meaning of Alexander’s renunciation of the world has been the subject of disagreement. For Lida de Malkiel, the passage is evidence of the hero’s reconciliation with


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Though these lines work to erase the potential competition between father and son, oedipal conflict plays a major part in the subsequent depiction of Alexander’s imperial conquests, principally in connection with his relationship with the Persian emperor Darius. The two leaders are linked by a consistent pattern of associations that suggests that Alexander’s conquest of Babylon entails a struggle against his own symbolic father. In victory, Alexander aquires Darius’s empire and becomes the paternal protector of his family. In short, he becomes his victim and assumes his destiny. Since the parallel between Alexander and Darius is fairly straightforward, and forms part of the cyclical patterns noted by Cañas (Libro de Alexandre 1995: 49–50), just a few examples will suffice. Most obvious, perhaps, is the fact that Alexander aspires to the very title used by Darius when he first addresses the invader: ‘Dario, rey de los rëys, igual del Criador, / diz’ a ti, Alexandre, nuevo guerreador’ (780bc; my emphasis). In response, the young Greek accuses Darius of weakness and degeneracy in terms that could equally apply to Alexander himself at the end of his own imperial conquests: ‘que ave rica tierra e sobra grant aver, / ca nunca fizo ál sinon sobreponer’ (788bc).9 The difference between them at this early stage, of course, is that Darius’s accumulation of wealth and power supports a life of tranquillity, not war: ‘Dario era de días de guerra desusado, / avié con la grant paz el lidiar olvidado’ (777ab). Nonetheless, the narrator’s laconic observation ironically anticipates the fact that Alexander’s own betrayal and death will coincide with the end of conflict and the establishment of universal peace. As is well known, Alexander brings about his downfall when he emulates divinity. Thus, he has assumed the legacy of Darius and his Babylonian forefathers, whose unbounded aspirations are symbolized by the city of Babylon and the tower of Babel (1460–1533). Alexander’s conquest of Babylon entails on the one hand a translatio imperii from one man to another, but also a legacy of doom. A pointed allusion to this fatal inheritance is embedded within the digression on Babel, when just before returning to Alexander the poet recalls the life of Nebuchadnezzar, ‘el que se fazié Dios a los omnes dezir’ (1531cd).10

God and a sign of his final humility (1952: 196–97). For Michael (1960) the words imply no such repentance. Both scholars, however, draw parallels between Alexander’s death and that of monarchs such as Saint Louis of France and Fernando III of Castile. For a non-committal summary of the positions, see Cañas (Libro de Alexandre 1995: 574 note). The implications of the author’s representation of Alexander’s death are discussed below. 9 This pattern of associations is reinforced by a textual detail which, although it occurs only once, is thematically significant. Alexander warns Darius ‘contirt’ a com’ a Lúcifer, que tant quiso sobir, / desamparólo Dios e ovo a perir’ (799cd); later, the poet himself will compare Alexander to the Devil: ‘murié el diablo por amor de lidiar’ (1186b). 10 The conquests and cruelty of this King are also inscribed on Darius’s shield (991–94), in an ecphrasis that I discuss below. For detailed studies of the poem’s representation of Babylon, its sources, and thematic implications, see Arizaleta (2000), Pinet (2003), and Bañeza Román (1994: 95–109).

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The detail is symptomatic: the phrase links two great monarchs who restored the fortunes of their respective kingdoms, but at the same time it represents their earthly achievements as a challenge to the omnipotence of the divine Father, and as such subject to inevitable defeat. To formulate it thus is to say nothing new (or even interesting) about either the poem or the larger conventions that shape its suspicions of temporal sovereignty. Broadly speaking, the representation of secular power in this poem is heavily influenced by an Augustinian model, which sets the innate transience and self-interested aspirations of human society against the eternity and moral righteousness of the civitas Dei.11 What is more intriguing is the particular slant given to this otherwise hackneyed opposition. The transience of empires, including universal monarchy itself, is presented to us in the ironic mode. Numerous moralizing interventions – which embroider the topos of contemptus mundi (e.g. 999–1001) – establish the world’s treacherous mutability as an unquestionable fact. At the same time, however, it is also a secret, at least for the poem’s protagonists. Running throughout the narrative is the motif of a hidden truth which the main characters may dimly perceive or which they actively try to suppress or ignore. The idea is introduced tentatively, as we have seen, with the rumours surrounding Alexander’s origins, but it soon gathers pace and force in the portrayal of Darius. When the Persian emperor first enters the story, we see him contemplating a drawing of the youth who would eventually supplant him. The image inspires anxiety, as if Darius recognizes the fate before him: ‘pero fue muy quexoso quand sopo la natura, / mas sópos’ encobrir com’ omne de cordura’ (153cd). Similarly, after his first defeat, he first affects rage to conceal his despair (779), and he then hides his grief behind a show of fortitude. It is a theatrical display, a drama of pretence, and it is re-enacted after Alexander’s final crushing victory, with the parallel between the two episodes underscored by verbal similarities (‘encubrió su pesar’, 827b; ‘encubrió su desarro’, 1441a). In fact, the verb encubrir is the key word in Darius’s vain struggle against the inevitable, for a hidden truth is part of his very lineage. As he spurs on his men, the emperor reminds them that they are descended from the Babylonian giants, the builders of Babel (948). Yet, as the poet takes pains to point out, all these are empty words – ‘todo es vanidat’ – since God has ordained another fate for Darius and his empire (986–88). The motif of concealment is then inscribed – literally – on Darius’s shield, with its ecphrasis of the emperor’s warlike and noble lineage (989–1001). This ecphrasis is as notable for what it purports to hide as for what it actually portrays. We learn that its maker did not want to engrave upon it certain dishonourable events: Por amor que las armas non fuessen manzilladas unas estorias bueltas, que fuessen entecadas, 11

See especially De civitate Dei, XIV, 1–7, 28; XXII, 22.


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non quiso el maestro que fuessen ý notadas, que serién las derechas por éssas desfeadas. (993)

Even so, the poet takes it upon himself to disclose them, and after recalling Nebuchadnezzar’s madness (994), he draws our attention to a scene of oedipal violence: Non quiso ý poner al fijo perjurado que fue sobre su padre crudo e denodado; lo que peor le sovo, óvolo desmembrado, ca querié regnar sólo el que aya mal fado. (995)

Conflict between father and son also is at the heart of the legend of Cyrus the Great (997–1001), for this monarch’s birth was foreshadowed by the omen that he would dethrone his own father. Given the poet’s sermonizing intervention (999–1001), the moral function of the digression on Darius’s shield could hardly be more explicit.12 Nonetheless, the implications of this passage for a political reading of the poem as a whole have yet to be fully worked out. The ecphrasis exposes the allegedly hidden truth about the violence wrought by sons on fathers precisely at the moment when Darius is about to be toppled by his own figurative offspring. Thus, the episode of the shield reveals the instability of the very ideological instruments – genealogy and patrilinear succession – that were being increasingly used to shield contemporary European monarchies from the corrosive effects of passing time. As Darius turns his face away from the obvious, he anticipates a move that will be repeated, in especially dramatic fashion, by Alexander himself. His adventures under the oceans reveal to him an extraordinary world that for all its strangeness turns out to be disturbingly similar to human society (2306–30). Like the world of men, the oceans are a place of continuous conflict, where the strong dominate the weak in their unrestrained greed for power (2316–19). As Alexander surveys this scene he learns the nature and effects of pride, which he defines in a very specific way. It is a kind of force, used to impose hierarchies of power, and it holds sway under water, in the skies and on land: Dize el rey: ‘Sobervia es en todos lugares, es fuerça en la tierra e dentro en los mares, las aves esso mismo, nos catan por eguales; Dios confonda tal vicio que tien tantos lugares.’ (2317; my emphasis)

12 For the moral lessons, see Cañas’s notes to 987 & 999–1001 (Libro de Alexandre 1988: 315, 318–19); for further analysis of the text and its source, see Arizaleta (1999: 134–36), who points out that the function of this ecphrasis is to prefigure Alexander’s fall; see also Bañeza Román (1994: 112–16).

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In spite of this insight, first the poet and then God himself declare that Alexander is incapable of applying this lesson to his own imperial conquests (2321 & 2330).13 Later, as he continues his explorations on land, he encounters two talking trees that miraculously reveal his fate (2490–94), although the name of his eventual assassin is not disclosed so as to prevent Alexander from disturbing the providential course of history (2493). In short, first Darius and then Alexander represent two interrelated motifs, secrecy and destiny. Their fates are open secrets, and the oxymoron is, as I shall explain, a profound symptom of the poem’s larger ambivalence towards the idea of universal monarchy. Alexander’s pride, constituted by his inability to look within himself and contemplate his own impermanence, shows how frailty at the political level is manifested in moral terms. His weakness, both moral and political, lies within; it is as if the patriarch contains within himself the seed of his own destruction. That there is something innately self-destructive about political sovereignty is highlighted by a striking paradox developed in the parallel episodes that lead up to, and underscore the relationship between, the deaths of Darius and Alexander. Instrumental in the deaths of both these men are two father figures, at least ‘fathers’ by virtue of their names: Padrón and Antipater. They are in a sense the alter egos of Alexander as patriarch, since like Alexander himself they embody the paradox of loyal treachery, a paradox created from the conflict between ethical and political conduct. Alexander is loyal to a secular model of political order that is felt to betray the higher, divinely established order of Nature. Similarly, Padrón is a traitor to the Greeks, but the model loyal vassal who tries to warn Darius of the plot to kill him (1686–98). Padrón is good – ‘a tan leal vasallo dél Dios paraíso’, exclaims the poet – but, at least from Alexander’s perspective, he is an enemy. Antipater, on the other hand, is one of Alexander’s intimates (his ‘amo’ 2369c), but also the ‘amigo fiado’ of Treachery personified (2449b) and as such unambiguously cursed by the poet (2456). And yet, although he is the ‘ministro del pecado’ (2605a), in the final analysis he is also the instrument of divine justice. The fact that the chief assassin of the father is named ‘anti-pater’ is an apt expression of one of the central ironies of the poem, which is that Providential order is protected by an act of betrayal. On one level, this irony can be explained as an example of poetic justice – Alexander is punished by betrayal for his own betrayal of divine frontiers. But

13 While the passage offers us a clear exemplum of moral blindness, it is not without its nuances. Alexander fails to follow the implications of what he sees to their full conclusions in part perhaps because he does not annex this underwater world through the use of force. The fish all swim up to him in an act of fearful, though natural, obeisance, which would eventually be mirrored by the diverse populations of Alexander’s world empire in the climactic scene of the poem. I return to the implications of this below.


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I think the issues it raises go further and deeper than that. For one thing, Alexander’s demise provokes not just moral censure of human pride and a critical reflection upon the ephemeral nature of worldly aspirations, but pathos too. Upon his death, Alexander’s subjects break out into lament: Dizián del otro cabo: ‘Ay, emperador, ¿cómo lo quiso esto sofrir el Crïador, por dar tan grant poder a un mal traïdor por fer atantos huérfanos de tan gentil señor?’ [. . .] ‘Non devié este día, señor, amanecer, que nos faze a todos tan buen padre perder’. [. . .] Por toda la cibdat era grand el dolor; los unos dizián: ‘¡Padre!’, los otros ‘¡Ay, señor!’; otros dizían: ‘¡Rey!’, otros: ‘¡Emperador!’ (2651, 2655, 2658)

These passages mark the culmination of the poet’s fascination with the sovereign as a patriarch: an all-embracing father-figure, whose various epithets (‘Padre’, ‘señor’, ‘rey’, ‘emperador’) evoke the reach of his authority in its various domains. Later on in the thirteenth century, the term ‘pater’ would commonly be used by jurists as a means of consolidating what Ernst Kantorowicz calls a ‘law-centred kingship’, and it would also be pressed into service by the apologists of absolutism.14 The realm organizes itself around this figurative father, whose death is therefore accompanied by a powerful sense of loss. Following the lament of the vassals, this anguish culminates in the final image of Alexander’s widow, Roxana, and her bereft, inconsolable dueñas, ‘señeras, fenbras desconsejadas’ (2661b). Channelling public sorrow through the female voice is a common enough rhetorical strategy, though it is the poet’s own contribution to the inherited tale, and it adds weight to his own emotional intervention: ‘tengo la voluntad con el duelo turbada’ (2663c).15 The desolate mood throws into relief the lack of a successor, and retrospectively lends a note of poignant irony to the otherwise matter-of-fact way in which Alexander had just divided up his possessions, clinging tenaciously but vainly to the hope that he might pass on his dominions in their entirety to an heir (2636). The collective pathos then modulates, and in two ways. First, the natural fact of Alexander’s bodily death, itself a microcosm of the larger caducity of all earthly things, is transcended by personal renown:

14 See Kantorowicz (1957: 87–192, especially 97–107, 130–31, n. 131, & 305, n. 107), Black (1992: 146), and Nieto Soria (1988: 240–41), who documents the phrases ‘padre del reino’ and ‘padre de la tierra’ in Juan García de Castrojeriz’s Glosa castellana al Regimiento de Príncipes of Aegidius Romanus. The poem also compares the loss of Alexander to the loss of a ‘pastor’ (2664b), on which term see Black (1996: 146) and Nieto Soria (1988: 241). 15 The principal source is Alexandreis (X, 386–432), though with the influence of Historia de preliis; for analysis, see Willis (1935: 47–51, esp. p. 50).

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Si murieron las carnes que lo han por natura, non murió el buen precio, que ý encara dura; qui muere en buen precio, es de buena ventura, que lo meten los sabios luego en escriptura. (2668)

A man’s ‘buen precio’, preserved in the written record, bestows fame and means that his life can be measured by a different standard of time. As Alexander himself asserted, in what turned out to be an eminently quotable phrase: ‘Non conto yo mi vida por años nin por días, / mas por buenas faziendas e por cavallerías’ (2288ab).16 This poem’s preoccupation with fame, which has been amply documented by Lida de Malkiel (1952: 167–97), therefore anticipates a shift in attitudes towards time that would soon be promoted by jurists who attempted to theorize the continuity of political corporations. Speaking of the Averroists’ Aristotelian challenges to an Augustinian notion of time, Kantorowicz argued that: Tempus, the limited span of terrestial Time, thereby lost its ephemeral frailty and limitation, and its character also changed morally: Time no longer appeared predominantly as the symbol of caducity, of Death; Time, to the Averroists, became a vivifying element, a symbol of endless duration, of Life. (1957: 276–77)

El libro de Alexandre is no political treatise, of course, but it does bear the imprint of the emerging pressures of political thought, and its final stanzas register the ways in which the idea of fame would eventually be integrated into the new arsenal of monarchical authority (Kantorowicz 1957: 277–78). However, they make no conceptual link between personal and corporative continuity. It is Alexander’s individual fame, not the renown of his empire (much less its political integrity) that lives on. The poem does not – indeed cannot at this stage – represent Alexander as a king with two bodies. The distinction is clear from the second way in which the mood of grief modulates in the concluding lines. Having established the positive, vivifying possibilities of Alexander’s ‘buen precio’ (2668), the narrative then folds back upon itself and reflects on the transience of all earthly glory: ‘La gloria deste mundo, quien bien quiere asmar, / más que la flor del campo non la deve preciar’ (2671ab). The transition from ‘buen precio’ to ‘gloria’ is effortlessly made, because they are represented as different facets of the same phenomenon, time. It is time that measures the gap between virtue and vanity. The inner contradictions of temporal or secular power are symptomatic of the fundamentally moral terms of contemporary political thinking; but they are also worked out by a poet who, like Juan Ruiz in the following century, had an ear

16 This lapidary observation was taken up almost verbatim by the poet of the Poema de Fernán González (351ab), as various commentators have pointed out.


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finely tuned to the dissonances produced by overlapping yet fundamentally opposed categories.

‘A single sovereign authority’ If an oedipal undercurrent registers the poem’s preoccupation with time, it also raises the question of power and the authority to exercise it. The idea of Alexander as father-figure is a symptom of the fascination with centralized monarchical power that was to evolve in the course of the thirteenth century and would culminate in Dante’s finely wrought defence of universal monarchy.17 But the fact that the poem’s climactic representation of Alexander as pater universalis takes place under the sign of death is significant for several reasons. The final scenes of the poem reveal the moral anxieties that surround the idea of an absolute, uncontested power, even as the poet’s impassioned malediction of traitors, the Devil’s flunkeys (2616, 2618–19), argues for loyalty to a single sovereign authority. The contradiction is unresolved, and it cannot be attributed simply to the clash between political aspiration and moral doubt. At the deepest level it is shaped by the dialectic of feudalism, in which fragmentation of actual political power is counterbalanced at the ideological level by the belief that there should in fact be some final centre of authority. The dialectic manifests itself most graphically in the denouement, but it also operates throughout the poem in the form of a tension between centres and margins, constituting what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’.18 The poem’s dramatic force derives in large measure from the continuous outward drive of its hero. As Amaia Arizaleta has explained: ‘Alexandre marche toujours vers l’extérieur, qui devient centre lorsqu’il y laisse l’empreinte de sa puissance – c’est lorsqu’il cesse d’avancer et s’installe à Babylone qu’il meurt’ (1999: 230). She goes on to observe how, in one of Alexander’s first speeches to his men (254–60), he encourages them to abandon their homeland in search of fame and freedom. In this way, she suggests, the poem not only projects the image of a monarch of the Reconquest, but also – and more profoundly – allows us a glimpse of ‘la réalité qui réglait la vie des contemporains du poète castillan: la lutte et le mouvement constituent dans le texte, ainsi que dans le monde réel, des valeurs omniprésentes. Dans le vers 948 du Cantar de Mio Cid il est dit: “qui en un logar mora siempre lo so puede menguar” ’ (1999: 230–31). Although Arizaleta occasionally talks of a metaphoric relationship between the poem and ‘la réalité’ or ‘le monde réel’,

17 Similar theoretical justifications of monarchy as the rule of one over many were made by Aegidius Romanus (De regimine principum, 1277–79) and the author of the treatise on kingship attributed to Thomas Aquinas; see Black (1992: 141–43). 18 On this concept, and the notion of feudalism employed here, see the introduction.

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here she presents the relationship essentially in mimetic terms. For her, the poem reflects the continuous state of war during the period, and projects the idea that the King’s function was to wage war for material and/or spiritual gain. Her insight that Alexander is, so to speak, a migrating centre of power enables us to open new perspectives onto the text, especially if we adopt a broader concept of reality and refine the poem’s relationship to it. Arizaleta is perfectly correct to emphasize the constant outward movement that characterizes the narrative, and to suggest that the political centre shifts to wherever Alexander happens impose to his power. In one respect, this is hardly surprising given the fact of peripatetic monarchies. However, it also corresponds to the political and economic structure of high medieval colonialism. As Robert Bartlett puts it, unlike modern colonialism, medieval territorial expansion was based not on the ‘long-term functional subordination of the periphery to the core’, but on a model of cellular reproduction which entailed ‘a process of replication, not of differentiation’ (1993: 307). And yet in El libro de Alexandre this centrifugal dynamic is counterbalanced by a pull in the opposite direction, a desire to return home that makes itself felt primarily on an affective level and is described at one point as ‘el sabor de la tierra’ (258a). This yearning is more than love for one’s patria chica. After all, the origins of Alexander’s authority as a monarch lie in one particular place: Corinth. This is where Philip’s body is taken to be buried, and where Alexander rushes to be crowned. The poet is careful to assert its historical credentials as a seat of power and authority (and, in the fullness of time, Christianity) in terms that call to mind Castile as ‘cabeza de España’: Era esta Corinto atan noble cibdat, convirtióla Sant Pablo después a la verdat, sobre todas las otras aviá grant potestat, cabeça fue de todas bien de antigüedat. Quando avién en Grecia rëy a ordenar, allí l’avién a fer, non en otro lugar; el infant non lo quiso en sí desaforar, ý fuera cavallero e fues’ ý coronar. (196–97)

The idea that sovereignty can invest itself with an aura of stability and continuity through association with a symbolic space is not in itself remarkable.19 More important is the way the poem recognizes the importance of an ideological heartland even as it promotes what Bartlett called the ‘cellular reproduction’ of medieval colonialism. Indeed, Alexander’s first conquests are undertaken in order to unify the various Greek city states and to free them from

19 The Christianized Corinth, as ‘cabeza de reinado’, possibly evokes Castile as ‘cabeza de España’ with Toledo at its centre. Thebes is possibly León, but the analogy, though attractive, is too tenuous to be developed.


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foreign control. The pacification first of Athens, then of Thebes, is represented not so much as the annexation of autonomous territories as the recovery of a larger political whole. The idea that Greece, like the Visigothic Hispania, was once a unified kingdom is never explicitly stated, but the analogy is implicit in the manner of representation: the language of betrayal that runs throughout this part of the poem presupposes the existence of a territory whose political unity has been splintered by a combination of internal conflict, greed, treachery, and foreign oppression (‘premia’). The recovery of Greece, with Corinth at its head, becomes a moral imperative as the precondition for future expansion. In this respect, the depiction of the vengeance wrought on Thebes (216–44) is particularly interesting. On the verge of a crushing defeat, the Thebans send out a juglar named Cleor to plead for mercy, and he sings a song that is part eulogy, part warning. Being a well-read minstrel, ‘omne bien razonado que sabiá bien leer’ (232a), his is a broad, almost clerical, perspective. He begins by praising Alexander’s divine origins and aura, his combined might and wisdom (233–35), and then he turns to Thebes’s own glorious chivalric past, he reminds him that his own grandfather, Hercules, the epitome of his warrior caste, ‘d’aquí fue natural’ (238a). Other Thebans include Diomedes, Achilles, and ‘Don Bacus, un cuerpo venturado, / que conquistó a India’ (238–39). The allusion to Bacchus and the conquest of India ironically anticipates the expansion of Alexander’s empire, so that for Alexander to destroy Thebes would mean trampling on his own lineage, betraying the bonds of blood and caste, and placing a curse on his destiny: ‘Aquí merced te pido’, concludes Cleor, ‘si tú lo destruyeres, / nunca acabarás todo lo que quisieres’ (240ab).20 The argument falls on deaf ears. Pausing only to reward the minstrel for his learned song, Alexander pitilessly razes the city to the ground, and returns to Corinth. If at this point ‘empeçó a mandarse Grecia por un señor’ (244d), the unity comes at a cost. Rather than meting out punishment upon a people, as Cleor requested, Alexander has destroyed a symbolic place at the heart of his future dominions. Unlike the description of Corinth, the episode of Thebes recognizes, only to reject, the desire for some ideological centre within an expanding empire. The same dynamic tension occurs in the very next scene, when Alexander exhorts his men to overcome their grief at leaving Greece to confront the Persians: Si nos d’aquí non imos, en paz nunca bivremos, de premia e de cueita nunca escaparemos; [. . .] Qui al sabor quisiere de su tierra catar, nunca fará bernaje nin fecho de prestar; [. . .]

20 Although this passage is fairly closely modelled upon the corresponding scene in Alexandreis (I, 284–344), there are some notable differences. The addition of Cleor’s prophecy is one of them, and the reference to Diomedes (which suggests Thebes’s chivalric past) is another.

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El sabor de la tierra faze muchos mesquinos, e que a grant repoyo biven de sus vezinos; Jasón si non oviesse abiertos los caminos, non avría ganado tan ricos vellozinos. Yo lexo buena madre e buenas dos hermanas, muchas ricas cibdades e muchas tierras planas; mas tant en cor me yazen las tierras persïanas que tod’esto non precio quanto tres avellanas. (254–59)

Alexander’s rhetorical skills (like those of Cleor) fail to persuade, and his men continue to lament (261), and although their grief is gradually attenuated as they cross the seas, it is still not forgotten (264d). When they reach Asia, however, a change occurs. Alexander shoots an arrow into the ground as a symbol of his conquest, anchors are cast onto the sands, tents pitched, and the Greeks settle in, ‘a anchura, a luengas e a ladas, / com’en su heredat assí prendién posadas’ (275cd). The poetic tone and language of the passage, which links their new location to their old ‘heredat’, clearly indicate the fluidity of the concept of home. Its contingency is further underlined by the excursus on the mapamundi that immediately and ineluctably follows. ‘La materia lo manda por fuerça de razón’ (276a), writes the poet, as he veers away from the Greeks’ new power base on the shores of Asia, to describe the contours of the known world (296–94). The shift in narrative viewpoint is inevitable, and not just because it anticipates the ultimate scope of Alexander’s empire and the magnitude of his ambition.21 The mapamundi has a decentralizing effect, keeping at bay any idea that the empire can be spatially organized around a stable ideological hub. Asia, as the map emphatically reports, is indeed the centre of the world, a place of reverence, in terms of geography, material resources, and religion: there lie the Garden of Eden, the birthplace of Christ, and the foundations of the Christian Church (284–87). But there is no sense that Alexander is travelling towards a putative centre, since although Asia provides the ‘cimiento’ of Christianity, ‘a Europa Dios le dio grant alçamiento, / ca es Roma cabeça de tod’ ordenamiento’ (286cd). These lines epitomize the historically ambivalent relationship between the concepts of Europe and Asia: ‘Europe, which will fashion itself for generations in opposition to Asia, has always owed to Asia its historical origins’ (Pagden 2002b: 33–36, at p. 35). Thus, at least in the minds of the medieval Castilian audience, Alexander will conquer an ambiguous space that is both spiritual home and an exotic place of exile. The tension between centres and margins resurfaces twice more in the narrative before the climactic scene of Alexander’s poisoning in Babylon. In pursuit of Darius, Alexander comes across the ancient city of Persepolis. As

21 For the structural function of this passage, see the relevant notes in Cañas’s edition (Libro de Alexandre 1988: 184–85).


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Persia’s ‘cabeça del regnado’ (1599c), it is the ancient launching pad for its imperial armies, and the origin of the Greeks’ oppression or ‘premia’ (1604b). As with Thebes, the destruction of Persepolis is portrayed as an act of revenge that secures the liberation of Greece, and also as moral retribution for the city’s materialism and violent anarchy (1605–06). Its fate is sealed by the discovery of three thousand Greek hostages, who have been brutally tortured and maimed. In one of the most powerful passages of the entire poem, the prisoners debate what to do with their new freedom. On the one hand, there is Eüticio, a ‘sotil retórico’ (1614c), who argues that their disfigurement is a source of shame, and that if they return home they will be treated like lepers (1621), rejected by kith and kin. Condemned to eternal mockery, they should hide away in permanent exile: ‘es bien atales omnes solitarios bevir’ (1622d). On the other, there is Téseus, equally eloquent (1625b), who counters that they should be proud of wounds received in service of their lord (1629–30), and that they will be welcomed sympathetically by friends and family. Rejecting the anonymity and alienation of life spent on foreign soil (1633), he brings his speech to a close by encouraging his comrades to embrace the security of kinship: Amigos, quim quisiere creer e escuchar, non plantará majuelo en ageno lugar, buscará como pueda a su tierra tornar: rudo es qui su casa quiere desamparar. (1637)

These appear to be compelling arguments, but they fail to convince the majority, and Alexander hands over enough servants, gold and silver for them to live out a lonely, albeit wealthy, life of exile. What is striking about this decision is that it is made on the basis of bad faith and distrust. Whereas in Alexander’s earlier harangue (and the sermon he will shortly deliver), ‘el sabor de la tierra’ is represented as an impediment to fame and chivalric prowess, here it is not. The choice is between returning as heroes and staying away as outcasts, between the conflicting expectations of honour and shame. Ultimately, home and kinship are spurned because most Greeks expect from them only estrangement and ignominy; as Téseus himself points out, such a despairing view reflects the hostages’ own lack of compassion and their impiety (1634–35). In spite of his generosity, Alexander himself is reticent. His armies continue their onward march, and the question of what home actually means is left behind, immersed in pathos.22 Following the betrayal and murder of Darius, the rumour spreads that Alexander’s objectives have been achieved, and that having given his erstwhile adversary an honorable burial, he is preparing to return to Greece. The rumour

22 This episode follows the basic lines of its source (Alexandreis, VI, 196–296), except that Walter explains why the hostages refused to return home: custom (exile) was stronger than nature (home). Excising these lines is symptomatic of the ambiguity in the Spanish text.

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is, of course, nothing more than a projection of the soldiers’ own desires (1831–32). Enraged, Alexander summons first his generals and advisors (‘el su noble senado’, 1834c), and having put them straight, he then addresses his entire army. Taken together, his two speeches (1835–37 & 1841–57) offer yet another perspective on frontier life. In this instance, anxiety is caused not by the desire for fame or by lack of faith in home and kinship, but by a specific political problem: how to hold on to conquered territory. Returning to one’s ‘heredades’ (1841c) would mean losing land won on the frontier. And while honour and shame are certainly at stake, the principal concern is with the stability of conquest. The tension between centre and margins is manifest in the way Alexander confesses his own yearning for home and family, even as that yearning threatens to slacken his grip on his newly won dominions: Si esto que ganamos fuesse bien recabdado, o de seer estable fuesse yo segurado, lo que vos querríedes faría yo de grado, ca el sabor de Grecia non l’he yo olvidado. Querría mis hermanas e mi madre veer, avrién ellas comigo, yo con ellas, plazer; mas veo dos contrarios detrás remanecer por do podremos toda la ganancia perder. (1844–45)

The first of these ‘dos contrarios’ is a very specific reason not to return home. Military might itself, argues Alexander, does not guarantee permanent conquest. Territorial expansion must be consolidated by securing the will of those subjugated; they must be governed by consent rather than by coercion. This consent is established through a period of peaceful co-existence and acculturation, understood as the transfer (not the exchange) of custom and culture. ‘Vagar doma las cosas’, Alexander explains, invoking the Bible (1847a); without this process of peaceful settlement, someone else will take control as soon as we turn our backs (1848). Therefore, he continues, let us not return home, but bring the language and laws of the centre here, to the edges of empire: Vayamos con aquéllos algunt poco faziendo; irán nuestros lenguajes, nuestro fuero sabiendo, de nuestra compañía irán sabor prendiendo; después podremos ir alegres e ridiendo. (1849)23

This laughter is the euphoria of power – the esthetics of violence pervade the poem – but even this joy is insecure. It is undermined by the second threat 23 For the Biblical source of the phrase ‘vagar doma las cosas’ and a comparison with Walter’s text, see Bañeza Román (1994: 36–37). The corresponding passage is Alexandreis, VII, 431–515. The quotation illustrates the key difference between source and adaptation. In the former, savage barbarians are tamed by becoming habituated to subjugation; in the latter, by peaceful co-existence (‘compañía’), language, and law.


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to the stability of conquest, which is embodied by Narbanus and Bessus, the traitors who murdered Darius. The fact that their assassination of Darius had just sparked off a long digression on the transience of life, greed, and the inherent unruliness of the world (1805–30) illustrates the larger figurative role played by these two men. Alexander’s desperation to pursue and destroy these individuals demonstrates how social and political chaos will continue to menace, even once frontiers have been tamed. As the power centre moves, so does the betrayal that is stubbornly embedded within it, though the full implications of this fact always lie just beyond Alexander’s grasp. It is another instance of what I described above as the open secret that governs the fate of universal monarchy, and it introduces the problem of the relationship between knowledge and power. There are numerous permutations to the connection between knowledge and power in the exemplary traditions of the speculum principis, though compilations like Sendebar, Calila e Dimna, and El conde Lucanor all recognize that absolute knowledge, like absolute power, is a fantasy. In this respect, El libro de Alexandre is no different, but it does give its own dramatic twist to the problem of how political sovereignty is established by conquest but maintained by the monarch’s power to know his domains. The poem thus anticipates, though in rather skeptical mode, Dante’s conviction that a unique princedom can be established only when a ruler and his subjects have realized man’s full intellectual capacity. In this poem, the issues are for the most part explored through the motif of arms and letters, which is woven throughout the poem, with the two sometimes acting in harmony, sometimes in uneasy tension. Right from the start, Alexander is called ‘fijo’ by Aristotle (36b, 51b), and he is in an important sense Aristotle’s creation as king, as the speculum principis episode demonstrates (38–86). The early episode of Nectanabo, though brief, is resonant; by violently severing the relationship between King and intellectual mentor it compensates for Alexander’s debt to his pseudo-father Aristotle and is a constant reminder of the fundamental independence of a monarchy confronted by its inevitable reliance on advisors and the need to delegate power. The pressure to delegate is acknowledged early on, when two of Alexander’s vassals take him to one side with a warning: Grant es la tu fazienda, as mucho de veer, non lo podrás por ti todo acabecer; podrié por aventura tal falta contecer que a ti e a nos podrié empeecer. (313)

The advice leads to the foundation of the doze pares, but it also ironically foreshadows the conclusion to the poem. By then, Alexander has been able to ‘veer’ and ‘acabecer’ the entire world, but his overarching perspective and power are revealed to be illusory; the illusion is represented as a moral flaw, but this ethical turn rationalizes a problem that lies at the heart of the convention of the rex litteratus itself. The power that was delegated to the letrado

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class needed to be recuperated, at least on an ideological level, by asserting the overarching supremacy of royal literacy, which nevertheless will always be insufficient. The fact that the poem offers no easy image of the wise king has long been clear (e.g., Surtz 1987). It is the quest for knowledge, which exemplifies the intellectual sin of curiositas, that brings about Alexander’s downfall, and with it, his empire. It is not knowledge for its own sake that matters, of course, but knowledge as the expression and support of political power. As the murder of Nectabano suggests, the relationship between knowledge and power is not always balanced; the poem vacillates between wisdom and coercion as the origin and guarantor of political sovereignty. Although Alexander’s speech to his men on the importance of acculturation is relevant here, perhaps the supreme example of this tension is the fact that the famous enigma of the Gordian knot – how to acquire world empire – is solved through force not wisdom (831–38). The knot can be understood on various levels. Explicitly, it represents all the intricacies of Asia, the greatest empire on earth (831). As such it stands for a problem that is central to the political concerns of the poem, for this empire, like all empires, is made up of multitudinous strands miraculously intertwined to create what looks like a seamless whole: Assí eran los ramos entre sí enbraçados, non podié saber omne do fueran ajuntados; semejava que eran los filos adonados, mas era fiera cosa como eran travados. (832)

The knot is in one respect a trope for unity in diversity, which the poem readily acknowledges as a magical, paradoxical alliance (831c, 832c). As we shall see, the ideas of unity in diversity and seamlessness resurface in especially interesting ways once Alexander has forced an entrance into this metaphorical knot that is Asia. However, the knot is also pertinent here because it embraces the temporal dimension of power and authority. Gordius was a Phrygian peasant who was elected king in order to satisfy an oracle that declared that the future ruler should be the first person to ride up to Zeus’s temple in a wagon. The knot that secured the yoke to the wagon pole was placed in the temple to celebrate the divine legitimacy of the dynasty founded by ‘padre Midas’ (830cd), but it also, implicitly, proclaimed its very lack of perpetuity, since whoever unravelled the knot would take over the empire. Sovereignty, then, derives part of its authority from its mythical origins, which lend it an air of inscrutability and seal it off from being contested on more rational juridical, philosophical, and historical grounds. But even as the appeal to ancient myth bypasses recent history and alternative dynastic interests, the fact that such mystification is deemed necessary implicitly recognizes that more rational forms of knowledge have a claim in establishing legitimate sovereignty.


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As I have suggested, the knot is itself quite a tangled symbol. Alongside the mythic functions I have just described, there is another: the myth of cutting the Gordian knot severs the ties linking knowledge and power, and establishes force as the main legitimizing instrument of sovereignty. The point is acknowledged when Alexander slices the knot apart and asserts his right of conquest: ‘Yo otra maestría non sabría que far, como quiere que fuesse óvelo a soltar.’ ‘Señor’, dixieron todos, ‘¡Dios te faga durar! ca nunca lo podriés más mejor aguisar.’ (837)

Here, force is shown to provide its own justification. As Alexander’s conquests gather momentum, the need to justify the continuation of violence and to establish its outer boundaries becomes ever more urgent. In the process, towards the end of the poem, the relation between knowledge and power is reconfigured. In spite of his wounds, Alexander refuses to put an end to his campaigns and vows to ‘buscar algunas gentes de otro semejar, / de sossacar manera nueva de guerrear’ (2269cd). His men can only marvel at his restlessness and ‘fiera cobdicia’ (2274a). From this point on, knowledge and power are poetically conflated. Alexander’s descent into the ocean (2305–23) is indeed a voyage of discovery, but it is inseparable from the act of subjugation: merely knowing the fish tames them (2314) – an idea that, according to Willis, is unique to this version (1935: 31–39, at p. 36). A little later, when Alexander flies into the heavens in a chariot drawn by two griffins (2496–2514) and surveys the entire world, he does so to ensure and demonstrate that he is in fact the ‘potestat sin frontera’ (2496a). His literal and metaphorical ascendancy is powered by violent yet controlled hunger, since the two griffins, ‘aves valientes’ (2497a), are lured onwards and guided by their starvation, just as Alexander starves for intellectual and territorial triumph.24 Though Alexander’s conquests often do appear to be driven by an uncontrolled lust for power, his final marvellous flight suggests that underlying the coupling of fortitudo et sapientia is desire to know and thus administer the empire that has been won by force of arms. The image

24 The symbolism of the griffin – half eagle, half lion – though obvious in most respects is worth pondering. The poem registers its ferocity (‘valientes’): ‘it will tear to pieces any human beings which it happens to come across’, according to one twelfth-century Latin prose bestiary (White 1954: 24). But as part lion, it is also regal (it appears in the description of Darius’s throne, 860–61). The eagle was, amongst other things, an allegory of spiritual renewal: as it grew old and its famed eyesight dimmed, it would soar up to the sun which would clear the mist veiling its eyes. Alexander, on the other hand, rises but becomes even more blind to his fate. On the lion and eagle see White (1954: 7–11, 105–07). For a broad survey of this ‘flying machine’, and a summary of the poet’s sources, see Michael (1974) and Willis (1935: 39–41).

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of Alexander and the griffins shows knowledge and violence in harness, so to speak. The universal monarch has now realized man’s full intellectual potential, which underwrites his dominion over the world. About one hundred years later, Dante would argue that there would be nothing left to tempt a man whose ‘jurisdiction is bounded only by the ocean’ (Monarchia I, xi, 11; Dante 1995: 27). There is no such optimism in El libro de Alexandre, of course.

The cleric and the Jews, inside and out What makes universal monarchy possible is the harmonious interlocking of unity and diversity. The unique princedom is a concordia discors. In El libro de Alexandre this discordant harmony is forged by a protagonist who subjects the world, in all its marvellous variety and strangeness, to his military and intellectual control. In part, the symbolic function of placing Alexander’s final seat of power in Babylon is to convey precisely this sense of tamed multiplicity. This is where difference and identity meet, held together in fragile balance within the symbolic confines of Alexander’s tent. To detail all the ways the hero confronts difference would require a chapter in itself. For this reason I shall focus upon Alexander’s encounters with those who were perhaps the archetypal Others for medieval Christians: the Jews. This case study offers yet another perspective on the troubled relations between the two religious and cultural groups in earlythirteenth-century Castile; but it also illustrates how the figure of the Jew was used as a category through which to think about the boundaries between social exclusion and inclusivity. In other words, it is about convivencia understood not just as the co-existence of three religious groups, but as the co-existence of social structures, values, and beliefs in sometimes compatible, sometimes competing relationships. This kind of ideological co-existence can entail, on different levels of specificity and in different domains, borrowings and comparisons: metaphor, a kind of semantic borrowing, is central to convivencia. The Hebrew poets of Al-Andalus borrowed cultural forms from Islamic courtiers, and in the process implicitly compared themselves to Muslims – a troubling comparison, as Ross Brann (1991) has shown. Jewish architects borrowed Muslim motifs in their synagogues, though, as Jerrilynn Dodds (1992) has argued in a study on El Tránsito, such borrowings became a naturalized component of their cultural vocabulary – dead metaphors, so to speak. Jews first appear half-way through the poem, when Alexander visits Jerusalem in his conquest of the Persian empire of Darius (1131–63). This encounter captured the imagination of many writers down the ages, though it appears in the Spanish poet’s principal source, Walter’s Alexandreis, but in the Historia de preliis.25 Alexander demands the tribute Jerusalem owed to Darius, 25

See Lida de Malkiel (1956–57); Willis (1934: 46–47).


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and when the Jewish leader replies that it would be wrong to break their agreement with the Persian, he lays siege to the city. Faced with the threat of destruction, the Jews panic: ‘Ya dizié el aljama, “somos mal confondidos” ’ (1138d). But meanwhile the Jewish leader has dreamt that he should welcome Alexander, appearing before him as if saying Mass: ‘qual la missa dizié’ (1137c). This christianizing element continues with the Jew described as a bishop, dressed in his ecclesiastical regalia, and followed by his clergy (‘clerezía’, 1139–40), and with Alexander’s arrival evoking Christ’s entry into Jerusalem (1141). This welcome, in turn, reminds Alexander of an old vision whose significance he did not understand until that moment (the Spanish poet dramatically withholds explanation), but which inspires him to release the inhabitants of Jerusalem from all taxes and tributes, to order that the Jews be allowed to practise their religion in peace, and to establish an eternal truce with them (1144). Moreover, Alexander is also reminded of Daniel’s prophecy (11. 2–3), that a Greek would have sovereignty over the whole of Asia, and he excitedly proclaims: ‘Yo seré ésse, por la cabeça mía’ (1145d). The whole affair – the combination of Alexander’s aspirations to divine imperial right and his generous treatment of the Jews – provokes scandal among the Greeks, who consider it an affront to their nobility, a mark of shame (1146). To reassert his authority, Alexander then recounts his dream, which foretold the present welcome by the city of Jerusalem and the Jewish leader who prophesied his conquests (1148–62). The Greek army leave for Samaria, where the inhabitants request the same laws and rights given to Jerusalem. Alexander asks who these people are, and learning that they are ‘ebreos’, he declares: ‘Yo, amigos, tamaña enguedat [freedom] / a los judíos solos la di por heredat’ (1165cd). Towards the end of the poem, the religious and economic freedom afforded the Jews under royal protection reappears on the walls of Alexander’s tent, as a painting that recalls ‘cómo a los judíos otorgó su señal’ (2591c). As I have suggested, this tent symbolizes the space of empire, where diversity and difference are encompassed within a unifying and centralizing monarchical authority, and it reminds us that royal protection of the Jews became the focus for some of the ideological tensions that would become especially acute during the thirteenth century. The poem registers these tensions by representing the privileged relationship between Jews and monarchy together with the assertion of divine royal authority in highly dramatic, even problematic, terms. Although prophecy is one of the most common legitimizing strategies in the rhetoric of empire, being designed to raise the local and the contingent to the level of transcendental truth, almost by definition its ideological work depends upon recording the very obstacles that will – in theory – be overcome. In this respect, the Spanish poet’s handling of the prophetic vision is particularly interesting. Jewish freedom and imperial aspirations are intimately linked, and though legitimized, the connection is coloured by scandal. From a narrative point of view, the poet adapts his source in such a way as to highlight the idea that the very identity and status of the Jews are not self-evident but, both for

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the protagonists and the audience, discoveries: this, I think, is the ideological function of the exchange in Samaria, otherwise a rather insignificant detail. The Jews’ identity and status are revealed only after a question. Of course, the conjunction of the words ‘Jewish’ and ‘question’ would acquire a terrible resonance in later antisemitism, but here the representation of the Jews is, rather, a drama of recognition played out in a period of readjusting attitudes and relationships. Also relevant to the question of identity is the christianization of the Jewish religious rites. The use of Christian terminology is determined by two interrelated factors: on the one hand, it is part of the desire to overcome the disquiet provoked by the link between Jewish and Christian destiny, which expresses the authority of secular empire through the medium of the Jew and Jewish history. But the language also functions as an extended metaphor: Jews are portrayed as Christians to remind the audience that in spite of their different destinies they both form part of an overarching and seamless Providential plan. In due course, I shall return to the idea of seamlessness; but for the moment it is enough to note that the Jews, of course, are not entirely christianized. It is significant that the only obvious term specific to the Jew occurs is ‘aljama’ (1138d), that enclosed urban space reserved for the Jews. Deployed in a context of despair (‘somos mal confondidos’), the allusion constitutes a poetic addition to the source text (Michael 1970: 189) and it possesses a structural function linking this passage to the second occasion when Alexander discovers the Jews. This second encounter appears to offer an inverted image of his generosity in Jerusalem. It occurs when the narrator interrupts his account of Alexander’s pursuit of Porus, the ruler of India, to describe events that were absent from Walter’s Alexandreis. According to the Spanish poet, the flagging stamina of ‘Galtier el bueno’ (2098a) meant that he missed out a lot of things from the story: ‘muchas maravellas, mucha bestia granada’ (2099b). Taking it upon himself to fill in these gaps (which follow the death of Bucephalus, Alexandreis, IX, 269), the Spaniard first relates the wondrous enclosure of the lost tribes of Jews behind the Caspian mountains. Here, Alexander finds a multitude of people, cut off from the rest of the world by a single narrow pass. When he asks who these wretched, huddled masses are an anonymous ‘sabio’ replies that they are the Jews, confined there because they betrayed the faith the Lord placed in them as his chosen people. Since betrayal is Alexander’s particular bête noire (as well as one of the poem’s principal themes), the Greeks seal up the narrow pass. But fearing that this remedy will be as transient as all human handiwork, Alexander prays to God who miraculously moves the mountains to form a permanent barrier. This fantastic episode is not the Spanish poet’s own invention, of course, and his direct source is once again the Historia de preliis. However, as with the Jerusalem episode, the motif of enclosure had extraordinary imaginative appeal and since Biblical times it lent itself to a variety of theological, historical, and literary treatments, applied variously to barbarious Scythians, the Jews, the apocalyptic forces of


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Gog and Magog, or a confused combination of the last two groups.26 One decisive moment in the tradition was, significantly, in the twelfth century, when Peter Comestor consolidated the idea of the enclosure of the lost tribes, and, as Willis has suggested, his work seems to have had an influence upon the Spanish poem. The Spanish poet casts his version within a distinctive narratorial frame: he begins by declaring how, because of the miraculous sealing up of the pass brought about by Alexander’s prayer, the Greek hero will become an instrument of God’s will: ‘quiso Dios por su ruego tal virtud demostrar / que serié a Sant Pedro grant cosa a ganar’ (2100bc). This anticipates the moralizing conclusion (2116ab) that if God could perform his miracle for a pagan, what would he do for a Christian?27 The final moral about the power of belief – or rather the evil consequences of disbelief – is then hammered home: ‘por nos non lo perdamos, desto só yo certano: / qui en Dios ave dubda torpe es e villano’ (2116cd). It is entirely sympomatic of current approaches to this poem – indeed to the mester de clerecía as a whole – that this didactic intentionality has been very loosely construed. Jesús Cañas, for example, limply notes: ‘Es una función didáctica y moral – trata de mostrar una verdad de orden religioso – la que posee este episodio’ (Libro de Alexandre 1988: 491n). But exactly how this religious message about Christian faith is worked out through the Jews, and what ideological work the episode does to the Jews, has not troubled any commentator on the Spanish poem, or indeed the prominent scholars on the legend of the lost tribe more generally. However, the decision to depart from his principal source, the Alexandreis, in order to include more fantastic elements signals more than the generic realignment from epic to romance that scholars have already noted. Broadly speaking, this particular episode is determined by the larger cultural and institutional changes that underpinned what R. I. Moore has called the ‘creation of a persecuting society’, which had its roots in the twelfth century, when, as I have already mentioned, this version of the motif was popularized by Peter Comestor. But the episode can also be mapped onto other recent works of scholarship, which I have discussed in Berceo’s representation of the Jews (see chapter 1). It is another of those ‘gentile tales’ that supports Miri Rubin’s thesis about ‘the narrative assault on latemedieval Jews’ (1999); it is also, as we shall see, especially interesting in light of David Nirenberg’s chapter on Easter celebrations in his Communities of Violence (1996: 200–30).

26 The relevant passages from the different recensions of Historia de preliis have been identified by Willis (1934: 93–94); see also Bañeza Román (1994: 116–31). Although the legend of Gog and Magog is not mentioned, it was also at times confused with that of the lost tribes. For the convoluted relationship between the two see Anderson (1932: 58–86), Cary (1956: 130–34), and Michael (1982: esp. 138–40). 27 The idea derives from Petrus Comestor, who had erroneously attributed it to Josephus.

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This encounter with the Jews is constructed out of a series of motifs, which recur throughout other versions of the legend. They are commonplaces of medieval and much later Jew-hatred, and are easily enumerated. To begin, these people are represented as an infinite crowd (‘tan grand muchedumbre que non serién contadas’, 2101d), physically massed together (‘muchas gentes en uno ajuntadas’, 2101c), and rendered coherent through common language, culture, and religion: Todos en un lenguaje fablavan su razón, trayén costumbres propias todos en su missión, encontra orïente fazién su oración. (2102a–c)

At this stage in the narrative, this crowd is characterized in neutral terms; but like all unidentified crowds it carries within it the threat of the unknown and of difference. The final line of the stanza just quoted, however, marks a transition towards a more overtly judgmental representation, for it describes these people as ‘de flaca conplisión’ (2102d). This is probably a reference to the theory of the four humours rather than to the colour of their skin. The idea that the Jews possessed a weak, or feminine, complexion was not uncommon, and their lack of manliness and cowardice is emphasized on two further occasions.28 Despite reassurances, these people still pose an implicit threat, which is progressively revealed: they are treacherous (‘gentes a qui Dios fizo mucha de pïedat, / mas ellos non supieron guardarle lealtat’, 2104bc); contemptible and abject (‘caídos en esta mesquindat’, ‘malastrugos’, ‘mesquinos e lazrados’ (2104d, 2109a, 2109c); dirty (‘omnes astrosos’, ‘de suzia mantenencia, astrosillos barones’, 2105a, 2105c); and greedy (‘cobdician dineruelos más que gato pulmones’, 2105d). The poem makes it clear that they have been walled up as a punishment, but also to contain the threat of contagion, like so many lepers in a leper colony.29 But even after divine intervention, the sense of fear is maintained as, in the final stanzas of the episode, the Jews are conflated with the hostile forces of apocalytic visions: ‘avrán cerca la fin ende a estorcer, / avrán el mundo todo en quexa a meter’ (2115cd). They bear, as it were, the mark of Cain: their history and destiny are indissolubly linked with dissension and violence. Having rebelled against God, their kingdom and holy city were destroyed, and they became wretched survivors, not only witnesses to their own abjection but living metaphors for all forces of disorder that human society breeds and can barely contain. The poet strives to convey a

28 The anonymous sabio reassures Alexander that ‘non ayas qué temer, / non te puede por éstas nul embargo nacer’ (2103cd), and contemptuously remarks that they are ‘de flacos coraçones, / non valen por en armas más que sendos cabrones’ (2105ab). For other discussions of the feminized Jew, see Mirrer on the Poema de mio Cid (1994: 179–81). 29 For the association between Jew and leper, see Moore (1987: 64–65, 97–98) and Nirenberg (1996: 62–68).


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sense of real and present danger: Alexander, although safely on the other side of the pass, asks and hears about ‘estas gentes’ (2103b & d), ‘esta mesquindat’ (2104d), ‘aquí metidos [. . .] aquí cerrados’ (2109d), ‘esta foz’ (2110d). After God’s intervention, the narrative perspective alters, as the poet concludes: ‘fasta la fin del mundo [. . .] han ý de yazer’ (2115c). The shift from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is an attempt to contain the threat of contagion within a narrative, even visual, boundary, which is buttressed by the transcendental authority of the anonymous sage (‘el sabio’) and the book (‘diz el escripto, que bien es de creer’, 2115a). What is the nature of this contagion? Projected onto the Jews are fears of various categories of disorder and pollution: physical, gender, economic, moral, religious, political, and perhaps even demographic, because the shifting boundaries of the Christian states and the expulsions from Al-Andalus brought more Jews into the Castilian orbit. How one interprets the contrasting representations of the Jews – their freedom on the one hand, and their enclosure on the other – raises an interesting methodological problem. One could argue that the narrative structure inscribes a linear development in attitudes, mirroring the shift from so-called ‘open’ to ‘closed’ societies, a broad and progressive historical structure that has been traced in different ways and domains by historians such as Friedrich Heer (1962), R. I. Moore (1987), and John Boswell (1980). Whereas I think some of the poem’s more virulent details do undermine established Augustinian arguments for tolerating the Jews (they are reminders of difference, but also of what Christians could become), I would be cautious about resolving contradictions through a sequential reading of the episodes, not least because the poet later recalls the free or protected status of the Jews in his depiction of Alexander’s tent. The images co-exist because they appeal to different interests, and are an instance of convivencia at an ideological level: the Jews are signs of imperial sovereignty, burgeoning ecclesiastical militancy, and popular urban resentment. Later, these conflicting interests found an outlet in the ritualized violence of the Easter celebrations, as Nirenberg has argued (1996: 200–30; see also above, chapter 1). This historian’s analysis, which offers a salutary warning against the dangers of teleological periodization, brings out a range of multiple meanings inherent in the violence, some of which we might call stabilizing, others the contrary. [. . .] [Holy Week violence] was also a comment on the nature of power, establishing as it did an opposition between uncorrupted sacred power and the many compromises of political and economic power. (1996: 227–28)

The idea that anti-judaic violence expressed broader power relations is particularly suggestive and prompts new readings of the enclosure episode. There are two spaces of enclosure in the poem, the second being Alexander’s tent, where all diversity and difference are reconciled in subjection to an all-encompassing

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imperial unity whose very existence is predicated upon ‘the many compromises of political and economic power’. Although the poet’s political anxieties are evident in other ways, linking two moments of enclosure turns Alexander’s betrayal of God’s uncorrupted order into a more obvious echo of the paradigmatic treachery of the Jews. At the risk of forcing the text, Alexander and the Jews are also linked at the level of metaphor. The Jews, allegedly worthless warriors, are compared to goats (‘non valen por en armas más que sendos cabrones’, 2105b), and so is Alexander: he is ‘el cabrón mal domado’ (1339c), who destroys the ram in Daniel’s prophecy (Daniel 8, 20–21; see also 1802). The diametrically opposed meanings of the goat, both feeble and ferocious, are reconciled in the ultimate worthlessness of all military and secular power when confronted by divine omnipotence. The Jews are present in the poem not simply as a contemporary people, however. The poet is also fascinated by the ideological potential of Old Testament history, and by the metaphoric possibilities of an individual Jew. These categories – the collective, the historical, and the individual – certainly overlap, but they open up different perspectives that are not easily reduced to simple generalizations about ‘the Jews’. The individual Jew is called Apelles, and he makes significant contributions to the narrative, building and decorating the tombs of Darius’s wife and of Darius himself, the marriage bed of Alexander and Darius’s daughter Roxana, and, at the end of the poem, Alexander’s famous tent, where the Greek receives the tributes of his world empire. The two tombs and the tent are examples of the rhetorical set piece of ecphrasis: finely wrought descriptions of objects inscribed with a narrative. This Jew, then, is a story-teller within a story, and his tales form an important counterpoint to the main narrative. Having said that, it is important to note that the poet does not draw overt attention to his Jewishness. He is identified as ‘Apeles el ebreo’ only on his first appearance (1239a). Moreover, his Jewish identity is the result of a confusion in his source between the legendary Greek painter (fourth century BCE) and a Jew called Apelles in Horace’s Satires (I, v, 100).30 Nonetheless, for reasons I shall explain, I do not believe he or his Jewishness can be ignored. Symptomatic of the Spanish poet’s handling of his source (Walter’s Alexandreis, IV, 176–274) is his version of Apelles’s construction of a tomb for Darius’s wife (1239–49). Sculpted in marble, this tomb portrays numerous

30 He first appears in Alexandreis IV, 179: ‘celeber digitis Hebreus Apelles’ who built a tomb for Darius’s wife (see also IV, 218), then for Darius himself (VII, 384, 393, 421). Although Walter mentions his knowledge of Hebrew scripture (Daniel’s prophecy) and history he is identified as a Jew only on his first appearance. None of the glossators published by Colker (Walter of Châtillon 1978) comments on his Jewish origins. Indeed, the only one to annotate Apelles simply calls him ‘optimus pictor’, with a reference to Horace (Walter of Châtillon 1978: 412–13). As Townsend points out, Walter also mentions him in his Tractatus contra Iudeos (Walter of Châtillon 1996: 195).


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Biblical scenes, figures, and prophets, allegedly to illustrate the ancient nobility of Darius’s wife (Walter of Châtillon 1996: 197). In El libro, however, Walter’s account is substantially compressed, and it ends in quite a different manner with allusions to the triumvirate of David, Solomon, Rehoboam, powerful leaders all of whose reigns ended in discord and rebellion.31 Instead of a genealogy for a dead empress, therefore, the Jewish craftsman provides a prophetic genealogy for a future emperor, pointedly closing his narrative with an explicit reference to Rehoboam’s violent reign: ‘Roboam en el regno metié asma e vando; / es día fue su obra Apelles encerrando’ (1247cd). As if to underscore the point, the Spanish poet describes how the Persians crowded around to marvel at the many appropriate stories: ‘tant’eran las estorias muchas e adïanas, / que sedién sobre’l cúmulo las gentes persïanas’ (1248cd). These stories, given priority over marginal pagan history (literally on the edges of the tomb), are witnessed, but their ‘aptness’ (‘adïanas’) is unseen. Yet again, we have the motif of the open secret, as the Spanish poet turns the Jew into a knowing and ironic commentator on Alexander himself, and, from a larger perspective, on the rise and fall of kingdoms. This ability to combine perspectives, the local and the transcendental, is perhaps one of the reasons why the Spanish poet embellishes and expands upon Walter’s praise of Apelles, gathering together the incidental references to the artist’s skill, and clustering them together at the beginning and end of the ecphrasis (1239 and1249).32 But the Spanish text restructures the original in another way: at the start of Book IV (25), Walter has the eunuch Tyriotes bring Darius news of the approach of Alexander. The Spanish poet pushes this further forward in time, until after the ecphrasis on the tomb of Darius’s wife. This is, to be sure, a minor detail, but it has a calculated effect: to produce a seamless join in historical events, strengthening the connection between the tumultuous discord of Biblical narrative, where earthly kingdoms succeed one another in strife, and the transition in power between Darius and Alexander. Those who, on different poetic levels, give voice to this metanarrative are the Jew, the eunuch, and the Spanish poet himself. I shall return to the implications of this parallel later, but for the moment, I want to emphasize how the tomb for Darius’s wife combines elements that will be repeated in each of the other symbolic monuments constructed by Apelles. Just as the first tomb foregrounds Jewish history, so the ecphrasis on Darius’s tomb adds a reference to

31 David was involved in a dispute with his eldest sons: first Absalom, then Adonijah who bitterly rejected David’s preference for Solomon (see, e.g., I Kings 11–14). 32 ‘Erexit celeber digitis Hebreus Apelles’ (IV, 179) becomes: ‘Apelles el ebreo, un maestro contado, / que de lavor de manos non ovo tan ortado, / entalló el sepulcro en un mármol preciado, / él se maravillava quand lo ovo labrado’ (1239). Indeed, portraying Apelles’s wonderment at his own handiwork has a structural function, because it looks forward to the completion of the tomb, when the Spanish narrator – unlike the Latin poet – returns to praise Apelles once more: ‘el seso de Apelles será siempre contado’ (1249d).

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the Old Testament ruler Saul (1794b) and makes the Israelites, like the Greeks and the Romans (1794a), witnesses to the inevitable transience of empire. This sepulchre also provides the poet with an opportunity to eulogize his own mester, by describing Apelles as if he were a medieval cleric: ‘clérigo bien letrado, / todo su ministerio tenié bien decorado’ (1800cd). An integral part of this ‘ministerio’, as the poet’s reelaboration of the monument to Roxana suggests, is the ability to combine perspectives and to show how the here and now is indissolubly conjoined to the eternal. I would argue that this idea of a seamless vision of events resurfaces, albeit in metaphorical terms, on Darius’s tomb. For the various components of this sepulchre, we learn, are assembled with such skill that it appears to be an indivisible whole: Apelles, en comedio, obró la sepoltura, la tunba de primero, después la cobertura, las basas en tres guisas, de comunal mesura, tant’eran bien juntadas, non parecié juntura. (1791)

The idea is repeated at the end of the passage, when the poet exlaimed ‘non parecié juntura – ¡tant’era bien lavrado!’ (1803c). His admiration is all the more notable given that Walter had said precisely the opposite, finding beauty in the golden seams that held together the different parts of the monument (VII, 379–430, at 385–88).33 This monument is, in a sense, also a monument to the poet’s own desire to forge a unified vision of events out of a varied panoply of episodes and literary sources.34 As he adapts Walter’s account of Darius’s epitaph he inscribes not only Daniel’s prophecy of Alexander’s conquest of Asia, but also the poem’s larger obsession with betrayal: Aquí yaz’ el carnero los dos cuernos del qual quebrantó Alexandre, de Grecia natural; Narbazanes e Bessus, compaña desleal, estos dos lo mataron con traïción mortal. (1802)

Once again, the poet uses a Jew to provide the audience with an overarching view which links two betrayals – first of Darius, then of Alexander – in a cycle of conquest and death. 33 Seamlessness of a different order is also implicit in the marriage bed, or ‘tálamo’, built for Alexander and Roxana (1962–63). Here, the Jew, with ineffable ‘maestría’, constructs a monument to the smooth transition of imperial power; or, I should say, a monument to the secular ideal of political continuity, because, as the poem ultimately proves, in the temporal world such aspirations are inevitably betrayed. 34 See Arizaleta (1999: 143–44), the only scholar to draw attention to the implications of Apelles’s role in the poem. On the poem’s structural and underlying thematic unity, see Uría Maqua (2000: 200–06, esp. 203) who draws principally on the analysis of Cañas (Libro de Alexandre 1988: 34–70, esp. 69–70).


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The final monument constructed by Apelles is Alexander’s fabulously bejewelled tent (2539–94).35 On its four walls he painted a panoptic vision of the world, its geography and history, with the final panel offering a narrative of Alexander’s conquests that comes to rest – ominously enough – with the betrayal and murder of Darius. Although woven from a myriad of pieces, these were stitched together so tightly that overall it appeared as one seamless fabric: ‘como era bien preso e bien endereçado, / nol desvisarié omne do era ajuntado’ (2542cd). Just as this digression slows down but can never hold off Alexander’s inevitable demise, so the ecphrasis itself – the months of the year, the scenes from the Bible and classical myth, and Alexander’s own life – arrests passing Time in a moment of stillness. Clearly, the tent is an emblem of empire in its temporal and spatial dimensions. As I have mentioned, in the course of the thirteenth century jurists would attempt to develop more positive, vivifying notions of Time, encapsulated by such maxims as imperium semper est and universitas non moritur: individual rulers may die, and customs may change, but the empire and its communities will remain in a state of immanent continuity (Kantorowicz 1957: 294–95). Such principles took time to establish, and they were not unchallenged. The complexities and uncertainties of the process are already mapped out on Alexander’s tent, which is both a celebration of his achievements and a memento mori. That this monument to empire and to a man brought low by pride should be constructed by a Jew is a telling detail. It recalls Augustinian arguments about the Jews as a chosen but fallen race, an exemplar of Providential history, but with the added twist that it is a Jew himself who is entrusted with the act of witnessing. Jews may be sequestered and walled up, but Jewish writing and history provide the indispensable ground of Christianity. What is more, the Jew Apelles is transformed into a ‘clérigo letrado’, an alter ego of the poet himself, as Arizaleta has already pointed out (1999: 143–44). I think the implications of this association could be taken further. The Jew works for Alexander, celebrating his achievements in a series of monumental narratives that also provide a running commentary on the fate of his and every empire. Just as the Jew straddles two world orders, being both insider and outsider in God’s providential scheme, so the new clerical caste was defined by what Francisco Rico called its ‘dualidad constitutiva’, aspiring to view the here and now from an eternal perspective. The clerical author understands that political empires, like intellectual ones, are desirable and necessary, yet morally and spiritually suspect when viewed sub specie aeternitatis.36 As Arizaleta has argued, he adapts

35 The materials for this passage constitute a ‘free reworking’ of versions of the French Roman d’Alexandre; see Willis (1935: 41–46, at p. 46); see also Michael (1970: 267–69), and Cacho Blecua (1985). 36 Similarly, Augustine argued that the universal peace desired by the earthly city was undeniably good, but nothing when compared to the transcendental peace offered by the

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his source in such a way as to create a book that both promotes the ideals of his patrons and also creates a space for critique. The widely noted ambivalence towards the protagonist is a symptom of the writer’s own ambivalent position, affiliated to but not aligned with his immediate masters. Consequently, the poem displays ‘une certain idée du pouvoir, mais il ne constitue pas l’oeuvre d’un commis écrivain de la royauté’ (Arizaleta 1999: 261). Although I believe that the poem is fundamentally about the scope and limitations of monarchical power, I would not say that its relevance was restricted to that, and for two reasons. The ideologies of secular empire that were in the process of being developed were heavily modelled on those of the Church, and given theoretical form by a clerical caste also engaged in defining the boundaries of the ecclesiastical imperium. When Innocent III became pope in 1198, there was considerable disagreement about the temporal power of the papacy, yet Innocent’s subsequent pronouncements and interventions in secular politics appeared like ‘uninhibited assertions of extreme theocratic principles. He described himself as “lower than God but higher than man.” Quoting St Bernard, but with a slight change in wording that altered the whole meaning of the phrase, he declared that Peter was given “not only the universal church but the whole world to govern” ’ (Tierney 1980: 127–38, at p. 128). When set in this broader historical context, the anxieties underlying the poem’s representation of empire seem even more acute. These tensions emerge most succinctly at a symbolic level, in the manner of Alexander’s death. At one point, the poet moves away from his main Latin source to draw on versions that provide a more elaborate and dramatic vision of the hero’s betrayal, doubly poisoned by a drink and an emetic feather. He is finally killed off not because he drinks from the poisoned chalice, but because he tries to save himself by using a ‘péñola’ in a vain attempt to make himself vomit: Metió el rey la péñola por amor de tornar, non podrié peor fuego en su cuerpo entrar, enveninó las venas que pudo alcançar, en lugar de guarir, fízolas peorar. (2617)

This feather is at once an instrument of God’s justice and of betrayal. But it is also a symbolic feather, a quill, an instrument of writing that stands for the ultimate ‘trahison des clercs’. The undercurrent of treachery links poet and Jew, the archetypal traitor, in a metaphoric bond that throws into relief the ambivalence of the writer’s position. Attachment to God makes him betray political ideals; attachment to political ideals is a betrayal of God.

city of God; see especially De civitate Dei XV, 4. For Kratz (1980), Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis is a ‘mocking epic’ that scorns the warrior’s misplaced heroism, based as it is on fundamentally earthly objectives. Although he is right to point up the poem’s moral dimension, I find his reading too one-sided.

4

The Birth of a Nation: Feudal Fictions in El poema de Fernán González With the exception of María Eugenia Lacarra’s important analysis of the political antagonism between Castile and Navarre (1979), the politics of El poema de Fernán González have been discussed only on the most general level. That this epic promotes a nationalist agenda is accepted by all: Castile is the true inheritor of the Visigothic legacy, and as such leads the way in the fight against Islam.1 This reading, while broadly accurate, needs to be fleshed out by more detailed textual analysis and a wider frame of reference. For in the process of promoting Castilian hegemony, the poem reveals much more. As we shall now see, its representation of nationhood rests upon a particular, and ultimately rather anxious, vision of the political and economic organization of the feudal state and its relationship to violence.

Structures of freedom Since its conclusion has not survived, Alfonso X’s historians will have to speak for the clerical author of El poema de Fernán González at the climactic moment of the first count’s life. And in their words, it was thanks to his leadership and cunning that ‘salieron los castellanos de premia et de servidumbre et del poder de León et de los leoneses’ (Alfonso X 1977: II, 422). The Poema is one direct textual source for much of the chronicle, but there is no need to speculate upon the precise wording of its lost conclusion. In general terms, both epic and chronicle have as their basic narrative framework a foundational legend based upon the struggle for political emancipation. It is, however, an emancipation structured in domination: Castilian freedom is predicated upon being subject to a particular set of ideological constraints. This process is crucial to the way the poem represents a formative period in Spanish history, when Castile acquired an identity and a mission, to become the ‘cabeza de España’. In this respect, the key term, in both chronicle and epic, is premia.

1 See pp. 23–24, above for further references. There, I also address the interpretative problems posed by the fragmentary and corrupt state of the text and by the difficulties in dating.

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Certainly, premia and its cognate forms occur only eight times in the surviving fragment of El poema; but it appears at critical junctures in the narrative of emancipation.2 It connotes not so much a state of oppression — though the struggle for autonomy is certainly the plot that drives and structures the poem — as an ideological process. The term triggers a set of beliefs and values that concern some of the central problems of feudal power: land and the peasants who work it; territorial jurisdiction, i.e. the supremacy of Castile as allegedly natural leader of Hispania; and the balance of power between Church and State. In other words, premia is ideological in that it gives a sense of experiential rightness to particular forms of social and political organization: rather than suggesting mere affective state of being oppressed, the word sets in motion a set of ‘action-oriented’ beliefs which, although not always articulated on a rational level, nevertheless exert a powerful influence on practical life (Eagleton 1991: 47–51) The point may be clarified when we consider when the word is first introduced. In only his second speech in the poem, Fernán González prays for divine aid: Señor, ha luengo tiempo que viven [los castellanos] mala vida, son mucho apremiados de la gent descreída. [. . .] Señor, contigo cuedo atanto conquerir por que aya Castiella de premia a salir.3

Before this point, coita is the principal term used to describe the life of the Christians under the Moors after the fall of the Visigothic kingdom. It connotes the shame of being leaderless, landless, afraid, without food or shelter, and – less obviously perhaps – the betrayal of destiny and contamination of bloodlines. As the poet exclaims in his opening invocation: Contarvos he primero de cómmo la [tierra] perdieron nuestros antecessores, en quál coita visquieron; commo omnes deserdados fuidos andodieron; ¡essa rabia llevaron que ende non morieron! Muchas coitas passaron nuestros antecessores, muchos malos espantos, muchos malos sabores, sufrién frío e fanbre e muchos amargores. (3–4c)

After the defeat of don Rodrigo, coita is again used to describe the shame, panic, political and social disorder, and famine suffered by the Christians See Geary’s concordance (1987), s.v. ‘premja’, ‘primja’, and ‘aprimjados’. Stanzas 187ab and 190cd. Unless otherwise indicated, I follow the most widely available edition by Juan Victorio (Poema 1981). I add accents, adjust the word separation according to modern usage, and use ‘c’ (not ‘ç’) before ‘i’ and ‘e’. More recent editions by Muro (Poema 1994), López Guil (Libro 2001), and Hernando Pérez (Poema 2001) differ in orthography, reconstruction of stanzas, occasional line order, and metrics; I note below the few occasions where these differences affect my reading. 2 3

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

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(89–114), but with an important new dimension: betrayal of the past, and contamination of the future. The loss of España betrays both God and their ancestors, who were guardians of a divinely bestowed territory (99–100); the tribute to the Moors of ‘cien donzellas fermosas que fuessen por casar’ (104b) compromises the purity of the Visigothic bloodline. Coita resurfaces after the death of Alfonso el Casto to describe the discord caused by the loss of a powerful leader (161a). In short, when, in the pit of despair, the Christians exclaim ‘Mucho nos valdrié más que nunca ser nascidos’ (161d) they are giving voice to the essence of coita as it is used up to this point: coita is suffering shorn of desire. The greatest lack is the will to power. With the introduction of Fernán González, the discourse undergoes a powerful shift in emphasis, from coita to premia – from the condition of virtual nonexistence to the desire to recover life, defined by the possession of land, and with it a political structure and a place in history. Though the ideological issues develop in complexity in the course of the narrative, their basis is laid in the three speeches that mark the hero’s entrance upon the scene. Fernán González’s first speech is a prayer (179–82), following the discovery of his true identity as the rightful leader of Castile. The context of this prayer – the folkloric motif of the hero’s abduction by a carbonero and his subsequent lowly upbringing – is complex and important, and I shall return to it later. In a characteristically defiant tone, Fernán González attributes Christian coita (179d) to Fortune and, challenging Christ to ‘mudar la rueda’ (180b), he declares: ‘Señor, ya tienpo era de salir de cavañas, / que non só yo osso bravo por vevir en montañas’ (181ab).4 This prayer, structured around the refrain ‘tienpo era’ (180a, 181a, 181c), invests Castile with a teleology: rustic isolation in a mountain hut is the hero’s (and his people’s) childhood; his manhood, and that of Castile’s, is measured by his power to assume leadership, cross boundaries and frontiers, and enter upon the world stage: tienpo es ya que sepan de mí las mis compañas e yo sepa d’el mundo e las cosas estrañas. [. . .] si yo d’aquí non salgo nunca valdré un figo. (181cd; 182d)

The logic of natural Castilian supremacy is explicit in the second prayer (185–90), uttered with even greater urgency after Fernán González has returned to his people. Demanding divine aid in his quest to avenge the defeat by Islam, he claims that the Castilians are ‘apremiados’ by the pagans (187b), but also, in a significant new twist, that ‘yazemos cativos de todos los d’España: / los señores ser siervos téngolo por fazaña’ (188cd). The condition of premia becomes an unnatural inversion of the rightful hierarchy. As vassals of the Lord, and under his leadership, Fernán González claims for his Castilian

4

The comparison will be repeated: ‘tornada es Castiella una pobre cabaña’ (608d).

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followers the right of conquest, in lines that echo Alexander’s justification of his imperial adventure: seyendo tu vassallo, non me quieras fallir; Señor, contigo cuedo atanto conquerir por que aya Castiella de premia a salir. (190bcd)5

The transformation of coita into premia provides the framework for these two opening prayers. The first begins with a reference to coita (179d), the second concludes with an emphasis on premia (190d). This framework of transformation entails the move from passive guilt to the desire for vengeance; from the loss of land and the means of subsistence to the desire for territorial expansion; from lack of leadership to subjection to a powerful lord; and from spiritual exile to the recovery of the Visigoths’ providential status as God’s chosen people. Consequently, the ideology of premia entails the desire for agency, and creates for Castile a natural place in Providential history, in a process that mirrors Alfonso X’s manipulation of Visigothic history and heritage in the Estoria de España (Deyermond 1984–85). The third speech reasserts and extends the equation between struggle and existence. When first confronted by the armies of ‘Almanzor’ (the cultural type, not the later historical figure), Fernán González summons a war council.6 One of his men, Gonzalo Díaz, argues that it is better to arrange a truce, and pay tribute, rather than be annihilated by the far superior forces of Islam (202–07). What is initially presented as a sensible strategy, couched in moderate terms, is of course nothing more than an easily refuted straw argument, uttered by a fictional character conjured up for the occasion (Chalon 1976, 411). Leaving aside the crudeness of this rhetorical technique, Fernán González’s reply effectively summarizes the ideology of premia. The first part of the speech continues the association between submission and death, life and conquest (210), and reaffirms how premia inverts the natural hierarchy:

5 See Alexander’s promise to free Greece from the shame of being subject to Persian rule: ‘Mas vivré con rencura, morré con repentencia, / si de premia de Dario non saco yo a Grecia’ (Libro de Alexandre, 46bc). The similarities between the speeches of Alexander and Fernán González were pointed out by Muro (1994: 17) and developed by Uría Maqua (2000: 337–38). 6 For Chalon, the presence of Almanzor is ‘un anachronisme flagrant’, since during the life of Fernán González the leaders of Islamic Spain were Abd al-Rahman III and his successor al-Hakam II (1976: 418–19; see also 431–36). Chalon is certainly right to say that the poem offers ‘une vision fort simpliste du monde islamique’ (433), but as West explains, this simplification is an inherent part of oral and folk narrative (1983: 81–82, 86–87, 146). The fullest treatment of the poem’s relation to history is by Cotrait (1997); for a useful synthesis, see also López Guil (Libro 2001: 123–28).


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Por la tregua aver por algo que pechemos, de señores que somos vassallos nos fariemos; en logar que a Castiella de la premia saquemos, la premia en que era doblárgela y emos. (211)

In addition to taking on an explicitly economic dimension with the reference to pechar, the unnatural condition of premia also begins to acquire a moral value. Although the following stanza is not transparently clear, Fernán González appears to associate peace through tribute with deceit: Por engaño ganar non ha cosa peor, quien cayere en est’ fecho cadrá en grand error; por defender engaño murió el Salvador: más val ser engañado que non engañador. (212)

Appeasement is a lie which betrays not only their obligation as Christians to uphold what they consider to be truth, but also, as the following two stanzas make clear, their ancestral debt of loyalty. But loyalty to what? The range of the concept is gradually revealed. In the first instance, Fernán González stresses the inherited obligation to maintain economic and territorial autonomy: Nuestros antecessores lealtad aguardaron, sobre las otras tierras ellos la heredaron. [. . .] eredar non quisieron pora menos valer lo que ellos non podiessen enpeñar nin vender. (213ab; 214cd)

The concept of loyalty then acquires political and military force, as Fernán González recalls the Castilians’ ancestral debt of absolute loyalty to their leaders (215). This entailed more than just dying in battle to protect their lord, but also forgiving his possible sins: Non deve otra cosa ý seer olvidada: porque’l señor fiziesse cosa desaguisada, ellos nunca l’fizieron saña vieja alçada, mas sienpre lealtat lealmientre pagada. (216)7

The admonition is clear. In the context of this speech, however, it is important to note that the debt of unconditional loyalty possesses a temporal force: absolute submission to one’s lord should not be compromised by errors of past leaders, and it means putting aside ‘saña vieja’, that rebellious feuding spirit which is a leit-motif of various epics (Victorio in Poema 1981: 90; see also

7 In this stanza I follow the reading of Muro, López Guil, and Hernando Pérez, rather than Victorio who introduces some unnecessary emendation.

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Vaquero 1994, and, for French analogues, Calin 1962). What is implied by the injunction to suppress long-standing resentments is revealed in the very next stanza (217), when the poet introduces Rodrigo’s defeat and the consequent ‘fall of Spain’. El poema attempts a delicate balancing act between preserving the causal association between sin and divine retribution, and attenuating Rodrigo’s role in this historical drama. When, therefore, towards the end of his speech, Fernán González promises to free Castile from ‘premia e d’error’ (222c), one of the things this means is freedom from the sins of the past. As I shall explain, in this version of events Rodrigo’s sin is purged not simply in the moral sense of atonement, but also in the sense of being purged from the historical record. Though fallible, Rodrigo is ‘el buen rey’ whose defeat was brought about by ‘el mortal enemigo’ (217ab) and a general act of betrayal whereby the Visigoths neglected their military heritage. Instead of sin, what the Castilians inherit and what should remain in the collective memory is the desire for conquest. Set free from their narrow territorial bounds, and aware of being the few against the many, they should engage in a heroic struggle to recuperate their lost legacy: ‘lo que ellos ovieron a nos es d’heredar’ (220b). The victory which Fernán González promises his men will certainly liberate them from ‘premia e d’error’, but this emancipation is also predicated upon the group’s willing subordination to its leader. Picking up an earlier thematic thread (215), Fernán González concludes ‘de todos los d’España faredes me el mejor: / será grand la mi onra e la vuestra mayor’ (224cd).8 In short, the ideology of premia sets up a chain of associations whereby Castilian emancipation is indissolubly bound up with particular forms of identity that lend structure to the group. Freedom from oppression means recuperating an ancestral identity – the Visigothic legacy – and expanding its possibilities. Castilians will become the standard-bearers of Christianity, who are defined by their desire for territorial expansion, and their willing submission to political and religious authority, as loyal vassals of Fernán González and God. In more abstract terms, their political identity is structured by the same dialectic that characterizes the representation of empire in the Libro de Alexandre, according to which a centralizing authority is required as a counterweight to political and territorial growth (see chapter 3). The emergence of a new feudal state from the fragments of León demands mechanisms that can produce unity, at least at an ideological level. The ideas sketched above are not all introduced with the appearance of Fernán González; but he is their most coherent and powerful embodiment. The 8 The poem’s depiction of authoritarianism held an obvious appeal to historians of Francoist tendencies, such as Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, who put the legend to political uses in ways that are apparant from titles of some of his books: Fernán González, el héroe que hizo a Castilla (1952), and La España del siglo X: castellanos y leoneses, navarros y gallegos, musulmanes y judíos, y en la cima un hombre de hierro (1983). For a critique of Pérez de Urbel’s brand of nationalist history, see Linehan (1993: 113–14).


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opening historical survey (the annals of the Visigothic kings, the Islamic invasion, the eulogy of ‘Spain’, and so forth) together with the main narrative that follows three speeches I have just analysed also illustrate – and problematize – the feudal power structures that define Castile.

Homeland security I would argue that it is impossible to understand the politics of El poema de Fernán González without taking into account its preoccupation with land and nationhood. After all, the action of the poem is driven by the hero’s fight to protect Castile’s new boundaries from Islam and Navarre, as well as to secure its political independence from León. The poet’s representation of land, however, has to be analysed from two related perspectives. The most obvious of these is political: land in the sense of a geopolitical or national space whose boundaries need to be defined and protected. As I have explained in the introduction, considerable care needs to be taken in distinguishing medieval from modern notions of nationhood. Moreover, in order to historicize how the poem represents Castile as a political territory, or putative nation, it is also important to understand how Castilla is inflected by the second usage of the term ‘land’: its agricultural sense as a material productive force, the prime source of wealth under feudalism. It is not a question of conforming to a crude base / superstructure model, whereby economic structures inevitably determine what is thinkable at an ideological level. It is a question of appreciating the interdependence between concepts and the material conditions that give them specific forms at a specific historical juncture. For the purposes of analysis, I shall begin with those passages and features of the text that represent land and agrarian labour as a productive force. It is important to remember, however, that this is an analytic category, used to clarify the exposition of my argument; as I shall eventually show, it is inseparable from the poem’s ideological representation of land as the basis for social and political organization. Although the well-known motif of the laus Hispaniae (145–59) might seem the most obvious place to start, it is not in fact the first passage in which the agrarian world is depicted in the poem.9 Indeed, scholars seem to have overlooked how central agrarian society is to the poet’s representation of that foundational moment in Iberian history, the Islamic invasion. In his particular version of events, the fall of the Visigothic kingdom is not explicitly the result of Rodrigo’s sexual sin and Julián’s vengeance. In sharp contrast to other

9 For a useful overview of the theme of laus Hispaniae, focussing on Jiménez de Rada, see Fernández Valverde (1986); for a broader range of analogues and traditions, see Hernando Pérez (Poema 2001: 54–59), Nagore de Zand (1988–89), and Reckert (1967).

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versions in chronicle and ballad, El poema seems to make only the most indirect reference to any wrongdoing on Rodrigo’s part (‘por culpa en que era no le era Dios amigo’, 35d), and it strategically relies on the audience’s familiarity with the myths of rape and revenge to fill in the details of the narrative.10 Whatever the causes of the invasion, El poema is far more concerned with the circumstances that made possible the victory of Islam and the collapse of the Visigothic kingdom. And on this point the poet could hardly be more explicit: the ‘fall of Spain’ is brought about by the fact that Hispania is no longer a society organized for war. Believing themselves secure from outside threat, the Visigoths are persuaded to beat their swords into ploughshares and dedicate themselves to tilling the land. As a contributing factor to the Visigothic defeat the motif of disarmament is not unique to El poema; it occurs, for example, in the earlier chronicle accounts by Lucas de Tuy and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada. Although the consequences are the same, there are fundamental differences both in emphasis and detail, which are part of broader ideological patterns specific to each work. This is not the place for a thorough comparison between the representation of the fall in El poema and the earlier chronicles. Suffice it to say that in order to salvage the purity of the Castilians’ Visigothic heritage, the epic plays down the sexual corruption in Church and State which is a major theme in the chronicles, and in place of their vision of physical, moral, and spiritual decadence, offers instead a more overtly political view of a world in disarray.11

10 The poet’s reliance on popular knowledge of the episode is evident in the phrase ‘commo avedes oído’ (42a) when he first introduces Yllán. He declares that the latter’s ‘grand ira’ makes him betray Rodrigo (43a), but does not detail the causes of the conflict beyond the general reference to Rodrigo’s ‘culpa’ (35d). It should be pointed out, however, that there is a line missing between the eulogy of Rodrigo’s military feats (36ab) and final line of the quatrain, ‘commo perdió la tierra, esto es grand dolor’ (35d). The poet’s curse upon the followers of Witiza (41a), one of whom was Yllán, appears to be an allusion to another popular account, according to which Rodrigo was betrayed by a political faction opposed to his election as King. In short, the clerical poet engages with his audience by acknowledging various written and oral versions of the episode, only to make them subordinate to his particular vision. For a useful, though analytically vague, comparison of epic and chronicle accounts of this episode, which also acknowledges the possible debt to oral legend, see Chalon (1974–79). For a convenient anthology of relevant texts on the ‘fall’, see Smith (1988–92: I, 8–29). 11 The parallels between El poema and the Latin chronicles have been recognized since Marden’s edition, whose notes to the relevant lines contain useful extracts from both Lucas de Tuy and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (Poema 1904: xxxv and 166). For more detailed treatment, see Hernando Pérez (Poema 2001: 48–69). In Jiménez de Rada’s Historia de rebus Hispaniae (or Historia gothica), Witiza destroys city fortifications as a means of consolidating his evil regime (Bk II, ch. 16). But this is one relatively minor factor in his complex account of the fall of the Visigothic kingdom. For the most part, he attributes Islamic victory to the fact that the traditional fortitude and virility of the Visigoths has been sapped by years of peace and decadence; by their leaders’ corruption and the treachery of


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In his opening invocation, the poet declares that his epic will be about the loss and recovery of land (2–3). But as the subsequent historical survey unfolds, it is clear that the recovery of land entails the recovery of a Visigothic heritage, constituted by particular forms of social, religious, and political organization. ‘Lo que ellos ovieron, a nos es d’heredar’, claims Fernán González in his third speech (220b). How this heritage is constructed may be briefly summarized. The poet combines a variety of claims about the Visigoths which gained increasing currency during the thirteenth century: they are the quintessential warrior caste (15–19), guided by the divine spirit (19–20), and, once converted to Catholicism, unsurpassed defenders of the true faith (23–25).12 The combination of military and Christian values finds its perfect embodiment in Rodrigo (35–36), and under his leadership Hispania lives in peace, unified both by their Christian belief and by the harmony between the three estates: Era estonce España toda d’una creencia. [. . .] Estavan las iglesias todas bien ordenadas, de olio e de cera estavan abastadas, los diezmos e premiencias lealmiente eran dadas, eran todas las gentes en la fe arraigadas. Vesquién de su lazerio todos los labradores; las grandes potestades non eran rovadores, guardavan bien sus pueblos com’ leales señores, vesquién de sus derechos los grandes e menores. (37a; 38–39)

Although, as I explain in my analysis of Elena y María (chapter 5), the three estates theory was first explicitly articulated in the Castilian vernacular by Alfonso X, it clearly underwrites this concept of social, political, and religious order. The emphasis which these stanzas place upon loyalty sets up a contrast

their own men; by famine and epidemics; by clerical licentiousness (Bk II, chs 16–24; Jiménez de Rada 1987; Fernández Valverde has also produced a Spanish translation, Jiménez de Rada 1989). Although Lucas de Tuy also attributes the defeat to sexual and religious corruption, he gives greater prominence than Jiménez de Rada to the weakening of military defences. Witiza’s destruction of town walls is compounded by Rodrigo’s decision to accept Julián’s advice and send his armies out of the kingdom, which was thus left defenceless before the Islamic invasion (Lucas de Tuy 2003, Bk III, chs 63–64). As we shall see, a variant of this idea reappears in El poema. Victorio also notes a variant of the disarmament motif in La condesa traidora, in which Fernán González’s son, Garci Fernández, is persuaded by his wife to disarm the county (Poema 1981: 54). 12 The poet’s antecedents were Jiménez de Rada (1987, Bk I, ch. 8), and Lucas de Tuy (2003, Bk II, chs 4–6), whose eulogies of the Visigoths may be traced back to Isidore’s Historia gothorum. For further discussion of the poet’s treatment of Castile as the inheritor of the Visigothic mantle, see Uría Maqua (2000: 332–35). This scholar, following Gimeno Casalduero (1968: 185), points out that in order to make the Visigothic connection, the poet first has to confuse the distinction between Castile and Asturias (333).

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with the treachery of Julián, whose betrayal can then be seen not as an act of personal revenge, but as the betrayal of a whole social structure.13 Julián persuades Rodrigo that since the boundaries of his kingdom are secure, he has no need of weapons and soldiers and that everyone, ‘peones e caveros’ (52a), should return to their lands and dedicate themselves to farming: ‘enriquescan tus reinos de pan e de dineros, / ca non has contra quien poner otros fronteros’ (52cd). Taken together, the two speeches by Julián and Rodrigo in which the process of disarmament is described are characterized by several important features. As the previous quotation indicates, one important motive for disarmament is the desire to produce material sustenance and wealth, a task which conventional wisdom assigned to the third estate. The poet is keen to emphasize how the consequent return to the land entails a restructuring of the social order, with caballeros and villanos pursuing the same goal. This new functional equality stands in ironic contrast to the equality described earlier: ‘estava la fazienda toda en igual estado’ (40a). By ‘equality’ the poet here means ‘harmony’, with each social estate fulfilling its separate, juridically ratified, role: ‘vesquién de sus derechos los grandes e menores’ (39d). The levelling of functional difference, the implication is, would also bring about the collapse of juridical difference. In addition to this, there are other levels of ironic contrast between the two social orders. In the early sections of El poema, the term heredad entails a cluster of associations linking the spiritual and military destiny of the Visigoths to their possession of land. Put another way, land is never represented independently as just a source of wealth; its representation is always inscribed with a particular set of values and social and political relationships, some of which have been examined in the discussion on premia. Therefore, when first Julián and then Rodrigo encourage the Visigoths to return to their ‘eredades’ (54b and 62d), the agricultural labour to which they now dedicate themselves stands in ironic contrast to the spiritual and military destiny which is previously described as their true inheritance. Moreover, this return to the land also carries with it a sense of domesticated immobilization. ‘Mas todos los varones a sus tierras se vayan / [. . .] / Labren sus eredades, vivan en sus posadas’ (53a, 54b), is Julián’s call, duly echoed by Rodrigo’s obviously catastrophic prediction that the Visigoths ‘non avrán ningún miedo, vivrán en sus posadas / [. . .] que viva cada uno en las sus eredades’ (61d, 62d). The new edict to live within the territorial limits of the individual’s clan contrasts with the Visigothic tradition of mobility and conquest, and even more emphatically with the later representation of Fernán González’s expansionism, which as we shall see is underpinned with symbolic patterns of growth. Dialectically, of course, the

13 For Marden (xxxiv) these stanzas are closely based upon the anonymous chronicle Epitoma imperatorum (754). This has since been disputed, in favour of the more likely influence of Lucas de Tuy; see Muro (1994: 25–26) and Uría Maqua (2000: 317–39).


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existence of frontiers assumes the possibility of movement, the crossing of boundaries (not just the need to defend them from within); consequently, the argument that there are no more frontiers to guard (e.g. 52d) certainly suggests peace, but also immobility. On an ideological level, these ironic contrasts are all related to the binary opposition between loyalty and betrayal. As I have already mentioned, the overriding function of this episode is to link Julián’s personal treachery with the subsequent collective betrayal of the Visigothic heritage. In part, this connection is forged rhetorically through the emphasis upon the juridical force of Rodrigo’s edict to disarm and return to the land. Whoever disobeys will be branded ‘traidor enemigo’ (66d), ‘traidor provado’ (67d). From the poet’s perspective, however, the real act of betrayal is committed by those who actually carry out the edict. The sheer absurdity of the notion that it is an offence for the warrior caste to carry arms would hardly have been lost on the audience (although the idea may have provoked wishful thinking on the part of harrassed peasants and priests who enjoyed the dubious benefits of the defensores’ ‘protection’). Less obvious in its irony is the repetition of the terms ‘paz’ and ‘pan’: evident social and material necessities in themselves, but as the primary criteria of social organization they are undermined by the context of deceit and betrayal. This process is intensified by the horrified fascination with which the poet dwells upon the transformation of arms into farm tools (63–64). Although Julián’s personal motive for revenge (the rape of his daughter) is not emphasized in this version of events, the poet still exploits the audience’s collective memory of his legendary treachery to colour perceptions of the larger and more profound social collapse unleashed by the new agricultural order: ‘trastornó el cimiento, cayeron las paredes’ (68c). By tainting the ignorant peasants with Julián’s guilt, the poet tries to maintain the traditional social, economic, and political subordination of the third estate: Teniénlo a grand bien los pueblos labradores non sabién la traición los malos pecadores; los que eran entendidos e bien entendedores dezién: ‘¡Mal sieglo ayan tales consejadores!’ (69)

Following the invasion itself and the defeat of Rodrigo, the poet does not at this point adopt Alfonso X’s strategy of explicitly demonizing the Islamic forces and fantasizing about their sadistic rape and slaughter of innocent women and children (1977, ch. 559; also excerpted in Smith 1988–92: I, 18–23). Apart from one stanza describing the desecration of the churches (90), the poet focusses instead upon the utter panic, fear, and social chaos caused by the arrival of Islam. It is worth quoting at some length the way in which the poet represents the collapse of the Visigothic social structure, because it provides yet further evidence of his attitude towards the third estate:

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Los omnes d’otro tienpo que fueran segurados, veíanse de nuevo en la tierra tornados: comién el paneziello de sus fijos amados, los pobres eran ricos e los ricos menguados. Dezién los malfadados: ‘en mal ora nascimos: diéranos Dios España, guardarla non sopimos. [. . .] Si nós atales fuessemos commo nuestros parientes non avrían poder aquestas malas gentes. [. . .] Nós a Dios falesciendo, hanos él falescido, lo que otros ganaron, hémoslo nós perdido; partiéndonos de Dios, hase de nos partido, todo el bien de los godos por end es confondido’. (97–100)

These stanzas explicitly associate the anarchic and defenceless agrarian world with a betrayal of a Providential order entrusted to and enforced by the Visigothic military caste. The Islamic invasion is thus represented as a symptom, not a mere cause, of the barbarity into which Spain has sunk: Spaniards have deserted God and their ancestral way of life. The verbs ‘segurar’, ‘guardar’, ‘ganar’ suggest how the function of the defensores is not just to repel the threat from outside, in this case Islam, but to protect against the threat from within— that easy slide into brutality and barbarism suffered by those who live ‘de nuevo en la tierra tornados’. This last phrase is particularly suggestive: the adverb ‘de nuevo’ implies that Spaniards have returned to a pre-Visigothic dystopia; while ‘En la tierra tornados’, whose literal meaning is ‘returned to working and living off the land’, figuratively hints at the brutal ‘earthiness’ of the peasants, which I discuss below. The world upside down, with its rolereversal of rich and poor, is invested with its full horror by being coupled with the pathetic picture of parents snatching bread from the mouths of their children. Like parents, the labouring caste is there to provide sustenance, not keep it for themselves. At this stage in the poem, therefore, Rodrigo’s error has finally been commuted into the primal sin of organizing society on the basis of agrarian labour. As the previous passages indicate, the basic tenor of this part of the poem is to illustrate a divinely sanctioned social order which is structured, not surprisingly, around the twin pillars of Church and military power. The Visigothic tradition is to live from the land, but not off it. Needless to say, there is no question of representing the means by which agricultural wealth is actually produced and circulated: extra-economic coercion – juridical and brute force – has been rationalized as devotion to God and arms, two forms of subjection which protect society from ‘deviance’, i.e., Islam and peasants. Although Islam is relentlessly othered and pushed beyond the boundaries of accepted social order, the peasant world is indispensable and so subject to containment rather than expulsion. Indeed, the rhetoric of containment is one of the more interesting aspects of the laus Hispaniae (145–59). This historiographical set-piece was put to a


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variety of uses in medieval chronicles, and it also serves several functions within El poema.14 As we shall see, it fulfills an important structural role in the poet’s treatment of Castilian nationalism. At this point, however, I am concerned not with its place within the larger narrative, but with its internal structure, which is organized around the implicit division of society into three castes: peasants (and traders), warriors, and priests. The eulogy begins with six stanzas (146–51) devoted to the natural fertility of the land, and to the quality and abundance of its textiles, minerals, cattle, fruit, fish, game, and other agricultural products. These resources supply not only the Peninsula, but also other countries (147d); indeed, some of the goods mentioned (wool, wax, salt, dye, and oil) constituted Iberia’s principal exports in the burgeoning commercial activity of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.15 There then follows a single stanza (152) which eulogizes a resource that is said to be even more valuable: Por lo que ella más val aún non lo dixemos: es mucho mejor tierra de las que nunca viemos, de los buenos caveros aún mención non fiziemos nunca tales caveros en el mundo non viemos.

The reconstruction of this stanza is not without its problems. Victorio emends the manuscript’s ‘cavalleros’ to ‘caveros’, although most editors prefer to read ‘cavallos’, which also seems to me the most likely reading.16 But for the

14 See, for example, the chronicles by Lucas de Tuy and Jiménez de Rada whose eulogies of Spain were El poema’s immediate models. Although these three eulogies share many features, there are considerable differences in content, internal structure, and structural function within the larger work. Jiménez de Rada uses it to give tragic depth to his account of the Visigothic defeat, and he neatly structures his praise around the trope of fecundity, whereby metaphoric rivers of eloquence and wisdom match the natural fertility of a well-irrigated land (1987, Bk III, ch. 21). Lucas de Tuy’s encomium (which is part of a speculum principis that prefaces the chronicle) is a more diffuse account of the land’s natural wealth, as well as the religious and martial qualities of its inhabitants (2003: 1–11). 15 For the agricultural background, see Hillgarth (1976, I: 33–40 with bibliography on p. 414). 16 The manuscript reads: ‘Por lo que mas val avn non vos lo dixemos / delos buenos cavalleros avn mençion non fyziemos / mejor tierra es delas que quantas nunca vyemos / nunca tales cavalleros enel mundo nunca vjemos’ (Geary 1987: 15). Other than the order of the lines, the main problem is ‘cavalleros’, which produces a hypermetric line. Victorio rejects previous editors’ emendation ‘cavallos’, in part because ‘caveros’ seems to him more logical: ‘¡lo mejor de España, los caballos!’ (77n). Victorio might have been less incredulous had he checked Lucas de Tuy (2003, prologue) and Jiménez de Rada (1987, Bk III, ch. 21), both of whom include horses (and mules) among the natural riches of Hispania Lucas explicitly connects the abundance of swift and valiant horses with the martial prowess of the people (2003: 4). See also the textual and historical sources furnished by Hernando Pérez in support of the reading ‘cavallos’ (Poema 2001: 57–58).

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present purposes, whether it is metonymic or literal, the reference to the Visigothic military heritage is clear, particularly since the following three stanzas include far more specific praise of Hispania’s supremacy as defender of the faith, the privileged resting place of St James (153–55). The laus Hispaniae comes to a close with a eulogy of the Peninsula’s inhabitants: ‘omnes sodes sesudos, mesura heredades’ (156c). In the larger context of the poem, it might seem odd to single out this particular quality above all others. Although mesura is certainly a quality associated with heroic virtue, I think it is included here for other reasons. By recalling the temperate, balanced climate that is supposed to characterize the Peninsula, it provides a symmetrical framework for the laus and forges an associative link between the people and the land. Secondly, it is an ideological strategy which enables the poet to represent this exercise in propaganda as a simple display of common sense. Of course, as the preceding account of collapse of the Visigothic social order makes plain, it is not the case that those who are closest to this fertile and temperate land are the most ‘sesudos’. On the contrary; as the fourteenthcentury bishop of Silves, Álvaro Peláez, put it, those who work the soil are the object of fear and loathing: [peasants] work with their own hands and do not cease to do so in old age, twisting their bodies and corrupting their souls [. . .]. All day long they plough and dig the earth so that they are wholly earthy. They suck up earth, they eat it, they talk of earth, in their land they have placed all their hope [. . .]. They are commonly inhumane to pilgrims and the poor.17

‘Perhaps the clergy were in part responsible for the “earthiness” of their rural congregations’, comments Hillgarth in his account of the uneducated rural priesthood. Whether a more spiritually effective or educated clergy would have made a substantial difference to the underlying assumptions of the Portuguese bishop is a moot point. He articulates in particularly graphic language an ideological position which in El poema de Fernán González is at once more implicit and more contradictory. For at this stage in the poem the underlying tripartite caste system takes on a clear hierarchy. Those who carry out agricultural and manual labour, as well as trade, are never mentioned as such in the laus. Unlike knights (152) and holy men and women (153–55), the existence of actual peasants has been silenced, their toil utterly assimilated into either the forces of production (the land) or the commodities and goods they produce (textiles, cattle, etc). Yet, as the internal structure of the laus demonstrates, their work is foundational: the description of the land and its material resources takes up half the eulogy itself.

17 Quoted from Hillgarth (1976: I, 120). See above (chapter 1, on Berceo’s ‘Labrador avaro’) for further discussion of the representation of peasants.


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Productive labour is, then, foundational but third in the distribution of power. The ‘third estate’ may be a modern phrase which requires no glossing, but it renders explicit what was understood by those in power to be the natural order of the Middle Ages. Equally, modern scholarship’s inability to rank the other two estates merely acknowledges (and in some minds suppresses) the uneasy political and economic relationship between Church and State, the factious allied powers of the feudal system. Although the structure of the laus suggests the primacy of spiritual over secular power El poema attempts to harmonize their interests. And in one important respect, that harmony is grounded upon the subordination of agrarian labour. Within the larger structure of the poem, the position of the laus is telling. It falls between two formative episodes in the narrative of territorial recuperation: the defence of Hispania against the external threat of Charlemagne, and the threat of internal disorder following the death of Alfonso el Casto. The eulogy of agrarian wealth is therefore circumscribed by anxieties over leadership and control. Land is inevitably a matter of dominion. Just before the coda which declares Castilian supremacy within the Peninsula, the main section of the laus draws to a close with a summary of the Visigothic inheritance: mesura. In this context, the word evokes more than the well-tempered violence expected of a nation with an epic destiny; it is restraint, not just in an ethical, but also a political and economic, sense. The natural abundance of the land, and by metonymy the potential excesses of those who work it, are held in subjection by the secular and spiritual powers. This ideology also finds expression in other narrative details: a motif, a metaphor, and thematic parallels. With regard to the motif, one of the folkloric elements analyzed in West’s study of the poem’s narrative traditions is the abduction of the hero as a child (1983: 35–42). According to the poem, Fernán González is the youngest, and finest, of the three sons of Gonzalo Núnez, alcalde of Castile.18 As West reminds us, ‘the combination of third, youngest and best is the most important characteristic of folk narrative. [. . .] This element of Fernán González’s legend appears to be much closer to the fantasy world of the folk tale than to the world of the heroic epic’ (1983: 37). Though he is born of noble blood, Fernán González’s childhood follows the pattern of many a folkloric hero. As the poet explains: Dezirvos he del conde, quál fue su criazón: furtóle un pobreciello que labrava carbón, tóvolo en la montaña una muy grand sazón. (177b–d)

18 Fernán González was in fact the only documented son of Gonzalo Fernández and Muniadona. The name Gonzalo Núñez may be a conflation of two other ancestors, although the details of his lineage are disputed. The best succinct account of this problem is by Cotrait (1977: 257–60). See also Márquez-Sterling (1980), West (1983: 7–9), and Chalon (1976: 395–99).

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Whether this episode is the product of the ‘popular’ or ‘learned’ imagination has been the subject of some debate.19 In contrast to those who argue that the episode was invented by the clerical author on the basis of literary sources, West believes that the passage shows all the hallmarks of traditional legend, structured as it is around a combination of stock folkloric motifs: ‘1) the hero is either the first-born son, or the third, youngest and best; 2) an act of violence is committed upon him; 3) he is taken to a far-off land; 4) he is raised either by a king or a lowly peasant’ (1983: 40). Although I find West’s arguments more persuasive, the question of origins is not my principal concern here; in any case, the analytic categories ‘popular’ and ‘learned’ (which in cultural practice so often overlap) do not provide the most helpful framework for understanding this episode’s narrative and ideological operation. From a narrative viewpoint, it works in similar fashion to the even more sketchy account of Rodrigo’s role in the fall of the Visigothic Kingdom. In both episodes, the poet exploits pre-existing knowledge to abbreviate his own tale. As West has suggested, the account of the abduction is ‘obviously incomplete’ (1983: 37), three lines being enough ‘to recall the event to the minds of [the poet’s] listeners’ (41). Ideologically, the poet incorporates previous understanding of the episode (whether based on written sources or derived from oral legend, or a conflation of the two) and channels it towards his particular vision of Fernán González. But to what end? Although West shows how the abduction motif is an integral part of the poet’s construction of Fernán González as a traditional hero, even she confesses to finding this episode ‘puzzling’ and ‘bizarre’ (1983: 39 and 41). I would argue that the abduction has to be understood in the broader context of the poet’s representation of the agrarian world. This brings us to the metaphor. The theft of the hero-child has a figurative force, since the literal abduction also entails the figurative theft of a birthright. It is significant that this theft is perpetrated by a member of the third estate, a charcoal burner, whose presumed blackness may have symbolic connotations of the Devil and Islam.20 Just as Fernán González’s true identity and lineage are now temporarily hidden, so, a few centuries earlier, the Visigothic heritage of martial and spiritual power had been kidnapped by the triple alliance of 19 The hypothesis of learned origins was first advanced by Keller (1956); see also Deyermond (1960), who suggests that the episode is modelled upon an analogue in the Liber regum, and Avalle-Arce (1974). In his later work, Keller (1990) adopts a multifaceted approach, arguing that the poet ‘borrowed from legends, folklore and hagiography’, and that he did so ‘probably in intentional imitation of the Libro de Alexandre’ (where Paris is also said to have been reared in the mountains); moreover, he concludes that the figure of the carbonero is taken from a scribal error in MS A of a French translation of the life of St Eustace (1990: 47–52). Keller’s argument could benefit from Occam’s razor. The influence of the Libro de Alexandre upon other passages of this poem has been accepted since Marden (Poema 1904: xxxii–xxxiii). 20 For the possible symbolic connection between the carbonero, the devil, and the ‘sucios e carbonientos’ Islamic invaders, see West (1983: 39).


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agrarian world, Islam, and the devil. The alienation of Castile’s birthright, however, is here represented in a different ideological mode. The violent consequences of the earlier theft are now transmuted into a process of reintegration, whereby the third estate willingly legitimizes its own subordination. Not only does the peasant place the fruits of his labour entirely at the disposal of his ward, he is also the means by which the hero discovers his true identity: Quanto podía el amo ganar de su mester, todo al buen criado dávalo volunter; de quál linax venia faziégelo entender, quando lo oía el moço avié muy grand plazer. (178)

In short, one of the effects of this brief episode is to acknowledge the third estate as a threat, in order then to relegate it to its properly submissive role. The abduction episode resonates with the poem’s central martial theme, by highlighting the distance between Castile’s humble origins and ultimate supremacy. However, my contention is that Castile’s emancipation from others is, according to the poet’s view, necessarily grounded upon the continued domination of the third estate. Indeed, the rural world becomes a symbol of the threat of chaos, despair, and political weakness. As we have seen, once Fernán González discovers his noble lineage, he prays for Castile to allowed to realize its destiny: ‘Señor, ya tienpo era de salir de cavañas’ (181a). Even though on a literal level he leaves his mountain hut, the cabaña is always present as a symbolic space, just as the carbonero accompanies Fernán González on his return from the wilderness: ‘Salió de las montañas, vino pora poblado / con aquel pobreziello que lo avié criado’ (183ab). Like the carbonero, therefore, the cabaña serves as a constant reminder of the precariousness of power. It is no coincidence that this very symbol is echoed by Fernán González’s men at their moment of greatest despair, when their leader is incarcerated by the King of Navarre: ‘tornada es Castiella una pobre cabaña’ (608d). This imprisonment is another metaphoric theft, which recalls the earlier abduction by the carbonero, whose rustic cabaña is the supreme symbol for the alienation of Castile’s martial destiny.

Feudal logic So far, we have seen how the representation of Castile’s independence is characterized by a discourse of power. This discourse is structured around two mutually supportive ideologies: the ideology of premia, which rationalizes both Castilian separation from León as well as the feudal domination of the peasantry, is complemented by an ideology of nationhood, which justifies Castilian superiority within Hispania. These two ideologies work together to secure the legitimacy of the new kingdom. Without the ideology of nationhood to lend it providential authority, the separation of Castile would seem a mere instance of

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the fragmentation of power inherent in feudal states – a fragmentation that could later be duplicated within Castile itself. Without the ideology of premia, the nation would lack an internal power structure and its defining militaristic identity. But this discourse of power is not as seamless as it might at first appear. A certain disquiet manifests itself at both the literal and the symbolic levels of the poem’s narrative of military struggle and political relationships. For in the final analysis, what actually precipitates Castilian freedom from the oppressive yoke of León is not in fact the crusading force of arms – the Visigothic heritage – but a financial transaction: the deceptive and usurious bargain struck between the King of León and Fernán González over the sale of the Castilian count’s horse and hawk. Moreover, when we also take into account the fact that Fernán González’s final escape from the King’s jail is the result not of his manly prowess, but of a female disguise – he dons his wife’s dress and leaves her in his place – we might reasonably suspect that the poet was struggling to respond to some unarticulated anxieties about political legitimacy, stability, and the limits of military force. In the final section of this chapter, I shall discuss how these and other episodes give symbolic expression to the poet’s concerns over the nature of feudal power and relationships; but as I shall now show, these concerns are also manifested on a literal level. One form of relationship – the subjugation of the peasantry – has already been discussed, and its continued relevance will be seen below. But more explicit and more pervasive is the preoccupation with the vertical power structure within the warrior caste itself, which is configured in terms of the feudal bond between lord and vassal. This bond operates on two related levels: the relationship between, on the one hand, Fernán González and his lord, the King of León, and, on the other hand, between Fernán González and his own followers. In essence, the author of El poema was faced with the dilemma of making the split between one lord and vassal (the King of León and the Count) appear logical and natural without comprising the ideological integrity of the feudal bond between the Count and his own men. As a result, legitimizing the emancipation of Castile produces the dialectical need to reassert unity and contain further fragmentation at a lower level of feudal relationships. In short, the epic displays a dramatic tension between the forces of separation and integration, as the poet attempts to dissolve authority on one level and reconstitute it on another. This tension offers a perfect illustration of what Perry Anderson (1974: 152) has described as the defining political problem of the feudal mode of production and which I discussed in my introduction and in chapter 3, on the Libro de Alexandre. Because his analysis is so relevant to this epic, some of his words are worth repeating. He argued that there was an inbuilt contradiction within feudalism, between its own rigorous tendency to a decomposition of sovereignty and the absolute exigencies of a final centre of authority in which a practical recomposition could occur.


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Feudal monarchy, therefore, was never wholly reducible to a royal suzerainty: it always existed to some extent in an ideological and juridical realm beyond that of those vassal relationships whose summit could otherwise be ducal or comital potentates, and possessed rights to which the latter could not aspire. (1974: 152)

The structural tensions and contradictions to which Anderson refers leave numerous traces in El poema de Fernán González, whose basic narrative, after all, operates precisely within the gap between monarchy and sovereignty. Anderson’s quotation seems an apt gloss upon the way that the poem strives to exploit and then stop the cycle of decomposition inherent in feudal sovereignty. In the process of shifting sovereignty to Castile, the anonymous poet has to decentre the ideological and juridical authority of León. But in doing so, he also confronts the problematic truth that however necessary it may be for the ‘practical recomposition’ of sovereignty, a ‘centre of authority’ is never in any absolute sense ‘final’. As the establishment of the new state of Castile indicates, a centre of authority is in fact movable, which means that sovereignty itself stands in constant need of renewal. Actual control over land, which is both the object and the source of feudal power, cannot be supported only in ‘an ideological and juridical realm’: at some level, it also needs to be enforced and reproduced through the threat or reality of violence. Some of the ways in which the King of León’s authority over his Castilian vassal is undermined have already been suggested in the discussion of premia and Hispania. The poet’s essential strategy is to render unnatural Castile’s feudal ties not only to León but also to any secular lord: ‘los señores ser siervos téngolo por fazaña’, exclaims the Count in one of his first speeches (188d). And toward the end of the poem, the idea that Castile’s own natural sovereignty has been subverted finds a symbolic echo in the imprisonment of Fernán González, ‘que tal omne non era pora en cárcel tener’ (616d). This strategy is an interesting variant on what Eagleton calls the ideological strategy of naturalization (1991: 58–61). As Eagleton explains, this strategy ‘does not so much combat alternative ideas as thrust them beyond the very bounds of the thinkable’ (1991: 58). It is a dehistoricizing process, which ‘freezes history into a “second nature”, presenting it as spontaneous, inevitable, and so unalterable’ (59). It is worth dwelling for a moment upon the terms on which this strategy operates within El poema, since it is clear that although the Castilians’ status as natural lords may have been represented as the ‘spontaneous’ effect of Providential choice, it is certainly not shown to be an ‘inevitable and so unalterable’ condition. What the poet does with history is to acknowledge the historical vassalage of Castile to León only to represent it as an aberration from Castile’s true destiny: Castile is conceived not as a comital state, which owes allegiance to a higher royal authority, but as a self-contained community, which needs to remain in constant readiness against outside threat, of which the King of León is simply one example. In this way, the poem illustrates Eagleton’s qualification that the

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naturalizing process is not entirely blind to its own objectives and conditions of power, and that ‘partial self-reflexiveness may tighten rather than loosen its grip’ (61). The existence of Castile as a vassal state has not, therefore, been ‘thrust [. . .] beyond the very bounds of the thinkable’; rather, it has been pushed to the edges of the thinkable, to a zone in which Castile’s vassalage to León is automatically associated with servitude and oppression. This zone is an ideological borderland between actual history and a higher Providential truth. In part, the naturalization of Castilian autonomy takes place through a process of displacement: the historical feudal relationship between Castile and León is substantially displaced onto the relationship between Castile and Islam and Navarre, on the one hand, and between Castile and God on the other. As Deyermond notes, some scholars have been disconcerted by the apparent thematic incoherences of El poema, with its shift in focus from the history of Spain and the reconquest (14–121) to the history of one individual and his struggle against León (1990: 47–48). Deyermond’s figural reading of the poem convincingly restores thematic coherence to the epic, as he shows how Castile’s three adversaries (the Moors, Navarre, and León) are ‘interwoven’ and become ‘in some sense one’ (1990: 62–63) in order to rewrite Castilian history according to Biblical patterns. Ideologically, this reading could be taken one stage further. The structural imbalance between the ostensible purpose of the narrative (the emancipation of Castile from León) and the actual content (predominantly the conflicts with Navarre and Islam) colours the way the audience views the juridical rights of the King of León over his vassal Fernán González. It is not until stanza 570, when he convokes the cortes, that we first encounter the King. His summons to Fernán González is thus burdened with the heavy freight of the previous chronicle of betrayal and persecution at the hands of Navarre and the Moors, with the result that ‘el buen conde’ can spontaneously represent the act of feudal homage, the besamanos, as simply another instance of premia: Ovo ir a las cortes, pero con grand pesar, era muy fiera cosa la mano le besar: ‘Señor Dios de los cielos, quieras me ayudar que yo pueda a Castiella d’esta premia sacar.’ (571)

In this way, the audience is called upon to think about Castilian independence from León not as the internal fragmentation of the Leonese kingdom, but as the enactment of its true vassalatic relationship with its natural feudal lord, God Almighty. In an attempt to forestall any possible interpretation of Fernán González as rebellious vassal, a traitor to his legal lord, all betrayal is rigorously displaced onto others: consecutively, don Julián, the peasants, the Navarrese, and by way of culmination to this naturalizing process, the Queen of León, ‘navarra natural’ (734c). This process of displacement is one way of acknowledging, and at the same time containing, the centrifugal tendencies of the feudal state. A far greater


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emphasis upon containment, however, is evident in the representation of the feudal relationship between Fernán González and his men. In this respect, this epic is a world apart from the polity of El poema de mio Cid, whose ideals have been so well described by Michael Harney. In the earlier poem, vassalage is represented as a fictive kinship, operating upon the principles of amity, reciprocity, and the symbiotic relation between lord and vassal (Harney 1993: 55–98). These principles, and the dynamics of power that underwrite them, play only a minor role in El poema de Fernán González. Here, the hierarchical relationship between the count and his men is structured by absolute subjection to and dependence upon an authoritarian leader. The term amor, for example, is a key term in El poema de mio Cid: as Harney puts it, ‘People do not merely acquiesce [. . .]: they give their love’ (93). Fernán González, by contrast, commands acquiescence. Of the half-dozen occasions in which amor is used to evoke the feudo-vassalatic relationship, only two apply to the Count’s relationship with his own men (338a and 662c).21 And on the first of these occasions, the term takes on negative connotations, as the Castilians complain that their love for Fernán González drives them into incessant and self-destructive war (see below for further discussion). Although the count often addresses his men as ‘amigos’, this is invariably in the context of a harangue, before, during, or after battle, in which he urges his vassals to follow his lead. Their amistad is far from the ritualized friendship which was synonymous with kinship, and it is signally devoid of the reciprocal generosity with which it is traditionally associated (Harney 1993: 65–69). The distribution of booty, which plays such a prominent part in defining the feudovassalatic relationship within El poema de mio Cid, is virtually absent in this epic. It is significant that the only occasion on which the poet describes the spoils of war, after the Castilians’ first victory over the Moors (275–82), he recounts how the booty is donated to San Pedro de Arlanza. Distributive generosity between lord and vassal operates in this passage, but only in displaced form. The ‘averes’ and ‘ganancia’ ‘que Dios les avía dado’ (275c and 281a) are returned to Him in an exchange that removes reciprocity from the feudal relationship by transforming it into a means of consolidating the Castilians’ collective identity as milites Christi. An even more striking instance of the way the poet manipulates the feudal notions of kinship and mutuality occurs in the aftermath of the second victory over Almanzor at the battle of Hacinas. To heighten the epic stature of this conflict, the poet evokes the conventional scene of a small band of heroes pitted against the apparently overwhelming forces of Islam. As he emphasizes the solidarity that unites the Castilian troops, the poet has Fernán González render explicit the fictive kinship that joins him to his vassals. In the heat of

21 Amor describes the bond between the count and God three times (397d, 409c, 430b) and the relationship between the Navarrese and their King once (330d).

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this battle, he is moved to call his men not simply his ‘amigos’, but his ‘vassallos e parientes’ (507c), or his ‘amigos e hermanos’ (538d).22 After their victory, however, a curious episode takes place in which the bonds of kinship, which were rhetorically so essential to the drama of the battle, are reconfigured according to a different scheme of collective identity. The Castilians search through the field of battle collecting their slaughtered comrades, planning to return each body home for burial, ‘cada uno a sus lugares que se los levarían’ (565d). Fernán González, on the other hand, persuades them to bury the fallen at the place most closely associated with him: San Pedro de Arlanza, which was earlier described as ‘essa su ermita’ (392d), and which is here eulogized as ‘un buen lugar’, ‘lugar tan honrado’, ‘lugar mucho honrado’ (567c, 568a & d). In this and the previous example, much more is at stake than the unquestionable desire to promote a monastic tomb cult. This passage is further evidence of the poet’s preoccupation with the relationship between physical space, political ties, and collective identities. What is important to stress here is the implicit belief that the extended, and hence geographically more diffuse, ties of kith and kin need to be restructured around the more compact bonds of Christian brotherhood and obedience to a secular lord, symbolized by the monastic space of San Pedro de Arlanza which combines secular and religious authority. The reconfiguration of reciprocal generosity and fictive kinship into the more hierarchical structures of dutifulness and submission is brought to the fore in one of the most significant motifs of the whole poem: the notion of protecting one’s lord, expressed in variants upon the phrase ‘guardar señor’. Drawing upon the idea that the vassal was obliged to provide auxilium and consilium to his lord, the poet makes repeated reference to the need for loyalty. Loyalty is represented as one of the defining qualities of the Castilians, indeed it is part of their Visigothic heritage. In the opening historical section of the poem, loyalty is a form of mutual security and harmonious social organization, with each estate being faithful to its allotted role, working in defence of the land, which is both source and symbol of collective identity and material well-being (30c, 38–39, 98, 121). Shortly after the eulogy of Spain, there is a significant shift in emphasis. Mutual loyalty, with particular weight given to the responsibility of the monarch towards his land and people (Wamba, Pelayo), is simplified into a more hierarchical form of political allegiance:

22 See also the following lines which clearly evoke the ethical dimension of kinship and, in its basic etymological sense, of companionhood: ‘Non sé dó falle pan quien oy fuer’ retraído: mucho le valdrié más que nunca fues’ nascido.’ Non sé omne en el mundo que al conde oyesse que en ninguna manera serle malo podiesse; nunca podrié ser malo el que con él comiesse, mejor devrié ser que otro el que con él visquiesse. (540–41)


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Varones castellanos, este fue su cuidado: de llegar su señor al más alto estado; d’un alcaldía pobre fiziéronla condado, tornaron la después cabeça de reinado. (173)

From here on, the emphasis is upon the loyalty of vassal to lord, who becomes, as the context makes clear, the iconic embodiment of the nation. In the previous three stanzas, there is a telling parallel between Castile, which is powerful yet ‘un pequeño rincón’ and Fernán González, who is a ‘cuerpo de gran valor’ yet the youngest son. It is also significant that the poet introduces the concept of subordinate loyalty to one’s lord precisely when the praise of Spain as a physical space is uppermost in his audience’s mind. The juridical theory of the king’s two bodies (Kantorowicz 1957) is not, of course, explicitly articulated here, but the portrayal of the feudal relationship between Fernán González and his men does, I think, follow the same impulse. This is to say that the poem represents an attempt to conflate two forms of loyalty, and combines the warrior’s fidelitas to his lord with the emerging notion of patriotism being developed by jurists in the early thirteenth century.23 As I have already explained, one of the fundamental ideological effects of the count’s three opening speeches is to naturalize the association between Castilian freedom and the absolute political subjection of vassal to lord. The third speech conveys this point in unambiguous terms: Nuestros antecessores lealtad aguardaron, sobre las otras tierras ellos la heredaron; por ésta aguardar la muerte olvidaron, quanto saber ovieron por lo acabaron. [. . .] Este debdo levaron nuestros antecessores: de todos los que viven mejor guardar señores, de morir ante que ellos teniénse por debdores. (213–15)

Note here, first, how a virtue and a geographical space are conflated. Loyalty is inherited along with land, and the combination of moral and political virtue is expressed in spatial terms (‘por ý’). Second, the extent to which their historical identity as Castilians is deeply invested in their debt of self-sacrifice is made abundantly plain by the following narrative, which provides repeated examples of loyalty construed as physical protection of the lord’s body (see

23 See ‘pro patria mori’ in Kantorowicz (1957: 232–72). He remarks on ‘the general shift of the center of political life, when jurists in the early thirteenth century pointed out “that the duty to defend the patria was higher than the feudal obligations of vassal to lord” ’ (234, citing the historian Post). The poem’s consistent emphasis on loyalty should also been seen in the light of contemporary attempts to categorize various forms of treachery, and limit the meaning of ‘traición’ to betrayal of the king and his señorío (Iglesia Ferreiros 1971: 149–264).

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stanzas 260 [reconstructed], 264–66, 309, 320–23, 347, 379, 423, 495, 594–95, 669, 723). Although it is not necessary to examine each of these episodes, two of them are worth brief comment for the light they shed upon the way the poet represents the conflict between Castile and León. In the battle against King Sancho of Navarre at ‘la Era Degollada’, the Castilians are shamed by their temporary inability to protect the wounded count from the blows of the enemy knights (320–23). The culture of shame resurfaces towards the end of the poem when Fernán González denies the Leonese request to accompany him in his campaign against the Moors: Conpañas de León, caveros de prestar, salieron con el conde, queriénlo aguardar; non quiso el buen conde, e mandóles tornar, ovieron leoneses d’esto fuerte pesar. (723)

Though they are relatively minor narrative details, these passages possess an important political significance. In both episodes, collective honour and identity are literally determined by physical access to the count’s body. On a symbolic level, the desire for proximity with the source of political identity and authority reflects the centralizing aspirations of thirteenth-century monarchies. The physical distance that separates the count from the Leonese, their summary dismissal from his presence, and their subsequent jealousy and bitterness, all underscore the recentring of political authority and legitimacy brought about by the rise of Castilian power. The claims of reciprocity, however, are not entirely absent from the poem’s portrayal of the feudal relationship. Patently aware of his rights as God’s vassal (409b), Fernán González demands from his Lord protection and support for services rendered on three separate occasions (395–404, 548–55, and 600–02). Of these, the third is the most emphatic. Shackled in a Navarrese jail, the count protests in surprisingly querulous terms that God has abandoned him: Señor del mundo, ¿por qué me has fallescido? [. . .] Si fuesses Tú en la tierra, serías de mí rebtado; nunca fiz por qué fuesse de ti desanparado. (600d–602ab).

An echo of Christ’s lament on the cross this may be (Deyermond 1990: 59–60); an example of Christian resignation it is not. This passage is another instance of the poet’s favoured technique of displacement, whose effect is to mystify the beliefs and values that underpin particular social relationships. In this case, the reciprocal bond that ought to link lord to vassal is on view in the poem, truly present as an operating principle; but its displacement onto a metaphysical realm occludes its absence from the actual working relationships between living human beings. God, the ultimate Lord in the feudal chain, is seen to lend both auxilium and consilium to the Castilians, through the intermediaries


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of his saints and Fernán González; but from the count downwards, the feudal chain is defined in more narrowly hierarchical terms. On those occasions when the count gives succour to his vassals (433–34, 449, 536, 604) there is no suggestion of mutual reliance, only of absolute dependence; only once does Fernán González accept the counsel of his men, freeing his captive King García of Navarre, a decision that he soon regrets (706–16; partially reconstructed stanzas). The ideological effect of this displacement is to legitimize the process of concentrating power and authority, from both above and below, in the commanding person of Fernán González. This process transforms the symbiotic relationship between lord and vassal, which characterizes El poema de mio Cid, for example, into a matter of sovereignty. Interdependency becomes dependency; vassals become subjects. The extent of this subjection is illustrated by the panic and bereavement experienced by the Castilians when Fernán González is first imprisoned by the King of Navarre (605–10). After describing the count’s betrothal and liberation, the poet returns to a scene of Castilian despair: diré de los castellanos, gente fuerte e ligera, avenir nos’podién por ninguna manera. Los unos querién uno, los otros querién ál; commo omnes sin capdiello aveniénse muy mal. (659–60)

How do the Castilians recover a measure of stability and solidarity? By carving a stone statue of their lord, swearing fealty to it, placing in its hand the banner of Castile, and dragging it along with them in a wooden cart (661–71). In reviewing the possible pagan and biblical subtexts for this curious passage, Deyermond argues that the ‘operative parallel’ is Jesus’s declaration to his disciple Peter that: ‘tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam’ (Matthew 16, 18–19; quoted from Deyermond 1990: 61). This is a valuable insight, not only into the poem’s patterns of biblical discourse, but also into its representation of political relationships. Although the sacralization of the monarchy may not have developed as fully in Castile as it did elsewhere (Nieto Soria 1988: 60–62), El poema shows a clear desire to invest Fernán González with the ideological authority that derives from being one of God’s intermediaries on earth, just as Alfonso X claimed that kings were the ‘vicarios de Dios [. . .] puestos sobre las gentes para mantenerlas en justicia et en verdad quanto en lo temporal’ (Siete partidas II, i, 5; 1972: II, 7). In this particular passage, this desire is related to the way political order and identity are conceived in spatial terms. The Castilians coalesce physically and politically around the body of their leader, and his absence requires the symbolic trappings both of his power and of their allegiance. Physical contact with their lord empowers and defines the Castilians, and for this reason they go in search of the count, in a quest that, so to speak, takes them back to an ideological centre, where sovereignty (the count’s physical

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presence) and monarchical authority (the symbolic statue) are united. It is perhaps significant in this respect that before their actual physical encounter with Fernán González, the vassals’ quest takes them over the Montes d’Oca, ‘una fiera montaña, / solié ser de los buenos e los grandes d’España’ (670cd). As these lines suggest, these mountains fulfill the symbolic needs of oral narrative, and help the audience orient themselves ideologically as much as geographically. As concrete symbols for an abstract collective identity, they evoke the borders that define Castilians and separate them from others. The Montes d’Oca mark the humble origins of a now expanded and mighty Castile (171b); they define the heartland of Hispania, the home of the ‘the good and the great’ (670); they defend the fertile land, ‘buena tierra provada’, from constant threat of outside invasion (747b). In crossing these mountain boundaries, therefore, the vassals reenter a political relationship and a defining national identity from which they were temporarily separated. Their dependency upon Fernán González, both politically and as a nation with traditions to uphold, may be neatly summed up by the scene that immediately follows their reunion with him and their celebration of his marriage to Sancha. In the battle against his brother-in-law, King García of Navarre, the count urges on his wavering troops with words that betray the fantasies of absolutist monarchs everywhere: ‘fazervos he buenos de grado o amidos’ (698b). Submission to political authority becomes a moral imperative. Before continuing, it is worth pausing to summarize some of the main issues raised so far. A number of factors, dialectically related, determine how El poema represents the political ties between lord and vassal. In part, the Castilians’ submission to Fernán González, their desire to find security within his controlling presence, is conditioned by the discourse of nationhood. Although the poet recognizes the binding force of common geographic origin (natio), he strives to give political, moral, and religious shape to that form of identity. Physical space, therefore, is transformed into a means of representing ideologically social and political relationships, values, and beliefs. In a world dominated by orality, the inevitable way of thinking about that geographical and ideological space is through its embodiment in a heroic, larger-than-life figure. At the same time, however, Fernán González’s absolute authority covers over the fissures inherent in the feudal mode of production, with its centrifugal parcelization of sovereignty. Having naturalized the rupture between one lord and vassal (the King of León and the count), the poet needs to recuperate some stability for feudal order by emphasizing the sovereignty of Fernán González over his own men. To paraphrase the words of Perry Anderson, quoted above, the poet tries to represent Fernán González as that final centre of authority, where feudal monarchy could in fact be reducible to royal sovereignty. The count thus gives ideological form to the way in which ‘actual royal power always had to be asserted and extended against the spontaneous grain of the feudal polity as a whole, in a constant struggle to establish a “public” authority outside the compact web of private jurisdictions’ (Anderson 1974: 152).


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This dynamic is particularly relevant, of course, to the material conditions of thirteenth-century Castile, when this kingdom virtually doubled in size. According to Ana Rodríguez López (1994), whose thesis I outlined in the introduction, the first half of the century was characterized by a dual process of territorial expansion and consolidation of monarchical power. Like other European monarchs, Fernando III deployed a variety of political mechanisms in his struggle to consolidate and centralize royal power during a period of expanding frontiers, and one of these concerned his relationship with the nobility. Fernando’s policies with regard to the nobility varied by region and circumstance (Rodríguez López 1994: 317), but in general they produced ‘una dialéctica propia de la configuración de las monarquías feudales, al disponer de su sector muy importante de la nobleza territorial como un instrumento del ejercicio del poder regio y como medio de imponer su jurisdicción, al tiempo que dicho poder sirve para reforzar su condición magnaticia’ (316). This contradiction makes its presence felt, I believe, in particularly interesting ways within El poema de Fernán González. For although, as I have explained, the poet attempts to fabricate a seamless web of monarchical authority around the figure of Fernán González, his text also betrays a deep concern with the uncertainties and paradoxes inherent in the exercise of royal power. Without drama, struggle, and reversal of fortune, of course, there would be no epic. In ideological analysis, however, it is important to understand the terms of that drama. And in this case, what is dramatic is the fact that, by definition, power is always exercised over something or someone, and as such it never operates without actual or potential resistance. For present purposes, the most significant point of resistance is when the count’s vassals first openly confront his authority as military leader. Seriously wounded in the battle to defeat King Sancho of Navarre, Fernán González faces a threat from the count of Toulouse. Rather than recover from his wounds, he plans to fight the count in immediate battle. His willingness to resort to force provokes the rage and frustration of his vassals: porque avían por fuerça sienpre d’andar armados. Folgar non les dexava nin estar segurados, dizién: ‘Non es tal vida si non pora pecados, que andan de noche e día e nunca son cansados, él semeja a Satán e nós a sus criados.’ (336d–37)

Reiterating this analogy with the Devil, their spokesman, Nuño Laínez, warns Fernán González that his loçanía verges on greed (cobdicia is repeated three times in consecutive stanzas, 340–42), and that his life of unending struggle is unnatural: ‘Los vientos que son fuertes, sabemos los cansar, / el mar que es irada, vemos la amansar’ (344ab). As we have seen in the previous chapter, greed and Nature are also the very terms in which El libro de Alexandre conducts its debate about imperial expansionism; indeed, this passage in El poema is clearly modelled upon the earlier romance (2271–92). The thematic and verbal borrowings (summarized by Uría Maqua 2000: 319–22) include a direct

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allusion to the Alexander legend. In the Libro, Alexander declares ‘non conto yo mi vida por años nin por días, / mas por buenas faziendas e por cavallerías’ (2288ab), which is reworked in El poema as ‘Non cuentan d’Alexandre las noches nin los días, / cuentan sus buenos fechos e sus cavallerías’ (354ab). In the remainder of the quatrain, however, the comparison between Alexander and Achilles is supplanted by a biblical analogy between the count and two Old Testament ‘freedom fighters’, David and Judas Maccabeus. The change is symptomatic of the poet’s attempt to craft a Castilian identity out of biblical materials, and to set this people’s liberation within a Providential framework. These objectives determine other differences too, as the epic poet introduces the notions of mesura and reason, which are elsewhere presented as one of the distinguishing marks of Castilian identity (156 and 480). In what seems eminently rational advice, Nuño Laíno argues that the count should recover his strength and await reinforcements (346). All these arguments, however, are swept aside as the count sets before his men the inducements of everlasting fame and glory (349–57). One of the particularly interesting features of this exchange is the apparent lack of engagement between the two sides in the dispute. Beyond a fleeting reference in the final line of his oration to ‘mal seso’ (357d), Fernán González does not confront the moral dangers, possible irrationality and unnaturalness of his rush to arms. By the same token, his vassals offer in return nothing but silence and acquiescence: ‘a cosa que él dezía non sabién responder, / quánto él por bien tovo oviéronlo a fazer’ (358bc). This double silence betrays the malaise at the heart of El poema concerning the tense relation between force and social stability, according to which order is both enforced and disrupted by the exercise of military power. Even though he does not invest the dilemma with the tragic pathos of the Libro de Alexandre, the author acknowledges that in the world of men, as in the world of nature, there ought to be a point at which the need for physical force is suspended. It is true that the paradox of fighting for peace surfaces only momentarily, only to be rapidly submerged in the ideologies of fame and national identity. The anxieties caused by the prospect of an unending cycle of violence are both rationalized by the logical demands of personal glory — fame does not come without suffering — and naturalized by transforming loçanía and mesura into an inevitable binarism that defines the Castilian psyche. Nonetheless, this ‘unnatural’ and ‘diabolic’ paradox remains. Indeed, it is part of a broader pattern of contradictions embedded in the very structure of the poem. As Alan Deyermond has pointed out (1990: 63–65), El poema is apparently riven by the clash between two opposing views of history: the cyclical, based on the image of Fortune’s wheel; and the linear, based on the biblical concept of figura, with its teleological patterns of repetition. When Fernán González exhorts his men before the decisive battle of Hacinas, he claims that Fortune’s wheel will be reversed if they defeat the Moors: ‘endreçarse ha la rueda que está trestornada; / serán ellos vencidos, de Cristus la fe onrada’ (441cd). Logic dictates, however, that even after this victory Fortune’s wheel will again turn


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to the detriment of the Castilians. Deyermond’s answer to this problem is convincing: the poet introduces the figural view of history precisely in order to break this cycle and, through the actions of Fernán González, to make ‘Castile secure from the perils of transience’ (65). But what interests me is why this dual concept of history is there in the first place. I would argue that it articulates the same paradox mentioned above: namely, that in a society organized for the waging of war the vicious circle of violence is never broken, but rolls onwards, coming to rest at a point that is forever just over the horizon. This tension is also found in other details, operating on a variety of narrative levels. The drama, for example, derives much of its force from the very instability of power, with plans and plots frequently going awry or backfiring upon their authors. As we shall see, the decisive agreement over the sale of the horse and the hawk, upon which the poem’s denouement hinges, works out neither for the King of León, nor, at least in the first instance, for Fernán González himself since (at least in the chronicle prosification) he has to resort to violence to enforce it. This basic structure informs other episodes too: Fernán González’s wife, Doña Sancha, persuades him to release her brother, King García of Navarre, from jail (706), an act of courtesy that merely frees the King to continue his hostile campaign against Castile; the Queen of León’s treacherous plots are constantly frustrated (see, for example, 580); the lecherous Archpriest sets a trap to rape doña Sancha, only to become another example of the ‘deceiver deceived’ (645–58). Examples could be multiplied: scholars from Gimeno Casalduero (1968) to Uría Maqua (2000: 345–46) have commented on the fact that the later sections of the poem are much more novelesque in tone. The ideological effects of this structure are important and they have yet to be fully recognized. As the poem moves towards its close, and with it the liberation of Castile, the sense of betrayal and lack of control over destiny increases: it is expressed in paradigmatic terms by the count’s vassals, upon hearing that he has been captured by the King of Navarre: ‘con el conde coidávamos d’esta coita salir, / oviemos nós enantes en ella de venir’ (609cd). On another level, Fernán González himself is composed of two elements in tension. On the one hand, he is ‘un fermoso castiello’ (488b), offering the prospect of rock-like stability; in his absence, his men naturally seek comfort in the totemic presence of his stone statue (661–71). But he is also in constant movement, Castile’s ‘pies e manos’ (624). Although El poema provides many examples, his deep-rooted vitalism was most explicitly captured in Alfonso X’s version of the count’s life: ‘El conde Fernand González de Castiella, que non sopo estar assessegado et quedo pues que conde fue de Castiella’(1977, chapter 720).24 Thus, albeit from a different perspective, the poem engages with a concern with monarchical continuity and 24 For other evidence from El poema, see the count’s speech to his men on the dangers of folgura and lost time (350–57); his later rhetorical question, ‘los muertos a los vivos, ¿por qué han d’enbargar?’ (567a); and the phrasing of San Millán’s message to the count, with its insistent repetition of ‘ve tu vía’ (414–15, 429).

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control that is noticeable in contemporary juridical thought, and which gave rise to such formulations as the rex insomnis (Kantorowicz 1957: 496). In one sense, this dynamic combination of stability and action derives from the imagined Visigothic heritage: like their forefathers, Castilians are by nature ‘gente fuerte e ligera’ (659c). But on a more profound level, it is conditioned by the poem’s more general representation of the dynamics of power. Power needs to be constantly renewed; unless it is on display and in action, strength collapses under its own weight. Closely related to this is the problem of authorizing the exercise of power. The poet enhances the monarchical authority represented by Fernán González by elevating him to the status of intermediary with the divine. Although he is not sacralized, he is the privileged instrument of divine providence. However, the more symbolic power is placed in the hands of the leader, and the closer he is to God, the more distant he becomes from those over whom exercises authority. The pressures of monastic propaganda also mean that the poet stresses the personal, almost private, bond between the count and San Pedro de Arlanza, ‘essa su ermita’ (392d). Although contact with the hermitage provides access to divine authority, the poet clearly represents that contact as a potential rupture and betrayal of the feudal relationship. As the count’s vassals complain: Assí commo ladrón que anda a furtar, assí solo señero te amas apartar. [. . .] Porque tanto t’ sofrimos por end somos peores, pedímoste merced, non nos fagas traidores. (422ab & 423ab)

This produces the paradox that the very process that lends authority to the count’s power over his men also threatens to undermine their relationship. Even though this threat is swiftly contained, the fact that it is voiced in the first place suggests the tensions inherent in the process of endowing an increasingly centralized monarchy with a degree of ideological authority.

Symbolic violence: the horse and the hawk In the course of this chapter, I have tried to show how the freedom which the Castilians achieve though their heroic struggle against premia is a freedom structured in domination. As he reconstructs the origins of his nation, the poet imagines a world which is inevitably shaped by the material conditions of thirteenth-century feudalism. Consequently, El poema displays a complex set of anxieties concerning the relation between lords, vassals, and serfs, as well as the exercise and legitimation of centralized political power. Whatever ideological strategies the poet uses – consciously or not – to resolve these anxieties they still exert their pressure upon the text, in the form of contradictions and tensions woven into the very fabric of the work, which manifest themselves in particularly interesting ways on a symbolic level. And in this respect,


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the most revealing symbols are those at the heart of the curious episode of the horse and the hawk. For the most part, the problem of origins has constituted the greatest allure of this passage. Certainly, much is at stake in discussing its genesis for it has been used, directly or indirectly, as evidence in debates over the very nature of epic. The sale of the horse and the hawk lent apparent support to Menéndez Pidal’s neo-traditionalist theories: first, when the Spanish scholar argued for the episode’s historicity by showing its possible roots in the legal practice of roboratio (whereby symbolically prestigious goods, such as horses and hawks, were exchanged as corroboration of major property donations); and second, when William J. Entwistle’s discovery of an analogous motif in a sixth-century history of the Goths seemed to confirm Menéndez Pidal’s theory of ‘latent states’. The idea that El poema de Fernán González forms part of an unbroken web of oral epic which stretches back to the Visigothic era has been refuted by René Cotrait (1977), and his arguments do not need to be rehearsed here.25 More recently, L. P. Harvey and David Hook (1982) explored the possibility that the episode had more literary sources, as they brought to light suggestive parallels with Arabic chronicles on the conquest of Spain. In one of these, by the tenth-century historian Ibn al-Quiyya, Julián is a merchant who trades in North-African hunting animals. On discovering that his daughter has been raped by Rodrigo, he makes the thinly veiled threat that when he next returns to Spain he will bring back some particularly striking horses and birds of prey. Apart from the five Arabic instances of this motif, Harvey and Hook also recall the passage in the Libro del caballero Zifar in which Roboán’s immoderate desire for a horse and a hawk causes him to lose the kingdom of the Islas Dotadas. As they speculate upon the question of whether the passage is Arabic in origin or is an instance of polygenesis, Harvey and Hook conclude, cautiously, that it is probably a ‘generalized motif’ (1982: 843), used as a test of character (particularly of kings), or to signify punishment for excessive desire (1982: 844–45). In genetic analysis, their caution is appropriate. But it is, as I argue below, unwarranted when it extends to discussion of the motif’s specific meaning within El poema de Fernán González. Although they accept Burke’s view that in Zifar the horse and the hawk symbolize cupiditas, they are disinclined to find an allegorical meaning in the case of the earlier epic: ‘the animals are used simply as particularly valuable and prized attributes. [. . .] They seem, then, to have no significance other than that of prestige objects and status symbols’ (1982: 846), especially since the horse had been captured from the enemy 25 Cotrait accepts, however, that this passage may have derived from the lost Cantar de Fernán González (1977: 55–59, 282–83). The full bibliography on the legal practice of roboratio and the chronicler Jordanes’s allusion to popular legend that the Goths redeemed themselves for the price of a single horse may also be found, with further discussion, in Harvey & Hook (1982) and West (1983: 70–72).

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leader Almanzor. At least in part, however, the significance can be explained by this episode’s folkloric function. As West argues, the deceptive bargain struck by the Castilian count and the Leonese king over the sale of these prestigious animals serves as Fernán González’s fifth and final initiation rite, the test of ingenuity, ‘the decisive test which will ultimately free Castile from its dependence on León and cement the hero’s fame for centuries to come’ (1983: 69). But beyond this, West has little to add. Like Harvey and Hook, who claim the modest goal of expanding the range of discussion and identifying interpretative difficulties, she concludes her analysis merely by observing that the field is still ‘open to further elucidation’ (1983: 72).26 Indeed, in the most recent monograph on the poem, by Jean Paul Keller, the sale of the horse and the hawk warrants only a passing mention in the handy plot summary which is his final chapter on the liberation of Castile (1990: 147–59). In my view, however, the most useful line of inquiry into this episode’s role in the narrative of emancipation was suggested by Louis Chalon. Commenting upon the way the sale of these animals adumbrates the poem’s outcome, he pointed out that by refusing the gift and by accepting the terms of the contract, the King of León makes himself solely responsible for the fragmentation of his kingdom (1976: 443). This point is well worth developing, because, as I argue below, the affair of the horse and the hawk attempts to resolve at the symbolic level a host of issues concerning the nature of political agency–how power is exercised, and how dominion over others is legitimated and sustained. Consequently, the affair cannot be studied in isolation from the poem’s representation of political relationships as a whole. On the most obvious level, the episode of the horse and the hawk enables the poet to displace the responsibility for the rupture between lord and vassal onto the King of León. This is a valid but partial account of the transaction. The ostensible object of the episode is to show how the King legitimizes the fragmentation of his own kingdom and gives juridical authority to the emergent Castilian state. But the symbolic form in which the poet represents this process, and the way in which the transaction actually plays itself out, are particularly rich in their implications. For one thing, the transaction takes on the form of a deceit. Although it is not originally presented as such, later on the poet suggests that Fernán González devised the usurious contract in the expectation that the King would fail to meet its terms (740). This should be seen not only in terms of a folkloric motif (the decisive test of cunning that

26 On the question of origins, West is remarkably cagey: ‘Therefore, a traditional folktheme, perhaps Oriental in origin, may be the basis for this strange legend, although the Germanic origin suggested by Entwistle and supported by Menéndez Pidal, along with Menéndez Pidal’s historically based corrobación theory should not be excluded from consideration’ (1983: 72). Arguments in favour of Arabic origins have been adduced by Marcos Marín (1981).


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proves the count’s heroic stature), but as an integral part of the way that the poem represents feudal relations as inherently deceptive and unstable. Consider the objects of the transaction itself: land is exchanged for the symbols of chivalric status and military might. How ironic a commentary on the dangers of the feudal exchange of auxilium and consilium for the private jurisdiction and economic benefits of a fief, since the very things that define their relationship are those that destroy it. The sale is certainly a test of heroism, but it is heroism forged in a world of unpredictability and betrayal. For all its cunning, the legal trap the count sets for the King does not by itself guarantee the outcome. The King refuses to pay, and only does so when faced with the threat of continued violence, a point to which I shall shortly return. Besides the object of the transaction, we also need to consider its circumstances and nature. The King convokes his cortes, an act which Fernán González views as yet another instance of oppression: Ovo ir a las cortes, pero con grand pesar, era muy fiera cosa la mano le besar: ‘Señor Dios de los cielos, quiérasme ayudar que yo pueda a Castiella d’esta premia sacar.’ (571)

This alarm contrasts not only with the general delight and honour with which he is received, but also with his own behaviour as vassal, carrying out to perfection his duties of providing consejo (574). It hardly needs to be pointed out that the object of this passage is to demonstrate the moral superiority of the Castilian count over his Leonese lords. The well-known words of El poema de mio Cid – ‘Dios, ¡qué buen vassallo, si oviesse buen señor!’ (l. 20) – evidently apply to Fernán González, except that he does not require a good king to prove his perfection. The ethical disparity between the King and vassal is also evident when the King refuses the count’s offer of the horse and the hawk as gifts and insists on buying them (576–77). The noble symbols of the warrior ethos are degraded, by being treated as mere merchandise, objects of ‘mercado’ (578d).27 As Michael Harney has explained in relation to El poema de mio Cid, the carefully-wrought rules of the contract (578–79) are anathema to the economy of gift-giving, since they violate the traditional ethics of the gift, signifying as it does a relationship grounded in an open-ended reciprocity bound by a moral, not juridical, force. According to Julian Pitt-Rivers ‘the permanence of a relationship cannot be assured by contract, for jural reciprocity is terminated by the counterprestation’ (quoted from Harney 1993: 82;

27 As I explain in chapter 5, the contrast between commerce and courtesy is also an important element in the Libro de Apolonio, when one of the characters chides the hero with the words ‘amiztat vender non es constumbre nuestra. / Quien bondat da por preçio malamientre se denuesta’ (76cd); cited from Monedero’s 1987 edition.

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see also 78–89).28 In other words, by rejecting his vassal’s symbolic display of loyalty the King discredits himself as feudal lord. This aspect of the exchange is straightforward enough; matters are complicated when one takes a broader view of the somewhat ambivalent role law plays in El poema. Law takes on negative connotations within the economy of the gift, but it has an entirely positive function in helping secure and validate the autonomous statehood of Castile. In this respect, what is crucial is the King’s initial refusal to recognize the contract once the payment date has passed, and the debt has reached exorbitant heights. Since the Castilians feel impelled to invade his territory and lay waste to it, what the original bargain actually ends by legitimizing is in effect the continued need for military force. Within the structure of the poem, therefore, the problem this transaction attempts to resolve is not how to enforce the rule of law, but how to legalize and give moral justification to the inevitability of violence.29 From this perspective, the endlessly proliferating value of the horse and the hawk comes to symbolize the unpayable debt to war. On a symbolic level, the poem corresponds to the juridical fiction of perpetua necessitas. In the course of the thirteenth century, lawyers devised this argument as a means to justify permanent taxation to fund the budgetary needs of the administration, including an annual military taxation to defend the patria (Kantorowizc 1957: 284–90, at p. 286). Thus, the Leonese King may be the literal debtor, but ideologically he shares a far more widespread and deeply-rooted debt to military force, a common debt which Fernán González freely acknowledges earlier on in the poem, during his third speech: Este debdo levaron nuestros antecessores: de todos los que viven mejor guardar señores, de morir ante que ellos tenién se por debdores, catando esto ganaron el prez de los mejores. (215)30

Indeed, there are other reasons for connecting the speech from which this quotation comes to the issues raised by the sale of the horse and the hawk. For in this harangue the count warns his men of the spiralling costs of suing for peace with the Muslims. The costs are not financial, but the political and social consequences of premia: ‘en logar que a Castiella de la premia saquemos, / la

28 On the economy of the gift in El poema de mio Cid, see also Joseph Duggan (1989); I return to the issue in chapter 5. 29 Alfonso X’s historians phrase the issue in clear-cut terms. The Leonese King realizes that there would always be war with Castile unless he ceded that territory to Fernán González, because ‘tan buenos omnes et tan fuertes eran los castellanos et tan catadores de derecho’ (Primera crónica general, chapter 720; cited from Victorio, Poema 1981: 185; for original, see Alfonso X, 1977: II, 720). Castilian identity is founded upon the mutually reinforcing components of military power, law, and morality. 30 The last two lines have been reconstructed by the editor.


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premia en que era, doblárgela y emos’ (211cd).31 He persuades his men to exchange the debt incurred by peace for the debt due to ancestral tradition, namely the preparation and conduct of war. As we have seen, violence in the form of military force – the Visigothic heritage – is at the heart of the poem’s representation of the Castilian identity. And since that identity is in large measure embodied in the figure of Fernán González it is significant that the hero’s own liberation is the result of a hidden identity, as he dresses up in his wife’s clothes to escape his Leonese jailors. The episode of cross-dressing is the second time the count’s identity is concealed (the first was when he was abducted by the peasant). The female disguise entails no transgression of gender boundaries, because from the audience’s perspective the count’s manliness is reaffirmed by the contrast between his outward appearance and his true masculine identity. These acts of concealment themselves conceal how an identity which appears naturally fixed and self-evident is in fact the result of fluid and contested social, political, and economic relationships. Ideologically, these relationships may coalesce into abstracted forms that can then be presented as something solidly recognizable as an identity, but the fact that identities can be concealed, discovered, or misrecognized betrays how the transcendental is always constructed under pressure from the contingent and the unpredictable. As the hero’s adoption of female disguise suggests, the feminine operates as a powerful symbol of unpredictability. Although, by way of conclusion, I can merely gesture at what is a very complex issue, women’s symbolic roles in this particular epic are determined in part by the need to locate some logical and transcendental authority at the centre of the feudal order and to gender that authority as masculine.32 Although in both epic and romance queens have a range of symbolic roles, they are often used to explore the problems of sovereignty and wayward power. Both the count’s wife, doña Sancha, and her aunt Teresa, Queen of León, occupy liminal positions within the drama of Castilian independence: they both instigate and resolve much of the conflict

31 Another thematic parallel follows immediately: ‘Por engaño ganar non ha cosa peor, / quien cayere en est’ fecho cadrá en grand error; / por defender engaño murió el Salvador: / más val ser engañado que non engañador’ (212). Strictly speaking the sale of the horse and the hawk is not an engaño, but a written contract; the Leonese King is not so much duped as a dupe. The count’s cunning modulates into overt trickery when he puts on female clothing to escape the Navarrese jail. The speech continues with another financial reference: the Visigoths ‘eredar non quisieron pora menos valer / lo que ellos non podiessen enpeñar nin vender’ (214cd). Their freedom and honour are defined by their ability to dispose of their patrimony on their own terms. In a sense, this is what the count does by insisting on setting the conditions for the sale of his beasts. 32 For an overview of gender issues raised by the epic, with further bibliography, see Lacarra (1986 and 1988), Deyermond (1988), and Vaquero (2005). Vaquero’s important book appeared too late for me to take full advantage of its literary insights and historical research.

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in the second half of the poem.33 That the feminine should be used to symbolize the borders between chaos and order is hardly a surprising conclusion. It is more significant that as the narrative moves towards its climax and rationalizes the martial destiny of an independent Castile, it displaces its insecurities about social order on to the symbolic level. For as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, ‘symbols are the instruments par excellence of “social integration”: as instruments of knowledge and communication [. . .], they make it possible for there to be a consensus on the meaning of the social world, a consensus which contributes fundamentally to the reproduction of the social order’ (1991: 164 & 166). In this respect, though the poem depicts various forms which power takes in the establishment of order, its own exercise of symbolic power is the most insidious form of all.

33 For illustrations of the symbolic polyvalence of queens, and the issues surrounding queenship, see the collected essays in Fradenburg (1992a) and Anne Duggan (2002). For the liminality of queenship, see Fradenburg (1992b: 4–6).

5

The Cleric, in Between Story-telling implies a narrator with a point of view. The problems that this statement poses are immediate and well known: the story may be told from multiple perspectives, and by an unreliable narrator who acts as a counterpoint to, or even to obscure, the author’s position. Formulated thus, we think of voice and perspective as the result of a conscious decision on the part of the creator. But they are obviously shaped by more than this. The stories of the mester de clerecía were not invented but adapted by their authors. Rewriting introduced changes that can be identified through comparative study and analysed for their contemporary ideological significance, as Gumbrecht has argued (1974). The residue can be harder to assess. The poet inherits basic narrative structures and motifs which continue to determine how his work, even in its new poetic format, will set its face towards the contemporary world. Of course, the ideological meaning of these basic narrative elements will evolve as the work moves in time and space (a theoretical point most simply demonstrated by Borges’s exemplum of Pierre Menard). But even so, the source text may offer a legacy of meanings that do not fit seamlessly within the new version’s ideological landscape. As I argued in the introduction, this landscape is more fractured than the text itself might lead us to believe; taking note of what does not appear to fit is a practical way of acknowledging that a text’s ideology is never reducible, at least not without simplification, to a fully fledged system of beliefs that stand in perfect alignment with the clerical poet’s objectives. This point, which has been illustrated in all kinds of ways in previous chapters, is central to the analyses that follow. Here, I examine texts in which the cleric is situated in the intersection of discourses and values that, if not necessarily in open competition, are not always compatible. These poems cast the notion of the cleric as intermediary in a different light. The axis of mediation that interests me in this chapter is not the one that links centres of authority with the world at large, but the one that runs between the dominant authorities themselves, namely Church and State. The mester de clerecía offers more opportunities for studying the relation between Church and State than could be fitted into this book. If I have chosen a relatively minor poem, the fragmentary debate Elena y María, it is because it demonstrates better than any other the complexities of studying the clerical writer’s alignment. The two poems that follow, El libro de Apolonio and Berceo’s twenty-third miracle, El mercader fiado, show the cleric engaged in another

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form of mediation, attempting to find a space for emergent discourses of commerce. They are metaphors for the cleric as wandering scholar, moving between the Church, the court, and the town and not necessarily at home in any of them.

Between Church and Court: Allegory or ‘Othered Speech’ in ‘Elena y María’ Although there is uncertainty about its exact date, scholars believe that the Spanish debate poem Elena y María is the latest example of the knight/clerk debates, and that it was composed sometime during the reign of Alfonso X (1254–84). There have been various attempts to situate the poem within its literary tradition, and to understand its surviving fragments as part of a diachronic system.1 From the vantage point of the late thirteenth century, we look back over nearly two hundred years of knight/clerk debates in a review that takes us back past the half-dozen or so romance versions of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, until we finally come to rest in the Latin Romaricimontes Concilium and the Altercatio Phyllidis et Florae, which were written about 1150. Although these two Latin poems set the generic parameters for the subsequent vernacular tradition, they themselves take up a theme developed in goliardic and vernacular lyrics. Giuseppe Tavani, for instance, finds evidence for the earlier origins of the debate in a poem written about 1100 by Guilhem IX of Aquitaine (1964: 52). Tavani’s passing reference to Guilhem raises a symptomatic methodological paradox. The premise of his survey is that a particular text’s meaning is not the result of its place within its generic tradition, but that variance in form and content is determined by specific cultural and ideological circumstances: ‘situazioni culturali e concezioni di vita nettamente differenziate’ (1964: 51).

1 Menéndez Pidal suggested 1280 as the date of composition (1948: 16), but Enzo Franchini places it earlier, even before the mid-century (Diccionario filológico 2002: 381). The principal studies on the poem’s tradition are by Menéndez Pidal (1976: 134–42; with modified conclusion in 1948: 15–36), Di Pinto (1959: 77–109), Tavani (1964), and Bubnova (1993). The text was first published, with linguistic and MS study, in Menéndez Pidal’s paleographic edition (1976: 119–59; originally 1914). I quote from his later edition (Menéndez Pidal 1948), which includes a revised study. For other significant editions, see Di Pinto (1959), Bossy (1987: 78–97; with a translation based on Di Pinto’s text), and Ciceri (1995, with Italian translation). For editions of other vernacular texts in the tradition, see Oulmont (1911) and Faral (1913: 191–303). Speaking of the French poems, Bloch holds that ‘The love court poem is [. . .] at once the quintessential and the least successful of courtly forms. Because of the overtness with which it exposes its true subject, the legal function of courtliness itself, the Judicia amoris flounders on a tedious no-man’s land between pseudodocument and literary text’ (1977: 213–14, at p. 214). As far as the Spanish poem is concerned, the ‘true subject’ is different, and certainly not always overtly exposed.

THE CLERIC, IN BETWEEN

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Tavani rightly dismisses the approach of Faral and Menéndez Pidal, who view literary tradition in narrow evolutionary terms. But to all intents and purposes, his actual practice differs little from theirs. Having acknowledged the foundational significance of the lyric (in this case its satiric form), he proceeds to exclude it from his own survey of the debate genre, which is conducted in hermetic isolation from other literary forms, and as a result he arrives at highly questionable conclusions, which I sketch out below. Though dubious in practice, Tavani’s methodological premise is in essence correct: in order to place Elena y María within its literary tradition, and to reconstruct its particular engagement with its contemporary world, we need to combine diachronic and synchronic analysis. If we are fully to appreciate the esthetic and ideological scope of this satire, we need to consider the contemporary vernacular court lyrics which, as Guilhem’s poem indicates, constituted one of the most powerful means by which the noble laity appropriated concepts of courtliness and cultural authority from their clerical counterparts. Comparison with the Galician-Portuguese cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer throws the targets and scope of the poem’s satire into sharper relief; it helps, in short, to explicate the poem on a literal level. And without a clearer understanding of the poem’s literal foundations, we are in no position to explore its latent figurative meanings, which have in fact been ignored in previous analyses. I label these figurative meanings ‘allegory’ because the debate between Elena and María falls within that permeable and capacious rhetorical definition of allegory which was popularized by, among others, Isidore: ‘Allegoria est alieniloquium: Aliud enim sonat, et aliud intelligitur [. . .]. Allegoriae vis gemina est et sub res alias aliud figuraliter indicat’ (Etymologiae, I, xxxvii, 22, 26).2 To produce this vis gemina, medieval grammarians explained, allegory drew on a host of devices, such as irony, sarcasm, and personification, which this poem displays in abundance. But this sense of duality is also reproduced on a broader formal level. The analogies with the cantigas are also worth pursuing because form positions a writer socially. By adapting the conventions of the tradition so as to move the poem closer into the orbit of courtly satire, the writer shifts his stance.3 Combining clerical and courtly traditions, he 2 ‘Allegory is “othered speech”. For it says one thing, and another is understood [. . .]. The force of allegory is double; under some things it figuratively points to another.’ For a sample of the range of meanings covered by allegory, largely based on Quintilian’s Institutiones, see Lausberg (1966–69: §§895–900); see also Alfonso de Palencia: ‘Allegoria es mysterio et semejança: Et allegoria es “fabla ajena”, quando ál se entiende do lo que suena’ (1967: I, 13r). I owe this reference to Jeremy Lawrance. 3 Gómez Redondo (1996: 237) notes the juglaresque nature of the poem, and suggests it was destined for a courtly public ‘acostumbrado a valorar las sutilezas intelectuales’ of the debate format. While I would not associate intellectual subtlety with this poem, the courtly connection is valid. For an echo of the debate in court circles, see Pero d’Ambroa’s invective against his former lover, who left him for an escolar, poem 337 in Lapa’s edition (Cantigas d’escarnho, 1970), from which all subsequent references are taken, citing poem number.

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refuses a simple alignment with either caste, in a move that places him in a poetic, social, and moral space similar to the one occupied by the Occitan troubadour Marcabru. This cleric, of humble origins, may have visited the courts of South-West France and Iberia espousing particular dynastic and religious causes, such as the reconquista, but overall what best characterizes his verse is his disillusioned and ironic distance from the world, castigating generalized decadence and corruption.4 As I have mentioned, Elena y María belongs to the long literary tradition of debates between two women, often sisters, who argue over the relative courtly virtues of their respective clerical and warrior lovers, and who then travel to a fantasy world – the court of birds – to seek the ruling of the king and emperor, ‘Oriol’ (Golden Oriole), who ‘nunca julga senón de amor’ ( l. 288). It is the sole extant Spanish example of that genre, and it survives only in a single fragment of about four hundred lines, though its heavy reliance on the techniques of amplificatio suggests that it would have been the longest version in the romance corpus. Unfortunately, we lack the final judgment scene, which takes place within the thinly veiled allegorical setting of the Alfonsine court, presented as the harmonious epitome of courtliness, minstrelsy, and law, with the King as the ultimate arbiter of Love. Because there is no judgment scene, there is considerable doubt about whether the contest is won by the knight’s mistress (Elena) or – as is usually the case in this tradition – by the cleric’s (María). I should say at the outset that I do not agree with Kevin Reilly’s thesis (1983) that María wins the debate: I shall not rehearse my reasons here, since his arguments have been effectively rebutted by John Perivolaris (1994). Perivolaris does not speculate upon the outcome of the debate, but wisely takes up Tavani’s basic conclusion that ‘both the knight and the clerk are condemned through the mouths of their mistresses’ (1994: 122; see also Bossy 1987: xxi). If the lack of a conclusion limits our analysis of the poem’s literary and social significance to the terrain of the hypothetical, the lacuna also has a certain symbolic value: it points up the uncertainties of the text that does survive. As several critics have observed, the particular contribution of the Spanish poem is to make both knight and cleric appear equally repugnant. In the words of Tavani, the two estates are treated with ‘quasi imparziale ostilità’ (1964: 77).

4 For a useful summary and sample of Marcabru’s verse (with Castilian translations), see Riquer (1975: I, 170–77); the most recent edition (with English translations and detailed commentaries), is by Gaunt, Harvey, and Paterson (Marcabru 2000). These editors note that Marcabru’s poems ‘are often vehicles for a hard-line, clerical, orthodox morality’ (5); but as their commentaries make plain, this ‘orthodox morality’ makes him an establishment outsider in the world as it actually exists. Analogous positions are taken up by the Iberian clerical poets Martin Moya (poems 275, 277) and Airas Nunes (poem 69), who lament the decline of clerecía and the flight of truth from both secular and religious institutions.


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Thus, the Spanish poet brings to the fore the satiric possibilities of the tradition and writes what appears to be a generalized critique of the two dominant estates, rather than a defence of either. However, I would argue that this ‘impartial hostility’ is structured by a particular dynamic. For as the poem progresses, Elena and María appear equally untrustworthy, avaricious, and self-serving: in our eyes, the mistresses are first literally sisters, and then figuratively so.5 It seems to me that the Spanish poet’s contribution to this conventional debate lies precisely in the play between the literal and the figurative. We begin by differentiating between the sisters, reading them literally as lovers of two distinct men, in a vague but nonetheless apparently real setting. But then, as their underlying similarities emerge, and as they head off towards the more explicitly allegorical setting of the court of birds, so layers of figurative meanings begin to unfold. Bossy has made the suggestive point that the motif of the court of birds indicates that ‘while the knight and the cleric wear very different “plumages”, they may figuratively be birds of one feather’ (1987: xx). Moreover, the sisters themselves are figurative not simply in the obvious sense that they personify the moral and social vices of two associated but distinct estates (the name Helen evokes Troy, and thus the warrior caste; Mary, the Virgin, and hence the Church). The style, tone, and content of their portrayal encourage us to read their ‘sisterhood’ differently. As I shall explain in my conclusion, these two sisters are bound together by gender: together, they represent Woman, and in this way the poet brings into play a host of symbolic meanings associated with the feminine. Lack of closure does not mean that, however conjectural they may have to be, we cannot advance some substantial hypotheses about the poem’s ideological meanings. For this kind of reading, we have to return to the two most detailed accounts of the poem and its place in literary tradition, written over thirty years ago by Mario Di Pinto (1959) and Giuseppe Tavani (1964).6 Both these critics argue that the poem’s hard-edged satiric tone is explained by a putative urban, or bourgeois, audience, in response to the exploitation of the two dominant estates. Di Pinto’s thesis that Elena y María represents ‘un imborghesimento e una popolarizzazione degli ideali cavallereschi’ (1959: 104) is pushed to extreme lengths by Tavani, for whom the poem displays ‘una mentalità piu gretta, un moralismo grossolano e provinciale, nutrito di conformismo e calato nelle forme aspramente realistiche dello scherno corrosivo e demolitore’ (1964: 51). And he goes on to add that the opposition to the dominant estates comes

5 In one of the redactions of the Jugement d’amour, the two women are so intimate that they are like sisters (ll. 72–74; Faral 1913: 254). They are literally sisters in Blanchefleur et Florence (ll. 102–03; Oulmont 1911: 171), but not in Melior et Ydoine or in Huéline et Aiglantine. 6 Bubnova’s article (1993), though a useful overview, is less substantive.

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da parte del mondo intelletualmente limitato di una nascente borghesia cittadina, incapace di intendere l’arte elaborata e controllata degli intellettuali e insieme ostile allo spirito guerriero e al gusto dell’avventura (o meglio ai miseri resti di questo e di quello); e tesa invece alla ricerca di nuovi moduli di vita e di nuove concezioni d’arte che possano sostituirsi a quelle manifestazioni di una società cui si sente fondamentalmente estranea. (1964: 51)7

While I agree that the text suggests a degree of alienation, it is too simplistic to attribute this to a ‘rising bourgeoisie’, whose allegedly vulgar provincial values would seem more at home in a novel by Flaubert, Galdós, or Alas. The fact that the work is copied out in a minstrel’s notebook from the early fourteenth century does not indicate that the work was performed exclusively before an urban audience; in ideological terms, the poem is as itinerant as the surviving text itself. If we are to uncover the incidental figurative meanings, the diachronic analysis of the way the poem adapts inherited conventions, which has been begun but not exhausted by Tavani and others, needs to be extended and refined by a synchronic study of the poem’s relationship to three fields: contemporary political and socioeconomic conflicts (e.g., the struggle between Church and State, the changing structure of the nobility); legal and political treatises (such as Alfonso’s Partidas, which advance the theory of three estates and their corresponding social and ethical responsibilities); and contemporary satire and invective, the literary descendants of Guilhem of Aquitaine’s canso. The cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer provide analogues not only for the social satire of the poem, but also for the representation of Woman, as I shall show. Drawing these parallels is hardly an unusual step to take when one considers the fluidity of the clerical estate, and the basic fact that clerical poets were just as at home composing and listening to court lyrics as they were with the forms of the mester de clerecía.8 In short, the general force and flavour of the Spanish satire derives not from the internal dynamic of the tradition (its increasing trivialization, inflected by what Di Pinto called its ‘imborghesimento’), but from being composed against a horizon of expectations created by the vicious lampooning of court satire. At its most general, the point may be illustrated when we consider the rank of the two women’s lovers. Elena and María offer us contrasting images of

7 See also his account of the poem as ‘una opera letteria di consumo spicciolo’ (literary ‘small-change’, 1964: 79), and as ‘l’espressione di una cultura rudimentale, affidata essenzialmente ai giullari e destinata all piccolo borghesia cittadina, i cui interessi limitati e grossolani dovevano trovare piene soddisfacimento in testi come Elena y María’ (1964: 83). 8 The surviving cancioneiros record the verse of the following cluster of clerical poets: Airas Nunes, Rui Fernandez de Santiago, Pay de Cana, Sancho Sanchez, Gomez Garcia, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the Aragonese cleric Martin Moya (or Moxa), on whom see Stegagno Picchio (Moya 1968: 23–94). For basic details on the other writers see the respective entries in Dicionário (1993).


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these two men. They are either impoverished and immoral wastrels, or the epitome of religious and chivalric power and authority (not virtue, it should be noted), and the contrast constitutes an ‘enigma’, one of the many possible tropes of allegory. What exactly are their rank and status? The humour and multiple ironies generated by the question are in part inherited from Elena y María’s closest literary antecedents, the two Anglo-Norman poems, Blancheflour et Florence and Melior et Ydoine, and the earlier Francien Huéline et Aiglantine. However, it is significant that to represent the estate of knighthood the Spanish poet uses not simply the generic term caballero, but also the more precise infanzón (l. 100). Overall, while this does not narrow the scope of his comic attack on caballería as an estate, it enables the poet to draw upon the satire of impoverished infanzones that makes up such a rich harvest of the cantigas de escarnho e mal dizer.9 He deploys a similar technique in his satire of the orador, whose representative is most frequently labelled abad.10 As several critics have noted, after the French Jugement, the debate focussed not upon the amorphous category of the cleric but upon ordained ecclesiastics. Menéndez Pidal’s suggestion that the term abad means country priest (‘cura o párroco’; 1948: 32) implies that the Spanish poem continues to define the target of attack. However, given the unreliability of the protagonists’ claims and counter-claims, there is no solid evidence as to the rank of the abad within the Church hierarchy. Indeed, it is possible that the term was chosen precisely for its ambiguity, and hence satiric range. Although there is no suggestion that María’s lover was literally an abbot, the use of the term abad could also evoke the vices of the monastic world. As is well known, the impoverished infanzón was one of the favourite targets of Galician-Portuguese satire and invective, even though the ricoshombres and hidalgos were often ridiculed on similar grounds. Collectively, the cantigas present us with an image of degenerate knighthood that corresponds closely to the pathetic portrait offered by María: cowardice, lack of food and wealth, the shame of having to pawn his clothes, arms, and horse, which are the outward symbols and juridical guarantors of his rank and status. As others have pointed out, several antecedents to the Spanish debate poem share these satiric features, but not even the closest analogue, Huéline et Aiglantine, presents

9 For representative examples, see poems 107, 113, 143, 167–68, 207, 215, 224, 226. As Scholberg notes, although there were other more frequent targets, ‘infanzones y ricoshombres avaros o venidos a menos, hidalgos pretenciosos y religiosos impúdicos fueron los más dura y sarcásticamente atacados’ (1971: 99). For the poet of Elena y María, pretension and sexual licence characterize both estates equally. 10 For abad or abadón, see ll. 101, 209, 261, 350, & 375. His domain is described as ‘eglisa’ in ll. 184, 206, & 252, though on the last two occasions the word applies to the Church as an institution.

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such a relentlessly wretched picture.11 Indeed, some features of the poem’s caricature of this estate do not appear in the earlier tradition. For example, María’s scorn for the knight’s poverty is enlivened by an original, albeit minor, graphic touch: ‘siempre ha fambre e frío’ (l. 58), she remarks, concluding that whenever the knight returns home empty-handed ‘luego es fría la posada’ (l. 68), and her derision is echoed in identical terms later in the poem (l. 157). Whether or not the coldness of the knight’s reception is a form of comic sexual innuendo, this descriptive detail recalls a poem by the famous Pero da Ponte (348), in which we laugh at a penurious infanzón whose frigid house is never warmed by the kitchen fire. Pero da Ponte’s verse also sheds light on a passage that occurs towards the end of the fragment, where Elena boasts of the wealth and land accumulated through her lover’s chivalric deeds: ‘gana muchos haberes por su barraganía / e por su caballería’ (ll. 397–98). The primary meaning of barraganía is no doubt a synonym of caballería. But the term ‘barragán’ could be used in a pejorative sense (Pero da Ponte’s poem 344), and although it occurs only once in the corpus, the association with ‘barragana’, mistress (poem 372), contributes another layer of irony to Elena y María: as we shall see, the knight is accused of having pawned his weapons, the defining symbols of his estate, and thus of having prostituted the values of his caste. By proclaiming her lover’s ‘barraganía’, María unwittingly condemns herself and her man, in the ironic process noted by Perivolaris (1994: 122). The points I have just made concern relatively minor lexical details. But there is a more important aspect of the debate poem which is thrown into sharper relief by the Galician-Portuguese satire. In a couple of passages, María ridicules the knight for being at the beck and call of an unpredictable and ungrateful lord: quien anda en casa ajena nunca sal de pena. (ll. 61–62) [. . .] cuando él es en palacio non es en tal espacio, oras tien algo, oras tien nada, que aína falla ela soldada. (ll. 126–29)

This concern with the precarious dependency that underpins feudal relationships is absent from the previous tradition. In Huéline et Aiglantine, for example, which provides the closest analogies to the Spanish poem, the impoverished 11 Aiglantine, for example, insists on the knight’s ‘poverté’ and his ineluctable slide into debt in terms very similar to María’s diatribe (ll. 123–73; Oulmont 1911: 161–62). But even here there is a difference: the relevant passage hinges on the verbal play upon gaje, which denotes the courtly love-token as well as the man’s debt to the moneylender. The pun does not bear out Tavani’s observation that the work lacks ‘ogni effettivo contenuto cortese’ (1964: 64), since the values of true courtliness, denied to the knight, are emphatically reclaimed for the cleric (e.g. ll. 25–28; Oulmont 1911: 157–58).


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knight is at one point accused of being economically dependent upon his mistress (l. 136; Oulmont 1911: 161). In literary terms, the references to the ‘casa ajena’ and the ‘soldada’ are facilitated by the numerous cantigas that inveigh against the slowness with which the king rewards the services of his knights (the bitter complaints against Alfonso X by the Portuguese nobleman Gil Pérez being perhaps the most striking examples; see poems 156–60, 165). In spite of their different perspectives and political objectives, both the cantigas and Elena y María respond to the changing definitions of knighthood that were taking place during the thirteenth century. As part of his ambitions to centralize monarchical power, Alfonso X attempted to reshape the office of knighthood, in practice a very polymorphous category, and transform it at an ideological level into a social estate with specific juridical, cultural, and political rights and responsibilities (Rodríguez Velasco 1993–94; 1996: 19–20). The principal strategy Alfonso developed to create internal cohesion among this estate, and subject it to the monarchy, was the concept of naturaleza. Though it could be created in various ways, in essence naturaleza was a bond of solidarity based on mutual obligation, honour, and amity, which lent a sense of moral rightness and naturalness to a hierarchical relationship.12 Seen in this context, the satire of the debate poem takes on sharper focus, as it represents the knight as an ad hoc wage earner whose relationship with his lord is based not on mutual loyalty but on the ready flow of cash. Elena’s proud boast that her lover was the recipient of ‘grandes soldadas’ (l. 77) would not have sounded out of place in the frontier world of the Poema de mio Cid; but in a period when knighthood was increasingly being equated with nobility and its associated virtues, such payments would hardly have constituted a significant claim for prestige and dignity, especially since this knight is represented more as a courtier than as a warrior.13 That the author of Elena y María was particularly fascinated with the implications of the knight’s financial plight is clear from two details that are found neither in the earlier debate tradition nor in the cantigas de escarnho. In order to relieve his poverty and hunger, the knight sells his arms to ‘los francos de la cal’ (ll. 141–53), and forces María to pawn the clothes he gave her as gifts (ll. 160–64). But the Spanish poet extends these conventional motifs by having María claim that he also resorts to gambling (ll. 130–41) and theft (ll. 167–70).

12 See Partida II, xxiv, 1: ‘Naturaleza tanto quiere dezir como debdo que han los homes unos con otros por alguna derecha razón en se amar et se querer bien. Et el departimiento que ha entre natura et naturaleza es éste: que natura es una virtud que face seer tidas las cosas en aquel estado que Dios las ordenó, et naturaleza es cosa que semeja a la natura, et que ayuda a seer et a mantener todo lo que decende della’. 13 As Harney remarks, in the Poema de mio Cid ‘wealth and power serve as the basis for enhanced prestige, rather than the other way round’ (1993: 208), which is one aspect of the poem’s ‘conservative’ even ‘reactionary’ political and economic tendencies (229). For references to the knight as courtier, see ll. 51, 71, 79, 94, 125.

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These added details reveal more than a fertile literary imagination, which inspires the poet to employ gambling as an apt allegory of the precarious life at court. The references to both gambling and theft also betray an awareness of the reasons for which a knight could lose his juridical status as member of this noble elite. According to Alfonso X’s Siete partidas, II, xxi, 25, ‘Por quales razones pierden los cavalleros honrra de cavallería’: quando el cavallero estodiese por mandado de su señor en hueste o en frontera, e vendiese o malmetiese el caballo o las armas, o las perdiese a los dados, o las diese a las malas mugeres, o las empeñase en taberna, o furtasse o ficiese furtar a sus compañeros las suyas, [. . .] o si usase públicamiente él mismo de mercaduría [. . .] por ganar dineros. (My emphasis)14

With regard to the knight being reduced to selling or pawning his weapons, and being tainted by his public involvement in mercaduría, Alfonso’s prohibition picks up a recurrent theme in the vernacular debate poems (Menéndez Pidal 1976: 127 note), which may be illustrated by María’s contempt for her sister’s impecunious lover, or the disdain expressed in Huéline et Aiglantine for the knight reduced to loitering in the ‘marché’ (l. 154; Oulmont 1911: 161). With regard to the abad, the vices of this man – principally greed, licentiousness, and the abuse of his position – have all been analysed and amply documented by earlier scholars of the text, and so my comments will focus on a single issue, which I believe lies at the very heart of the poem’s critique of the ecclesiastical estate: the relation between sexuality and power. The priest’s sexuality was re-examined by Reilly, who proposed that the fact that priest was not celibate should not by itself be taken as a damning indictment of the man, given the widespread practice of clerical concubinage and the apparently laissez-faire attitude towards it (1983: 253–54). His appeal to historical context is suggestive, but his actual argument is ultimately inconclusive: rhetorically, the whole point of the poem (or at least its surviving fragment) is to set up an ironic, even spurious, debate over primacy between two equally degenerate and irresponsible estates. Reilly was right to try to historicize the issue of celibacy, but a different argument needs to be made, because the priest’s sexuality opens up a multilayered critique. At its most general, it enables the poet to satirize not only the unchaste priesthood, but also the Church authorities and community of believers who tolerate it. The most revealing passage in this respect is when María denies that her lover curses her when saying Mass, by arguing that no cleric would damn another person’s soul in this way. If this were not the case, ‘non farién otro abad / senon el que toviese castidat’ (ll. 261–62). In one of his few gestures towards comic

14 See also Partida II, xxi, 12, which defines those who are excluded from the noble estate of caballería: ‘decimos que non debe seer caballero home que por su persona andodiese faciendo mercadorias’.


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subtlety, the poet manages to evoke the general acceptance of clerical concubinage, the priest’s own guilty but hypocritical awareness of his wrongdoing, and the ecclesiastical authorities’ inability to do anything about it. This passage holds the clue to an aspect of sexual corruption that was particularly troubling, for it depicts public attention being focussed on the concubine at the precise moment when her lover is saying Mass. This is not the only moment when Mass provides the location and armoury for the dispute (ll. 183, 209–16, 352, 355–60). Through these repeated references, the poem plays on fears of host desecration and ritual impurity, which, though longstanding, grew in force with the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century, to become especially acute after the theory of transubstantiation was accepted as dogma after the IV Lateran council. Though she is writing about the eleventhcentury theologian Peter Damian, Dyan Elliott’s remarks on the presence of the concubine at Mass are equally relevant to the later period of reform: ‘To Damian’s mind, sexual purity was the sine qua non of sacerdotal holiness. And so the clerical concubine’s sexual presence was a kind of rape of the altar in the double meaning of the word rapire – a sexual crime against the animate offering to God, the priest; and a theft perpetrated against the Christian community at large’ (1999: 102–03).15 The renewed emphasis on chastity that was set in motion by the Gregorian reforms had other, more material, implications, which are linked at an ideological level to the economic and political power of the Church. This poem makes various allusions to the abad as a wealthy feudal landlord, with plentiful vassals, tithes and (in a particularly grotesque touch which has no parallel in the previous tradition), the submissive homage of the secular powers: se fueren reis o condes o otros ricos homnes o dueñas de linaje o caballeros de paraje, luego le van obedescer e vanle ofrecer; bien se tiene por villano quien le non besa la mano. (ll. 267–74)

The outlandish boast, which suggests that María is in a fantasy world even before she reaches the court of birds, exaggerates a claim uttered in passing at the start of the debate (l. 41). By the end of the fragment, just before the two women set off for arbitration, the phrasing of their dispute suggests that they are by now less concerned about which of their lovers is superior than

15 See also 15–16, 19–20; I return below to other aspects of Elliott’s chapter on ‘The Priest’s Wife’ (1999: 83–106). For the Jews and host desecration, see above, chapter 1 (62).

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about subjecting their opponent to a state of vassalage, sealed by the ritual act of ‘besamanos’ (ll. 318–33). In spite of his courtliness, riches, and retinue, Elena’s lover is by her own estimation nothing more than an infanzón (l. 100); María tops this modest ambition by conjuring up for her abad a much higher social station: gana diezmos e primencias sin pecado e sin fallencia, e cuando quier bebe e come ha vida de rico homne. (ll. 185–88; my emphasis).

María’s delusions of wealth, power, and influence are rich in implication. Besides being a put-down, her hopeful comparison with the wealthy landed nobility offers an ironic commentary upon the economic plight of the thirteenthcentury Iberian Church, in hock to Italian bankers, and involved in a protracted and generally unsuccessful struggle to control its land, jurisdiction, tithes, and appointments. María’s claim clearly betrays the insecurity: the phrases ‘sin pecado, ‘sin fallencia’ and ‘cuando quier’ suggest the need to assert both the legitimacy and the autonomy of her lover’s economic foothold in the community.16 These concerns, of course, spread wider roots. María’s fanciful aspirations to sovereignty over kings and counts also derive their comic effect from the protracted crisis of Church and State and the debate over temporal supremacy.17 This feature of Elena y María anticipates the Disputatio inter clericum et militem (1296–98), in which a cleric complains that the Church’s property is constantly usurped and its rights violated by secular rulers, who in truth ought to be subject to ecclesiastical authority (Tierney 1980: 200–03). The Latin debate, which is a response to Pope Boniface VII’s bull Clericis laicos, is conducted largely on theoretical grounds, with scriptural arguments and authorities being brandished on both sides. For the knight, the idea that a bishop could be a territorial lord, or even worse, that he, a warrior, could be a vassal to a mere priest is a ‘bad joke’, and the ‘nonsense’ is duly swept aside on biblical grounds (203). But he then moves beyond the Bible, and casts his arguments in moral terms, protesting that churchmen misuse their endowments by spending their donated wealth on themselves rather

16 Linehan (1971: especially 101–221); he concludes that thirteenth-century Church leaders were, on the whole, ‘helpless and hopeless’, and notes the contemporary insult of them as ‘dumb dogs’ (329). See also Hillgarth (1976: I, 92–96, 107–08, 110, 117–19, 122–26). The need to protect the economic independence of the Church was recognized by the IV Lateran council, with the decree that the ‘clergy was not to pay tax levies to lay rulers without first consulting the pope’ (Tierney 1980: 175), which was more of an aspiration than a realistic expectation. 17 For a succinct survey of this debate, with representative documents, see Tierney (1980).


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than on charitable works, and that they fail to look after the spiritual needs of their flock (203), charges that have parallels, albeit in a different mode, in Elena y María (e.g. ll. 361–64). The shift in the argument is telling, and it returns us to the issue of the priest’s sexuality. As R. I. Moore has argued, in the prolonged period of reform instigated by Gregory VII, celibacy provided the principal ideological leverage for the Church to elevate its role in society (2000: 81–88). Long past the age of martyrs, virginity conferred moral legitimacy, since it constituted ‘a sacrifice comparable with that of martyrdom [. . .]. For the individual monk it provided an alternative route to salvation. For the monastic community as a whole virginity defined its status in the traditional three-fold ordering of society, and distinguished it sharply from that of the warriors (bellatores)’ (Moore 2000: 87). Though Moore is writing about the monastic world, his point is valid for the Church as a whole, as the frontiers of celibacy expanded. Celibacy also had very material implications by helping to define the terms upon which it held its land, and it did this in two ways. It enabled a compromise to be reached in property relations with the secular world, which was characterized by the endemic oscillation between donation and usurpation. In theory at least, it removed the threat of an alternative dynastic order, which noble lay patrons particularly feared (Moore 2000: 86–88); secondly, celibacy was supposed to prevent a drain on church resources and prevent the alienation of land by the sons of priests (Elliott 1999: 83). Both designs provide the implicit context for Elena’s sneer at the priest’s bastard offspring: ‘la batalla faz con sus manos / cuando bautiza sus afijados’ (ll. 110–11). However, this particular taunt, mocking as it does the priest’s spurious ‘battles’, is principally levelled at the man’s indolence. In contrast with the warrior’s virile and belligerent life, the priesthood makes no equivalent sacrifice to justify its wealth, and it is significant that Elena’s denunciation of clerical gluttony and sloth (ll. 112–13) slides so easily into scorn for the priest’s predatory sexuality, whose only conquests consist of ‘fijas de homnes bonos enartar, casadas e por casar’ (ll. 114–15). Try as she might to portray the priest as a sexual predator, the poem’s satire is perhaps not that simple. Such is the evocative force of the poem’s depiction of these querulous and demanding women, who exchange sexual favours for material wealth and the prestige that goes with it, that we might reasonably ask who is the real subordinate, the priest or his concubine. And although there are fewer cantigas satirizing clerics (whether lay or ordained), they make up in force what they lack in number (Scholberg 1971: 94), and an important cluster of them sets this precise question into sharp relief.18 Caricatures of 18 In other respects, comparison with the cantigas does not reveal more than we already know about Elena y María on the level of content. Besides the arguments made below, however, one other minor hypothesis is worth noting. When Elena slights the priest’s bookish knowledge, his mastery of the liturgy and the sacraments, the rhetorical function is to set up her later accusations of hypocrisy. However, a further possible dimension of this and

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licentious friars, clerics and chaplains (such as poems 146, 188, 248) ridicule religious men who succumb to a more powerful female desire. These poems are not just acknowledgments of the reformist demands of celibacy: they are figurations of power. The most explicit example of this is the poem by Martín Soarez (poem 297), where the clerical phallus is clamped tight in the donzela’s apparently insatiable vagina: Uã donzela jaz preto d’aqui, que foi ogano un clérigo servir e non lhi soube da terra sair: e a dona cavalgou e colheu i Don Caralhote nas mãos; e ten, poi-lo á preso, ca está mui ben, e non quer d’el as mãos abrir. [. . .] e meteu-o logu’ en un cárcer atal, u muitos presos jouveron assaz; e nunca d’ i, tan fort’ e preso jaz, ten como saia, a meõs de morrer.

The image of vagina as prison, a variant of the vagina dentata motif, is a lurid illustration of how often fear of female power finds metaphoric expression in sexual terms; and the metaphor also underpins the obscene ferocity of the invectives against the fornicating and sexually aggressive abbess.19 The nexus between sexuality and power, which is often articulated through the convention of women’s domination of men in marriage or the myth of the ‘mounted Aristotle’, is a thread that runs throughout misogynist thought, and it is also central to the ideological issues at stake in Elena y María.20

other scornful references to the priest’s literacy emerges when we consider the cantigas that attribute seductive powers to a priest’s library (poem 23, by Alfonso X, satirizing the Dean of Cadiz), or describe the boredom experienced in sitting through an interminable Mass (poem 20, also by Alfonso X). 19 See, e.g., poems 134, 135, 147, 171, and Scholberg (1971: 94). These poems, like Berceo’s miracle of ‘La abadesa preñada’ (on which see above, ch. 2, 95–108) are variants of a satirical convention, which also surfaces in the earliest of the knight/clerk debates, the Romaricimontes Concilium in the mid-twelfth century. Venarde’s brief comments on this similar works are applicable here: ‘Writings such as these might be considered backlash, an expression of fear of the female power and independence that found its greatest expression in the cloister. That power was easily summarized for satirical purposes in aggressive female sexuality, a stock-in-trade of the Western literary tradition’ (1997: 166). It may be that the poet drew on his audience’s familiarity with this convention and chose the term abad to create a male counterpart for this female figure. 20 For a compilation of representative texts, see Blamires (1992: s. v. ‘domination’); given its chronological proximity to our text, especially relevant is Mathieu of Boulogne’s infamous Liber lamentationum Matheoluli (1295), which is anthologized in Jehan Le Fèvre’s fourteenth-century French translation (Blamires 1992: 177–97, esp. 180–83).


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Overall, this debate poem combines two obsessions, which are relatively less important in the earlier debate tradition but which are also significant features of the contemporary cantigas: sociopolitical structure (distinctions of caste, rank, and status) and feminine desire (for power, both sexual and economic). Historical circumstances allow a different perspective on the change in emphasis in the literary tradition. As the thirteenth century advanced, attempts to sort out and defend the respective domains and rights of Church and State became increasingly sophisticated; indeed, as these centres of power grew in complexity, it became increasingly urgent to define them as categories. In the Iberian Peninsula, the three-estates theory was introduced in the third quarter of the thirteenth century in order to support and rationalize these developments. Jesús Rodríguez Velasco (1996: 19) observes that it was Alfonso X who first introduced the three-estates theory into the Castilian vernacular.21 This move was revolutionary (the term is Rodrígez Velasco’s), and at least for this monarch it created an overarching ideological structure within which each member of society could be assigned his or her place in an interlocking hierarchy of duties, privileges, and values, all ultimately subordinated to the king. Alfonso’s treatment of knighthood, for example, is an attempt to classify and contain within juridical limits what Rodríguez Velasco calls the ‘poliformismo’ of that estate. The move was mirrored in the cultural domain, when the itinerant troubadour Guiraut Riquier wrote a verse treatise, called the Supplicatio, in order to rationalize the blurred distinctions between classes of troubadours and minstrels who were all, implicitly at least, subject to the ultimate poetic authority of Alfonso himself: an estates theory of poetics, so to speak (Bertolucci Pizzorusso 1966). Transgressive behaviour, in poetics and politics, makes up a significant proportion of the satiric cantigas, and it is obviously on ritual display in Elena y María. But transgression, or in this case the representation of transgression, underlies the existence of boundaries, even as they are being crossed. With regard to Elena y María, the most significant revision to the knight/clerk debate is, as I have mentioned, the prominence given to sociopolitical structures, functions, and privileges. No other poem refers explicitly to the estates of orador and defensor (ll. 23–24); no other poem has the women haggle over who will be the other’s vassal (ll. 318–33); no other poem refers to the feudal institution of tithes (ll. 185); no other poem has the knight’s mistress boast about sitting in the front pew at Mass (ll. 215–16); and in no other poem is the actual rank of the two women so open to question. In line with tradition, they describe themselves initially

21 For a general overview of the estates theory and its ideological implications, see Duby (1980). It did not, of course, provide the only social vocabulary and categories: for evidence derived from thirteenth-century moralists, canon lawyers, and mendicant friars, see the essays collected in Labrousse et al. (1978: 63–82, 83–100, and 108–49). For a schematic overview of estates theory and medieval Spanish literature, see De Stefano (1966).

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as ‘hermanas e fijas de algo’ (l. 19), and toward the end as ‘dueñas somos de otras tierras’ (l. 339). But in between, their language, conduct, and aspirations suggest that if they are not already the ‘monaguesa’ or ‘coitafesa’ that they accuse each other of being (ll. 220, 277–78), then they have the very real potential of becoming so. Rank and status are unstable, and the idea of instability is figured through the symbolic feminine. Although one could point to other textual evidence, comparison with the satiric cantigas is once again helpful. For in these poems, the representation of the female body is rooted in medieval physiological theories which have been much studied in recent work on gender and the body. At the grotesque extreme, the female body in the cantigas is a carnivalized body, one that subordinates the higher bodily functions to the lower, particularly those of the vagina and the anus. It symbolizes excess, a surplus that needs to be contained, a desire that can never be filled. It is the contradictory site of masculine need and loathing.22 For a particularly repellent example, witness the poem by Afonso Eanes do Coton (poem 52): Marinha, en tanto folegares tenho eu por desaguisado; e sõo mui maravilhado de ti, por non arrebentares: ca che tapo eu d’aquesta minha boca a ta boca, Marinha; e con estes narizes meus tapo eu, Marinha, os teus; e co’as mãos as orelhas, os olhos e as sobrencelhas; tapo-t’ ao primeiro sono da mia pissa o teu cono, como me non vej’ a nengu˜u, e dos colhões esse cuu. ¿Como non rebentas, Marinha?

Marinha’s bodily orifices – the unknowable, the flux and sheer illogicality of the symbolic feminine – are plugged as she is pinned down, covered, in a fusion of male hatred, desire, and awe: ‘¿Como non rebentas, Marinha?’ There is nothing as excessive as this in the debate between Elena and María,

22 These notions derive from the critique of Bakhtin’s celebrated theories of carnival and grotesque realism elaborated by Stallybrass and White (1986: 1–26). The bibliography on the alleged inferiority and disorderliness of the female body is vast: for a convenient sample of primary texts, see Blamires (1992: e.g, 38–49, 92, 192–93); for a broad treatment, see Cadden (1993); for the application of these ideas in debate literature, see Solterer (1995: 48–52). I consider the implications of female physiology as represented in religious texts in chapter 2, above, where further bibliography is cited.


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and although there is no point exaggerating the textual parallel, the poem bears an ideological affinity with Elena’s gloating claim: A mí tien honrada, vestida e calzada; vísteme de cendal, e de ál que más val. Créasme de cierto que más val un beso de infanzón que cinco de abadón. (ll. 95–101)

Just as Afonso Eanes ‘covers’ Marinha, so, in the debate poem, the knight ‘clothes’ Elena, covering her in two senses, sexually and sartorially, with the pun ‘ál’ connecting the double meaning, or vis gemina, of ‘vestir’. But in Elena y María, the notion of excess, or a surplus that needs to be contained, is by and large not figured through the female body. To do this, it exploits another conventional set of misogynist assumptions: female volubility. In Elena y María, the poet’s amplificatory technique produces a female speech whose verbosity and violence far exceed anything found in his sources. Of course, on a superficial level, this is an effective way of lending the poem yet another layer of irony, with the women themselves becoming objects of derision, and thus implicated in the critique of greed, avarice, and lust. But I think we should also explore the underlying implications of this, and push the moral reading towards the political. And in this respect, the women’s immoderate speech, coupled with their excessive material needs and aspirations for power, have a symbolic value within the feudal imaginary. For this poem, the label ‘knight/clerk debate’ is a misnomer, because it makes us forget that it is much more than a debate over the male representatives of the two dominant estates: it is a debate between their female surrogates. This displacement is crucial, because it turns the poem into a debate between the symbolic assets of these two estates. The women’s fundamental material concerns are with food and clothing, which are the material signs of the economic and social power of Church and State, as well as the symbols of their basic protective obligations.23 In this way, Elena and María stand at the ideological intersection that links power to responsibility. These wayward beings, with their insatiable demands for food and clothing (their ‘protection’), are analagous to the Aristotelian matter that yearns for the stability of form; they are, so to speak, the feudal feminine. The women are thus contradictory symbols, representing both the 23 Although the symbolic use of food and clothing hardly needs documentation, pertinent examples abound in the cantigas: e.g., Alfonso X’s satire in which Pope’s cape is used symbolically in the unsurprising context of a dispute over investiture (poem 33); or the invective of an infanzón whose social irrelevance and degeneracy is figured through his inability to dress and feed himself properly (poem 207). As we shall see, these symbols return in the conclusion to the Libro de Apolonio.

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hierarchical desire for stability, rank, and status, and, as its inevitable counterpoint, the fear of disruption, mutability, excess. The theory of the three estates developed to rationalize these contradictions, to hold together, at least on an ideological level, the forces of fragmentation inherent in the feudal mode of production. It attempted to create a coherent whole based upon mutual need, on the grounds that productive labour, the third estate, produces a surplus that sustains the two dominant estates, who in return claim to protect it, both spiritually and physically. Although the poem’s satire is blatant and direct, the fact is that it is also distanced – doubly distanced, by the poet’s use of irony and by his exploitation of the female voice as a surrogate voice with which to lay bare the degeneracy of the two dominant estates. This fact, which has been consistently overlooked in criticism on this poem, helps us read the poem in its proper literary and ideological context. Though it is not noted for its sophistication, the poem’s interplay between the literal and the figurative, its use of irony, its challenging juxtaposition of vulgarity and idealization, firmly link this poem to its better-known partners in the clerical literary movement, the Razón de amor and the Libro de buen amor. These aspects are clearly part of the esthetic of clerical writers who ‘had their feet on the earth but their heads in the heavens’. If the Spanish poet departs from convention and emphasizes vulgarity, it is because he wants to underscore this duality between earthly and spiritual perspectives; and by implication he adopts a third position between, but perhaps more accurately, outside the polarity of heaven and earth, Church and State. Allegory and style, mechanisms by which meaning is produced, become a means of situating the writer as outsider, rather than intermediary, as one who speaks with ‘fabla agena’. His ‘other voice’ is, principally, the voice of women. This enables him to do two things: to speak from a vantage point outside the two dominant estates, even as he implies – through his negative portrayal of these women, and the inherited associations of the feminine – that order should be recuperated from within them. The use of the female voice to disrupt dominant discourses and taxonomies of power is not unique to this poem, of course. Marcabru’s famous pastourelle, ‘L’autrer jost’ una sebissa’ uses a peasant woman in order to represent the pretensions of courtliness from the viewpoint of the exploited, and, if correct, the suggestion that she was also of mixed race would push her perspective even further towards the social margins.24 Writing about the debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale (c. 1216), Christopher Cannon has argued that the poem ‘envisions a wider world in which women’s speech is not harmful but useful, an indispensable means of knowing’ (2004: 111–38, at p. 137). As part of his argument, he makes a point that is also applicable to Elena y María, which is

24 See Marcabru (2000: 375–87), poem 30. For the putative Iberian setting of this poem, and the hypothesis of its mixed-race protagonist, see the editors’ notes on line 2 (384).


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that although there is a ‘winner’ in the debate, by the end of things every position embraced in the course of the poem is preserved: ‘all of it matters’ (137). Formally, the poem looks like a debate, but ‘a debate is finally what this poem is not’ (135). In this regard, Cannon might well have referred to an earlier book on Middle English debate poetry by Thomas Reed (1990), for whom an ‘aesthetics of irresolution’ prevents many poets’ work from being reduced to the playing out of fixed positions and beliefs. Dyan Elliott’s observations on the symbolic significance of the priest’s wife also have special bearing on this issue. Elliott, as I have mentioned, argues that ‘the establishment of clerical celibacy helped reify binaries such as clerical / lay, celibate / married, male / female’ (1999: 82). The priest’s wife represents an anomaly, because her mixed, hybrid, ‘impossible’ status is ambiguous in a way that reveals the seams in classificatory categories. [. . .] She wobbles between heretical and orthodox, depending on the ideology of whoever apprehends her [and] deserves special notice for her capacity to unsettle the history of the western church. Not only is she a remembrance of what the church would like to forget but she also acts as a mechanism for eliciting threatening subtexts that the reformers would have consciously disowned. (1999: 83–84)

Though she is not herself a priest’s wife, María is certainly one of her avatars. On an ideological level, therefore, on the basis of the surviving fragment it does not matter much who wins the debate in Elena y María: the eventual winner would be nominal. And nor should one attempt to pin down the poem’s ideological alignment by trying to assign it a primary audience. Whether performed before a proto-bourgeois, urban public, and/or monarchical, seigneurial, or even ecclesiastical courts, the poem derives much of its power from what Tavani called its ‘impartial hostility’, from its refusal of any obvious parti pris, in a variant of the conventional contemptus mundi.25 Indeed, I would go further and suggest that through the symbolic feminine, the poem’s bitter disillusion encompasses figurative language itself, which was in one form or another central to both courtly and clerical discourses. Simply put, the women are an allegory of allegory itself. The excesses and vulgarity of their speech evoke, in particularly grotesque mode, the broad definition of allegory as alieniloquium, ‘othered speech’, or ‘fabla ajena’ in Palencia’s translation (1967: I, 13r). The convention of female volubility has been examined by Helen Solterer, whose starting point is that clerical representation of women as quarrelsome, chattering interlocutors was designed in part to illustrate the dangers of literalism, misreading and lack of access to the symbolic (1995: 3–4). And although Solterer shows that women readers and respondents posed 25 The most important contemporary example of the contemptus mundi tradition is the widely disseminated work by Innocent III, which was translated into Castilian cuaderna vía in the late thirteenth or fourteenth century as the Libro de miseria del omne.

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a far greater challenge to clerical mastery, literalism, figured through the symbolic feminine, is precisely what is on display in Elena y María.26 The two women are unable to pass beyond the material signs and outward trappings of the social order and perceive the transcendental harmony that should bind together the Church and State as ‘sisters’. This is a critique not so much of women as of their alleged masters.

Between Court and Town: The Mercantile Morality of ‘El libro de Apolonio’ En el nombre de Dios e de Santa María, si ellos me guiassen, estudiar querría conponer hun romance de nueva maestría del buen rey Apolonio e de su cortesía.27

The opening stanza of the Libro de Apolonio announces cortesía as a central theme of the romance. As a moral and social virtue, cortesía evolved out of life at court, and exemplified a set of values propagated initially by the clerical class from which the author of the Libro de Apolonio himself came. As defined by Alfonso X, the term denotes those ‘bondades y enseñamientos buenos aprendidos en la corte’.28 And yet, although the adventures of Apolonio, King of Tyre, begin and end at court, they are by no means circumscribed by its physical boundaries. The conventions of romance lead the hero through a much wider spectrum of fictional situations, in which his values and identity are tested, modified, and forged anew. So far, studies on Apolonio’s intellectual, ethical, and religious qualities paint the picture of a hero whose identity epitomizes the aspirations and anxieties of the clerical class, patterned by the narrative structures not only of romance but also of hagiography.29 This picture corresponds neatly to our present understanding of the social origins

26 Commenting on the Concilium Romaricimontes and the Jugement d’amour, Solterer argues that these works reinforce clerical control of women and knowledge, and that ‘valorizing the clerks’ prerogative to know women has the effect of disenfranchising them’ (1995: 31–35, at p. 34). 27 I follow Monedero’s ed. (Libro de Apolonio 1987), except that I regularize i/j/y, u/v, and c/ç, and transcribe the ampersand by ‘e’. Quotations are located by stanza. 28 Partidas II, 9; quoted by Monedero (1987: 95). On the semantic range and social significance of cortesía in Iberian texts, see Maravall (1983b). For the broader European context, see Burgess (1970: 20–34), Bumke (1991), and Jaeger (1985 and 1995). 29 For the protagonist’s clerical values see Manuel Alvar (Libro de Apolonio 1984: xlv–lxi; revised as article, 1986), Surtz (1987), Carlos Alvar (1989), and Monedero (Libro de Apolonio 1987: 27–34); on christianization, see Manuel Alvar (Libro de Apolonio 1976: I, 143–50); for hagiography see Surtz (1980) and Brownlee (1983b); for folkloric motifs and structure, see Deyermond (1968–69).


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of the mester de clerecía: a group of clerical writers who emerged in the process of ecclesiastical reform, expansion of schools and secular administration, and whose ‘empeño didáctico’ (to borrow Francisco Rico’s term; 1985: 23) brought them into critical engagement with the world that lay beyond the boundaries of their own courts and cloisters. As I have explained in the introduction, however, the term didacticism, so often used to characterize the mester, is far too limited a critical tool to do justice to the range and complexity of the clerical poet’s engagement with the world, its new institutions and changing social formations. In the case of the Libro de Apolonio the ‘bondades y buenos enseñamientos’ which sustain its hero on his quest are also those of a social world in which commerce plays a significant part. In addition to the economic vitality of the pilgrimage routes in the North, the conquest of large tracts of Andalusia opened up the southern seashore and the commercial centres of Córdoba (1236) and Seville (1248). By the time of the poem’s composition around the middle of the thirteenth century, the Barcelona trading empire stretched to the furthest shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.30 Indeed, to such an extent is the poem imbued with the language of exchange and economic transaction that it might initially seem tempting to explain Apolonio’s cortesía by simply extending its semantic range to incorporate one much later definition, taken from the Diccionario de autoridades of 1726: ‘Vale equidad, moderación, o conveniencia, que hace uno a otro en alguna cosa vendible: y assí se dice que le hizo Cortesía: esto es agasajo y conveniencia en el precio de la compra. Lat. Gratia, Obsequium.’ This critical move has the virtue of simplicity, especially for those who would like to be released from the labour of historical understanding. But it needs to be resisted. For while it may not be difficult to understand how by the eighteenth century cortesía could have taken on such an apparently non-courtly connotation, it would be much harder to explain it for the thirteenth century, without resorting, glibly, to that general panacea of vulgar marxists and sociological critics: ‘the rise of the middle classes’. The temptation to explain away the satire of Elena y María has already been noted, and though both the debate poem and the romance pose similar problems of literary reception, in the case of the Libro de Apolonio they are particularly acute given the length of time spanned by its narrative tradition: what new social meanings accrue to a poem which has its roots in late antiquity, and the transition from a slave to a feudal mode of production, when it is revived and reworked during the long and uneven transition from feudalism to capitalism? So far, analyses of the poem’s relation to its source have yet to address the question in depth.31 30 Most scholars accept Manuel Alvar’s dating of c. 1260 although much earlier and later dates have been proposed; see Monedero’s summary in Libro de Apolonio (1987: 14–15), where she offers a compromise date of 1240. 31 For an attempt to outline the broader social issues at stake in the reception process, see Gumbrecht (1974). Though not ideological readings, valuable studies of the adaptation

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Economic transactions are a salient feature of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, in particular the monetary exchanges characteristic of Roman cities (Lana 1975: 103–17; Duncan-Jones 1982: 251–55). As Carlos Alvar has noted, the thirteenth century marked ‘el momento de expansión de la leyenda por Castilla’ (1991: 7), and the prominence given to economic transactions in the Latin work may have contributed to its appeal during the economic growth of that period. Even so, as I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the meaning of individual economic transactions, and their collective function within the ideology of the poem, inevitably alter in the Libro de Apolonio, however accurately they may have been translated. My principal aim, therefore, is to explore how the poem incorporates economic transactions within the broad range of social exchanges that constitute Apolonio’s courtly identity. Much of what I have to say is a gloss on one of Marx’s lapidary statements about pre-capitalist economic formations: ‘Man is only individualized through the process of history [. . .]. Exchange itself is a major agent of this individualization’ (1965: 96). The Libro de Apolonio represents identity not just as a given, but more importantly as a problem: Apolonio’s courtliness, which defines his identity (or individualizes him) as king, husband, and father, is deeply embedded in a web of social and economic relations; and these relations are subject to the threat of constant change.32 To a certain extent, the same process operates in Berceo’s version of the miracle of El mercader fiado, which also shows an identity being acquired and put under strain in the process of economic exchange (see below). Here, I examine how cortesía functions as an ideological mechanism to remove individual identity from the realm of history and changing social relations. This is to say that representation of cortesía dehistoricizes, and thus mystifies, the challenges posed by new forms of economic production which were based on a morally and financially unstable process of acquiring, circulating, and potentially losing material wealth. It does this not by setting up an absolute opposition between courtly and mercantile values, or by assimilating them, but by exploring how they might overlap. An analogy may be drawn here with one of the possible early allusions to the Apollonius legend, a cantiga by Alfonso X. In it, the King expresses his disillusion with the poisonous life at court and yearns (surely with sardonic irony) for the relative security of a sea merchant’s life (Carlos Alvar 1991: 8–9). Whether or not Alfonso is in fact drawing a comparison between himself and Apollonius, his cantiga, like the romance, finds common ground between court and commerce even in the process of distinguishing them.

of the Latin poem are by Carlos and Manuel Alvar (1984: 131–43), and Alvar (Libro de Apolonio 1976: I, 113–82; 135–40 and 149–50). Artiles (1976: especially 198–201) is too superficial to be of analytic value. For an overview of the Apollonius tradition, with useful (though at times inaccurate) bibliography, see Archibald (1991); for further details on Iberian dissemination see Monedero’s prefatory notes (Libro de Apolonio 1987: 60–63). 32 The economic exchanges discussed in this section have also been analysed by Olivier Biaggini (2003), in a valuable account of the ambiguities of public and private identities.


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Although not conceived in specifically Marxist terms, there have been a number of recent studies on the ways medieval narrative represents different forms of economic exchange (commercial, monetary, and gift-giving) and their related social structures and values.33 Within Iberian literature, these issues have been explored primarily in relation to the Poema de mio Cid (Duggan 1989, Lacarra 1992–93, Harney 1993, and Montgomery 1993–94). With respect to the Libro de Apolonio, the only critic to have commented on its representation of mercantile themes has been Manuel Alvar, according to whom this poem ‘nos ha descubierto una vida burguesa; ya no clerical, ya no de una aristocracia guerrera como las gestas, sino el relato de las empresas de un héroe que no fue eclesiástico ni guerrero. Fue, simplemente, hombre atribulado’ (1976: I, 164). Alvar idealizes the seamless incorporation of market scenes into the world of the romance as instances of the poem’s basic humanity (1976: I, 151–81).34 The homogeneous humanism that results appealed to the new class of lay reader (‘los señores y los burgueses’) produced by the developing urban society (1986: 62–65). This is not the place for a detailed critique of the way Alvar conflates the existential angst of the protagonist and the representation of the market with the human condition as such. Like Tavani in his reading of Elena y María, Alvar conjures up nineteenth-century notions of the bourgeoisie and projects them back upon the poem. In one respect, however, he is quite correct: this version of the poem offers a window onto a period ‘cuando multitud de motivos hicieron que surgiera la ciudad como estructura civil y no como organización militar’ (1986: 65). If we are to understand how the poem constitutes its sense of ‘humanity’ and relates it to civic society it is crucial to throw into question the alleged coherence of the poem as well as the nature of romance itself.

33 The monographs of Shoaf (1983 and 1984) and Kellogg (1989) are representative. They speak with untroubled ease about ‘the loss of real power and wealth among the feudal aristocracy’ at the hands of the rising urban bourgeoisie (Kellogg 1989: 1), or of the uneven contest between chivalric feudalism and a commercialism triumphant in the later Middle Ages (Shoaf 1984: 3, 5). Both thus simplify the material and ideological complexity of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Although they allude to Marx (Shoaf 1983: 244) or Marxist literary critics (Kellogg 1989: 7), neither benefits from the debates on this topic generated by and within Marxist historiography since the 1950s; on which, see Sweezy et al. (1976) and Aston & Philpin (1985). For a more subtle treatment of courtliness, individualism, and the revival of a money economy, see Bloch (1977: 223–38, esp. 225–26). 34 The vernacular poem is a ‘criatura [. . .] humanísima’ (Libro de Apolonio 1984: xliv) conjured into existence from the aridity of the Latin source. Its domestic and market scenes possess ‘un hueco definido e inalienable’ (Libro de Apolonio 1976: I, 211) within the narrative structure and exemplify both the poem’s ‘singular humanidad’ (162; see also 139, 157), and the poet’s original genius (180). Structural coherence and homogeneity are later defended in passionate detail (185–244). These points are repeated verbatim in the 1984 introductory study, which represents the author’s ‘pensamiento actual sobre el Libro’ (Libro de Apolonio 1984: lxv). For a more nuanced approach, see Deyermond (1989: 160–61), a concise summary of his earlier views on structure and motivation.

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In his book on medieval romance, John Stevens maintains that this genre is essentially idealistic and, quoting Henry James, argues that it deals with ‘experience liberated [. . .] exempt from the conditions that we normally know to attach to it’.35 I believe that the only way fully to appreciate this ‘liberated experience’ is to resituate it within the material conditions and social relations that make it possible. The incorporation of the market into Alvar’s homogeneous and human world is an ideological effect, masking a far more contested process whereby commercial exchange is assimilated or contained as a means of preserving Apolonio’s identity as a courtly feudal lord. Just before the poem’s denouement, Apolonio’s unrecognized daughter, Tarsiana, calls him ‘romero o merchante’ (489b). The comment is all the more apt for having been made by Tarsiana, for it is over her prostituted body that the struggle over commercial, ethical, and spiritual values is enacted. Her doubts give voice to an underlying tension in the poem between travel for the spirit and travel for the pocket.36 As Deyermond points out, the sea not only has the narrative function of advancing the plot, it also symbolizes ‘la ambigüedad de la condición humana’ (1989: 157). It thus serves as the conventional wasteland of romance, in which the hero’s identity is temporarily suspended. As Apolonio exclaims at one point ‘el nombre que havía, perdílo en la mar’ (172c). Apolonio’s sea voyages symbolize the contingent and fluid nature of social relationships and the identities they require and produce. More specifically, Tarsiana’s hesitation over whether Apolonio is really a pilgrim or a merchant is a symptom of a deeper uncertainty over the boundaries between economic, ethical, and spiritual identities. From an ideological standpoint, the best place to begin exploring these issues is the two statues erected in Apolonio’s honour by the inhabitants of Tarsus and Mitylene towards the beginning and end of the poem (97 and 571). Built in gratitude for Apolonio’s gifts of wheat and money which enrich and ennoble both towns, they stand in the town markets. Thus, they honour gifts within the space of commercial transaction, and this tension between place and motive betrays the poem’s attempt to negotiate between the social values attached to different forms of exchange: commercial exchange for economic profit, and the exchange of gifts for status and to cement a political relationship (as in the gift-giving of the Poema de mio Cid). And where the statues stand, structurally, within the poem itself is significant too. They frame the main action, and fixed on land as perpetual shrines they also fix within a stable

35 Quoted by Stevens (1973: 17). This idealistic strain of thought also pervades Brownlee’s view that the romance is self-referential, hermetic entertainment, uninformed by extra-textual values (1983b: 161). 36 In support of her thesis that the poem represents a pelegrinatio vitae humanae, Brownlee notes that Apolonio is called a pilgrim ten times (1983b: 169). See also Deyermond (1989: 161–63). For Surtz (1987), Apolonio’s wanderlust dramatizes clerical ambivalence about intellectual curiosity.


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set of identities and values the fluctuating and interrupted relationships of the intervening travel. What combination of values, then, do these shrines attempt to universalize?37 When Apolonio first arrives in Tarsus (62), he encounters famine and depopulation: ‘Mala tierra era, de conducho menguada, / avié gran carastía, era de gente menguada’ (66ab). Notwithstanding this, he instructs his men to buy food and prepare a banquet. This first encounter with the Tarsians is especially significant because it is absent from the Historia Apollonii (Archibald 1991: 118). It is thus valuable evidence for the way the Iberian poet reads and adapts the social relationships inscribed in his source. Though the relationship between Apolonio and the Tarsians is initiated by an economic transaction (Apolonio’s men buying the food), the representation of the subsequent banquet emphatically denies commercial motive and profit: the product of their labour, the banquet itself, and its means of production, the cooking-pots and tablecloths, are not the instruments of monetary gain: ‘non costavan dinero manteles ni forteras’ (64d); and the prepared food was distributed freely to the starving inhabitants of Tarsus: ‘dávangelo de grado, non lo querían vender’ (65b). People flock to see Apolonio because of his urbane magnanimity, and their social intercourse is a display of mutual cortesía. At the end of the poem, the poet gives this banquet and its underlying ethos a spiritual veneer, when he encourages us to think about our preparations for ‘el convivio de Dios’ (655d).38 Among these visitors comes Elánico, an old man, possibly a member of the urban patriciate (since he is described as an ombre bueno of noble lineage).39 He warns Apolonio that Antiochus had set a price on his head (68–70), and in exchange, Apolonio offers Elánico as much money as Antiochus had previously offered to have him killed. The proposal is backed up with an attempt to allay any fear that Apolonio might be attributing purely pecuniary motives to his interlocutor: Éste puedes, en salvo e sin pecado, levar, que asme tú buscado placer e non pesar.

37 For universalization, and the other ideological strategies mentioned below, see Eagleton (1991: 33–61). 38 The symbolism and ideological function of the banquet is also central to Berceo’s miracle of El mercader fiado, on which see below. 39 ‘Vino hun ombre bueno, Elánico el cano, / era de buena parte, de días anciano’ (68ab). Although the term omne bueno frequently designated ‘town representative’, it could cover a variety of social and legal categories, e.g. caballero villano or procurador (O’Callaghan 1989: 12, 15, 17); it could also be simply another general term for burgués, which according to Valdeavellano had rather limited use outside Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, and Galicia (1969: 31 and 183–85). See also María del Carmen Carlé (1964). In the Historia Apollonii, Hellenicus is a fellow citizen of Apollonius (‘cive suo’), who happens to arrive at the same time. He is an honest plebeian, treated with regal disdain by Apollonius (Archibald 1991: 118–19).

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Non pierdas tu derecho, qua me podriés reptar; podría yo, por ello, gravemientre pecar. (75)

In spite of this disclaimer, Elánico retorts that ‘amiztat vender non es costumbre nuestra. / Quien bondat da por precio malamiente se denuesta’ (76cd). The poet then intervenes to elevate this secular moral onto a spiritual plane, by exclaiming that when in need every Christian worthy of the name (‘que su nombre toviere’) should find such a man as Elánico. It is important to realize that Elánico has turned down more than just the offer of money: he has rejected what Apolonio presumes to be his right to sell his protection at a just price.40 Once again, though this time in relation to a specifically Christian identity, the poem denies that a contractual social relationship can be established on monetary terms. Apolonio, however, is undeterred. In the very next scene (80–91) he singles out ‘hun burzés rico e bien adobado’, by the name of Estrángilo. Ignoring Elánico’s lesson, Apolonio perseveres in his attempt to buy friendship and safety, and he offers Estrángilo and his fellow citizens ‘grant gualardón’ (82d) in return for protection. There are several contrasts between Apolonio’s dealings with the two men, and these are heightened by structural parallels in the narrative. Together, the characters form one of the various patterns of gemination identified by previous scholars (e.g. Phipps 1984). On the one hand we have Elánico, whose moral status is conflated with his age and lineage, and on the other Estrángilo, who represents the wealthy merchant, tagged by his fine clothes. Moreover, this time Apolonio takes the initiative in the exchange, presumably recognizing in Estrángilo’s dress the potential to strike a deal.41 However, his opening offer (the vague ‘grant gualardón’, 82d) is rejected on the grounds that Tarsus is too poor to support the King’s nobility (83). Apolonio therefore becomes more specific and – more significantly – alters his strategy. He promises Estrángilo his wheat, ‘cient mil moyos por qüenta’ adding with a merchant’s precision, ‘mandatlos medir’ (86d). He continues:

40 On the concept of the just price see Baldwin (1959). The description of Elánico as ‘omne bueno’ takes on added significance considering that under medieval Roman law the adjudication of the just price was often submitted ad arbitrium boni viri (Baldwin 1959: 27–28). 41 In the Historia Apollonii, Stranguillio is recognized simply because he is a previous acquaintance (Archibald 1991: 120). The Libro’s fascination with clothing has been noted by Artiles (1976: 189–93) and Monedero (Libro de Apolonio 1987: 29) though they both ignore its symbolic or thematic significance. Its function as a sign of identity is encapsulated by the poet’s closing question: when we die, what clothes will we wear to God’s banquet? (655). For an introduction to the new interest in the semiotic significance of clothing, see Roche (1994: 3–43).


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Dárvoslo he a conpra, pero de buen mercado, como valié en Tiro do lo hove comprado. Demás, el precio todo, quando fuere llegado, para la cerqua de la villa quiero que seya dado. (87)

This stanza contains some telling details. First, it renders explicit the notion of the just price: the poem echoes the views of the medieval legist, for whom ‘the just price or the true value of goods was simply the price which they currently fetched. [. . .] Since this price fluctuated according to different places, the just price was related to specific times and localities’ (Baldwin 1959: 54). Second, the stanza eliminates the original’s explicit opposition between royal benefactor and merchant, and its accompanying disdain for the ‘mercatoris [. . .] nomen’ (Archibald 1991: 120). In other words, a commercial transaction is not exorcised, so much as absorbed by the hero’s courtliness. The point is reinforced by having the commercial transaction immediately commuted into an act of courtly magnanimitas. This transformation of commerce into courtliness is effected by having the money reinvested in the construction of the town walls. These walls protect Apolonio in a double sense: obviously, they provide safer refuge from Antiochus’s assassins; but they also afford protection because they ennoble the town, rebuilding it into a place commensurate with the King’s status. As the townsfolk later recognize, not only did Apolonio save the city from starvation, but also ‘valié por él la villa más que nunca valía’ (92c). In short, by overcoming Estrángilo’s initial scruples, he transforms a commercial exchange into an act of cortesía, and in the process creates a space where cortesía (acts of the court) can take place. Another of the ways in which scholastic thinkers such as Aquinas determined the limits of reasonable profit was by declaring that a just price depended upon the agreement of all parties (Tawney 1926: 43). The contractual language of Estrángilo’s acceptance of the King’s offer (88–89) and its final ratification by the town council (90–91) ensure that this transaction cannot be tainted with commercial greed or usury. Gift-giving, as Duggan (1989) and Harney (1993) have demonstrated in the Poema de mio Cid, can establish a hierarchy. In our poem, the transference of money and goods from Apolonio to the town entails an inverse transference of power and authority from town to Apolonio. Ideologically, the shift in power is rationalized, as the pact between the two parties is shown to mirror the divine pact (or atenencia) between God and man (93–94): God makes people fear him, yet he is merciful before human suffering; moreover, ‘sabe maestramientre sus consejos prender, / trebeja con los omnes a todo su placer’ (94cd). In the same way, Apolonio’s merciful magnanimity is also conflated with control and status: El rey Apolonio, de facienda granada, avía toda la tierra en su amor tornada,

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por qual logar quería facía su posada. Qui non lo bendicía non se tenía por nada. (95)

As an expression of their gratitude/submission, the urban inhabitants construct a marble ‘ídolo’, placed ‘drecho en medio del mercado’ (97a) and find their own identities in their subordination to Apolonio’s regal authority, just as Estrángilo had earlier sealed his pact by kissing Apolonio’s hands in an act of feudal obeisance: ‘Besávale las manos, en tierra debatido’ (88b). On an ideological level, both acts reassert monarchical authority faced with the increasing legal and administrative autonomy of many contemporary municipalities, whose importance to (and dependence upon) the crown is indicated by their presence at the cortes early in the thirteenth century.42 The banquet and the scenes that follow are not so much a denial of commercial interests (which are, paradoxically, articulated most clearly by the monarch himself), as an attempt to define the ethical boundaries of commercialism. Nearly five hundred stanzas later, another set of town-dwellers construct an idol ‘derecho en medio del mercado’ (571c). This time, the statue is a gold, life-size image of Apolonio with his daughter Tarsiana at his feet, and now the town market is at Mitylene, where Tarsiana had earlier been sold into prostitution, and where, now reunited with her father, she is married off to the town’s lord, Antinágoras. As before, the statue individualizes Apolonio after a sequence of transactions: in return for having protected Tarsiana, Antinágoras requests the girl’s hand in marriage; Tarsiana seeks assurances that her erstwhile pimp be punished; Antinágoras passes on her request for vengeance to the town council, accompanied with Apolonio’s clearly disinterested gift of half a million gold marks; in exchange, the town council punish the rufián, and, feeling themselves indebted to the King (‘Tóvosse el concejo del rey por adebdado’, 570a), set about building their monument. This second monument celebrates Tarsiana also. Her earlier negotiations in the brothel with Antinágoras and the others who come to buy her services (407–33) are another instance of the containment of commercial transactions within a system of Christian values. Like her father, she translates economic exchange into a moral and spiritual practice, as her customers end up buying not her body but her life story, and with it their own moral redemption. The epitome of this process is Antinágoras, whose eye for a deal makes him realize that he could buy Tarsiana’s virginity more cheaply through renting her in a brothel than by purchasing her outright at auction (399). He eventually pays the asking price, one pound of gold, but moved by Tarsiana’s plight, her eloquence, and her similarity to his own daughter, he refrains from enjoying the goods. In this scene, the meaning of ‘precio’ moves from literal (400d) to figurative, as Tarsiana appeals to his reputation: ‘omne eres de precio, ¡sí te veyas logrado!’ 42 On the feudal institution of besamanos, see Harney (1993: 224–29); for the municipalities, see O’Callaghan (1989: 11–12).


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(409c). Antinágoras then donates the money so that Tarsiana can buy, or bribe, her way out of her predicament, but the donation is not entirely disinterested because, following the logic of gift-giving, Tarsiana incurs a debt (415d), just as the inhabitants of Tarsus became morally and socially indebted to Apolonio. Although the term is not used at this precise juncture, this exchange is an act of cortesía which reconciles ethics and commerce. The dynamics of this kind of cortesía continue (and this time the term is used, 423a) when Tarsiana persuades her pimp to allow her sell not her body, but her musical ability. In doing so, she emphatically invokes the profit motive (423–24), and eventually becomes a virtuous soldadeira with morally correct business acumen. That this entails a contradictory combination of virtues and activities – a fantasy – is an indication of the need to reconcile commerce and ethics at an ideological level. When Antinágoras gives Tarsiana the price of her virginity and insists that she remember the circumstances and location of the gift, he is actually making a longer-term investment. The donation reminds us that the second statue erected in Apolonio’s honour also commemorates the recuperation of the patriarchal family and the proper use of female sexual labour: in marrying Antinágoras, Tarsiana is put to work circulating wealth within marriage, instead of generating profit for the pimp, either with her body or by practising ‘otro mester [. . .] qu’es más sin pecado’ (422c) independently and publicly through her music. The Spanish poet recasts the original statue and rewrites its inscription to create a totem for a new set of family values. In the Historia Apollonii, the townsfolk celebrate the reuniting of father and daughter with an effigy that depicts Apollonius ‘standing on the prow of a ship, with his heel on the pimp’s head, and his daughter clasped in his right arm’ (Archibald 1991: 171). The inscription honours both the King’s generosity and Tharsia’s tenacious preservation of her virginity. In the Libro de Apolonio, however, there is room for one person only at the King’s feet: Tarsiana. The new inscription records her not as the subject of virtuous action, but as the object of a transaction between two men, and the means of transmitting inheritance through marriage: El rey Apolonyo, de grant mesura [. . .] falló aquí su fija Tarsiana por grant ventura. Con gozo de la fija perdió la enfermedat; diola a Antinágora, ssenyor desta cibdat; diole en casamiento – muy gran solepnidat – el regno de Antiocha, muy grant eredat. (572–73)

The consolidation and transfer of patrimony through the agnatic line of descent, with the consequent traffic in women, took on increasing importance in thirteenth-century Iberia.43 This process is summarized most eloquently by

43 See Beceiro Pita and Córdoba de la Llave (1990: 59–60, 79–80). Valuable insights and bibliography in Harney (1993: 36–46, 110–12, 140–50).

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a symbolic reading of what happens to another woman’s body, that of Tarsiana’s mother Luciana. When she apparently dies giving birth at sea, her body, wrapped in fine clothes, together with a large sum of money caulked up in a coffin, is set adrift on the waves. Material wealth and prestige (symbolized by the money and clothes, the signs of Luciana’s identity) are sent on their journey through time (her passage from death to life) through the controlled institutions of family and marriage (her protected body). These goods and values are safeguarded from the sea (the symbol of the unknown: or social relations in solution, so to speak) by being hermetically sealed off from the water. At this point, it is worth pausing to comment on the symbolism of the sea. It is a thoroughly overdetermined symbol, and as such sheds light on an aspect of the poem’s ideology. Explicitly the sea stands for the generalized and unpredictable disruption of social relations (‘Nunqua devía omne en las mares fiar, / traen lealtat poca’, 120ab), but it also evokes a more specific form of the social unknown: trade. Significantly, by the end of the poem the sea is controlled by the hand of God, and represents Divine Providence. It is thus part of a larger pattern of ideological strategies. Overall, the poem deploys a Christian ethical system in order to contain economic transactions within the bounds of cortesía, one of the dominant ideologies of the feudal mode of production. Representing the sea as unpredictable acknowledges moral and material dangers of commercial expansion and long-distance trade; representing it as ultimately subject to Divine Providence acknowledges that commerce possesses an acceptable rationale, albeit a metaphysical one. In this way, feudal hegemony is sustained. The role commerce plays in the transmission of wealth, power, and prestige is experienced in the world of the poem as a rupture, a denial, but it cannot be explained. For example, just as the sea is both a threat and the unacknowledged means by which Luciana’s body is carried to shore, so the trade it symbolizes also plays a silent part in transmitting wealth. The poem silences the web of commercial activities and social relationships that make possible the clothing which forms such an obsessive part of its representation of wealth and status, both material and spiritual. Similarly, the source of Apolonio’s half a million gold marks donated to the inhabitants of Mitylene is silenced by the money’s use, effects, and symbolic value, once the gold coins have been commuted into the golden effigy in the town market. The final aspect I wish to consider concerns the experience the poem offers us of the potential loss of wealth, power, and status. The work closes on a powerful note of anxiety: when we die others will appropriate what we leave behind: ‘Lo que aquí dexamos, otrie lo logrará’ (652a); ‘ell aver avrá otrie, nós hiremos escarnidos’ (654d). Self-love, therefore, is the closing message, and it anticipates the sixteenth-century Protestant work ethic that ‘Man’s self-love is God’s providence’ (Tawney 1926: 22). However much this anxiety over appropriation is rationalized in spiritual and ethical terms, the passage cannot conceal its very material concerns. Just a few stanzas before, in fact, Apolonio ends his travels with the wry understatement: ‘Por verdat vos dezir, ssiéntome muy


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canssado’, adding ‘desaquí adelante lograr quiero lo que tengo ganado’ (649cd). And much earlier still, Luciana accepts Apolonio’s offer of marriage by saying ‘non querriés que tu lazerio otrie lograse’ (221b). Representing herself as the product of Apolonio’s labour (he has trained her in the courtly art of music), not only does she legitimize her own subordination, she also voices the more generalized fear that products of human labour are subject to appropriation by others. Are these fears the guilty conscience of the feudal mode of production, which entailed the extraction of feudal rent by non-economic forms of compulsion (physical force, seigneurial jurisdiction)? Or do they represent the suspicion of the merchant who profits from the labour of others?44 The question is moot: for I do not think that in this respect the poem represents the specific interests of either the dominant feudal classes or the diffuse merchant groups that were pressing in from the edges. In this instance, it represents a practical consciousness of social and economic exchange in general: a generalized anxiety about relations between the production and consumption of goods, and relations between self and other which that exchange entails. That this anxiety operates on a general level is apparent in the incest that sets the poem in motion in the first place: Antiochus produces his daughter (his wife’s labour is suppressed) and enjoys her; outside of this relationship there is no exchange, and hence no identity (as the anonymous daughter puts it, using suggestive sea imagery: ‘es el nombre derechero en amos enfogado’, 11d). Apolonio solves the riddle, and shrinks in horror from the truth. As we have seen, the adventures that follow represent an encounter between competing modes of production. In that encounter, commercial exchange is certainly subordinated to one of feudalism’s controlling ideologies. But just as the motif of incest persists throughout the poem (Phipps 1984: 812–14; Archibald 1991: 15–18), so doubt and anxiety remain: is not feudalism, perhaps, that incestuous self-consuming relationship, hopelessly trying to reproduce itself without the external stimulus of trade? That is one riddle that Apolonio, and Marx himself, could not hope to answer.

Between Town and Church: Berceo’s ‘El mercader fiado’ Berceo’s twenty-third miracle, which is known by various titles, such as ‘El mercader fiado’ or ‘El burgés de Bizancio’, tells of a burgess from Constantinople, who, crushed by debt, turns to a Jew to lend him money to fund commercial ventures in distant lands.45 To secure the credit, and to the incredulity of the disbelieving Jew, he uses as guarantor a statue of Christ and the Virgin

44 According to Gratian, a merchant is one who buys a product and sells it on, unchanged but dearer (Tawney 1926: 38–39). 45 I follow the edition by Gerli (Berceo 1987: 175–87).

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Mary. On the day of the deadline, the protagonist – who has become carried away by his financial success and has forgotten about making any arrangements for repayment – puts the money he owes into a container and throws it into the waves, trusting that God will return it safely to the Jew by the end of day. Miraculously, the money is washed up on the city shore and finds its way back into hands of the Jew, who simply believes it to be a lucky find, unrelated to the debt. When the burgess eventually returns to Constantinople, the moneylender challenges him, and to settle their dispute they go back to the church with the effigy of Mother and Child, where they witness a second miracle. Christ speaks, and he explains that the money is indeed in the Jew’s house, stowed under his bed: the truth about the debt and the higher truth of Christianity are both revealed, and the astonished and humiliated Jew converts.46 On one level, this story is about religious belief. It pits the unconditional trust of the Christian against the scoffing distrust of the Jewish moneylender. Like the stories of ‘El judezno’ and ‘Los judíos de Toledo’, this narrative is a test of the relative truth of the two religions, and the miracles (which are the combined work of God, Christ, and the Virgin) prove the inevitable superiority of Christianity (Diz 1995: 148). Not only does the Jew learn that Christ is in fact the son of God, and not just a wise, upright man and a true prophet, as he had claimed (643), but more generally he understands that the divine support given to believers is unconditional, so long as they unconditionally believe. If the poem is about the conditions of belief, it is also about the conditions of commerce: it is about credit in two senses, spiritual and financial, and the religious and economic meanings converge. As Marta Ana Diz puts it: ‘Berceo acerca dinero y fe hasta llegar a fundirlos, en un relato que representa la buena fe, esto es, el cristianismo, como principio central de la economía de la salvación’ (1995: 146). I shall return to Diz’s insightful analysis in due course, but for the moment, I should like to stress that it is not simply a question of using economic language to think in figurative terms about religion (the ‘economy of salvation’), but of using religion to think about economic life. This is, of course, hardly surprising given the influence of the Church in economic thought, particularly in relation to moneylending. Berceo inherited a story that implicitly questioned the nature and importance of credit and the role of Jews in obtaining it. The process of adaptation and the evolving historical conditions refocus these questions in particularly interesting ways.

46 For contemporary analogues, see Gautier de Coinci (1955–70: IV, 110–33) and Alfonso X’s Cantigas (number 25; ed. Mettmann 1986–89: I, 117–22), along with several other tales in which merchants are protected by the Virgin; see numbers 172 (II, 178–79), 193 (II, 223–25) and 267 (III, 24–27). The thirteenth-century prosification of cantiga 25 is incomplete (ed. Mettmann 1986–89: I, 343–44). I quote Berceo’s Latin source from Gerli’s edition (Berceo 1987: 250–53), but see also Dutton (Berceo 1971: 196–202 for notes on Berceo’s adaptation). For more in-depth analyses of the poem and its relation to its source, see Montoya Martínez (1985a) and Diz (1995: 140–51).


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By the mid-thirteenth century, the Byzantine setting itself will have acquired new relevance. For although Constantinople had long been a major centre of international trade, and a fundamental link between East and West, its capture in 1204 by the Franks opened it up even further to the commercial interests of the powerful city states of Venice and Genoa (Bartlett 1993: 182–91). Barcelona was also rapidly developing a mercantile network that would eventually stretch through the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean, and to Constantinople itself, an enterprise that was funded in part by Jewish moneylenders (Pirenne 1937: 156–57). If, as Robert Bartlett has put it, ‘the unity of the medieval West was, in part, a traders’ unity’ (1993: 196), the links between eastern and western frontiers are put into sharper focus by Berceo. In his version, the Byzantine trader establishes himself not merely in what the Latin source vaguely terms ‘barbaras [. . .] naciones’ (252), but in Flanders and France (661a), presumably at the fairs in Champagne with their thriving international merchant colonies.47 Other narrative details give a stronger sense of a lively urban scene: the story no longer sets a ‘christianus’ against a ‘iudeus’, but a ‘burgés’ against a ‘truhán’, and gives a more vibrant sense of the city, where rich and poor, Christian and Jew crowd together. It is in the depiction of financial credit that Berceo introduces his most significant narrative innovation, and, as I shall suggest, it may be determined by changing attitudes towards usury that were taking hold in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian thought. To understand how Berceo attempts to reconcile commerce and Christianity, we can best begin with a symbolic reading of the central miracle itself. The desperate act of casting the loaned money into sea, itself a byword for unpredictability and change, recalls the moment when Apolonius throws his apparently dead wife’s body into the waves (see above p. 208). These acts possess a similar symbolic charge and evoke the anxieties commonly associated with long-distance commerce and the credit that makes it possible.48 These anxieties are both moral and material, combining as they do fears of commercial greed, the religious taboos affecting usury, the insecurity of sea travel, and the endemic fluctuations in coinage. According to the economic historian Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, ‘monetary conditions were chaotic in medieval Spain’ (1978: 23; see also Vicens Vives 1969: 278–81), and the composition 47 Alfonso and Gautier are similarly vague about the man’s travels, though the latter emphasizes how peripatetic he is with references to ‘Mainte diverse contree’ (l. 232; 1955–70: IV, 119; see also ll. 250 & 378–79). 48 The insecurities of sea travel also underpin Alfonso’s three other cantigas about merchants (poems 172, 193, 267; full references in note 46). Although Berceo’s miracle does not refer to Mary with the commonplace epithet ‘stella maris’, it is implicit in the narrative itself. The idea creates a thematic and lexical bond between the Mercader fiado and the previous miracle, the Romero naufragado (number 22), which closes with a plea to Mary to guide erring humans over land and sea: ‘guíe nuestra fazienda, nuestra vida lazrada’ (624b). The introduction to the Mercader fiado then announces its theme as the literal and metaphorical wandering of ‘un bon omne de fazienda granada’ (626d).

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of the Milagros overlapped with one of the great inflationary periods in Castilian history, 1252–58 (Vicens Vives 1969: 280). Berceo is particularly fond of lexical variety, and although he employs several terms to describe the loaned money (principally ‘el aver’ and ‘la pecunia’, a Latinism borrowed from his source), it is perhaps significant that he begins with one term, repeated in close proximity: ‘mudado’.49 The idea of change is inscribed even more forcefully in the description of the coffer that carries the money over the waves. The Latin describes it simply and repeatedly as a ‘scrinnium’, and its derivation ‘escring’ is also the only term used in the version by Gautier de Coinci.50 But in Spanish, the container is variously described as ‘sacco’ (666a), ‘bassel’ (672c), ‘estui’ (674d), ‘tablero’ (677b & 681d), ‘vaso’ (678b), ‘cesto’ (694c), and finally ‘escrinno’ (695c). By metonymy, the liquidity and fluctuation of its means of transport (the sea) transfers to the container (the box) and then merges with the contents itself (capital). Yet in spite of the uncertainties shrouding economic transactions, the protagonist’s absolute trust in his divine guarantors suggests a compensating faith that these dealings do in fact possess some ultimate order and moral rightness. The basic narrative, around which all variants of the tale are structured, thus performs a miraculous reconciliation between urban consumption, moneylending, commerce, and Christian belief. But because it is a miracle, the logic of this reconciliation appears to be located beyond human understanding in the realm of Divine Providence, of faith not fact. Indeed, God is the one who provides the solution to the protagonist’s dilemma, who, when no one will lend him money, turns to prayer: Demientre que orava, quísoli Dios prestar, ovo un buen consejo el burgés a asmar; non vino por su seso, mas quísolo guiar el que el mundo todo ave de gobernar. (635)

As both Dutton and Diz have pointed out, the man’s plea for divine aid as well as God’s intervention are absent from the Latin source (251).51 But adding

49 See 628d, 630c, 631b; on ‘mudado’, see Corominas (1980–91: s.v. ‘mudar’), citing Berceo and the Libro de Alexandre. Corominas notes an indirect relationship, via the idea of change, with the Latin mutuus, ‘loan’, ‘reciprocal agreement’. 50 See, e.g., ll. 327, 340, 345. ‘Scrinnium’ originally meant a writing casket, then any kind of box. Even though the general meaning is implied in the Latin version (which notes that the merchant had the box made specifically, 252), the original sense is nonetheless appropriate for a trader, given the increased importance of record-keeping and literacy during the commercial revolution (Pirenne 1937: 123). The point is echoed by Gautier whose protagonist berates himself for being a ‘folz marcheanz’ and for not keeping an accurate written record of his deal (ll. 281–89; 1955–70: IV, 121). 51 See Diz (1995: 145) and Dutton (Berceo 1971: 200). The prayer is also absent in the versions by Alfonso and Gautier. The French poet, however, does introduce God: ‘Par ce


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God produces a curious shift in narrative perspective. Although Berceo interrupts his inherited story to explain that borrowing money was not the protagonist’s idea, but God’s, he does not represent the actual visit to the Jew as the result of divine inspiration, rather as the burgess’s own plan. As Berceo remarks in the following stanza, ‘asmó de ir a elli entre su voluntat’ (636c). In one respect, the detail is a way of representing how God’s beneficent actions are hidden from the view of mere humans. Ideologically, however, it works in another way. Even as the poem confers divine legitimacy on the visit to the moneylender, the dual narrative perspective continues to acknowledge a separation between the religious and the economic. Diz’s argument that ‘Berceo acerca dinero y fe hasta llegar a fundirlos’ (1995: 146) represents, I think, only part of the equation.52 He does indeed attempt to bring together money and faith, but, as we shall see, the join is far from seamless. Keeping God at a safe distance from actual contact with a Jew betrays the Church’s disquiet over the recourse to Jewish moneylenders. All versions imply that the visit to the Jew was a final resort, the act of a desperate man who had become a social outcast.53 The dire circumstances recall the famous episode of Raquel and Vidas in the Poema de mio Cid. But as in the epic poem, Berceo chooses to represent the visit as a natural, logical step, and one which is from the Jew’s point of view also quite unsurprising, given their previous acquaintance and the latter’s knowledge of the Christian’s predicament: Fo luego al judío e fo bien recibido, demandó⭈l cómo andava, por qué era venido, ca de otras sazones lo avié conocido e todo el su pleito bien lo avié oído. (637)

The details of their familiarity, the warmth of the Jew’s welcome, and his willingness to cooperate are all added by Berceo, and they suggest his desire to lend credibility to the visit by adding a human and social dimension. Conflict and distrust between Christian and Jew are fundamental features of this tale, but they are not introduced in this particular moment of their relationship. The

que Diex le volt, espoir, / tout ausi com par desespoir, / alez s’en est ireement / chiez un gïu isnelement’ (ll. 95–98; 1955–70: IV, 114). He depicts the visit as the act of a desperate man, abandoned by friends and family: what God brings is hope, not a financial plan. I return to Gautier’s attempt to reconcile Christianity and commerce below. 52 The convergence of the religious and economic spheres is reflected at a lexical level, through the repetition of words such as acreer, fiador, redimidor (Diz 1995: 146). To Diz’s list, I would add the pun ‘Demientre que orava, quísoli Dios prestar’ (635a). In English, there is a similar double meaning in the history of the word ‘providence’, which in addition to its religious connotations could mean ‘economic foresight’, or the supplies (‘provisions’) necessary for a commercial enterprise. 53 Gautier is especially emphatic on this point (see the passage quoted in note 51); similarly Alfonso X, who has the Christian visit the Jew ‘sen lezer’ (l. 20; 1986–89: I, 118).

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initial decision and almost the entire encounter are of a piece with Berceo’s later depiction of Jews and Christians jostling together in a communal attempt to grab the money-box as it floats into harbour (675–66).54 Diz, in line with other commentators, argues that the Jew’s courtesy is simply ‘un índice de la duplicidad del usurero’ (1995: 144). I think such a reading homogenizes the representation of the Jew. As I argue below, what is ideologically interesting about this character is that he becomes greedy and duplicitous at the point when money and faith intersect. Divisions certainly abound, and they erupt quickly, but they are mapped onto the recollection of easy, though ultimately precarious, co-existence at the social level; indeed, the instability of this social convivencia is homologous to the tense co-existence, rather than absolute fusion, of money and faith. The dynamic that controls both sets of categories – Jew and Christian, money and faith – is cast into relief by the fact that the protagonist is termed a Christian only when he is doing business with the Jew. As the need for money to underpin a secular identity becomes more pressing, so does the compensating need to reassert Christian credentials. As this point suggests, the fracture lines that run through the poem’s attempt to reconcile the spiritual, moral, and economic meanings of credit may be traced in the naming of the characters. Initially at least, we are not introduced to the Christian as a trader. We first encounter him as ‘un bon omne de fazienda granada’ (626d), whose lavish spending and borrowing are motivated by the desire for fame and status. Throughout the tale Berceo most commonly labels him ‘burgés’, and the term is occasionally paired with the original epithet ‘bon omne’.55 Only once is he called a ‘mercadero’ (681c), and this is when he has left Constantinople and embarked on his commercial venture: Fo a tierras estrannas, a Flandes e a Francia, con grandes mercaduras e fizo grand ganancia. (661ab) [. . .] ganó muchos dineros, comprando e vendiendo a ley de mercaderos. (683ab)

It is true that at the climax of his prayer to the Virgin, he hints at a commercial history through a symbolic allusion to the sea – ‘¿nadé todo el mar, ¿morré enna ribera?’ (634d) – and we can certainly infer from this that his wealth was derived from direct involvement in trade. As we have seen in chapter 1, however, shifts in perspective are a crucial feature of Berceo’s esthetic, so what is

54 When ‘christianos sabidores’ attempt to reach the box with grappling hooks they fail, ‘ca eran trufadores’ (676c): Berceo does not exploit the episode to distinguish Jew from Christian on economic or social grounds. 55 For ‘burgés’, see 627a, 635b, 638a, 653d, 654a, 660a, 663c, 673b, 679d, 682a, 684b, 692c; for ‘bon omne’ see 626d, 650a, 663d, 682c, 685c. For the various legal and social connotations of the term ‘bon omne’, see the discussion of Elánico in the Libro de Apolonio, in note 39.


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surely significant here is the way Berceo focusses attention on particular components of his protagonist’s social identity. In this respect, the poem reveals how he becomes a merchant. Given the association between urban growth and trade, the distinction between ‘burgés’ and ‘mercadero’ might seem, at least in the context of this poem, a fine one.56 But it is important nonetheless, because inscribed into the very structure of the narrative is the causal link between on the one hand conspicuous consumption and social status, and on the other the development of international trade. The commercial revolution was generated, in part, by the need to satisfy the increasing demand for luxury goods as a sign of social prestige (Spufford 2002: 12–19). As Vicens Vives remarked: ‘The nobility, the clergy, and the bourgeoisie ruined themselves because of their desire to dazzle others with jewels, clothing and ornaments. Chronically in need of cash, they found it in the tight purse of the Hebrew’ (1969: 284). The embarrassing assumptions that, in the final clause, pass for historical explanation have deep roots and, as we shall see, they conform to a particular ideological dynamic: to assuage Christian moral guilt and self-loathing there is always a stereotypical Jew who can be apportioned a healthy dose of hatred. This ideological process is played out, with variants, in the way the Latin and Alfonsine versions name the protagonist. In the former, he is first introduced as ‘civium quidam’ (251), who transforms into a ‘christianus’ at the point when he is forced to turn to the Jew (251); the religious tag is temporarily put aside when commercial success leads the man to forget the deadline; in fact, at this dramatic point, he lacks any descriptive label at all until, when his business is done (‘peracto negocio’, 252) and he is back in Constantinople, the author restores the word ‘christianus’.57 Alfonso X follows a similar pattern, in which ‘un ome’ (l. 9, or ‘bon ome’, l. 14; 1986–89: I, 117–18) first acquires his predominantly Christian identity (ll. 27, 35, 46, 53, 77, 86), during his bargaining with the Jew. Upon his return home, this identity is momentarily qualified by the term ‘mercador’ (l. 132; 1986–89: I, 121), only for his Christian label to reassert itself for the remainder of the narrative (ll. 140 & 159; 1986–89: I, 121–22).58 56 Valdeavellano notes that although ‘la calidad de “burgués” was originally ‘más o menos identificada con la del mercader’, it was ultimately defined by ‘la habitación, el domicilio, la vecindad en una ciudad determinada [. . .] y la circunstancia de poseer en la ciudad una casa o una heredad’ (1969: 59). 57 The Latin avoids fixing the protagonist’s identity with the noun ‘merchant’, and dwells instead on the process of selling and multiplying wealth: ‘Venditis igitur suis mercimoniis, ditatur mercibus novis, naves multiplicat, mercibus peregrinis onustat’ (252; my emphasis). The repetition and alliteration evoke the dizzying increase in profits and help explain why the man forgot the terms of his deal. For a similar use of repetitio, see Berceo: ‘con las grandes faciendas que era facendado’ (662a) and Gautier: ‘marcheande li marcheans’ (l. 233; 1955–70: IV, 119). 58 Although it is incomplete, the prose version does not seem to depart from this basic pattern, in which ‘un omne [. . .] muy rico’ becomes ‘el christiano’ (I: 343–44), with passing reference to his ‘mercadorías’. In cantigas 172, 193, 267 Alfonso names the protagonists as merchants consistently and right from the start.

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A more complex treatment is offered by Gautier de Coinci, whose version sets Berceo’s into particularly interesting relief. Like the Spanish poet, he introduces the man as ‘un borjois’ (l. 23), and he employs this epithet consistently, with various qualifying adjectives, throughout the story.59 But crucially, during his meeting with the Jew, the protagonist unambiguously identifies himself as a merchant and promises that he will be able to multiply whatever he borrows, since ‘marcheanz sui de grant savoir’ (l. 109; see also l. 282). This is a statement of pride, and recognition of their shared expertise, as much as an appeal to stereotypical Jewish greed. Moreover, like Berceo, Gautier tries to depict the familiarity between the two men during their initial encounter, as the merchant addresses the Jew as ‘biaux doz amis’ (ll. 119, 137), ‘bialz frere’ (l. 145), or ‘amis gïus’ (l. 185). Though their interests converge, a defining barrier must of course be erected, and it is built out of the terms of the agreement itself. If he fails to repay the debt, the merchant offers himself up as the Jew’s servant, even to be sold like any animal: ‘Tout ausi com une beste / vendre me porras au marchié’ (ll. 150–51). The proposal is accepted with alacrity by the Jew, ‘qui en son corage / couvoite et vielt mout le servage’ (ll. 153–54).60 Viewed in isolation, the merchant’s offer might suggest that he has become so imbued with mercantile values that he thinks of himself merely as another commodity. But Gautier safeguards his protagonist, and Christian ethics, by insisting at strategic moments on the man’s charity. For this man is characterized not just by his largesse, but by his compassionate distribution of alms to the poor (ll. 57 & 60). When abroad, he continues to draw on his dramatically escalating wealth to give generously ‘pour Dieu, qui toz les bien foissone’ (l. 242). He uses his money ‘for God’, because God, we learn, has favoured his enterprise (ll. 237–38). Gautier hammers the point home in his long moralizing conclusion: Que qui pour Dieu le sien desploie bien le marie et bien l’enploie. Diex paie adés si riches solz pour un denier rent il cent solz. (ll. 495–98)

Money itself is ‘faithless’, in the dual sense of being untrustworthy (ll. 488–89) and a key symbol of the secular world (ll. 571–72). Although Gautier never labels his protagonist a Christian – the term is applied to him only

See ll. 49, 67, 87, 172, 223, 303, 328, 369, 378, 389, 399, 472. The idea is later repeated (l. 299; 1955–70: IV, 122). In the Latin version, the Christian also promises to be the Jew’s ‘servus’ (251), though the idea is not developed as it is by Gautier. In the denouement, servitude resurfaces as a metaphor for conversion. The Jew, recognizing his error, ‘fide christiana cum omni domo sua colla submittit’ (253). 59

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once, when the Jew mocks him as a ‘vrai crestïan’ (l. 398) – he is careful to set the merchant’s economic values within a Christian framework.61 Although motivated by the same overall objective of reconciling money and faith, Berceo follows a different path. Gautier and the Latin source represent the religious conflict in terms of servitude, which, especially in the French poet’s embellished version, legitimizes the Jews’ legal status as servi camarae and their larger historical enslavement under the new covenant. Berceo, on the other hand, sets the battle on the terrain of reputation and honour: the protagonist’s overriding anxiety is to restore his own ‘precio’, and in the process he has put at stake the dignity of Christianity itself: reptar is one of the key words in his narrative. In line with this emphasis on status, Berceo focusses not on charity, but on the social virtue of largesse. Berceo inherits this idea from his source, but he subjects it to his usual amplificatory gloss (627–30), bringing out the man’s lack of restraint and social ambition through verbs and adverbial phrases that point up the burgess’s imprudence (‘derramar’ 628b, 629a, ‘sin mesura’ 630a, ‘sin tiento’ 629a).62 Magnanimity requires no moral justification, but its excess invites censure, and the invitation is taken up by Diz, who tries to argue that rather than being reckless the protagonist ‘es alguien que, con generosidad genuina, vale a su prójimo aun cuando no le resulta fácil’ (1995: 143). I would argue that the real interest of Berceo’s representation of the burgess lies in the gap between social and moral virtues. Displaying ‘genuine generosity’, by which I assume Diz means altruism, is not the same as being magnanimous (‘de muy grand corazón’, 627a), which entails a form of conspicuous consumption of wealth through public sharing that increases one’s ‘precio’ in the community – others benefit, but the ultimate beneficiary is oneself. So when the burgess explains his predicament to the Jew and says ‘yo a todos valía’ (639b), we should not confuse his largesse with charity. Berceo alludes to the moral dimension of gift giving without ever explicitly moralizing. In other words, the story explores the connection between religion and a social, rather than a moral, problem. Although there is an undercurrent of concern, the moral legitimacy of the burgess’s consumption is not explicitly an issue in either the Latin or the

61 Like Gautier, Alfonso X is clearly anxious to distance his protagonist from the taint of worldliness, writing that the man spent all his money ‘por fazer ben e mais valer, / ca non ja en outra folia’ (ll. 11–12; 1986–89: I, 117). Social prestige (‘mais valer’) is here married to good works (‘fazer ben’) in a legitimizing move that would be replayed, with many variations, in the subsequent history of capitalist philanthropy. 62 Taking her cue from Dutton, Diz remarks that in the Latin version the extent of this generosity ‘está apenas sugerida en el verbo “largiri” ’ (1995: 142). Yet, while is it true that Berceo is more explicit, the Latin version conveys the idea of largesse through its characteristic rhetorical repetition: ‘largas quas habebat opes largos in sumptus expendere cepit. Verum postremo magnitudine sumptum magnitudinem superans opum largiendis deficit opibus, cum ei largiendi non deficeret animus’ (251). For this use of repetitio see note 57.

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Spanish version. For Berceo, the protagonist is always a ‘bon omne’ (626d, 650a, 663d, 682c, 685c) and though the term could evoke the legal and social status of one of the town’s boni homines, his goodness is never in doubt.63 Even at his moment of greatest despair, when he confesses his sin of forgetting the deadline for repayment and calls himself a ‘mesquino peccador’ (664a), it is clear that he believes that his sin is not that he had been a spendthrift or had neglected to pay his debts; he berates himself for having forgotten his higher debt to Christ and Mary, who will be thus scorned by the Jew (664–65). When he turns to God for help, he is certainly contrite. ‘Sennor, hasta agora tú me as captenido, / só ya por mis peccados en falliment caído’ (663ab), he begins, acknowledging that he has benefited from the social circulation of wealth that begins (and, as we shall see, ends) with God. While the conventional phrase ‘por mis peccados’ hovers on the edges of moral guilt, he is saddened far more by his loss of social worth: ‘el precio que avía todo lo é perdido. / Mucho más me valiera que non fuesse nacido’ (633bd). His social value has plummetted to such an extent that it would have been better for him had he not existed.64 The poem registers the social value of wealth, and particularly the way it confers status and an honourable identity, which is why, when the protagonist returns triumphantly to his native city, he emerges from anonymity and, in a unique touch, acquires a name: don Valerio. As Diz notes, his name evokes his desire to ‘valer más’ (1995: 143). He acquires this name at the point when the dual meanings of the term – the financial and the social – will be complemented by a third, religious, meaning. In the climactic scene, we learn how he will be worth more in spiritual terms, since he defends the Christian faith against the mocking disbelief of the Jew (on which see below). The ideological issues raised by the portrayal of the burgess also shape the poem’s structure. The Latin tale begins with the visit to Constantinople of a foreign archdeacon, who comes upon tumultuous revelry, which it turns out was in celebration of the miracle that is then narrated in the main body of the story itself. Berceo takes this scene, adapts it, and transposes it to the conclusion of the poem. While the keynote of the celebration in the Latin text is noise – music, voices, the clashing of cymbals – in the Spanish tale it is food.

63 In an interesting coincidence (it is almost certainly no more than that), Homobonus or Omobono from Cremona (who died in 1197, and was canonized in 1199 by Pope Innocent III) was the patron saint of businessmen (and tailors). 64 When he realizes he has forgotten, the protagonist wants to kill himself (663d). His suicidal yearning is linked to his desire to give away his patrimony. As Dante noted (Inferno 11, 40–45), suicides and spendthrifts lie together in the same pit of hell, both damned for committing violence against the self. Violence against God is worse (Inferno 11, 46–48), and Berceo’s hero redeems himself by defending his Creator against the symbolic violence of the Jew. In the same circle, though some way off, lie usurers (Inferno 11, 94–96).


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Between allusions to the sound of ‘alegría’ and ‘instrumentos’ (698b) and the sight of processions and dancing (700c), Berceo inserts a vivid picture of banquets being prepared by ‘páuperes e potentes’ 698a), food being shared, and wine being passed round: Adobavan convivios, davan ad non habentes sus carnes, sos pescados salpresos e recentes. Andavan las redomas con el vino piment, conduchos adobados maravillosament. (698cd–699ab)

Indeed, food provides a figurative framework for the entire miracle. In the final line, Berceo blesses the archdeacon who preserved the tale for posterity: ‘déli Dios paraíso e folganza sabrosa’ (702d; my emphasis), and the blessing takes us back to the very start of the miracle, which, Berceo promises us, ‘preciarlo edes más que mediano comer’ (625d). The banquet, which the poet stresses is shared by rich and poor alike (698 a & c), is a powerful symbol of Christian agape, just as it was in the Libro de Apolonio. Here is conspicuous consumption of goods luxuriously and exotically prepared that indirectly commemorates the trading that helped make it possible. To a certain extent, the conclusion celebrates the social virtues embodied by the protagonist himself. But there is a difference, in that the individual’s desire to increase his personal renown is eliminated. Berceo’s adaptation transmutes the burgess’s desire for fame into a different mode. In the Latin the revels are sparked off by the miraculous testimony of the speaking statue that proved the Christian’s faith: in answer to the archdeacon’s inquiry, one of the revellers cries out ‘testimonium [. . .] testimonium’ (250). Berceo’s version adds new layers of meaning to the idea of testimonium. Grafted on to miraculous testimony of God are the acts of human witnessing – the recollection of the event in public ritual and in the written testimony of the archdeacon who recorded what he saw. In this way, the protagonist’s desire for prestige and renown has been overlaid by a public celebration that emphasizes the collective over the individual, equality over status, the religious over the secular. To summarize: the narrative is structured around a movement from consumption to credit to commerce, and back again to consumption, but this time with a religious, more emphatically communal and egalitarian gloss. The story follows a spiral pattern, which links heaven to earth through the circulation of wealth both vertically (between God and man) and horizontally (between men). The whole process takes place not just under divine sanction, but at divine instigation. God protects the merchant, who accrues a divine debt that needs to be repaid. Gautier creates the bond of mutuality by introducing the virtue of charity, of giving ‘pour Dieu’, which is reinforced by the poet’s moralizing interventions about the need to repay one’s debts (ll. 45–48; 1955–70: IV, 112). Berceo understands mutual protection in more literal terms, and turns his protagonist into a defender of the faith. For this he needs an enemy, of course, and he has one ready at hand in the Jew.

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As others have noted, Berceo’s representation of the Jew is far more negative than in his source (or indeed in the two other versions considered here). But it does not begin this way. As I have mentioned, the relationship between the burgess and the Jew at first appears to be conducted on quite reasonable terms. Though separated by faith, they treat their religious differences with moderation and mutual tolerance (643–47). While the Jew does accept that Christ ‘fo omne cuerdo e sin follía, / profeta verdadero’ (643cd), he draws the line at his being the son of God. Not unreasonably, he wonders how Christ can guarantee the debt, ‘ca non es en est mundo secúnd el mi creer’ (645b), and in answer to the Christian’s offer to lead him in person to Mary and her son he replies ‘facerlo é de grado’ (648d). Because of his faith he is certainly skeptical, but he also fears that the Christian is both mocking and deceiving him (644cd). If it does turn out to be a trick, the Jew warns, he will publically shame him for his treachery: ‘qual lealtad traes sabiente la faré’ (652d). Mockery, deception, public shame – these are the fears that threaten to disrupt their relationship, and Berceo, deflecting attention from the Christian, projects guilt squarely upon the Jew. Although the process begins towards the end of their discussion (with the reference to the ‘trufán renegado’, 648a), the denigration of the Jew increases in intensity in the presence of Christ and Mary. Indeed, the moneylender and the Jews that accompany him become active antagonists the moment they enter the church and stand before the statue of Virgin and child. At this point, the Jews become, as if by magic, ‘embergonzados’ (649d), the Christian threatens disbelievers with hellfire (650d), and the moneylender, who is the leading Jew (the ‘mayoral’, or the figurative archetype, 651a) is confirmed with the epithet that will stick to him until he converts: ‘el truhán’ (653a).65 The term combines deceit and derision, and as such it sets in motion some basic Christian fears and assumptions: besides the convention of betrayal, it recalls Jewish mockery of the crucified Christ, and plays upon Christian fantasies about Jews desecrating their most cherished symbols, such as the host,

65 For ‘truhán’ see 648a, 563a, 660b, 670b, 671d, 672d, 678a & d, 679a, 690a, 695d. Though the epithet is conventional (it is consistently deployed in the miracle of Theophilus, for example), it fulfills a special ideological need in this tale, which is to deny that the Christian is the really disdainful trickster (‘omne escarnidor’, 644d). The need to deny any similarity between the two religions operates at the syntactic level, e.g., ‘Dióle los fiadores al trufán el christiano’ (653a), where the hyperbaton creates a symbolic juxtaposition that reminds us of the closeness of Christian and Jew even in the process of separating them. When the trader returns he is accused by the Jewish community: ‘Reptávalo la aljama, essa mala natura, / que perdió so aver por su mala locura’ (680ab). The second line contains an accusation against the Christian in reported speech, but it also acts as a subordinate clause qualifying the Jews: we are expected to resolve the momentary ambiguity by denying that the trader is a metaphorical Jew, and that the real Jews are those who, in their madness, threw away their spiritual patrimony.


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or as here a statue of Virgin and child. As the story reaches its climax, and the merchant returns to be challenged by the Jew, the religious rivalry is rendered in even more explicit and graphic terms, as Diz has shown (1995: 148–51). Structurally, the progression is important because it helps obscure the fact that the language of religious conflict is also used to crystalize in a recognizable form an economic conflict that is harder to articulate. The contradictions surrounding financial credit had become, as I shall explain, particularly acute by the time Berceo was writing, but they are resolved ideologically by a Jew whose religious treachery predetermines his betrayal at an economic level. Treachery – as religious disbelief – merges with economic betrayal through the rhetorical mechanism of greed. When the chest full of coins ends its miraculous journey in the hands of the Jew, Berceo presents us with the following scene: we see the Jew emptying the coffer and making a huge pile of gold and silver on his store-room floor (677d), scrutinizing the container (to see if it contained any more loose coins, to assess its worth?), then hiding it under his bed, to the envy of all: ‘avién todos envidia del trufán renegado’ (678d). All Jews are thus implicated in the single man’s secretive covetousness. Treachery and greed then combine and evolve in predictable terms: El trufán alevoso, natura cobdiciosa, non metié el astroso mientes en otra cosa; tenié que su ventura era maravillosa, púsoli al burgés nomne ‘boca mintrosa’. (679)

What is interesting about this portrayal is not so much the particular components, which are conventional enough, as the way they are linked. The passage from one to the other is so natural that they appear merely as different facets of the same unquestionably coherent essence. From the final phrase of stanza 678, ‘el trufán renegado’, we move smoothly to ‘alevoso’, ‘cobdicioso’, to end up with ‘astroso’ – which in this context implies not merely a moral quality, but swinish dirt. Berceo thus traces a nexus between mocking disbelief, treachery, greed, and filth. The language of stink and corruption is absent in the other versions being considered here, and it is a measure of Berceo’s ideological position that he includes it, albeit in attenuated form.66 His adaptation illustrates R. I. Moore’s point that as European society became increasingly commercialized,

66 For ‘astroso’ see Diccionario de autoridades: ‘sucio, puerco, desaliñado’. The absence of this language in the other versions may be explained by the fact that this particular tale legitimizes Christian engagement in commerce: the stench of corruption cannot enter the narrative for fear of contaminating Christianity itself. It can surface in Berceo’s text, on the other hand, because has erected a firmer barrier between Christianity and Judaism by exaggerating the negative portrayal of the Jew.

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those who could provide local credit and facilitate long-distance exchanges became ever more indispensable. It became correspondingly imperative to maintain social solidarity against them, and to keep them in their places by humiliation, degradation and terror. In this context the association between money and excrement so regularly pressed into the service of anti-semitism was pungently to the point. (2000: 156–57; see also 1987: 105).

Berceo’s portrait of the Jew builds up to a powerfully resonant image, just at the point where the narrator leaves the Jew to pick up the story of the burgess: ‘dessemos al judío, goloso e logrero, / no lo saque Dios ende, aguarde so cellero’ (681ab). It is if the act of telling the tale itself has a performative function, damning this greedy and usurious Jew to perpetual enclosure in his storeroom, now transformed into a metaphorical circle of Hell. Berceo’s choice of adjectives in this climactic scene is revealing. Deriving from the Latin ‘gula’ (‘throat’), ‘goloso’ denotes the sheer physicality of this man’s love of money. His is a personal hunger that would not be sated by the banquet celebrated at the end of the tale. Within this larger context, the word ‘logrero’ is even more suggestive. Via ‘logro’, it is etymologically linked to ‘lucrum’, ‘money’ or ‘profit’, and according to Corominas ‘logro’ was first attested in a thirteenthcentury vernacular Bible as a translation of usura, and its association with usury continued to be recorded by Nebrija and other early modern writers (Corominas 1980–91, s.v. ‘logro’). The adjective ‘logrero’ becomes even more important when we consider that usury is the silence at the heart of this tale. The most curious feature of all the versions being considered here is the omission of any reference to interest on the loan, which consequently is not represented in explicitly usurious terms. Diz points to some of the ideological problems surrounding usury, and refers in passing to the various attempts to find a legitimate space for commercial loans; however, she argues that these issues are not central to the tale, and that in any case the poem does not associate money-lending or usury exclusively with the Jew. Commenting on the absence of any reference to usurious interest, she concludes that the narrator, ‘no condena la usura sino que, con relativa neutralidad, refiere la transacción del préstamo en virtud de la cual el mercader está, en rigor, comprando tiempo’ (1995: 142).67 Diz correctly identifies a problem, and hints at where an answer may be found (the meaning, scope, and causes of Berceo’s ‘relativa neutralidad’); but her argument unravels, in part because (as she previously explained) ‘buying time’ was one of the reasons for condemning usury in the first place; in part because she fails to distinguish between the different

67 See also Diz’s remark that ‘la verdadera cuestión [. . .] trasciende el asunto del préstamo del dinero’ (1995: 145). It seems to me that this ‘transcendence’ is an ideological effect, whose operation the critic needs to lay bare, rather than duplicate.


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forms of financial transaction implied by Berceo’s text.68 Although it is not specifically mentioned, the stigma of usury does attach itself to Berceo’s Jew, through the vocabulary of Jewish greed and treachery. Otherwise, where is the greed in wanting his money back? Where is his treachery? In representational terms, just as the burgess becomes a merchant to support his life as a generous burgess, so the Jew, as a logical necessity, becomes ‘logrero’, or usurious. That he does so precisely at the moment the money is miraculously returned to him is also crucial. When he gets his hands on the coffer, ‘tenié que si ventura era maravillosa, / púsoli al burgés nomne “boca mintrosa” ’ (679cd). He realizes something wonderful has happened, but his lack of faith in God prevents him from witnessing the true miracle. To rub it in, Berceo has him accuse the Christian of lying in an act of blindness that mirrors the larger spiritual blindness of Synagoga herself.69 It is as if he has forgotten the terms of his agreement – the burgess also forgot (though obviously for a Christian author some acts of forgetfulness are more redeemable than others). Diz acutely points out that the passage entails a kind of non sequitur: ‘el judío experimenta la alegría de recibir el dinero, que es, a las claras, evidencia de la devolución del préstamo y, casi simultáneamente, niega que se haya efectuado el pago’ (1995: 150). For her, this non sequitur demonstrates ‘la fusión’ of money and true faith. Yet another non sequitur, in the very next stanza but one, demonstrates that such a fusion is never complete. In a detail that is unique to Berceo, even after the Christian has cast the money into the waves he continues to despair: El burgés de Bizancio vivié con grand pesar, que non podió al plazo al judío pagar; non podié el bon omne la cara alegrar, ni lo podién por nada sos omnes confortar. (682)

There is then a double irony in this part of the poem, and juxtaposing the disbeliever’s joy and the believer’s misery demonstrates the incommensurability of religious and financial credit, which may be properly joined only in the unknowable realm of the miraculous. But the arrival of the coffer has more to reveal: for what the Jew receives is, apparently, something for nothing, which is one reason why medieval moralists attacked usury, on the grounds that

68 For example, stanzas 627–31 describe money being circulated in various ways: just as the burgess gives money to all and sundry, so he borrows it from family, neighbours, and foreigners (‘estrannos’, 630d). The terms – if any – are unspecified, but the phrase ‘non trovava mudado nin fallava usura’ (630c) implies a distinction between two extremes: loans without interest and usury. The reference to ‘usura’ is unique to Berceo. 69 The blindness of Synagoga is a well-documented iconographic motif in Christian art (e.g. the sculptures in cathedral portals); for various illustrations, see Schreckenberg (1996, figs 25 & 26) and Seiferth (1970).

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interest should not be earned on other people’s labour. On a literal level, usury was indeed absent from the story; but Berceo reintroduces it through his representation of Jewish treachery and greed, which acquires emblematic form in the Jew’s secretive and grasping pleasure on receiving money that is rightfully his (he is its ‘sennor verdadero’, 677a) yet also an apparently unearned windfall. The acquisition of the coffer both denies and acknowledges the problem of interest. In part, the ambivalence can be explained thematically. The absence of interest on a literal level is necessary to underscore the figurative religious message that God gives freely and without interest; to include usury would certainly set up a salutary contrast between human giving and divine giving, but such a move would trouble the dynamics of this particular tale, structured as it is around the figurative convergence (rather than contrast) between the economic and the religious: given the Jew’s conversion God would become implicated in his usury. Simply put, either the Jew is converted or usury becomes an explicit part of the deal. Usury, as I have tried to show, continues to make its presence felt in Berceo’s version, and the pressures it exerts upon the text are symptomatic of deeper ideological problems. It is entirely apt that usury should be camouflaged in the text, given the increasingly sophisticated attempts to hide it during the long commercial revolution of the high Middle Ages. Indeed, the whole of Grice-Hutchinson’s survey of credit and loans in medieval Christian, Muslim and Jewish thought is entitled ‘In concealment of usury’ (1978: 13–60). As the growing needs of commerce placed a strain on traditional taboos regarding lending with interest, merchants resorted to subterfuge, of varying degrees of subtlety, to circumvent teachings that ultimately derived from the Old and New Testaments and the works of the Church Fathers. In response, contemporary theologians, canon lawyers, and moralists attempted to define usury more precisely, in order to sort out where interest was legitimate, and at what rates. Their complex taxonomies of loan recognized the needs of business in a vain attempt to regulate it. As the thirteenth century progressed, Church teaching became even more intransigent, in part to avoid the taint of Judaism that was associated with moneylending. However, this trend also produced a conflict with parallel developments in civil law. Roman law did not prohibit usury, and its revival in the thirteenth century, coupled with the continuing importance of traditional Visigothic codes, meant that Castilian civil law enshrined more permissive attitudes towards moneylending. As Grice-Hutchinson puts it: ‘the hardening of the Church’s attitude towards usury placed the Castilian monarchs in an awkward predicament. Many Jews were bankers and money-lenders. To comply with the ecclesiastical ban on usury would diminish Jewish fortunes, and with them the revenues of the Crown’ (1978: 35). Even though Alfonso X’s Siete partidas would (in theory at least) reconcile the positions of Crown and Church, the earlier loopholes continued to be exploited, and the contradictions remained. Berceo’s version


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of the miracle uses the inherited trope of the ‘economy of salvation’ to show how a financial transaction can offer a figurative way of thinking about a spiritual issue. The move rests upon the belief that religion and economics are compatible. But when the terms of the relationship are reversed, and religion is used to think about an economic problem, then the cracks begin to appear in his narrative, just as they did in the relationship between the economic teachings of the Church and actual economic practice. Faith and money may co-exist, but only when profit is eliminated.

Afterword Those readers who have followed me this far may have two reasons to be disappointed. First, because they will not find here a thoroughgoing summary of the conclusions that could be reached through the various case studies that make up this book. Since one of my principal goals has been to offer models of ideological interpretation of the poetry of the mester, readers will have to draw their own conclusions, on a case-by-case basis, as to whether or not I have been successful. Nonetheless, in a book that has been so concerned with boundaries, it is appropriate that I try to delimit what this book has and has not done and then try, albeit in very schematic fashion, to pull some of the threads together and sketch out what directions future research might take. This brings me to the second reason for possible disappointment. My account of social, religious, economic, and political conflicts and concerns that engaged the clerical poets discussed here has, inevitably, been partial (in more senses than one). It was certainly not offered in an attempt to be exhaustive. In writing it, I was aware that each of the chapters could have been enlarged into a monograph, and that there were other ways of structuring the material. For example, rather than spreading the conflict between Christians and Jews through different chapters, and examining the ideological function of the Jew in particular texts, I could have clustered the various discussions together in a single chapter on the representation of the Jew, and developed my analyses in the light of other works, such as Berceo’s Duelo de la Virgen, with a more fully contextualized account. Moreover, there are obvious gaps. I am aware that I have hardly touched upon the relation between Christianity and Islam, which is a thread that runs through the Poema de Fernán González as well as the poetry of Berceo, notably the Vida de San Millán.1 This poem also draws on the legend of the first count of Castile, and thus illustrates another area that this study treats only in a very allusive fashion: the involvement of the mester in the monastic politics of the period, and the way in which the monasteries of San Millán and San Pedro de Arlanza drew on, and further

1 Future studies of the mester could profit from the work of Hanlon (2000), who draws on postcolonial theory to analyse the ideological representation of the Muslim during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

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promoted, nationalist myth and legend.2 Similarly, Berceo’s lives of the powerful masculine saints, San Millán, Santo Domingo, and San Lorenzo could certainly have been mined with a view to providing a more substantial account of the conflict between Church and State that was such a crucial element in thirteenth-century Spanish history. Admittedly, my decisions as to what to include and how to organize the material were to some extent arbitrary. More importantly, however, although this book intersects with some of the major historical changes that characterize the early thirteenth century – ‘un hervidero de transformaciones en la historia medieval de Europa’ (Rodríguez López 1994: 8) – my project was not devised in an attempt to write a history of Castile from a literary perspective. This is not a work of history, rather a series of case studies that illustrate a way of reading a literary movement so as to bring out the fuller implications and complexities of a critical commonplace: that the poetry of the mester is, above all else, written in a didactic mode. In order to bring out the complexities of the verse I have been helped by the complexities of the two key words of my subtitle: intellectuals and ideologies. These words intersect in that they both raise questions about a writer’s commitment and alignments. I have tried to show how a clerical poet could be committed to a cause, but the way that commitment is poetically represented reveals that it cannot be understood simply in voluntarist terms, as an act of free will. His poetic position, his freedom, is also governed by factors over which he cannot exert control, though he might be aware of some of them: he is the product of an alignment. True commitment, writes Raymond Williams, means being aware of these alignments, and developing an ‘active consciousness of ourselves and our practices [. . .] speaking for oneself, and through this, for others’, and showing an awareness of our historical situation by recognizing that what we say needs to understood in relation to what others, before us, have written (1989: 86–87). In one respect, these words seem directly applicable to a movement that was at once a ‘nueva maestría’ and a self-conscious reworking of inherited materials, made up of writers who, fully conscious of their literary practices, spoke for themselves and, ‘through this, for others’. And yet it is on this last proposal that we are most likely to pause. The extent to which these largely anonymous writers spoke for themselves or displayed an ‘active consciousness’ of themselves constitutes, finally, the most challenging problem for analysis. No one would now seriously deny the existence of a critical spirit in medieval thought; the question is the extent to which dissent and independence were considered defining features of those who served the intellectual

2 For a recent example of this kind of work, see Escalana Monge, Azcárate AguilarAmat, and Larrañaga Zulueta (2002), who study the diplomas of San Pedro de Arlanza, the legend of Fernán González, and the creation of a Castilian national identity.

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function of society. The Latin word clerus could mean both an individual cleric and the clerical caste as a whole, and the ambivalence is symptomatic of the tensions between corporate fidelity, individual responsibility, and institutional patronage, whether of Church or State. The anonymity of these poets is one sign that corporate filiation and acts of willed affiliation (to borrow Said’s terminology) were expected to prevail over what we now would call individual conscience. But several of these anonymous works, most notably the earliest, El libro de Alexandre, and the latest, Elena y María, show obvious signs of resistance to having one’s voice entirely submerged in corporate identity and political affiliations. The paradoxical anonymity of these ambivalent and dissident works should remind us that identifying the critical consciousness which defines modern notions of the intellectual needs to take into account the conceptual and discursive resources available in a particular historical juncture. Displaying an ‘active consciousness of ourselves’ and ‘speaking for oneself, and through this, for others’ presupposes modern forms and concepts of consciousness and selfhood. Their absence does not mean the absence of critical spirit, rather that unease, doubt, or outright protest might be channelled in different directions and might find expression in unexpected ways, not simply in the voice of an individual author, speaking from a single consistent vantage point. In El libro de Alexandre, the notorious ambiguity of the conclusion is determined by multiple factors. Authorial ambivalence towards the hero is in large measure determined by the inherited conditions and conventions of political and literary discourse. As I explained in chapter 3, there was no single language of politics that could be cleanly separated from religious or moral discourse; moreover, as recent scholars have emphasized, the medieval conception of Alexander was inherently contradictory.3 As a counterpoint to the authorial voices of the Alexander poet, there is also the discreet running commentary of Apelles, the Jewish alter ego. And in Elena y María resentment is channelled through the voices of another kind of outsider, woman. The plurality of perspectives that can be registered within a single work is most strikingly illustrated by the verse of Gonzalo de Berceo. The multiple ways in which he makes his authorial presence felt has been studied by various scholars, most notably in my view by Harriet Goldberg (1979–80) and Olivier Biaggini (2001b). As he surveys the ways in which Berceo’s authorial voice is fractured by shifts into other narrative voices, Biaggini concludes that ‘Berceo, comme narrateur et auteur, compose avec d’autres voix, mais le

3 As Gerrit Bunt has pointed out in his critique of Cary’s pioneering approach to the medieval Alexander legends, ‘there is no simple dichotomy between “secular” and “religious” approaches to Alexander [. . .] discordant elements appear in the story, and thus many Alexander romances present a divided picture of their hero [. . .]. The medieval conception of Alexander [. . .] will not be an internally consistent conception, but [. . .] will need to accommodate contradictory elements’ (1994: 86–87). See also Lafferty (1998: 175).

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texte prétend ramener des interactions à un modèle d’autorité unique et cohérent’ (169). While I am in broad agreement with his argument, I believe that there is a danger of overstating uniqueness and coherence. As I tried to show in chapter 1, Berceo is fascinated by perspective, and writes with a poetics of resonance. While he is not shy in his assertions, he also allows meanings to emerge through verbal echoes which can create puns, or latinisms which carry with them the semantic freight of their etymon. His writing draws attention to the cleric as intermediary between the sources of authority and dogma and the multiple perspectives of the world at large, one whose task it is to act as a bridge between unity and diversity. This brings us to one clerical poem that I have not discussed in this book, but which can be read as an emblem of the mester as a movement of cultural mediation. La razón de amor con los denuestos del agua y el vino poses, as everyone knows, a problem of interpretation: how to reconcile its different parts, perspectives, discourses, and voices into a unified vision? There have been various attempts to solve the riddle, some more successful than others (for examples of the more plausible readings, see Spitzer 1950, Impey 1979–80, and Goldberg 1984). It is the problem, rather than the answer, that interests me here. The narratorial voice speaks with the pride that typifies the movement, as it began with the opening stanzas of El libro de Alexandre: Qui triste tiene su coraçón benga oýr esta razón. Odrá razón acabada, feyta d’amor e bien rymada. Un escolar la rimó que siempre dueñas amó; mas siempre ovo cryança en Alemania y en Francia, moró mucho en Lombardía pora aprender cortesía. (ll. 1–10)4

As the poem progresses, we learn that this pride is rooted in the cleric’s ability to see from multiple perspectives, to move effortlessly between sensuality and spirituality, vulgarity and refinement. This fluidity of vision is at once a sign of privilege and a kind of exile. His cortesía is present, in the sense that it is on display in the text, but absent in the sense that its home is elsewhere, learned in Lombardy, France, and Germany. When replaced in its manuscript context, with its ‘rich set of relationships’ between different forms of writing and registers (Dagenais 1994: 50), the poem acquires an even more varied array of viewpoints. 4 Quoted from Bustos Tovar (1984), with accents added. For the textual and interpretative problems posed by this poem’s manuscript, see Franchini (1987) and Dagenais (1994: 47–50).

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The question of narrative perspective and authorial voice, and not just thematic reasons, makes this poem, as Alicia C. de Ferraresi put it thirty years ago, a ‘prólogo a Juan Ruiz’ (1976). Drawing support from Walsh’s arguments (1979–80), I pointed out in the introduction how the thirteenth-century mester provides one of the fundamental contexts for understanding El libro de buen amor. This is true with regard not only to parody, but also to the larger problem of didactic perspective itself. If Juan Ruiz as author moves tantalizingly in and out of sight this is in part because he is developing a possibility inherent in the earlier idea of cleric as intermediary. And yet the elusive and fragmentary nature of the author figure in El libro de buen amor is a symptom of a new literary landscape, whose horizons have been broadened by a wider range of lay readers and writers (such as Juan Manuel). Thus, the decreasing cohesion of the works written in cuaderna vía from the fourteenth century onwards, which has been noted by numerous scholars, is a sign of an increasingly complex web of social relations embedded in literary texts. As Francisco López Estrada remarked: ‘la cohesión clerical se desperdiga en una diversidad de corrientes culturales que se entrecruzan: así el arte cancioneril y la organización social de las Cortes permiten una mayor variedad’ (1983: 372–73). Future research on the mester should draw more connections between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in order to offer a more finely calibrated account of the development of the movement. There are major differences, but the continuities are there too. Michel Garcia remarked that the survival of thirteenth-century poems principally in manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (1989: 53) was evidence for the failure of cultural mediation. But it is also solid evidence of their continued relevance and interest. How might these thirteenth-century poems be read against their new horizons of expectation, and what new meanings would emerge? The question is posed as a call for a more substantial and truly broad-based comparatist analysis, across centuries as well as across modern boundaries of national tradition. Such an approach would not be limited, as it has been here, to source study, which prevents a thorough comparison between works in their cultural contexts by focussing on the relation between one whole poem and selected bits of others. The need for a broader view was recognized long ago by Francisco Rico: ‘El estudio del “mester de clerecía” con el imprescindible enfoque panrománico se me antoja tarea prioritaria’ (1985: 4–5, at n. 9; see also Gómez Moreno 1988). However, to explain why Romance studies have yet to take up the challenge twenty years later would be to risk turning the afterword to one book into the foreword to another.

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Index abbesses, see Berceo, ‘La abadesa preñada’ Abelard, Peter 7, 31 Ackerman, Jane 19, 31 Adam 26–27, 40, 47, 74 Aegidius Romanus 121n, 123n affiliation 10, 228 agnatism 207 Airas Nunes 182n, 184n Alexander the Great see Libro de Alexandre Alexander III, Pope 31 Alexandreis see Walter of Châtillon Alfonso VIII, King of Castile 8, 24, 112 Alfonso X, el sabio, King of Castile 151, 180, 182, 187, 193 Cantigas d’escarnho e de maldizer 192n, 195n, 200 Cantigas de Santa María 33n, 36n, 38n, 39, 40, 45n, 57, 58n, 61, 63n, 104, 210n, 211n, 215, 217n Estoria de España (also known as Primera crónica general) 143, 146, 153, 171, 176n Siete partidas 56, 60n, 61, 167, 184, 187, 188, 198, 224 allegory 26–27, 36, 40, 42, 49, 70, 74n, 77, 141, 181, 185, 196, 197 Almanzor 146, 163, 174 Alvar, Carlos 200 Alvar, Manuel 83n, 90n, 201 Álvaro Peláez (Bishop of Silves) 156 Anderson, Perry 22–23, 160–61, 168 Andreas Capellanus 7 Andrew, Saint (the Apostle) 54 antisemitism 55–56, 57, 134, 222; see also Jews Apelles, the Jew see Jews Aquinas, Saint Thomas 28, 123n, 205 Aristotelianism 122, 195 Aristotle 129, 192 Arizaleta, Amaia 10, 11, 111–12, 115, 123, 140n, 141–42

Arlanza, San Pedro de 163, 164, 172, 226–27 arms and letters 129, 131 Asia 126, 130, 133, 140 Augustine, Saint 29, 32, 55, 59, 74, 122, 137, 141 De civitate Dei 118 De Trinitate 28 Babylon 117, 118 Bakhtin, Mikhail 194 Baldwin, John W. 205 Bartlett, Robert 124, 211 Battaglia, Salvatore 5 Benda, Julien 10 Berceo, Gonzalo de 2, 6, 10, 16–17, 227 as intermediary 66 authorial voice 228–29 self-representation 8, 73–74 Duelo de la Virgen 61, 65n, 70, 226 Loores de la Virgen 42n, 65n Milagros de la Virgen 12, 17, 18, 26–66 allegorical introduction 26–27, 40–41, 42 Miracle 1 ‘La casulla de San Ildefonso’ 97n Miracle 2 ‘El sacristán fornicario’ 19, 29–35, 42, 43, 45, 106 Miracle 3 ‘El clérigo y la flor’ 19, 35–42, 95, 106 Miracle 4 ‘El galardón de la Virgen’ 42 Miracle 9 ‘El clérigo simple’ 97n Miracle 11 ‘El labrador avaro’ 19, 42–48 Miracle 16 ‘El judezno’ 19–20, 55–60, 61, 210 Miracle 17 ‘La iglesia profanada’ 60 Miracle 18 ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ 19–20, 55–56, 60–65, 210 Miracle 19 ‘El parto maravilloso’ 81

252

INDEX

Berceo (cont.) Milagros de la Virgen (cont.) Miracle 21 ‘La abadesa preñada’ 20, 95–108, 192n Miracle 23 ‘El mercader fiado’ 25, 209–25 Miracle 25 ‘El pleito de Teófilo’ 19, 38, 48–54, 96, 97n miraculous composition of 65–66 see also Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa María; Gautier de Coinci; Miracula beate Marie Virginis Poema de Santa Oria 20, 68–82, 91 Vida de San Millán 97n, 98n, 226 Vida de Santo Domingo 16, 72n, 74n, 75n, 97n, 98n Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint 67 bestiaries 131n betrayal 110–11, 120, 129, 138, 145, 148, 152, 153 by clerics 10, 142 by Jews 53, 138, 220–21, 223, 224 by peasants 154 juridical notions of 165n see also loyalty Biaggini, Olivier 200n, 228–29 Bible 128, 140, 141, 162, 166, 170, 190 and usury 224 Genesis 47 Exodus 54 I Kings 139 Psalms 47 Song of Songs 67 Daniel 133, 138, 140 Matthew 44, 167 Black, Antony 110 Bloch, R. Howard 180n blood libel 60; see also Berceo, ‘Los judíos de Toledo’ Boniface VII, Pope 190 Boreland, Helen 59, 96, 107 Borges, Jorge Luis 18, 179 Bossy, Michel-André 183 Boswell, John 93, 137 Bourdieu, Pierre 178 bourgeoisie 24, 184, 199, 201 Brann, Ross 132 Brown, Catherine 7 Brown, Elizabeth A. R. 21 Brownlee, Marina S. 202n Brundage, James A. 32n, 33, 106 Bunt, Gerrit 228n

Burke, James F. 173 Bynum, Caroline Walker 70, 79n, 92 Cain 44, 52 Calila e Dimna 129 Cañas, Jesús 11, 135 Cannon, Christopher 196–97 canon law 31, 32, 105, 106, 107 cantigas d’escarnho e de maldizer 181, 184, 185, 186, 191, 193, 194; see also individual poets Carpenter, Dwayne 64 Carpentier, Alejo 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 66 Castile 24, 169 as ‘cabeça de España’ 124, 143, 144, 145, 157, 159 foundation of 23, 143–78 Castilian identity 147, 148, 165, 167, 170, 176 and Christianity 145, 146, 148, 162, 163, 166 and conquest 145–46, 148, 159, 172, 178 embodied by Fernán González 148, 165, 166, 167 see also nationhood; Spain; Visigoths, legacy of Catherine of Siena 68, 79n celibacy 33, 67, 98, 188, 191, 192, 197 Chalon, Louis 146n Cherchi, Paolo 77 Christine de Stommeln 67 Church, the 18, 25, 49, 66 administration of 31, 32, 51–52 , 107 and State 64, 109, 142, 154, 157, 179, 184, 190, 193, 195, 198, 227 authority of 50–51, 54, 61, 68, 79, 80, 84, 90, 96–103, 106, 107 economic interests of 189, 190 eschatological 77 gender relations in 20, 67–108 militant 61 reform 2, 3, 19, 20, 27, 31, 32, 36, 49, 51, 54, 55, 67, 84, 85, 107, 189, 191 sexual corruption in 29–35, 36–37, 95–108, 188–89, 191–92 see also celibacy; clerics; concubinage Clanchy, M. T. 73n classic, defined 16 clerics 9–10, 74, 114, 184, 198, 228 as intermediaries 8–9, 25, 28, 52, 66, 67, 71, 79, 102, 179, 229, 230

INDEX

as outsiders 180, 182, 196, 228 betrayal by 10, 142 delegated power 129–30 duality of 8, 16, 17, 141, 196 scholastic definition of 8 worldliness of 10, 36, 37, 79 see also celibacy; concubinage; mester de clerecía clerus 228 Coakley, John 68, 90 Cohen, Jeremy 65 colonialism 124 commerce 199–225 and credit 210, 211, 219, 221–24 and knighthood 187–88 international 208, 211, 215 merchants, defined 209 see also Jews as moneylenders; money; towns; usury concubinage, clerical 188, 189, 191, 197 confession 31, 32, 34, 36, 49, 84, 101–2, 107 confessors 68, 70, 71, 81, 84, 85, 90 convents 95–108 convivencia 60, 63, 64, 65, 128, 132, 137, 214 tolerance 55, 58 Corominas, Joan 222 cortes 162, 175, 206 cortesía 196, 198, 200, 203, 205, 207, 208, 229 defined 199 Cotrait, René 173 Cruz-Sáenz, Michèle Schiavone de 83n courtliness see cortesía cuaderna vía 2, 3, 4, 15–16, 34, 230 Curtius, Ernst Robert 15n Dagenais, John 229 d’Ambroa, Pero 181n Damrosch, David 67 Dança general de la muerte 29n Dante Alighieri, De monarchia 109, 110, 112, 123, 129, 132 Inferno 218n Darius see Libro de Alexandre debate poetry, Middle English 196, 197; see also Elena y María; Disputatio inter clericum et militem Devil, the 29, 30, 32, 38, 53, 57, 93, 105, 123 and Alexander 117n

253

and Fernán González 169 and Muslims 158, 159 and Woman 67, 103 devils 30–31, 46, 47 Devoto, Daniel 104 Deyermond, Alan 74, 162, 167, 170–71, 202 Di Pinto, Mario 183, 184 didacticism 4–8, 14, 111n, 135, 199, 227; see also exemplarity Disputatio inter clericum et militem 190 Diz, Marta Ana 6n, 12, 19, 56, 57–58, 62n, 69, 96, 97, 103, 210, 213, 214, 217, 218, 222–23 Dodds, Jerrilynn 132 Dutton, Brian 47, 73, 100 Eagleton, Terry 13, 161–62 Eanes do Coton, Afonso 194 Eden, Garden of 27, 40–41, 74 Elena y María 2, 24–25, 180–98, 201, 228 antecedents of 180–81, 182, 183n,185, 186–87, 188, 198n audience of 181n, 184, 197 dating 180 Elliott, Dyan 67, 103, 107–8, 189, 197 empire 109–42 and time 112–23, 141 defined 109, 112 see also monarchy Entwistle, William J. 173 epic 147; see also Poema de mio Cid; Poema de Fernán González estates, theory of 5, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 164, 183, 184, 191, 196 introduced to Spain 193 ethical poetics 4 ethics, intentionist 31, 105 Eucharist 57, 62–63 devotion to 79, 90 host desecration 62, 189, 220 transubstantiation 62, 189 Europe, concept of 10, 126 Eve 40, 74, 96, 103 exemplarity 5–6, 11, 85–86, 92, 110, 120n; see also didacticism fame 122, 170 Färcas¸iu, Simina M. 73–74 felix culpa see sin Fernán González see Poema de Fernán González

254

INDEX

Fernando III, King of Castile 24, 117n, 169 Ferraresi, Alicia C. de 230 feudalism 21–23, 123, 148, 149, 160–61, 172, 199, 208, 209 and fragmentation of sovereignty 112, 123, 160, 162, 168 and fictive kinship 163–64 and nationhood 143–78 and symbolic feminine 195–96 auxilium et consilium 164, 166, 175 besamanos 162, 190, 206 definitions of 21, 22–23 lord / vassal relationships 160–68, 175–76, 186–87 transition to capitalism 201n, 209 folklore 97, 98, 104, 145, 157–58, 174 Franchini, Enzo 180n Freedman, Paul 19, 43, 44, 45 freedom see premia Freud, Sigmund 7 Garcia, Michel 8–9, 230 García de Campos, Diego 8, 15n García de Castrojeriz, Juan 121n García de la Concha, Víctor 31, 46 García Turza, Claudio 30n, 34n, 44n, 50n, 52n, 100n, 101n Gaunt, Simon 83, 86, 87, 88, 182n Gautier de Coinci, Miracles de Nostre Dame, 32, 34n, 36n, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42n, 45n, 49, 57, 58n, 59, 63n, 98n, 101, 104, 210n, 211n, 212, 216–17, 219 genealogy 113, 114, 115, 119 Gerli, E. Michael 19, 26, 38 gift giving 175, 205, 207, 217 Giles of Rome see Aegidius Romanus Giménez Resano, Gaudioso 19, 43, 44 Gimeno Casalduero, Joaquín 171 Goldberg, Harriet 228 Gómez Moreno, Ángel 2n, 4 Gómez Redondo, Fernando 181n Gramsci, Antonio 9, 10, 14 Gratian 209n greed 110, 131, 169, 190–91, 195 Jewish 136, 214, 215, 221, 222, 223, 224 peasant 44 Gregory VII, Pope 3, 54, 191 Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie 211, 224 Grieve, Patricia 83n, 85, 93–94 Guilhem IX of Aquitaine 180, 181, 184

Guillén, Jorge 17 Guiraut Riquier 193 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 179 Gurevich, Aron 45 Habermas, Jürgen 12 hagiography 69, 80n, 198; see also individual saints Hanlon, David 226n Harney, Michael 163, 175, 187n, 205 Haro Cortés, Marta 5 Harvey, L. P. 173 hatred, defined 64–65 Heer, Friedrich 137 hegemony see ideology Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor 109 heretics 93 Hillgarth, J. N. 156 Hilton, Rodney 24 Hispania see Spain Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri see Libro de Apolonio Hobsbawm, Eric 23n Homobonus, Saint 218n Hook, David 73 ideology 5, 11–14, 103 and hegemony 14 as dominant belief system 11, 13, 179 ideological strategies 13, 55, 66, 123, 144, 161–162 structure of feeling 14, 23, 123 incest 209 Innocent III, Pope 3, 106, 142, 197n, 218n intellectuals 8–11, 227, 228; see also clerics investiture controversy 190, 195n; see also Church and State Isidore of Seville, Saint 181 Islam see Muslims Jager, Eric 41, 74 Jerome, Saint 91 Jews 53–54, 55–65, 93, 132–41, 226 and betrayal 53, 138, 220–21, 223, 224 and convivencia 55, 58, 60, 63, 64, 65, 132, 137, 214 and Devil 20, 53, 57–58 and greed 136, 214, 215, 216, 221, 222, 223, 224 and host desecration 62, 220

INDEX

and monarchical protection 61n, 133, 217 Apelles, the Jew 138, 139, 140, 141, 228 as moneylenders 209–14, 216, 220–22, 224 as tax collectors 63 as witnesses 28, 55, 57, 58, 136, 140, 141 conversion of 20, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 216n, 224 physically loathsome 56n, 58, 136, 221 shame of 62, 220 stereotypes of 19–20, 136, 215, 216 Synagoga 56n, 223 violence against 55, 59, 61, 63–64, 137 Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo 149, 150, 151n John of Abbeville 51 John of Salisbury 7, 76 Jordan, William Chester 10 Juan Manuel 129, 230 Judas Maccabeus 170 just price, theory of 204, 205 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 121 Keller, Jean Paul 174 Kelley, Mary Jane 75n, 95n, 107 Kermode, Frank 16n Kinkade, Richard P. 6 kingship see monarchy kinship 127 knighthood, juridical status 188, 193 satirized 185–88; see also Elena y María knowledge and power 114, 115, 129–32 Kristeva, Julia 89n Lacarra, María Eugenia 143 Lacarra, María Jesús 5 land, representation of 149, 152, 156–157, 161; see also peasants Lappin, Anthony 69, 72n, 73, 75n, 77, 78, 80n, 81n, 82 Lateran IV (1215) 2, 3, 36, 54, 84, 189, 190n laus Hispaniae see Spain, praise of Lees, Clare A. 88n Legenda aurea 57 León see Poema de Fernán González lepers 92, 93, 127, 136 Liber lamentationum Matheoluli 192n Libro de Alexandre 1, 6, 10, 11, 15, 21, 22, 23, 54, 109–42, 146, 148, 160, 229

255

Alexander’s death 116, 121–123, 142 Alexander’s tent 132, 133, 137, 141 ambivalence of 111, 112, 113, 142, 228 and Historia de preliis 114n, 121n, 132, 134, 135n and Roman d’Alexandre 114n, 141 authorship 8 Darius in 110, 113, 114, 115, 117, 120, 126, 127, 129, 132, 138, 140, 141, Darius’s shield 118–19 dating 24, 111 influences Poema de Fernán González 146, 169–70 Jews in 132–41 see also Walter of Châtillon Libro de Apolonio 15, 24–25, 175n, 198–209, 219 and Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri 200, 203, 204n, 205, 207 Libro de buen amor see Ruiz, Juan Libro de miseria de omne 187n Libro del caballero Zifar 173 Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa 111n, 116n liminality 19, 30, 35 lineage see genealogy Linehan, Peter 33n, 190n liturgy 76, 79, 80, 81 parodied 33, 62 López Estrada, Francisco 230 Louis, King of France, Saint 117n loyalty 147, 151, 153, 164 Lucas of Tuy 150, 151n, 152n McLellan, David 12 McNeill, John T., & Helena M. Gamer 85 Maier, John 94n Maravall, José Antonio 5, 6n Marcabru 182, 196 Margaret of Ypres 67 Martín Cea, Juan Carlos 47n marvellous, the 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 28, 66 Marx, Karl 200, 209 marxism 22, 201n Mary of Egypt 95, 96; see also Vida de Santa María Egipciaca Mary Magdalen 84, 85 Mass see Eucharist mediation 68, 69, 89, 90 memory 81, 82 Menéndez Peláez, Jesús 4n, 11 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 173 merchants, defined see commerce

256

INDEX

mester de clerecía 1–3, 135, 140, 179, 227, 229, 230 and marvels 14–19 and orality 6, 20 duality of 8, 16, 17 ‘sen pecado’ 74 Michael, Ian 111n3, 115, 117n Miller, William Ian 64, 65 miracles 28, 45; see also the marvellous; Berceo, Milagros de Nuestra Señora Miracula beate Marie Virginis 28n, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36n, 37, 38n, 38–39, 41, 44, 49, 57, 58–59, 63n, 98, 99, 101–02, 104, 105, 211, 212, 215, 216n, 217n, 218, 219 misogyny 67, 85, 100, 102, 107, 192, 195 monarchy 22–23, 114, 124, 161, 168, 177, 206 absolutist 111, 121, 123, 133, 148, 161, 166, 169, 172 and delegation of power 129–30 and Jews 133, 217 and sovereignty 22–23, 123–32, 161, 167, 168 and succession 112, 115, 116, 121 divine authority of 115, 167, 172 fiscal policies of 63, 64, 176 king’s two bodies 122, 165 perpetua necessitas 176 rex insomnis 172 rex litteratus 129, 130 rex pater patriae 120, 121 see also empire monasteries 67, 69, 82, 92, 97n, 172, 185, 191, 226–27; see also convents money 93, 216; see also Jews, as moneylenders Moore, R. I. 54, 92, 93, 94–95, 135, 137, 191, 221–22 Moors see Muslims Moses, horned 54 motherhood 59, 67, 97, 99, 103–04, 107 Jesus as mother 99 Moya, Martin 182n, 184n Muslims 144, 145, 146, 149–50, 153–54, 162, 163, 166, 170, 176, 226 demonized 153, 158, 159 nationhood 23, 143, 149, 159, 165, 168; see also Castile; Castilian identity; Spain

Navarre see Poema de Fernán González Nebrija, Antonio de 222 Nieto Soria, José Manuel 110, 112, 115n Nirenberg, David 64, 65n, 135, 137–38 nuns, satirized 96, 99, 104 oedipal conflict 113, 114, 116–17, 119, 123 Ong, Walter J. 53 orality 6, 20, 33, 35, 41, 53, 71, 72, 74, 77–78, 80–81, 168; see also writing Owl and the Nightingale 196 Pagden, Anthony 126 Palafox, Eloísa 4–5, 6, 11 Palencia, Alfonso de 181n Palencia, University of 1, 2 Paul, Saint 31 peasants 22, 42–48, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 162, 196 earthiness of 19, 44, 156 subjection of 19, 43, 47–48, 159, 160 penance 34, 36, 49, 53, 90, 106, 107 penitential asceticism 75, 76, 77, 79, 84, 92, 94 penitential manuals 84, 85 Pérez, Gil 187 Pérez, Juan, Bishop of Calahorra 97n Pérez de Urbel, Fray Justo 148n Perivolaris, John 182, 186 Perry, Anthony 68, 69 persecution 93, 94 Peter, Saint 33 Peter Comestor 135 Peter Damian 189 piety, affective 42n, 90 lay 21, 44, 45–46, 49, 79, 83 Pitt-Rivers, Julian 175 Planeta see García de Campos, Diego Poema de Fernán González 2, 15, 21, 22, 23, 143–78, 226 and chronicles 149–50, 155, 171 and law 175–76 and León 148, 149, 159n, 160, 161, 162, 166, 171, 174, 175, 176 and Libro de Alexandre 146, 169–70 and Navarre 143, 149, 159, 162, 163n, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171 and Rodrigo, King of Visigoths 144, 148, 149–50, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158, 173 and tomb cult 164

INDEX

authorship 8n dating 24 women in 168, 171, 177–78 Poema de mio Cid 123, 136n, 163, 167, 175, 187, 201, 202, 205, 213 Poema de Santa Oria see Berceo, Gonzalo de politics, language of 110, 111 Ponte, Pero da 186 premia 125, 127, 143–49, 152, 159, 160, 161, 162, 172, 175, 176–77 prostitutes 85, 87, 93, 206–07 queenship 177–78 Quintilian 181n Ranft, Patricia 67 Razón de amor 196, 229–30 real maravilloso, lo see the marvellous reconquista 123, 182, 199 redemption 26, 27, 28, 34–35, 41, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 90, 92, 96, 103 Reed, Thomas L. 197 Reilly, Kevin C. 182, 188 Reynolds, Susan 21–22 Rico, Francisco 1, 8, 15n, 16, 17, 141, 199, 230 ritual 6, 19, 34, 35, 62, 64 Rodrigo, King of Visigoths see Poema de Fernán González Rodríguez López, Ana 24, 169, 227 Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús 193 romance 202; see also Libro de Alexandre, Libro de Apolonio Rubin, Miri 56–57, 59, 135 Ruffinatto, Aldo 69n Ruiz, Juan, Archpriest of Hita 4, 7–8, 50, 196, 230 Rutebeuf 53 Said, Edward W. 10, 228 sanctity, definitions of 20–21, 94 Saugnieux, Joël 49 Scholberg, Kenneth R. 185n selfhood 35, 36, 95, 228 Sendebar 129 shame 30–31, 38, 40, 42, 48n, 88–89, 91, 92, 95, 103, 106, 107, 127, 128, 166, 220 sin 26–27, 28, 42, 53 ambivalent representation of 30, 96, 104–05

257

and intention 31, 105 curiositas 130 definitions of 27, 31–32 felix culpa 96, 104, 106 feminine 84 luxuria 32, 34, 36–37 original 26, 40–41, 47, 67, 89, 103 remedies for 85 vanitas 110, 113, 118, 122 see also the Church, sexual corruption in; greed; penance; redemption; shame Smalley, Beryl 65 Soárez, Martín 192 Solterer, Helen 197, 198n Spain 124, 125, 144, 145, 150, 151, 159, 168 fall of 144–45, 148, 149–50, 158 praise of 149, 154–57, 164 State, the, see monarchy; nationhood; Church and State Stevens, John 202 superstition 45 Surtz, Ronald E. 130, 202n symbolic reversal 92 symbolic space 30, 33, 38, 52, 53, 73–74, 77, 133, 159, 164, 165, 167, 168 symbols 178 Alexander’s tent 133, 137–38 Babylon 117, 132 clothing 195, 204n, 208 food 62, 185, 186, 195, 203, 206, 218–19, 222 Gordian knot 131–32 hands 50–51 Marian 36, 40 of war 131, 155n, 174, 175, 176 of writing 82, 142 plough 44 river 30, 32, 72n sea 202, 208, 211, 214 sexual 33, 34n, 104 see also violence, symbolic; women, as symbol Synagoga see Jews Tavani, Giuseppe 180, 181, 182, 183–84, 197, 201 taxation and tithes 151, 176, 193 Thompson, John B. 13 Tierney, Brian 142, 190n time, notions of 122, 141

258

INDEX

tolerance see convivencia towns 24–25, 63, 64, 87, 93, 94, 201, 206, 211 homines boni 203n, 214, 218 urban saints 94 tradition 6, 16, 29 traditional societies 5 trade see commerce translatio studii 16 transubstantiation see Eucharist typology 44, 59, 97n, 98, 99, 105 Uría Maqua, Isabel 2n, 16–17, 73, 80n, 112, 151n, 171 usury 174, 205, 211, 222–24 definitions of 224 Valdeavellano, Luis G. de 203n, 215n Vaquero, Mercedes 117n Venarde, Bruce L. 192n Vicens Vives, Jaime 215 Victorio, Juan 151n Vida de Santa María Egipciaca 2, 20, 82–95 and rhetoric 85, 87 dating 83 doctrinal elements 84, 90, 93 its French sources 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92 Mary as Everyman 85–86, 92, 94 Mary as mediatrix 90, 92 violence 143, 157, 161, 177 legitimacy of 131, 163, 170–71, 176 language of 61–62, 63, 128 symbolic 115, 172–78 collective, against Jews 55, 59, 61, 63–64, 137 Virgin Mary 15, 19, 84 and Eve 96 as intermediary 27, 29 cult of 18 her compassion 31, 48, 49n, 60, 107 her power 48, 66

immaculate conception 103 see also Berceo, Milagros de Nuestra Señora Viroli, Maurizio 111 Visigoths 144, 145, 146, 149 conquering spirit 151, 156, 176, 177 defenders of faith 151, 156 legacy of 143, 146–48, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158–59, 160, 164, 172 their mesura 156, 157 voyeurism 86–87, 101 Walsh, John K. 7, 69, 78n, 80n, 230 Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis 114n, 121n, 125n, 127n,128n, 132, 134, 135, 138, 139, 142n glosses on 138n Weinstein, Donald, & Rudolph M. Bell 79, 94 West, Beverly 146n, 157–58, 174 Williams, Raymond 13–14, 23, 123, 227 Willis, Raymond S. 131, 135 women and Devil 67, 103 and pollution 34n, 67, 87, 95, 103, 189 as object of exchange 207–08 as symbol 20, 67, 68, 77, 78, 87, 88, 91, 107, 108, 177, 183, 194, 197 charismatic 67–68, 89, 90, 96, 102 corporeality of 20, 70, 78, 83–84, 85, 86, 88, 91–92, 96 in Poema de Fernán González 177–78 garrulity of 195, 196, 197 holy 20, 67–108, 97, 102 physiological theories of 70, 100n, 194 sexuality of 192, 193, 194 see also Eve; concubinage; motherhood; prostitutes; Virgin Mary world upside down 154 writing 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 74n, 76, 78 feminized 81–82

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