The Mester de Clerecía: Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile

Julian Weiss

• Publisher: Tamesis Books
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9781855661356
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781846154935
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the thirteenth century, profound changes in 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 far-reaching 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. The book will have a broad appeal to 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 or Alexander and Apollonius, the miracles of the Virgin Mary). JULIAN WEISS is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Spanish at King's College London.

Table of contents

• FRONTCOVER
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• Introduction
• The movement
• Didacticism
• Intellectuals
• Ideologies
• A marvellous reality
• 1. 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
• 2. 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 preñada’
• 3. Dreaming of Empire in El libro de Alexandre
• Measured by time
• ‘A single sovereign authority’
• The cleric and the Jews, inside and out
• 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
• 5. 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