Narrative heroics: Storytelling, intepretation and redemption in the saint’s lives of Gonzalo de

319 Pages·2001·12.13 MB·English

by  Robin Mary Bower

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Narrative Heroics: Storytelling, Interpretation
and Redemption in the Saints' Lives of Gonzalo de Berceo
Robin Mary Bower
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2001
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UMI Number: 9998135
Copyright 2001 by
Bower, Robin Mary
All rights reserved.
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Robin Mary Bower
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ABSTRACT
Narrative Heroics: Storytelling, Interpretation
and Redemption in the Saints' Lives of Gonzalo de Berceo
Robin Mary Bower
Gonzalo de Berceo packed the strictly crafted quatrains
of his verse with material rich in religious meaning:
Marian devotion, the theological significance of the
liturgy, the lives, works, and deaths of Iberian saints. In
so doing, he elevated the beloved tongue of gossip,
commerce, and neighborly conversation to the level of the
literary, the learned, and, indeed, the transcendent.
Berceo's poems allow the humble words and phrases of the
vulgar tongue to pronounce the names and works of God and
the saints.
This dissertation analyzes Berceo's three saints'
lives - the Vidas of San Millan de la Cogolla, Santo
Domingo de Silos, and Santa Oria, undermining any simple
understanding of these works as servile acts either of
literary translation or of pious devotion.
The first chapter situates Berceo in the context of
medieval Spanish letters and contemporary criticism and
sketches the categories that have come to govern critical
discussion the poems. I submit these categories to
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question to suggest ways of reading that serve the texts
themselves rather than ease of critical classification.
In the following chapters I offer close readings of
each of Berceo's saint's lives individually, and also trace
the patterns that bind the poems in a single body distinct
from Berceo's other writings. I consider the narrator's
role in each of the poems, the relation each poem
articulates to its source text, and the relations among the
poems themselves. Gonzalo's Vidas articulate a nexus of
concerns about the value of literary endeavor, the
spiritual implications of creation, and the production of
meaning in language which implicates both the poet and the
audience, whose interpretative re-creation, too, is fraught
with spiritual significance. Thus, not only does Gonzalo,
the poet, share in the saints' spiritual heroism; so too
does the community forged in the experience of the poem. I
argue in the last chapter that the final, unfinished poem,
the passion story of San Lorenzo, is a key to a proper
understanding of Gonzalo's theory of storytelling as an act
of faith and of witness, an act sweet with the taste of
salvation and bitter with the pains of sacrifice.
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TAB LE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments.......................................... iv
Introduction............................................... 7
Chapter 1 Gonzalo's Mester: Literary Historiography,
Hagiography, and Problems of Genre........... 8
Readings, Re-readings, and the Rhetoric of
Clerecia.......................................26
"Ovi gran talento de seer tu joglar": Mester
de Clerecia, Errant Song and the
Misapprehensions of the T ext 4 8
Notes to Chapter O n e ..........................58
Chapter 2 "No la podrie contar nin romanz nin dictado":
Translation and the Truth of SanM illan 65
Publishing Memory: The VotosN arrative and the
Fixing of Forgotten Records.................. 68
The Medicinal Prologue: A Prescription for
Listening.....................................7 6
Nin romanz nin dictado: Poetic Truth and the
Failure of Poetry at the Limit
of Knowledge..................................8 6
The Unscarred Body: Suturing the
Gaping Tal e ................................... 97
Notes to Chapter T w o ........................ 104
Chapter 3 A History of Priors:S imilitudes,D ifferences,
and the Saintly Life.........................108
Reading the Saint: The Critical
Background................................... 110
Domingo and Millan: Saintly Similitude and the
Life-Giving Letter...........................117
i
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Similitude and its Limitations: Aperture as
Departure.................................... 138
Authorial Departures........................14 9
Notes to Chapter Three......................165
Chapter 4 Uniquely the Same: Heroic Constancy and the Chaos
of the World in La vida de Santo Domingo
de Silos..................................... 172
Dynamic Stasis: Domingo's Militant Constancy
and the Paradox of Contemplative Action ....18 3
Barbarity at the Gate: The Unruly King and the
Soldier Saint................................188
Stones along the Way: Berceo's Disruptions
of the Cuaderna V i a ......................... 223
Hermeneutics and the Closure of the
Open T e x t .................................... 239
Notes to Chapter Four.......................250
Chapter 5 Writing toward the Other Side of Life:
Passion and Beyond.......................... 251
"Mas me pesa la lengua que un pesado canto":
Materiality and Language in the Vida de Santa
O r i a ......................................... 257
Passionate Writing: Gonzalo's Martirio and his
Martyrial Poetics........................... 281
Notes to Chapter Five.......................290
Bibliography............................................. 294
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To Frank and Rosemary Bower
whose names the wind s till remembers
iii
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