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

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 Millán 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 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.