Ca fallescio el libro: Ascetic Reading and Restorative Hermeneutics in La vida de Santo Domingo de Silos

The virgin martyrs who guide Gonzalo de Berceo's visionary Santa Oria in paradise have transcended their passion stories to become subjects of a narrative beyond time. They promise to complete Oria's reading, to overcome its limits and gaps, disclosing to her, in a text now truly consubstantial with its subject, knowledge beyond that transmissible or apprehensible in earthbound tales:Tu mucho te deleitas en las nuestras passiones,de amor e de grado leyes nuestras razones;queremos que entiendas entre las visionesquai gloria recibiemos e quules gualardones. (34)Their deaths become a miraculous narrative opening that transforms hagiographie categories: their passiones, the often lurid accounts of their sufferings and deaths, become transcendent vitae, otherworldly biographies that unfold for the further delectation of the reader Oria. Judging herself unworthy of these magnificently immediate texts, she offers her own life as a story completed at the moment of its reception in their memory: "si me recibiessedes vos en vuestra memoria, / alla serie conplida toda la mi estoria" feed). Where these texts and readings intersect with the experience of the reader/ listener of Oria's tale sits Gonzalo himself, engaged in the "mester pesado" of writing "en tiniebra" (Qua iod); it is the labored, tenebrous tale he tells that attracts the attention of heavenly readers and wins that luminous instant of celestial completion. Berceo's Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos offers a different experience. Here, a ragged, gaping text paradoxically imprisons the reader in ignorance, just as it leaves the captive of the final, unfinished miracle to languish in a dungeon, praying for deliverance:El misme en la carcel esso mismo facie,Ia lengua non folgava, maguer preso yazie;a Dios e al confessor rogava e dizieque si Io dend librassen nunqua malo serie.De quai guisa issio dezir non Io sabriaca fallescio el libro en que Io aprendia;perdiose un quaderno, mas non por culpa mia,escrivir a ventura serie muy grant folia. (750-51)Critical approaches to medieval Spanish letters have always been attentive to questions of reading. The cuaderna via verse form in which Gonzalo composed proclaimed its affiliation to literate culture in opposition to the poetry of the minstrels, thus a great deal of twentieth-century research focused on the circumstances and purposes of the reading that cuaderna via seemed to promote.1 Recent criticism has produced more nuanced discussions of reading and interpretation in medieval texts, yet the many challenges that Gonzalo de Berceo's narratives offer to contemporary readers have largely escaped critical notice, and discussions of reading in Berceo remain confined to the attempt to locate the poetic performance with respect to setting, audience, and event.2 Berceo's poems, in fact, abound with figures of readers and reading, but these, like his deference towards what has been consecrated in writing, his disparagement of the minstrels as vehicles of a base oral tradition, and his explicit concern for the process of poetic composition, have been construed as the accoutrements of the purposefully didactic cuaderna via verse.3 His representations of himself as translator of authoritative Latin sources have been read in the same vein. These self-representations, however, often have him tethered to a manuscript that discloses its secrets only partially, inhibiting his reading, truncating his knowledge, and thwarting his performance as bearer of the lore he transfers from Latin to the beloved cadences of his vernacular.4 Against these renderings of an always insufficient experience, I will argue, Berceo erects a contrasting model that conjoins reader and text, collapses the limits of self and object, of knowing and known, and thrusts experience beyond both the confines of the bounded world and the arbitrary, artificial boundaries of the text.Gonzalo's hagiographies translate to vernacular verse the Latin prose legends of Iberian saints-Lorenzo the martyr; the recluse Oria; the hermit Millan; and Domingo de Silos, restorer and defender of a decimated monastery in the reconquered wilderness of Northern Spain-whose stories and cult had fallen vulnerable to displacement and loss as Visigothic liturgy and tradition yielded to the Roman rite. …