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:

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 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.