Story-telling implies a narrator with a point of view. The problems that this statement poses are immediate and well known: the story may be told from multiple perspectives, and by an unreliable narrator who acts as a counterpoint to, or even to obscure, the author's position. Formulated thus, we think of voice and perspective as the result of a conscious decision on the part of the creator. But they are obviously shaped by more than this. The stories of the mester de clerecía were not invented but adapted by their authors. Rewriting introduced changes that can be identified through comparative study and analysed for their contemporary ideological significance, as Gumbrecht has argued (1974). The residue can be harder to assess. The poet inherits basic narrative structures and motifs which continue to determine how his work, even in its new poetic format, will set its face towards the contemporary world. Of course, the ideological meaning of these basic narrative elements will evolve as the work moves in time and space (a theoretical point most simply demonstrated by Borges's exemplum of Pierre Menard). But even so, the source text may offer a legacy of meanings that do not fit seamlessly within the new version's ideological landscape. As I argued in the introduction, this landscape is more fractured than the text itself might lead us to believe; taking note of what does not appear to fit is a practical way of acknowledging that a text's ideology is never reducible, at least not without simplification, to a fully fledged system of beliefs that stand in perfect alignment with the clerical poet's objectives. This point, which has been illustrated in all kinds of ways in previous chapters, is central to the analyses that follow. Here, I examine texts in which the cleric is situated in the intersection of discourses and values that, if not necessarily in open competition, are not always compatible. These poems cast the notion of the cleric as intermediary in a different light. The axis of mediation that interests me in this chapter is not the one that links centres of authority with the world at large, but the one that runs between the dominant authorities themselves, namely Church and State. The mester de clerecía offers more opportunities for studying the relation between Church and State than could be fitted into this book.