Finding an angle

As Berceo goes along his pilgrimage of life, he stumbles across a meadow: ‘caecí en un prado’ (2a). Although modern editors unanimously remind us that the verb is an apocopated form of ‘acaecer’, ‘to happen (upon)’, which derives from the Latin cadere, ‘to fall’, in this context Berceo's word choice is surely telling. As an allegory of the Virgin, this meadow is the space of redemption, and as such there is always an implied fall. Indeed, the fact of original sin underlies the entire allegorical introduction, which, as Michael Gerli has shown, plots ‘la Historia Universal del Hombre [y] traza un ejemplo de pecado y redención dentro de un marco claramente bíblico y mítico’ (Berceo 1987: 33–48, at pp. 45–46). What concerns me here is not so much the link Berceo establishes between sin and redemption – which is straightforward enough – as the way the connection is made: not the theological fact, in other words, but its ideological mode.

Having reaching this garden, the pilgrim takes refuge in the shade of some trees, removes his ‘ropiella’, and, refreshed, exclaims: ‘Perdí todos cuidados / […] oblidé toda cuita e lazerio passado: / ¡Qui allí se morasse serié bienventurado!’ (7a & 12cd). In this spiritual locus amoenus, original sin, and the toil and corruption that it brought into the world, are there only as a receding memory; they are there to be forgotten. There is of course an obvious logic to this in a poem displaying such optimistic faith in the Virgin's redemptive powers. As Gerli suggests, the scene stages a return to innocence and a rejection of shame (Berceo 1987: 41–43). I would add that this process of forgetting, and the return to innocence, are played out in representational terms. For within this allegorical garden sin makes its presence felt only through verbal echo (‘caecí’; ‘ropiella’ as the clothing of sin, Berceo 1987: 42), or through an act of association. ‘Semeja esti prado’, writes Berceo, ‘egual de Paraíso’ (14a) and the comparison brings forth the inevitable allusion to Adam and Eve: