Those readers who have followed me this far may have two reasons to be disappointed. First, because they will not find here a thoroughgoing summary of the conclusions that could be reached through the various case studies that make up this book. Since one of my principal goals has been to offer models of ideological interpretation of the poetry of the mester, readers will have to draw their own conclusions, on a case-by-case basis, as to whether or not I have been successful. Nonetheless, in a book that has been so concerned with boundaries, it is appropriate that I try to delimit what this book has and has not done and then try, albeit in very schematic fashion, to pull some of the threads together and sketch out what directions future research might take.

This brings me to the second reason for possible disappointment. My account of social, religious, economic, and political conflicts and concerns that engaged the clerical poets discussed here has, inevitably, been partial (in more senses than one). It was certainly not offered in an attempt to be exhaustive. In writing it, I was aware that each of the chapters could have been enlarged into a monograph, and that there were other ways of structuring the material. For example, rather than spreading the conflict between Christians and Jews through different chapters, and examining the ideological function of the Jew in particular texts, I could have clustered the various discussions together in a single chapter on the representation of the Jew, and developed my analyses in the light of other works, such as Berceo's Duelo de la Virgen, with a more fully contextualized account. Moreover, there are obvious gaps. I am aware that I have hardly touched upon the relation between Christianity and Islam, which is a thread that runs through the Poema de Fernán González as well as the poetry of Berceo, notably the Vida de San Millán. This poem also draws on the legend of the first count of Castile, and thus illustrates another area that this study treats only in a very allusive fashion: the involvement of the mester in the monastic politics of the period, and the way in which the monasteries of San Millán and San Pedro de Arlanza drew on, and further promoted, nationalist myth and legend.