Professor Brian Dutton's analysis of the motives behind some of Gonzalo de Berceo's writings-together with his scrupulous Quellenkritik of material relating to the life of San Millin and Berceo's use of it-now invite a far less timid search for additional Bercean sources and inventions. Specifically, Dutton draws the conclusion that Berceo's life of the saint was written at a time when the monastery of San Millin was losing ground as a pilgrimage center. Since the revenue of the monastery came partially from the sick who would stay there in hope of recovery-hence the emphasis on miraculous cures in the Vida-Berceo is presumed to have written much of his work to enhance the image of the economically troubled pilgrimage place. l Dutton shows that Berceo was not adverse to dramatizing his material, consciously falsifying certain facts, padding the sources with local elements, and generally exaggerating the importance of his saintly subjects. 2

Berceo's San Milldn and Santo Domingo have extant Latin originals to buttress his frequent assurances that he was accurately reworking most of the details of his sources. The Vida de Santa Oria, on the other hand, cannot be checked against a lost Latin life of the saint by Munno, claimed by Berceo as his model. 3 Yet even without an extant Latin source to serve as a countercheck, certain textual quirks permit us to extract a significant portion from Oria which seems to be of pure Bercean invention. A notable clue pointing toward Berceo's own embellishment of the Oria legend is the awkwardness of the last section of the text. Berceo describes the death of the virgin saint (strophes 172-1814), then tells