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Critical approaches to medieval Spanish letters have always been attentive to questions of reading. Recent criticism has produced more nuanced discussions of reading and interpretation in medieval texts, yet the many challenges that Gonzalo de Berceo's narratives offer to contemporary readers have largely escaped critical notice and discussions of reading in Berceo remain confined to the attempt to locate the poetic performance with respect to setting, audience, and event. Berceo's poems are rife with figures of readers and reading, but these have been taken as emblems of the purposefully didactic cuaderna vía verse. His representations of himself as translator of authoritative Latin sources have been read in the same vein; but these self-representations often have him tethered to a manuscript that withholds more than it discloses and thwarts his transfer of knowledge from Latin to his own vernacular. Against these renderings of an always insufficient experience Berceo erects a model of reading, embodied in the saint whose life is narrated, that conjoins reader and text and collapses the limits of self and object to thrust experience beyond both the confines of the bounded world and the arbitrary, artificial boundaries of the text.