Gonzalo de Berceo: The Poet and His Verses (review)

Anthony Lappin has written a book of inestimable value for Berceo scholars, one that entails wide-ranging corollaries for cuaderna vía scholarship in particular, and more generally for the study of early vernacular narrative verse in Spain. He presents an impressively researched and annotated critique of the existing condition of Berceo studies to support his call for a new edition of the Bercean corpus, which would adhere to more rigorous standards of textual criticism and observe much more stringent guidelines for editorial interventions in establishing the text.

The book's seven chapters are divided into two parts. The first, entitled 'The Author', centres on the biographical background and intellectual context of the author, while the second, 'The Verses', offers a meticulous study of problems of manuscript transmission and textual criticism. Lappin scrutinizes the historical archive and the poetic record to establish the biography of the Riojan author. The conclusions he draws from his findings cast significant doubt upon inherited knowledge about both poet and corpus. Most saliently, he argues against the notion of a close connection between the poet and the interests of the San Millán monastery, postulating instead that Gonzalo's perspective was European rather than local, and his loyalties more broadly ecclesiastical than attached to a monastic home. Lappin's conclusions convincingly dismantle Brian Dutton's hypothesis regarding the propagandistic tenor and purpose of Berceo's output, as well as his account of the poet's accessory involvement in furthering the much-touted Privilegio de Fernán Gónzalez fraud.

Lappin goes on to lead the reader through a painstaking overview of the received corpus to propose a thorough revision of its parameters. His point of departure is the observation that only four works - La vida de San Millán de la Cogolla, La vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, La vida de Santa Oria, and the Milagros de Nuestra Señora - contain verse signatures. Attribution of the rest of the corpus to Gonzalo, Lappin argues, rests on faith in the authorship of all anonymous works contained in the two medieval codices associated with the monastic library at San Millán. He subjects that faith to rigorous linguistic and textual proof to conclude that, in fact, only those four merit unqualified attribution to Gonzalo de Berceo. His revision of the corpus would discard the Duelo de la Virgen, Loores de la Virgen, and the Sacrificio de la missa entirely. Lappin goes on to argue for the collection of the Himnos, the Judiçio Final, and the Passión de Sant Laurent into a group of works which show insufficient support for definitive attribution, but were likely produced by Gonzalo de Berceo.

Part Two provides an exhaustive catalogue of errors and variants in the manuscript tradition. To be sure, these pages are a difficult read, tedious even for a specialist and quite probably impenetrable for anyone taking up the book with a more casual interest. Nonetheless, they represent a necessary labour and support a convincing indictment of the current status of the edition of Berceo's opera. If Lappin conceives this dense and meticulous scrutiny of manuscript transmission and editorial intervention as 'but an apologia for a new edition of the Bercean corpus', which he hopes to publish in the near future, those who follow him through the entirety of his argument, whether or not they accept all of its conclusions, will find this apology to be a rich resource for reading, thinking about, and editing cuaderna vía narrative, and will match - or exceed - Lappin's hope to see his promised edition published in the near future.