"Nunca mayor sobervia comidió Luçifer": límites del conocimiento y cultura claustral en el Libro de Alexandre by Fernando Riva (review)

The Libro de Alexandre has often been considered the most significant literary work to emerge from the mester de clerecía poetic movement during the long thirteenth century. While the poem has attracted extensive critical attention over the years, most book-length studies have been limited to traditional, philological approaches to the anonymous poet's use of language and style, and his Latin sources. Fernando Riva, in his splendid new monograph, delves deeply into the intellectual context of the poem, showing how it reflects the learned Latin culture of the early twelfth-century cloister.

In the introduction Riva explains how the work was most likely penned by a canon working during the 1220s, who, having received the kind of training available at cathedral schools and the fledgling University of Palencia, cultivated scholarly, ecclesiastical interests as well as a knowledge of secular, political matters related to the court. Riva goes on to show how the poem expresses preoccupations characteristic of such writers, who belonged to a religious order, but circulated outside the cloister: namely, a concern over worldly learning influenced by heterodox Aristotelianism, natural sciences, and magic arts, leading the curious and prideful astray from the orthodoxy of patristic wisdom. During this period a new, earthly scientia was challenging the spiritual sapientia of Church authorities. Alexander the Great's excessive pursuit of secular knowledge, as Riva demonstrates, would have been expected to bring about a Luciferic downfall.

In Chapter 1, "El saber de Alejandro y sus límites," Riva explores the danger of curiositas, warned against by St. Augustine and other Church Fathers, as well as medieval theologians. This vain desire to know for the sake of knowing was linked exegetically to the fall in the Garden of Eden, and opposed to true wisdom acquired by seeking God through Christian faith. According to Riva, Alexander's proud adherence to the former at the expense of the latter, his unbridled vitium curiositatis, leads him on a quest to conquer and perceive everything in the world, causes his failure to interpret signs correctly, and blinds him to prophesies revealing his fate. This chapter demonstrates how Alexander is linked—as a legendary student of Aristotle who constructs machines to see above and below the earth—not just to science and philosophy, but also esoteric knowledge being translated on the Iberian Peninsula from Arabic (and Hebrew) into Latin.

Chapter 2, "Scientia, sapientia y profecía de Daniel," examines the typological use of the biblical prophesies of Daniel and how this relates to Alexander's hermeneutical blindness. A rex curiosus, as Riva shows, cannot understand scriptural wisdom in spite of his efforts to rationalize nature. Alexander, in this sense, serves as a negative exemplar who illustrates the problem of vainglorious scientia as decried by influential figures like the canon regular Hugh of St Victor. Unlike Solomon, the Macedonian ruler fails to come to terms fully with his intellectual pride, his inordinate desire to know all that can be known. Ascending to look down on the world from above, Alexander fails to see that a fall is inevitable—being, like the Pagan philosophers of old, unable to discern the divine truth in spite of all his learning. As Riva explains, his role in sacred history and exegetical relationship to the apocalyptic coming of the Antichrist, preceded by Antioch IV, is closed to him. In this way, the book shows how the Alexandre reacts against new kinds of knowledge being absorbed on the Peninsula during the thirteenth century, and instead promotes the sapientia of the Church.

Chapter 3, "El clero y el claustro: el contemptus mundi y el fin de los tiempos," explores how the Alexandre develops the topic of contemptus mundi or disdain for the transitory nature of the physical world, popular among cloistered writers and reformers of the period, such as...