4 - Memory as Mester in the Libro de Alexandre and Libro de Apolonio

Summary

Sic transit gloria mundi

After more than a century of scholarship on the mester de clerecía, the second stanza of the Libro de Alexandre remains at the foundations of discussions about the literary and cultural significance of this poetic mode:

Mester traigo fermoso, non es de joglaría,

mester es sin pecado, ca es de clerezía

fablar curso rimado por la quaderna vía,

a sílabas contadas, ca es grant maestría. (2)

Manuel Milá y Fontanals (1874) and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1913) first regarded the mester de clerecía as a learned poetic school, diametrically distinct from a mester de juglaría. Scholars subsequently challenged this division, none more influentially than Alan Deyermond, whose articl ‘Mester es sen pecado’ included this caveat:

we should consider the possibility that, were it not for the words of one thirteenth-century poet, nobody would have thought of dividing early narrative poetry into two watertight compartments. The meaning that the Alexandre poet intended when he wrote these words, and the extent to which other poets writing in cuaderna vía accepted them as a manifesto, become in these circumstances matters of some importance. (1965: 112)

Deyermond's cautionary approach called into question the entire cultural and generic status of juglaría, traditionally regarded as a lower, even disreputable art. Where Raymond Willis had suggested that juglaría was ‘not necessarily despicable’ for the author of the Alexandre (1956–7: 213), Deyermond's contention was that the poet of the Libro de Apolonio was, in his depiction of Tarsiana, ‘so sympathetic to this particular juglaresa and her mester that it is very difficult to imagine him as being totally hostile to juglares in general’ (1965: 115).