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"Me dijo que antes de ese día en que Io volteó el azulejo, él había sido Io que son todos los cristianos: un ciego, un sordo, un abombado, un desmemoriado."
-(Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, el memorioso")
When Jorge Luis Borges describes his character Funes as blind, deaf, senseless, and memoryless, the twentieth-century Argentine author engages a concept commonplace in medieval hagiographie literature. In both literary contexts, disability is a sign of the Christian condition in this sinful life outside of Paradise. Readers of saints' lives are thoroughly familiar with the long line of blind, leprous, mad, possessed, and otherwise disabled individuals who seek the saints' miraculous healing powers in this widespread medieval literary genre. As the saints heal disease, exorcise demons, and rehabilitate mental incapacity, they reinstate the lost connection between human beings and the divine. In this study I explore Gonzalo de Berceo's representation of the first disorder on Borges's list, that of blindness, in the context of the mester de clereda literary school, whose learned authors wrote to teach Christian lessons from a position of clerical authority. By modeling exemplary conduct while condemning sin in their works, these writers affirmed the privileged imperative of the clerical cast to define what constituted order and disorder and to prescribe remedies.
In his hallmark study of thirteenth-century clerical culture, "La clereciacute;a del mester," Francisco Rico attributes a new power to university-educated clerics primarily through their employment as legal notaries in the service of a cathedral or monastery. Rico cites as an example Gonzalo de Berceo, who served as notary to the Abbot Juan Sánchez of San Millán de la Cogolla, and who wrote La vida de San Millán de la Cogolla in defense of that monastery's legal right to collect donations from local citizens. In my recent work, I have explored the way in which Berceo's writings aspire to an authority that reaches farther than legal defense of a specific monastery. Berceo's goal as didactic clerical author was to define for his audience the very essence of the medieval Christian's relationship to God. My 2004 study, "Ascendant Eloquence," explored how Berceo's representation of language reflected that relationship, and this current study examines the role of blindness and sight in defining the Christian's ability to know the...