Blindness as Physical and Moral Disorder in the Works of Gonzalo de Berceo

Abstract

In his hagiographic, Marian, and doctrinal works, the thirteenth-century Spanish author Gonzalo de Berceo depicts characters who suffer from various disabilities. Blindness is common among disorders afflicting these fictional individuals, and Berceo's scenes of miraculous restoration of sight conform to the hagiographic convention in which saints figuratively echo examples of Biblical healing. Berceo's works abound with imagery of blindness versus sight and darkness versus light, where light symbolizes the divine, sight enables Christians to connect with God, and blindness or lack of sight in darkness impedes Christian salvation. However, by the thirteenth century, the Christian construct of blindness had absorbed additional sources of meaning derived from certain tenets of Aristotelian natural science, Neoplatonic philosophy, and medical theory. Along with Christian imagery, Berceo's depiction of blindness incorporates the scientific principles of medieval vision theory and cognitive psychology in a synthesis typical of the learned mester de clerec�a's literary school. Berceo knew how light enabled sight and how sight lead to understanding in both the physical realm of cognition and the interior realm of the soul. Thus, Gonzalo de Berceo's literary works, through an intricately spun web of medieval thought, show the intended Christian audience how human physical capacity for sight can lead an individual to salvation. Berceo's works illustrate the thirteenth-century cleric's power to define, through knowledge, the medieval Christian's relationship to God and to facilitate, through teaching, Christianity's collective salvation.