The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia by Simone Pinet

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia by Simone Pinet Mary Jane Kelley KEYWORDS Mester de Clerecía, Libro de Alexandre, Libro De Apolonio, Libro De Fernán González, Cartography, Translation, Economics, Maps, Medieval Spain, Rhetoric, Medieval Literature simone pinet. The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia. U of Toronto P, 2016, 191 pp. Each of the three components in the subtitle of Simone Pinet’s new book on the Spanish mester de clerecía corresponds to one of three interrelated chapters that together define the task of the cleric. Pinet reads outward from the text to the scriptorium library to the medieval Iberian world in order to identify the intellectual, economic, and political contexts that shaped the Libro de Alexandre, Libro de Fernán González, and Libro de Apolonio. The result is a remarkably fresh conception of clerical narrative fiction from thirteenth-century Spain. The book opens with an intriguing thirty pages of manuscript images including medieval maps and other organizing diagrams, such as horseshoe arches and rotae. As they progress through the book, readers learn to interpret these drawings through a newly acquired literacy in which Pinet schools us. One measure of the book’s success is the satisfying familiarity with which we approach the images our second time through. The same can be said for the introduction, in which Pinet suggestively anticipates showing “how cartography served as a source . . . for the rhetorical invention of fiction” in chapter 1 (8), how the Tower of Babel provides “a point of entry . . . to the political potential in the figure of the cleric as translator” in chapter 2 (11), and how “contemporary practices and linguistic registers belonging to the sphere of economics are translated into a rhetoric that can negotiate increasingly complicated courtly politics” in chapter 3 (12). All of this becomes clear in the pages that follow. Chapter 1, “The Cleric’s Compass,” argues that the medieval discipline of cartography informs various scenes in the Libro de Alexandre, in which the poet maps with words. Readers of Pinet’s Archipelagoes (2011) will recognize and once again appreciate her ability to synthesize cartography with other medieval disciplines and bring it all to bear in insightful textual analysis in a specific literary context. In order to make her point through a detailed reading of the Alexandre in the second half of the chapter, Pinet first offers a history of mapping and its function in manuscript culture. A chronological study of maps appearing in manuscripts from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries reveals an evolution of function from [End Page 131] simple illustration of the three divisions of the world in T/O maps to a highly rhetorical language in mappamundi that parallels learned prose in its use of tropes such as abbreviatio, amplificatio, and digressio. When Alexander lands in Asia, the poet launches into a cartographic digression based in part on Gautier de Chȃtillon’s Alexandreis, but, Pinet suggests, an additional source for the material of unknown origin may have been an actual map, whose graphic components would have triggered associations in the clerical poet’s memory and inspired him to supplement further his source text. Later in the poem, in the ekphrasis on Alexander’s shield, the poet includes a detailed description of a mappamundi that both reviews and anticipates themes and action in his story. Based on that passage, Pinet builds an eloquent reflection on the interplay of visual and verbal representation, as well as the role of the artist/cartographer/author and the interpreter/observer/reader, both within the text and without. Map-making and authorship of narrative fiction are parallel endeavors, especially in the context of thirteenth-century Spain. Chapter 2 turns to translation as another way to describe clerical authorship and which, similar to mapping, involves more than meets the uninitiated, twenty-first-century reader’s eye. The chapter title, “Bricks and Mortar,” refers to the rhetorical materials that clerical authors had at their disposal for constructing, or translating, texts in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The first half of this, the most challenging of the book’s...