The 'Mester de clerecía': Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile

Julian Weiss, The 'Mester de clerecía': Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile, Coleccion T´mesis, Serie A: Monografias 231 (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2006). ? + 238 pp. ISBN 1-85566-135-7. £55.00.

In this book Julian Weiss offers a reinterpretation of the corpus of thirteenthcentury poems composed in Spanish known most commonly as the mester de clerecia. An innovative and refreshing feature of his approach is that in addition to works composed as quatrains of monorhymed alexandrines (the form that has most commonly been used to define the mester de clerecía), he also includes octosyllabic compositions, often thought of as belonging to an entirely different tradition, the mester dejuglaria. The book falls into six parts: an introduction in which the author proposes a series of new approaches to his modified corpus, followed by five largely self-contained chapters offering detailed readings...