Help! Help! - Decodable Book 7 Grade 1 by Nancy Furstinger illustrated by Travis Foster

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Berceo’s Latin source is characteristically succinct and direct: the clerics ‘scientes eum satis irreligiosam vitam duxisse decreverunt extra cimiterium sepeliri debere’ (226). 19 In characteristically more theatrical style, Gautier has us imagine the gossiping clerics giving free rein to their moral revulsion and sense of institutional honour: Lors fu assez qui mesparla, lors fu assez qui dist dou pis. ‘C’est a bon droit qu’il est ocis, ce dit chascuns. ’ Del clergié fu li conseus telz qu’il distrent que telz menestrelz en leur aitre ja ne giroit: leurs aitres trop en empieroit et reprové seroit adez ce qu’il estoit mors desconfez.

84) Significantly, Berceo restructures the narrative at this point. He places the moment of discovery earlier than in the Latin, before the debate between the Virgin and the devils, so that it occurs before we know that the man has, for the moment at least, been saved from Hell. Yet the monks’ shame indicates a 4 The Latin text starts with the monk already in post, and already corrupt: ‘Erat quidam monachus in quodam cenobio secretarii functus officio. Hic ergo valde erat lubricus et demoniacho instinctu aliquociens libidinis urebatur estibus’ (224).

Physically, on the inside of the monastery he is good, and on the outside he is corrupt. Morally (despite his saving grace) on the inside he is corrupt, and on the outside he is good. His main narrative action is to pass to and fro over a threshold that is both literal and moral. That he dies crossing a river is a basic part of the inherited plot, but Berceo exploits the liminality of the moment to raise questions about the definition and practice of sin. These questions entail problems of perception, and in this regard the river location offers a natural symbolic space.