Memory policies and poetics in medieval Castile: clerical mediation and materiality of knowledge in the poems of K-III-4 MS (Libro de Apolonio, Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, Libro de los tres reyes de Oriente)

Abstract

The Spanish clergy of the 13th century carried out a cultural policy of transmission of knowledge and preservation of memory through a poetics based on the exemplary nature of texts pouring their teaching through the mediation process identified with the translation of Latin sources to the vernacular languages, promoting their dissemination to a wider lay audience. Through the textual dynamics of territoriality and the physicality of the memory, clerical poems that integrate K-III-4 MS realize double spatial memory as a narrative device, through writing and codicological unit of compilation as privileged forms of a social and testimonial identity configuration.