Las raíces del “Mester de Clerecía”

The study of the “mester de clerecía” has to be made from a panromanic point or view, due to the existing connections between the Spanish poems and their counterparts written in Romance Languages. From this perspective, our work is focused on analyzing the origins of the tetrastich of monorhyme alexandrines, by exploring its Latin antecedents in the hymns and in the creation of “tropos” and “prosas”, forms considered by researchers as the first romance samples associated with the tetrastich. This study wants to contribute with new data to the confirmation of these relationships, by the analysis of one of the “tropos”: a provenzal version of the Épîtres farcies de Saint Étienne, which combines Latin texts with strophes glossed in vernacular. One of these strophes shows revealing data related to the origin of our “mester”