Composed in early thirteenth-century Iberia, the Libro de Alexandre was Spain's first vernacular version of the Romance of Alexander and the first poem in the corpus now known as the mester de clerecia. These learned works, written by clergy and connected with both school and court, were also tools for the articulation of sovereignty in an era of prolonged military and political expansion.

In The Task of the Cleric, Simone Pinet considers the composition of the Libro de Alexandre in the context of cartography, political economy, and translation....