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This article examines Gonzalo de Berceo's translation, poetization, and invention of various uses of the sense of taste in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora vis-à-vis its Latin source text. While Berceo's Milagros is generally a more flavorful creation than its source, modern translations have sometimes diminished the prominence of taste in service of rendering the miracles more palatable to modern audiences. In Berceo's original mester de clerecía collection, however, the poet describes a variety of physical objects and intangible qualities as delicious, sweet, tasteless, or bitter. The Latin miracles of the Thott manuscript are regarded as a close relative of Berceo's original source. In the Latin work, flavor is not absent, but it is far from a featured image or trope. The Latin uses flavor for a reduced field of descriptions, but it tends to employ those limited categories frequently. Music and affective relationships are repeatedly described as sweet in the Latin, while lamentations are recurrently described as bitter. Berceo, in contrast, uses flavor more frequently overall and in a broader variety of fields. The poet does not, for the most part, simply translate gustatory descriptions directly from the Latin, but rather deploys flavor innovatively. Berceo uses the sense of taste in sophisticated ways, often combining synesthesia with other rhetorical and poetic devices. Analyzing how flavor functions in the work illuminates this sensorial aspect of the collection's rhetoric and paves the way for further examinations across the Bercean and mester de clerecía corpora.
