Description:
For decade, studies in the Poema de Mio Cid have concentrated on the oralist/individualist controversy, emphasizing such stylistic questions as formulaic technique, the relationship between the epic and history, narrative structure, and the influence of other national literatures.

Eploration of social mentalities facilitates a better understanding of the Spanish epic’s authorship and audience. The analysis of kinship and polity in their intricately related manifestations reveals the emergence not of a particular social class but rather of class sensibility and the contradictions deriving from it. Exalting personal honor and achivement whide paradoxically glorifying collective endeavor and aspiratios, the poet and his hero live in denial of encroaching modernity. From this we may deduce an audience willful in its primitivism and nostalgic, even reactionary, in its sympahies.

This study of the social content of the only Spanish epic surviving in more or less complete form provides a means of assessing the motives and intentions of the protagonist and of other characters. Cahpters are devoted to such themes as the significance of kinship and lineage: amity as a system of fictive kinship, personal honor, and public organization: the importance of women and the meaning and function of marriage, dowry, and related practices: the emergence of polity as the result of a rivalry of social, legal, and economic systems: and the implications, within an essentially kin-ordered world, of the poem’s notions of shame, honor, status, and social inequality.


CONTENTS:

List of Abbreviations......IX

Introduction......1

Chapter I. Kinship......17

Chapter II. Amity......55

Chapter III. Marriage......99

Chapter IV. Polity......151

Chapter V. Conclusion: Deference and Inequality......199

Notes......231

Bibliography......241

Index......267