| Paper 1004-c | The Poema de Mio Cid, Past and Present: Reconquista, Border, and Frontier
(Language: English)
Mechthild Albert, Institut VII: Romanistik, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Spanish or Portuguese, Medievalism and Antiquarianism |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
The Cid's first campaign after his exile begins with the taking of two fortified towns, Castejon and the Alcocer. To any reader of contemporary epic poems, or chansons de geste, the Cid's methods would seem exceptional when compared to the ideal heroic knights that appear in other trans-Pyrenees literary works since the Cid and his men seem to freely and unabashedly employ ambushes and deception that many other contemporary literary heroes would avoid. In this paper I would like to explore the main differences between the Poema and other contemporary chansons and present my suggestions for the reasons behind them.
Paper -b:
Troubadour poetry was a success well beyond its original homeland in Occitania. Its influence reaches from Galicia to Sicily and, towards the North, to the Germanic speaking countries. This success meant that the poems were copied in songbooks and were sung and known in areas that were, from a linguistic and cultural point of view, very different from the original Occitan area. In this paper we want to analyse the reception of the poetry of the trobairitz, that is the women troubadours, in two different zones: in Catalonia and in the north of France. For the latter case, we want to analyse the reception of the trobairitz in the songbook W (the Chasonnier du Roi (King's Songbook), preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 844). For the former, we will study the quotations of trobairitz poetry in Catalan texts.
Paper -c:
In his 2019 version of the Poema de Mio Cid, entitled Sidi, the Spanish author and member of the Royal Spanish Academy, Arturo Pérez Reverte (*1951), interprets the medieval Spanish epics as 'Un relato de frontera', 'A Story of Border(s)'. In that respect, the concept of Frontera (Border) alludes as well to the historical frontier between the Christian reigns and Al Andalus in the context of the Reconquista as to the modern concept of 'border' in the realm of cultures in contact, and to the cinematographic genre of the Western. Superposing these different concepts, beginning with the medieval epic poem, the present contribution will examine the different ideas of border, including the English translation of Sidi as A Story of Border Towns.
Paper -d:
Spanish ballads - or romances - originated in medieval Iberia as oral, octosyllabic poems that fictionalised recent events. Romances persisted globally post-1492 as (neo)medievalisms in Hispanophone border cultures: the US-Mexico border, the Philippines, and the Sephardic and morisco Mediterranean diasporas. Their global proliferation remains an unstudied phenomenon. Why would medievalist ballads be a suitable way to capture modern life at borders? By studying a postcolonial and diasporic ballad and comparing these to a medieval romance, this paper newly theorises that ballads are border texts in both their composition contexts and their internal, open, poetics that allow for mouvance in the postmedieval world.
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