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THE POEMA DE MIO CID AND THE CANON OF THE SPANISH EPIC Mercedes Vaquero Brown University The Cid is undoubtedly the most impressive monument ofthe Spanish Middle Ages, and mav well have been the best ofall cantares de gesta. By the mere fact ofsurvival in verse form it has had a most powerful influence upon later Spanish literature, whereas other cantares de gesta are influential only in their shape as chronicles, ballads or drama. In this way the Cid has gained a kind of priority over the other works of thejuglates. Yet it is commonly admitted that the author's mature art implies a long previous elaboration in other works, and belongs to the apogee, not the dawn of a style. William J. Entwistle (1947-1948) Since Tomás Antonio Sánchez published for the first time die Poema de Mio Cid (PMC) in 1 779, this venerable text has defined the canon of the Spanish medieval epic. It is a great cantar de gesta and therefore not surprising that it has dominated the syllabi in American and European schools, colleges and universities. However, as I will try to explain below there are other much less studied epics that are as extraordinary as the PMC and were better known in the Middle Ages. I would like to question the Spanish medieval epic canon by asking how representative the PMC was ofdiis genre. When we teach medieval Spanish epic we present it as a 'popular' genre. Most of us agree that this genre sprang from a popular oral tradition, and that die written form in which it survives for us still bears the traces of performance. When teaching the PMC, however, the question is how 'popular' was it? And we use the term 'popular' in the sense of being for all the people, of being widely liked and carried on by the people at large. In a 1994 article Colin Smith cites Salvador Martinez in support of his theory of the PMC's learned composition: "Veinte años de pospidalismo nos han enseñado que un poema épico popular, como puede ser el Cantar de mio Cid, de vulgar = popular, tiene sólo la L.4 corónica 33.2 (Spring, 2005): 209-30 210Mercedes VaqueroLa corónica 33.2, 2005 lengua; la estructura literaria, la técnica retórica, y hasta las fuentes de muchos de sus pasajes son cultas" (1994b, 632). Indeed today almost all Hispano-medievalists would agree with this opinion.1 When comparing this text widi odier Spanish epics we can affirm that the PMC is conventional in diction, genuinely popular in tone, but nonedieless it is a very unusual text. The PMC is a rarity for die main schools ofdie Spanish epic; for traditionalists like Francisco Rico it is an oddity because it is the only case in die romance epic where a chanson de geste has been transmitted orally for centuries (from 1140 until the beginning of the fourteenth century) almost widiout alterations (1993, xxxvi-xxxvii).2 Why was it so stable? Rico does not have the answer.3 For individualists, and even for some oralists, the Cid is a rarity, because it "is indeed a learned work, but of the quasifolk style type, that is close or next to an authentic folk narrative tradition".4 The issue that I would like to raise in diis article, however, has litde to do with the composition; instead it has to do with the reception of this and odier epic texts, particularly in comparison with die Song of Sancho II (Sancho II). How well received were the PMC, die Siete infantes de Lara (SIL), the Sancho II, die Song ofSancho II, and other Spanish chansons de geste in the Middle Ages? How popular were these texts? Did they create a school? The PMC, since its first edition in the eighteenUi century, has been ver)' well received, in the last two decades almost one new edition of it has come out per year, and there is no need here to recount the extraordinary number of studies dedicated regularly to the poem. My queries, however, have to do with its reception throughout the Middle Ages, queries diat bring us...

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