Loss is More: Revisiting the Relics of the Medieval Spanish Epic

Abstract

Abstract: This piece situates itself in a chain of scholarly responses to Ramón Menéndez Pidal's theoretical framing of the "relics" of the medieval Spanish epic. It does so by revisiting Catherine Brown's "The Relics of Menéndez Pidal: Mourning and Melancholia in Hispanomedieval Studies," a seminal article published in La corónica in 1995 (vol. 24, no.1). Brown's article underlines Menéndez Pidal's abiding influence on epic studies and explores his idiosyncratic discourse, and critical framework, of loss and recuperation, understood as both the dearth of surviving texts and as a way of reading the epic's themes and modes. I highlight, in both Menéndez Pidal's Reliquias, and in Brown's assessment of its impact, a willingness to linger on contradiction and to accept that recovering wholeness for the epic tradition requires us to confront loss, partiality, and even futility. Inspired by the vestigial framework set out by Menéndez Pidal, and nuanced and revalidated by Brown, I argue that epic studies today needs to unashamedly inhabit, and to continue to explore, a middle ground that is both fragmentary and brimming with creative potential. Buoyed by Brown's invitation not to despair in the act of reassembling the epic, and maybe even to see tragicomedy therein, I suggest that it is in the very nature and narrative of epic to shape identities from unlikely and varied combinations. Epic's missing pieces are also its imaginative asset.