Relics and Fragments

Abstract

Relics and Fragments Ryan Giles It was an honor to participate in the session on Heather Bamford's splendid new monograph, and to celebrate her much-deserved La corónica Book Award this year. I only wish we could have toasted her achievement in person, en carne y hueso, and in Kalamazoo! Rereading her innovative research for this occasion brought to mind a stock metaphor that has had such a powerful hold on modern philology, and that—for those of us who specialize in pre-modern Iberian literatures and cultures—is closely identified with Ramón Menéndez Pidal's Reliquias de la poesía épica española. Started during the 1930s, this scholarly tour de force went on to become a foundational study for our discipline. The eminent philologist's book uncovered a body of literary relics, as Bamford points out, in what was a "celebration of all extant pieces and a reconstruction of others," using the idea of the fragment as a description of "the state of some of [End Page 13] the texts that are actually extant, but also … as the central piece of his methodology" (21). And, as Catherine Brown observed in an important La corónica article, the history of our field during the twentieth century was marked by a sorting through and what she called "mourning" of the "relics of Menéndez Pidal" (15). According to the Real Academia Española, the word reliquia is first-and-foremost meant to signify wholeness through the presence of surviving residue: part of a holy body detached from and evoking the whole, or what has come into contact with this body. By extension, it can also mean other vestiges of things from the past, any person or thing that is conspicuously old, sentimentalized—and finally the continuation of aches and pains that resulted from some past ailment or injury. Certainly the task of reconstructing wholeness on the basis of philologically reassembled fragments involved making contact with the secular holiness of national treasures, with an imagined, hallowed past that is longed for, a sentimental nostalgia for ancient origins that might still resonate in the present. E. Michael Gerli discussed this process of "Inventing of the Spanish Middle Ages" in another influential La corónica article (111). Definitely, philology has been used—some would say exploited—to put us in touch with pieces of the textual past whose ghostly lack of wholeness, like the remnants of martyred saints and the pained history of nations, can come back to haunt devotees of both. Most earlier work done on the fragmentary nature of texts that Bamford selects as emblematic examples in her book has, at the very least, paid some homage to this cult of relics and its hermeneutics of wholeness—from canonical texts like the Poema de mío Cid and Amadís de Gaula to those that have received less attention, such as the writings of Moriscos and apotropaic, religious inscriptions left in building materials. Bamford's book offers a rigorous and carefully researched antidote to many of the assumptions that have informed this legacy. To be sure, her work builds on and innovates the work of earlier scholars who constructively sought to reconsider and avoid pitfalls inherent in the Pidalian, philological cult of relics. John Dagenais immediately comes to mind, having first demonstrated in such an accessible way the benefits of [End Page 14] breaking away from this mold in his groundbreaking study of the manuscript culture of the Libro de buen amor (a title popularized by Menéndez Pidal), showing this poem's fragmented and damaged texts to be irreparably unwhole (not to mention, unholy), a residue of lost and variant performances. Bamford goes further, not just in her focus on and theorization of the intentional fragment as such, but, just as strikingly, through the breadth of her analysis. I admire her ability to bring together clear and convincing insights from an expansive array of texts that have most often been divided and separated chronologically and on the basis of traditional genres and specialties: epic, romance, jarchas, Jewish and Morisco writing. Like Dagenais's classic book, Bamford's work can not only have a lasting impact on...