Resumen de The Relics of Menéndez Pidal: Mourning and Melancholiain in Hispanomedieval Studies

Catherine Brown

• Catherine Brown considers Ramón Menéndez Pidal's theory of the origins of the Spanish epic as fragments of a complete, lost text. Brown compares Pidal's theory to that of medieval reliquaries. To become a relic, an object must be torn from its context (body or grave), encased in text, and renarratized. Such is the operation of Pidal's work, Reliquias de la poesía épica española, which, according to Brown's analysis, exhumes, reorders, and reconstructs the Castilian epic corpus from the fragments buried in the chronicles.