Structures From the Trivium in the Canta 9781442680241

This volume sheds new light on a central work in Spanish literature and on medieval poetry in general.

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Structures From the Trivium in the Canta
 9781442680241

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Poetry and the Trivium
2. The Dialectical and Rhetorical Education of the Poet
3. Refashioning the Material: The Art of the Poet
4. Finding the Topics
5. Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Imaginative, Poetic Syllogism
6. Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero
7. 'Tan buen dia es hoy': The Positive Frame of the Poem
8. Themes of Awakening and Manifestation
9. The Lion as Symbol
10. Rhetoric and the Cortes Episode
11. Economics and Poetry: The False Sign
Notes
Abbreviations
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

STRUCTURES FROM THE TRIVIUM IN THE CANTAR DE MIO CID

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JAMES F. BURKE

Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press 1991 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-5947-3 University of Toronto Romance Series 66

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Burke, James F., 1939Structures from the trivium in the Cantar de mio Cid (University of Toronto romance series ; 66) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-5947-3 i. Cantar de mio Cid. I. Title II. Series. PQ6373-B87 1991

861'.i

€91-094648-5

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Vii

Introduction 3 i Poetry and the Trivium 12 2

The Dialectical and Rhetorical Education of the Poet 27 3 Refashioning the Material: The Art of the Poet 35 4 Finding the Topics 45 5 Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Imaginative, Poetic Syllogism 60 6 Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 70 7 'Tan buen dia es hoy': The Positive Frame of the Poem 90 8 Themes of Awakening and Manifestation 101

9 The Lion as Symbol 115 10 Rhetoric and the Cortes Episode 133 11 Economics and Poetry: The False Sign 151

NOTES 167 ABBREVIATIONS 197 WORKS CITED 199 INDEX 221

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to those who have helped to make the writing of this book possible. The staff of the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto and the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid all spent a great deal of time and effort helping me to secure books. The Office of Research Administration of the University of Toronto, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, gave me several grants that allowed me to go to Madrid. Sally McKee of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto did the translations from Latin to English in the text. John Dagenais read the manuscript for me and made numerous useful suggestions. Alan Deyermond read the manuscript for the Press and provided a wealth of information and guidance. Since he had written all over the manuscript - and who among hispanists in the medieval period would not recognize this script? - he allowed the Press to reveal his identity. A reader for the Canadian Federation for the Humanities also read the manuscript and gave good advice. Thanks are also due to Darlene Money and the editors at University of Toronto Press. And finally I acknowledge the forbearance and good humour of the office staff, Rosinda Raposo and Blanca Talesnik, in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto, who managed to keep me and the office in balance as I ran back and forth between the thirteenth century and the present.

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STRUCTURES FROM THE TRIVIUM IN THE CANTAR DE MIO CID

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Introduction

In this study of the Cantar de Mio Cid my aim is to discuss two major concerns of the poem: the ideas of revelation and awakening, and the manner in which the actions and behaviour of the hero can be taken as exemplary, particularly in regard to King Alfonso vi as monarch. Both these concerns are presented and articulated in terms of dialectical and rhetorical structures that were learned by anyone who underwent the basic schooling of the Middle Ages. The student in the middle schools of medieval times, when refashioning material, applied a number of techniques besides the dialectical and rhetorical ones that I believe have been used to shape the CMC. The artes poetriae, also derived from academic curriculum exercises, are largely concerned, at least in the earlier manifestations, with descriptio, the portrayal and representation of the important persons in a work or the places in which an action occurred. If the Cid-poet experienced basic school training, we might expect to see reflections of these other techniques in the poem. But I have limited myself in this study to an explanation of those dialectical and rhetorical devices that underlie the most important themes in the work and that provide for it a structure that resembles what we moderns term plot. Such devices are analogous to those that characterized a particular form known in Spain in the period during which the CMC was composed. This is the 'imaginative syllogism/ a term coined by a modern critic, O.B. Hardison (1962, 13), to apply to a device described by the Spaniard Dominicus Gundissalinus in the mid-twelfth century. A similar artifice is discussed by Hermannus Alemanus, who did translations from Arabic to Latin in Toledo about a century after Dominicus. Although unfortunately these writers provide few specific details about this imagi-

4 Introduction native syllogism, they give us some information that enables us to relate this device to those ideas concerning the construction of a literary piece that were prevalent in the era.1 To prove that the poet who was responsible for the organization of the CMC was familiar with this form is, of course, impossible. I can only produce evidence from the poem itself in an attempt to demonstrate that there are structures in it for which the term 'imaginative, poetic syllogism' is certainly fitting. I believe there are three major structures of this variety in the work, which support the themes of revelation and awakening and of the hero as exemplar. I have devoted one chapter to the study of the function of rhetorical argument in the cortes episode. From the time of Aristotle the philosophical procedure that had served discourse both as subject of analysis and instrument of use had two parts: invention and judgment. The finding and setting of arguments belonged to the province of invention while the demonstration of the truth of what was suggested by the disputation pertained to judgment. In the CMC the arguments supporting the two major themes referred to above, arranged in what I think to be imaginative, poetic syllogisms, are displayed throughout the poem up to the moment of the cortes episode in Toledo. This confrontation between the hero and his group and the Infantes de Carrion and their entourage in the presence of the royal assemblage, which in great part literally serves as a trial, functions precisely as a final and absolute proof of the argumentative structures operative in the CMC. In a final chapter I have analysed two sets of sophistical arguments that occur in the poem. One group is usedio persuade Raquel and Vidas to lend to the hero the funds needed to finance his campaigns against the Moors. The other is used by the hero in an attempt to justify the marriage of his daughters to the Infantes de Carrion and later the Infantes' behaviour. These false arguments adhere to or are at least analogous to accepted forms from the classical Aristotelian tradition. Since my analysis of the CMC is an attempt to view the poem, both in parts and as a whole, as a reworking of material according to the precepts taught in the lower and middle schools of the Middle Ages, I have a problem that does not confront critics who deal with works only slightly later in date. Although the poems of Berceo or the Libra de Alexandre - which may also have been composed by Berceo - could not have been finished many years after the CMC, critics for many years viewed both as belonging to a very different type of poetry from that which characterizes the CMC. The opera of Berceo and the Alexandre

Introduction 5 were works from the schools, mester de clerecia, while the CMC, mester de juglaria, was the remnant of an oral culture, a masterpiece accidentally committed to writing, and largely untouched by the emerging scholastic culture of the period. Although I do not agree with him in all details, the investigations of Colin Smith are extremely important to my interpretation of the CMC, and I accept the overall thrust of his argumentation. Smith has understood perhaps better than any other critic that this poem belongs far more to the learned culture of its period than it does to the folk ambience that has been suggested as its matrix. Scholars have long suspected that logic, which, along with grammar and rhetoric, comprised the trivium, was influential in the development of the medieval literary work.2 C.S. Lewis gave a definition of dialectic that, although not relating the matter directly to the literary piece, does so by implication. 'Dialectic is concerned with proving. In the Middle Ages there are three kinds of proof; from Reason, from Authority, and from Experience. We establish a geometrical truth by Reason; a historical truth by Authority, by auctours. We learn by experience ...' (189). The medieval writer, in seeking to produce a work that according to the received opinion of the period should always be grounded in ethics (Allen 1982; Delhaye), was usually attempting to prove or demonstrate something concerning human behaviour. Even if such a writer did not seriously intend to do what authority demanded, he or she still tended to use those accepted structures, which at least lent an air of legitimacy and authenticity to the work. The problem has been how to understand the presentation and interrelation in a literary work of those truths that are founded in authority and those that are drawn from experience. Reason would employ the traditional forms of definition and division, deduction and induction, handed down from Aristotle and developed and modified by his followers. But what kind of structures would convey the wisdom garnered from authority and from experience? Could deductive and inductive arguments also be used in regard to these? If so, would it be possible to understand the succinct forms these usually take - those of the syllogism and the induction conveyed in the concise structure of the debate - as structuring devices for the literary piece? Herein lies the value of the theories of Eugene Vance in his recent book From Topic to Tale. Vance shows how proof from authority and experience could be used by a medieval writer in a manner analogous to that derived from reason, and he provides examples of the pertinent

6 Introduction structures that might be harnessed toward the accomplishing of such a goal. One important inference to be drawn from this study is that Vance, who does not mention Gundissalinus and the.imaginative, poetic syllogism, has effectively accomplished what those medieval commentators who discussed it failed to do - he has given an adequate explanation of how the device functioned. By the end of the thirteenth century the ideas implicit in the imaginative, poetic syllogism had become generally accepted in Western Europe and incorporated routinely into the forma tractandi, which was often viewed as the model for elaborating the structure of a poem (Minnis and Scott 314; Allen 1982,67-116). Thanks to the investigations of Vance, we can now begin to understand the basis for those logical structures that functioned in the forma tractandi. Although Colin Smith insists that we credit Per Abad with the authorship of the CMC, throughout this study I shall use a more general phrase, the Cid-poet, for the putative composer of the work.31 prefer my nomenclature for two reasons. First, although it is not implausible that Per Abad was the poet, there is no real evidence to prove that he was more than a scribe. Second, because of the palimpsestic nature of medieval authorship, it is difficult to posit for literary works produced in this era one single individual as creator. A writer took pre-existing material and refurbished it by adding some things, taking away other things, and generally adjusting the material to suit his purposes. Even if the CMC was written in 1207, we cannot be certain that this was the first version in writing, although many critics, chief among them Colin Smith, argue strongly that it is. Conceivably then one can and should refer to Cid-poets.4 I do not do that. I posit a presence, an authorial intention, and a controlling intelligence in one individual and call this person the Cid-poet. In postulating the existence of this Cid-poet, I face a dilemma familiar to critics these days. It is useful, and in some cases necessary, in order to suggest that a particular scheme exists within a work, to attribute an intentionality to an entity who becomes in the end a very concrete, implied author. But because the critic understands the difficulties of defining medieval authorship (see Minnis; Dagenais Larger Gloss) and recognizes what the study of literary phenomenology has taught concerning such, he or she must remain always aware of the problems implied in postulating even a theoretical individual as the maker of a literary work. Thus, when the prison-house of language (and argument) urges me to a statement that the poet did, meant, or intended this, that,

Introduction 7 or the other, my reader should always be prepared to take said statement cum mica salis.51 am aware, of course, that this caveat may undermine in part every assertion that I make. But such are the problems inherent in discourse, as the medievals well knew. I take the text as we have it as an entity that is well organized and aesthetically pleasing. I believe that the intentions of a concrete individual must be responsible to a large degree for the positive and appealing structure and features of this text. At the same time I accept fully John Dagenais's explanations of how the medieval interaction between text and reader produced a response - in reality a supertext that is difficult for the modern reader and critic to understand. In other words, I as modern critic, with my gloss, am providing a possibly pernicious and unreliable modern intermediary far-distant from that vital compound that was text and receiver in the Middle Ages. Obviously in such circumstances it behoves my readers to accept with caution and wariness this distanced analysis of the poem. It is, however, imperative also that we moderns not be too severely limited by the idea of the implied reader taken in another sense. Contemporary critics sometimes tend to believe that because they have difficulty in seeing something in a text, such cannot be there. Again Dagenais's explication of how readers in the Middle Ages read should make us cautious in regard to such absolute statements. The medieval period was very much a conscious culture of resonances. Such resonances might ring in the ears of an author or scribe from the declamations of a juglar or from the recitations of the liturgy or from oral renderings from a wide variety of contexts, and thus the possibility for the mixing and merging of the resonances was obviously great. Doubtless there existed a parallel phenomenon that functioned visually. The onlooker remembered what had been seen in paintings, illustrations, sculptures, and the like and reproduced amalgams of these in new forms when doing original work. In particular, one kind of amalgam of message and receiver in the period is troublesome to us as moderns. The Middle Ages was still in large part a culture of memory; thus there was conscious emphasis on the fact that a message as it was received was being mixed in the chambers of memory with resonances already retained there. And so the reader in many instances became, because of what was remembered or retained in memory, literally the text or a new text. Thanks to many excellent studies (Minnis; Minnis and Scott; Allen; Kelly) we are beginning to comprehend how the writer of the later

8 Introduction Middle Ages understood and dealt with the material, primarily but not entirely of classical origin, that was considered to be of importance. Studies devoted to the accessus, to glosses and scholia, are more and more helping us to see how the medievals interpreted such material and to understand what they felt was of special interest in it. But such studies still leave us with a serious problem in regard to works composed in the period in the vernacular languages. Can we be certain that an author who produced a medieval masterpiece in Old French or Old Spanish knew the techniques perfected by the compilator, glossator, commentator, assertor, and so forth? There is no easy answer to this question. Critics have been forced to deal with individual works one by one in the hope of demonstrating what learned methods are there and how they functioned. Slowly but surely, as a result of such studies, we have come to possess a kind of reference corpus that allows the critic to see at the very least what theories have been advanced for which works. In this study I refer to the poem as the Cantar de Mio Cid, although I hold no great preference for this title over the other one, Poema de Mio Cid, which has been used by so many scholars and critics. My choice has to do with my feeling that the poet was using and refurbishing preexisting material that was largely the product of an oral culture. It seems to me that such material, in either oral or written form, would most likely have been referred to with the word cantar. Of course one could readily make the point that the Cid-poet might have preferred the word poema for his creation. Many of the examples to which I refer in this study can only be taken as representative or illustrative of certain conditions and themes that might have formed the background for the composition of the CMC. I am well aware of the dangers of attempting to prove anything from Zeitgeist, and I accept that a critic can fairly accuse me of having done that very thing. My response is that since we do not know who wrote the poem, and have so little firm information about how it was composed, there is obviously no means by which we might securely establish an intellectual framework for the work. Even if we were sure that Per Abad was the poet and that he studied law either in France or Italy, we would still be far from understanding those ideas that informed his creative process because we would still know nothing of the crucial years of his basic study. On occasion I use as illustrations material from times after the period when the CMC was composed. Following the advent of the printing press writers began to portray in long descriptive sequences themes and

Introduction 9 ideas that, although important throughout the Middle Ages, had been referred to only in passing in the tradition reflected in laboriously produced manuscripts. Sometimes these later examples make clear what has been previously set in the shadows. But, of course, such cases can only be taken as exemplary for a tradition or illustrative of an ongoing process. In my analysis of the poem, I point out the existence of certain structures in the CMC and then attempt to show how such structures, with their attendant themes and motifs, were viewed and treated in the culture of medieval Western Europe. Whenever possible I further attempt to demonstrate how our implied poet might have known such ideas and how he might have perceived them. A question posed by Charles Fraker in one of his excellent studies on the Libra de Alexandre - 'What is rhetorical argument doing in a narrative poem?' (1988, 362) - alludes to a basic difficulty of the modern critic in regard to the possible use of dialectical and rhetorical persuasive forms in a medieval literary work. Why would a poet employ classical argumentative devices in a medieval literary piece in the first place, when a supposedly simple narrative development would have sufficed? In a critique of the manuscript of this book, Alan Deyermond put the question thus: 'And if the features of a literary work can be explained in some simpler way, is that simpler explanation not to be preferred?' In a recent review of Vance's From Topic to Tale Donald Maddox makes a similar point when he queries Vance's suggestion that Chretien on occasion used the dialectical topic 'from contraries':'... when instances of normal inference are at issue, why did Chretien - or do we, for that matter - need Aristotle, Cicero, and Abelard to demonstrate something as basic as the fact that "Helping an enemy is the true contrary of helping a friend ... 1" ' (235). This question is an old one. Eleonore Stump points out that Boethius addressed the matter by observing that 'men naturally hit on arguments without the help of any art. But dialectic enables them to find arguments "without travail and without confusion" ' (Boethius's De topicis differentiis 1978, 23). Boethius's view directs us toward the reasons why writers in the Middle Ages depend upon the topics to such an extent. The Socratic tradition of argumentation had heavily influenced Roman ideas on the subject and this orientation was then transmitted to the thinkers of the Christian Middle Ages (see Stump 1983, 131-2). What then probably happened, although I have seen no studies that address the matter, is that the practice of basing arguments upon the established topics was

10 Introduction taken as part of the heritage of auctoritas. One could obviously reason freely by means of procedures naturally inhering in thought and language (as Boethius observed) and then proceed to elaborate secondary verbal constructions, both oral and written, in accord with such procedures. But since in the Middle Ages the learned often preferred to follow the guidance of authority rather than to innovate, methods evolved by the ancients would have been attractive indeed. As a result of such dependence upon authority, the principal aim of the basic school training prevalent in the Middle Ages was to develop what Richard Lanham has called the homo rhetoricus. The individual trained in this system viewed the composition of a literary piece in a manner completely different from that of writers since the Renaissance. As Lanham puts it: 'Require no original thought. Demand instead an agile marshaling of the proverbial wisdom on any issue. Categorize this wisdom into predigested units, commonplaces, topoi. Dwell on their decorous fit into situation. Develop elaborate memory schemes to keep them readily at hand ... Drill the student incessantly on correspondences between verbal style and personality type, life style ... Let him, to weariness, translate, not only from one language to another, but from one style to another'(2). This system doubtless implied to the young student that dialectical and rhetorical argumentation was a basic means for constructing what we would term literary works. What to us is the logic of 'common sense' may have been apparent as such to medievals also, but because of the particular form their education took, they likely considered such matters in addition from the perspective of the masters of the dialectical and rhetorical argument. Deyermond's 'simpler way' for the medieval writer surely involved methods derived from the trivium and inculcated into the student by the type of schooling described by Lanham. Although it may be impossible in the majority of cases to prove that a medieval writer was using dialectical or rhetorical forms in the elaboration of a written piece, I argue that it is nevertheless important, if not necessary, that the modern critic and reader be always aware, when working with medieval texts, of what the culture taught concerning the composition of such texts. In this book I have attempted to outline medieval views on this subject and to show that the structure of the CMC reflects such views. In summary, this study advances three major points concerning the composition of the CMC: it is probable that the Cid-poet received education in the basic arts of the trivium; second, such training led the poet

Introduction 11 to develop his text, to devise narrative structures, and to characterize people in the manner prescribed in the trivium; third and finally, although the structure and functions of the poem have heretofore been explained without reference to the trivium, we can understand and appreciate the work better if we realize that its patterns - and those of other medieval literary works as well - frequently correspond to habits of mind instilled by the study of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. The Cantar de Mio Cid is a magnificent poem, which as a literary piece richly deserves the study and attention it has received from numerous dedicated scholars and critics. It has been understood for many years largely as a product of an oral tradition, a work influenced only slightly, if at all, by the emerging culture of writing. The studies of Colin Smith and others now force us to reconsider the poem, to view it in terms of the literary culture of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in Spain. If we are to do this, we must attempt to understand those processes by means of which the medieval auctor, working in the vernacular, constructed the literary work.

1

Poetry and the Trivium

Dominicus Gundissalinus, the philosopher who produced his De divisione philosophiae in Toledo somewhere around the middle of the twelfth century, gave the traditional view of the subjects of the trivium, which formed the basis for education at the lower levels in the Middle Ages: 'Grammatica est ars uel sciencia gnara recte loquendi, recte scribendi'(44) (Grammar is the art or practical knowledge of speaking and writing correctly). An important division of this first member of the trivium is poetry. Toetica est sciencia componendi carmina metrice'(54) (Poetics is the knowledge of composing poems metrically). Gundissalinus then proceeds to a discussion of rhetoric and logic that describes the two in the manner traditional for the period. In his treatment of these last parts of the trivium he makes a number of statements, as we shall see in a later chapter, that also closely connect them to the art of poetry. Numerous studies have been devoted to the use and association of rhetoric with the writing of what we moderns consider literary works,1 but far fewer have been concerned with the possible influence of logic in this process. But since both rhetoric and logic were basic subjects in the school curriculum, both should be taken as fundamental in a consideration of how the medieval literary piece was conceived and realized. Neither logic nor rhetoric can be understood completely as an artificial order invented by the human mind and imposed upon the raw material of language. It is clear that Aristotle, in exploring new paths as well as in drawing upon previously existing intellectual traditions, is to some degree in his logical and rhetorical works clarifying and explicating structures that are inherent in language.2 What we do not understand

Poetry and the Trivium 13 well is whether such structures can be seen as separate from language and belonging solely to mind - if it is indeed possible to divide mind from language. Further, we do not really know whether particular cultures as they evolve through time modify some secondary products of language. For example, are the rhetorical writings of Cicero different from those of Aristotle because Latin is different from Greek and because Roman culture and thought produced patterns of order distinct from those familiar to Aristotle? Christianity and the post-Imperial world effected another round of profound cultural evolution that continued into the medieval period. The culture of those people who speak the Romance languages was not created ex nihilo. These tongues carry within them, like long-forgotten genes in the genome, elements from all earlier usages and patterns, while at the same time many of their characteristics are reversions to natural structures endemic in the very process of language itself. Thus when we speak of what appear to be rhetorical or logical devices in a work such as the CMC, we are obviously talking about ones inherent in popular speech. But we must bear in mind also that we are dealing with a language that has inherited in part the results of many centuries of civilized use.3 Because language is 'logical/ in its very foundations one encounters in any written work figures of speech and figures of thought that seem to be at least suggestively syllogistic in form. In the Middle Ages, when logic played such an important role in education and culture, we would expect that writers became even more conscious of its importance and that, therefore, the critic would see more concrete reflections of dialectical thinking in literary works. There would be also, in other words, logical structures that had been elaborated intentionally by a writer. We have no sure knowledge about the schooling of the Cid-poet; we do not know for certain that he worked with Cicero's De inventione or the Rhetorica ad Herrenium, or that he perused the writings of Boethius. But can we assume that an individual such as he at least utilized a language steeped in a tradition whose evolution had been profoundly affected by these works and others similar to them? Joseph Duggan, who still argues passionately in favor of the oral origins of the poem, asserts that its real author, an uneducated jongleur, could have known little of the learned tradition. My response to that view arises from the answers to two questions. Was there a Castilian used at the court of the king in the late twelfth century,4 no matter how 'oral,' that had not been influenced to some

14 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid degree by learned uses? And second, may we assume that the scriptor, who copied down the oral rendition, had a modern post-romantic concern with faithfully reproducing the charming, rustic rendition of the singer? Most evidence from the period implies that in a work not of notarial nature - and even here in some cases - the tendency was to attempt to assimilate the material toward accepted models. Thus, while it may be somewhat presumptuous to connect the poem directly to the Ciceronian opera, as I shall do, I do not think it an exaggeration at all to say that the CMC in language and structure at the very least must reflect the tradition connected with works such as these.5 The idea that literary works had a basis in logical structure is an old one. Murphy (1981, 66) points out that Cassiodorus said that topics furnish arguments alike to poets, orators, and philosophers, as well as lawyers. Gillian Evans notes that Cassiodorus also stated that divine Scripture is often constructed in syllogistic form (1984,106) and that the same idea is present in writers such as Walter of St Victor later in the Middle Ages (ibid. 34). Witness the following statement from Conrad of Hirsau's Dialogue of the Authors, composed between 1100 and 1150: 'How often does Paul display his mastery of dialectic by putting forward a proposition, making a deduction, proving his point, and concluding his point?' (Minnis and Scott 59). Surely Conrad was not suggesting that the Apostle was using a proper Aristotelian syllogism. Rather the idea must be that he was following a deductive, syllogistic method. Such recourse to a dialectic scheme was advantageous because the Catholic early Middle Ages saw the world as held together by a system of agreements that obliged the speaker or writer to proceed by linking any given proposal to these agreements (Howell 10). The medieval student gained a basic knowledge of logical and rhetorical forms in the lower schools, which can be divided into two groups simple grammar schools and more advanced ones that were usually attached in earlier periods to a monastery and later also to cathedrals (Bliese 367; Maitre passim).6 James Murphy believes that in the late twelfth century there were at least thirty such middle schools in England, ten in France and Germany, and twelve in Italy (1980, i6o).7 Donald Clark (1957) in his chapter entitled 'The Elementary Exercises' gives a good explanation of the drills the schoolchild undertook during the classical period in learning to compose. In an important study Michael Roberts (1985) has demonstrated that it is almost certain, as indeed many scholars have believed for years, that the early Christian biblical epic composed in Latin is derived from the array of school

Poetry and the Trivium 15 exercises called the progymnasmata, which utilized these drills. Roberts's view of how this program may have affected education and thereby modes of composition in later centuries deserves to be quoted in full: 'The origin of the medieval theories of ampliftcatio and abbreviatio is controversial, though they are generally thought to go back to late antiquity ... One possibility not to my knowledge previously canvassed is that the doctrine derives from paraphrastic theory, developed in connection with the rhetorical exercises of the schools and perhaps incorporated in a now lost progymnasmatic work...' (1985, 225 n. 15). Although I think Roberts is correct in stating that no one has advanced a theory concerning medieval composition in terms of paraphrase, many scholars would certainly accept as valid for the Middle Ages the method he believes produced such a paraphrase.8 For example, James Murphy has also drawn upon the progymnasmata in order to suggest the program of study that was the basis for teaching in medieval schools. He describes the progymnasmata in terms of eight major elements, the last three of which were particularly relevant for the medieval pupil in learning to deal with writing both as consumer (reader) and as producer (writer). From the very beginning the student read and perused models of good writing and then had to imitate these models in a series of formal exercises in which he demonstrated a knowledge of the distinctions between grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (1980, i72).9 The description presented by John of Salisbury in the Metalogicon (i, xxiv) of the manner of teaching employed by Bernard of Chartres confirms that this was, indeed, the method put forward by the medieval master and adhered to by the student.10 The most important textbooks used for study were the Ars minor and Barbarismus of Donatus and the Institutiones of Priscian.11 In addition a student might have become familiar with the function of rhetorical artifices and devices by studying the somewhat elementary treatments of the subject found in Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, and Isidore. It is important to bear in mind that these and other similar works not only included the basic rhetorical figures and tropes but also made reference to at least the more elementary forms of argumentation.12 In order to teach the student to read correctly and to understand a text by observing the various devices and schemes the auctor had employed, the master presented a lecture called a praelectio, which provided racts about the author and explained the most important features of the work. These lectures were often written down, either by the master or by pupils, and then served as prologues for commentaries on

16 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid the texts under consideration.13 These prologues give us some of the most valuable information that we possess about what medieval teachers actually thought about the works they prescribed for their students. In many cases such information was also important in understanding the compositions later produced by students who had been educated in this system.14 From the time of Aristotle the philosophical procedure for the systematic treatment of discourse, in both analysing and structuring it, was seen as consisting of two parts - invention and judgment. This interpretation of the structure of discourse was accepted and adhered to in the teaching of reading and writing in the schools, both ancient and medieval. In one tradition that I suspect was largely rhetorical, invention, the art of discovering new arguments so that new themes and modes of procedures could be drawn from previously existing material, was deemed to be prior to judgment, which was the method of proving and demonstrating the soundness of such arguments and of showing that what they suggested was true (McKeon 1966, 367-8). Cicero considered invention to be the more useful of the two, and thinkers who followed him tended to agree. Boethius, for example, opens his De topicis differentiis by stating, as one might expect, that all discourse, ratio disserendi, is divided into these two parts, one being discovering, the other judging (29). But he then goes on to compose a work where judging is bound up largely with the disposition of the invented topics, obviously his major interest. Dominicus Gundissalinus, in Spain in the twelfth century, followed the Ciceronian tradition as conveyed by Boethius in partitioning the art of discourse into the expected two parts, inventio et indicium (75), and then further dividing indicium into diuisio, diffinicio, racionacio. Now the priority of the invention of arguments by the use of the topics, a subject discussed and explained in chapter 4, is troublesome, because from a strict logical perspective it would appear that the two other important matters mentioned by Gundissalinus under indicium, the division and definition of the concept to be considered, should be dealt with before the actual structuring of the argument. And, indeed, in the other tradition, that of dialectics, this is the case. Thomas Gilby says, for example, that definition 'is the first objective of dialectic ... the statement of what's what, quid sit?, the expression of quiddity' (153). Division, of course, would follow close upon definition, as indeed it does in Gilby's study.15 But, as we observe in Gundissalinus, definition and division are subordinated to indicium which in rhetorical tradition comes

Poetry and the Trivium 17 after inventio. The matter seems even more complicated because Cicero himself in his De officiis recognized the priority of definition: 'Every exposition undertaken on a systematic plan, whatever the subject, ought to start with a definition so that people can understand the subject of the argument (6~7).16 These two seemingly contradictory traditions obviously produced problems for medieval thinkers and writers, and as T.W. Baldwin has recognized, throughout the Middle Ages the order of invention and judgment was often reversed, so that, in effect, definition and division took precedence (n, 8-9).17 This reversal becomes definitive in the sixteenth-century reforming logician Ramus (9). In reality, of course, what happened was that components from the two traditions became mixed in what was a third order. Definitiondivision from indicium would come first, followed by the finding of topics from inventio, with the new sequence finalized in the deployment of the argument that derived from indicium. It is necessary to dwell upon these somewhat confusing details because it is clear that, although most medieval thinkers such as Gundissalinus chose the scheme of invention followed by judgment, many commentators in analysing the form of works began with the logically derived definition and division. Another essential exercise that the student was required to pursue while perusing the magna opera of the auctores was to search for the topics from invention that had been used in the elaboration of the work being read (Thierry of Chartres 27). It is important to understand that in the first instance such topics have nothing to do with content material. Ernst Robert Curtius, in developing his influential theory of the topos or topic, puts very little emphasis upon the fact - and he must have done so knowingly - that for the ancients the word topos (locus in Latin) meant not 'content' itself but a method for dealing with or arranging content. From the time of Aristotle onward a topic is the container, not the content, a middle, some variety of relative that allowed the speaker or writer to construct an argument from a given segment of information and also to evaluate an argument. It is a particular stylized method or means of arraying the raw material of an argument in the most effective manner. A whole system of topics, analogous to the 'places' of memory that are discussed so fully by Frances Yates, was developed both for logic and for rhetoric for the use of the student. These topoi are devices of structure and not the images or content that one mentally set in the places to represent what one wished to remember.

i8 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid Eleonore Stump in her studies and Vance (1987) give excellent explanations of what the topics were and how they functioned.18 I shall not, of course, repeat their ideas, except in some cases where it seems necessary to provide further elucidation in regard to the CMC. I believe medieval writers felt free to mix both dialectical topics and rhetorical ones in the same work; such certainly seems to be the case in the CMC. Therefore the Ciceronian rhetorical topics presented in the De inventione, (i, xxiv-xxv) and discussed by Boethius in Book iv of his De topicis differentiis must also be understood as basic and important to my arguments.19 The student learned in the middle schools to recognize topics in the material to be read, and thus, if perusing the following lines from Ovid, could sense that the poet had developed here a topical argument: 'Maximus, you fill out the measure of a mighty name, / Doubling nobility of birth by that of soul' (Pont, i, 2, 2) (Matthew of Vendome, Galyon trans. 48-9). Matthew of Vendome recognized that such was true and gave the following explanation concerning the passage in his Ars versificatoria: 'A theme or point drawn from a name is a matter of interpreting a person's name to suggest something good or bad about the person as Ovid does' (ibid). What Matthew means is that Ovid has used the name Maximus as the basis for an expatiation, an amplification drawn from a rhetorical topic, which is the one 'from a name,' in order to build an argument. It is important to understand that there is here a conceptual difference in one noteworthy respect between what Ovid did (and Matthew recognized) and the process of amplificatio as it is often discussed in various grammatical opera and in the artes poetriae. The finding of an argument may involve the physical amplification, a rewriting, of a work, but such expansion is not the only point. When the reader 'found' a dialectical or rhetorical argument in a text, what was significant was that he was recognizing the evidence in the text of a process of argument placed there by a previous writer. Fredborg emphasizes that even the mature medieval reader tended to analyse in terms of the topics and to interpret all details in any written work, whether literary, theological, or even a textbook, with reference to them (90). She translates from the well-known letter written in 1149 by Abbot Wibald of Corvai:'... and I have the habit, having read a book which holds any kind of difficult subject matter, to lay aside the book and by memory unfold the topics and arguments, the premisses in the discussion and the traps of the conclusions' (88-9).20

Poetry and the Trivium 19 We know that dialectic had infiltrated the study of grammar long before Petrus Helias did his gloss on Priscian in the middle of the twelfth century (R.W. Hunt 1950, 30), but documentation of what was done in the middle schools as the student learned grammar-logic in the earlier periods is scarce. According to McKeon, handbooks and encyclopaedias show that the presentation was very basic - there was reference to the categories of Aristotle and the predicables of Porphyry, brief treatments of the proposition, incipient exposition of the categorical and hypothetical syllogisms, and sections on the topics or commonplaces drawn principally from Cicero and Victorinus (1942, 8-9). There was at this stage little or no emphasis on questions having to do with metaphysics or problems of an ontological nature. Holmes presents a translation of a description of what went on in a lower school in London in the period 1170-80. The information in this passage corroborates, indeed, that the students learned and practiced orally argumentative skills at the level that McKeon describes: '... and there the scholars dispute, some in the demonstrative way, and others logically; some again recite enthymemes, while others use the more perfect syllogism' (25). Students such as these would certainly have used the topics in formulating many of their arguments. The principal exercise in writing that the mature student had to undertake actively was the composition of a dictamen metricum, a treatise in verse on a set theme; verse was preferred because it could be memorized more readily (Abelson 33; Stolz). Sometimes the theme was derived from a well-known fable, but it could also be based on some classical author or on an incident in the Bible (R.W. Hunt 1984, 41-42). All that the student had learned to recognize while reading and analysing the auctores was put back into this dictamen.21 That the topics indeed played an important part in the learning of written argumentative skills is demonstrated by an interchange presented in Conrad of Hirsau's Dialogue on the Authors, which must have been composed in the early part of the twelfth century. Master and pupil discuss the characteristics of good verse before moving on to the subject of the argument that gives form to the piece. Argument, according to the master, 'makes credible something which is in doubt' (Minnis and Scott 44). The student obviously wants to know how to form such an argument, and the master in his response recommends the use of the topoi: 'They are created from grammatically related words, when one moves from a verb to a noun or vice versa; from class, from kind, from likeness and from difference, from contrary ideas, and ideas that

20 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid follow on from what precedes, from prior circumstances, from facts that argue a case, from causes, effects, and comparisons. It is not difficult for an intelligent reader to spot all these if he possesses [i.e. has mastered] a valid authority (auctor) through hearing lectures' (ibid. 45). These topics are very similar to the Ciceronian ones listed by Boethius in his De topicis differentiis (see Stump's notes, 140), which are most likely derived from the circumstantial topics in Cicero's Topica.22 The latter part of the passage quoted above makes the point argued by Fredborg that students were expected to acquire the use of the topics by observing their occurrence in what they read. Another important piece of evidence proving that rudimentary training in dialectical forms was taken seriously in regard to composition exists in a group of exercises, composed by Priscian, which was used for instruction.23 As a guide for the student in composing practice verse, Priscian brought forth a close translation of the elementary exercises in rhetoric or progymnasmata attributed to Hermogenes, which he called the Praeexercitamina. The Pmeexercitamina are short, descriptive sections that gave to the beginning student the information necessary for learning to compose in an effective and convincing manner. The sections are De fabula, De narratione, De usu, De sententia, De refutatione, De loco cornmuni, De laude, De comparatione, De allocutione, De descriptione, De positione, and De legis latione (Institutiones 430-40). Donald Clark provides excellent summaries of these sections, showing how they were used and pointing out that the section De loco communi does not refer to commonplaces in the sense of places where arguments could be discovered but as those things that are common or general (1959, 26). This is surely one of the finest examples of the idea of the commonplace in the sense that Curtius emphasized, and one can readily see why he did so, as many writers would have learned to compose by using the ideas and methods elucidated in these sections or similar ones. But Clark, after indicating that the first two divisions De fabula and De narratione taught how to condense, abbreviate, and rearrange a story, discusses a point that becomes obvious as one reads through the Praeexercitamina: 'All the other exercises taught the art of expatiating on a theme by the use of the loci or the topoi, the places of argument, including definition, genus and species, cause and effect, contrast, similarity, consistency, conjunction, repugnancy, time (present, past, and future), magnitude (greater or less), paraphrase, example, and testimony of authorities' (1959, 27). In other words, the students had to understand the dialectical and rhetorical use of the loci as seats of argument in order

Poetry and the Trivium 21 to be able to make use of the sections of the Praeexercitamina. They learned to do this by following the kind of course of study in a middle school described by Murphy and by perusing the kinds of handbooks mentioned by McKeon and others. Although Clark does not dwell on the matter, it is clear also that the students used the figures and tropes of rhetoric. It would have been impossible otherwise to have achieved what is implied in the first lines of the section on description: 'Descriptio est oratio colligens et praesentans oculis quod demonstrat. fiunt autem descriptiones tarn personarum quam rerum et temporum et status et locorum et multorum aliorum ...' (438) (Description is speech that gathers together and presents to the eyes that which it represents. Moreover, descriptions may be of persons as well as things, times, conditions, places, and many other things). Thus, as young students followed Priscian's exercises, or ones similar, for learning to write a composition - exercises that consisted largely of retelling or rewriting stories with which the students were already familiar, stories from the auctores, the masters who had gone before - it is obvious that they dealt with the topics as empty structuring devices. But did they also attempt to define and divide material in a manner analogous to what was done in the logical debate? Judson Allen's explanation in The Ethical Poetic makes it clear that medieval authors from the early thirteenth century onward arrived at the forma tractatus and the forma tractandi of their works by using methods of defining and dividing that were derived from logic. These two forms are mentioned for the first time by a commentator on Priscian in the first quarter of the thirteenth century (Rouse and Rouse 224) a few years after the date, 1207, when the CMC was probably written. But the two could not have developed without a basis in exercises in definition and division practiced in the schools in a manner similar to what was done with the topics. I discuss further the manner in which these two forms reflect logical definition and division in chapter 6. A combination of the ideas in the progymnasmata with the use of definition plus that of figures and tropes yields much of the information and the treatment of it that appear in 1175 in Matthew of Vendome's Ars versificatoria and later in the other artes poetriae. Of course, as Vance has noted (1987, 45), these 'preceptive grammars' tend to treat descriptio or ethopoeia, the representation of character (or place), and consequently are concerned only with those topics that have to do with personal characteristics or that can be referred to location.24 Of great importance in understanding the kind of loose logical think-

22 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid ing that the young student would have picked up in early studies is Eleonore Stump's observation that Boethius defined an argument in psychological rather than logical terms (1978,189-90) - a definition used, as we have seen, by Conrad of Hirsau and identical to one given by Dominicus Gundissalinus and Herman the German in Spain. An argument is what produces belief concerning what was in doubt. In addition, as Stump also points out, only the trained could appreciate the nuances of the perfect, classic syllogism: Tor hearers without that specialized knowledge (and these are most hearers) belief will in fact come because the conclusion has been shown or assumed to be an instance of or a case falling under a tacitly understood and generally accepted truth' (190). Because the object of the very generalized argument is conviction, the techniques of the pure demonstrative and syllogistic dispute are unsuited to it. Paul Abelson addresses another matter central to an understanding of how the systems of basic logic were often utilized in the Middle Ages. Those writers who defined the scope of logic as it served for the school curriculum were not greatly concerned with questions of a metaphysical character, in particular the dispute concerning universals (79). However, for Aristotle, and later for Boethius, as well as for Christian authors writing about theological subjects, the theoretical, speculative side of logic, matters pertaining to ontology and metaphysics, were of great interest and importance. Thus the correct understanding of the term, the accurate formulation of a proposition, and the combination of these into proper deductive or inductive configurations were central to subjects vital to them.25 But it would appear that the structures of logical argumentation were taught at the basic and intermediate levels without great emphasis being put on such weighty matters. A writer who used dialectical forms could have learned these procedures before becoming interested - if indeed he or she ever became interested - in those ontological problems and ideas that Aristotle presented in the first two tracts of the Organon. Thus we find that Herman the German, in his translation of the Averroistic version of Aristotle's Poetics remarks concerning the mode and procedure of the poet that 'it does not seem to differ from treatises on subject-matter (topica), because both are concerned with things that do not fall under necessary laws' (Minnis and Scott 307). What I think this means is that for Herman neither the logician who uses the topics nor the poet has to worry about problems having to do with the concerns that interest the metaphysician. Such conceptions were, of course, avail-

Poetry and the Trivium 23 able to the early Middle Ages largely through the commentaries and translations of Boethius, and the new logic, heavy with such thought, began to make itself felt by the mid-twelfth century. But a poet could have composed using dialectic and rhetorical devices learned in the schools without possessing a sophisticated understanding of or interest in their philosophical base. As we have seen, logic and rhetoric each had a set of topics that pertained to it, and both groups could be used to formulate an argument.26 Boethius's definition of logic was that it dealt with hypothesis while the domain of rhetoric was the thesis; dialectic employs question and answer while rhetoric uses continuous discourse; and finally dialectic seeks to refute a single opponent while rhetoric hopes to convince some third party.27 An argument to produce belief could fall under either rhetoric or dialectic depending upon whether it pertained to the particular incident (thesis) or to the overall framing situation (hypothesis). The ancient idea that it was the function of rhetoric to persuade concerning a particular case or situation rather than to formulate a general principle also continued to hold sway in the Middle Ages. Cassiodorus, in the section of the Institutes in which he discussed rhetoric, a treatment that was very influential in the schools of the Middle Ages, divides argumentation into two parts, which he designates as inductio and ratiocinatio. Ratiocinatio is further partitioned into 'enthymema qui est inperfectus syllogismus' (enthymema, which is an uncompleted syllogism) and 'epichirema vero qui est rhetoricus et latior syllogismus' (Halm 498) (But epichirema is a rhetorical and broader syllogism). Cassiodorus uses the word inperfectus in regard to the enthymeme because it consists of only two parts: 'Ex sola enim propositione et conclusione constat esse perfectum' (499) (For it is thought completed by only one proposition and conclusion). But he introduces another factor in regard to the epichireme, which he explains as possibly three-part, four-part, and five-part: 'Tripertitus epichirematicus syllogismus est, qui constat membris tribus, id est propositione, assumptione, conclusione' (500) (An epichirematic syllogism is threefold, consisting of three parts, namely, proposition, assumption, and conclusion). But what is this assumptio for which Cassiodorus gives no further clarification? Latin dictionaries tell us that the word in a context of rhetoric means 'the introduction of a point for consideration' or 'the introduction of erroneous argument.' Cassiodorus and later writers possibly saw the word as having taken on the connotation that exists for the modern English word assumption -

24 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantor de Mio Cid something that is assumed to be true but cannot be proved absolutely. Such an assumption could be close if not identical to the topic as sedes argumentorum. The rhetorical racionatio, with its syllogistic form, would then be an argument based upon probabilities in regard to the individual case. This kind of argument would be the only type really possible in a court of law since ones deriving from a logical topic would be much too general in application to be relevant. Judson Allen translates a quotation from a commentary on Vinsauf s Poetria Nova - 'proverbium est idem quod sententia' - as 'a proverb is the same as a proposition' (1984, 225 n. 33). That his translation of 'sententia' as 'proposition' is correct is corroborated by Manuel Alvar's observation in regard to the Libra de Apolonio that 'argumento signifka "enigma, adivinanza'"(54). Such 'adivinanzas' would have had a kind of formal, scholarly use which parallels what Allen saw in the proverb: 'la adivinanza es un arte que hay que resolver - como los silogismos empleando una tecnica escolar aprendida ... Tendriamos en las adivinanzas una especie de ensenanzas tradicionales, formuladas en verso y que tanto Servian para desarrollar la memoria como la capacidad discursiva del alumno ...' (56). A true proposition has to obey strict rules having to do with the categories and the predicables, a situation that surely cannot pertain in the vast majority of proverbs. But this would not have mattered with most readers and listeners, who would not in any event have understood the subtleties of Aristotle and Porphyry. But the wisdom inherent in the proverb would have convincingly pointed toward belief and certainly could have provided the basis for the kind of assumptio mentioned by Cassiodorus. Gillian Evans believes that writers of pastoral works or of poetry composed in a tradition independent from that of technical dialectic (1976, 120) but one that fell under the aegis of rhetoric and that had borrowed characteristics from the logical tradition (115). What her ideas suggest then is an argumentative form that resembles, or imitates, the technical structures of dialectic and rhetoric, but does not adhere to the strict standards that in particular control the former. But what was the structure of this form and how did it function? Although we have for Spain much less information concerning models for the structuring of literary works than we have for France, there does exist from Castile an example of a logical variety that would have been an excellent prototype for the literary piece having an argumentative form. This is the imaginative, poetic syllogism - a concept well presented in the De divisione philosophiae of Dominicus Gundissalinus and later in

Poetry and the Trivium 25 the adaptation by Herman the German of Averroes's version of Aristotle's Poetics. Both Gundissalinus and Herman relied upon ideas that had to do with the way in which the Arab philosophers understood Aristotle. The Arabs considered poetry to form part of logic and therefore included it in the Organon.28 The De divisione was composed about fifty years before the CMC, if we accept 1207 as the date for the poem, while Herman did his adaptation about fifty years afterward. The imaginative, poetic syllogism is the kind of construction that has as its object something completely different from that of scientific demonstration. It elicits psychological assent and attempts to move rather than prove by triggering an imaginative response on the part of the reader or listener (Minnis and Scott 282). The formulator of such a poetic deductive device obviously draws upon information from a wide variety of sources, such as the encyclopaedias, in order to strengthen the appeal of the equation.29 In chapter 5 I analyse in some detail portions of the De divisione philosophiae, since it was written before the CMC; I also refer to Herman's ideas when they prove helpful in understanding points relating to the CMC. I believe that the Cid-poet was using a structure dependent upon precepts of logic and rhetoric that paralleled the workings of the imaginative, poetic syllogism. To demonstrate and prove, of course, that the poet had knowledge of Gundissalinus's ideas or of the Arabic tradition upon which they so heavily depended is impossible. But I believe that the forms we find in the poem can better be explained and understood if we take into account an idea about the composition of poetry that was known and appreciated by thinkers in Castile from the mid-twelfth century onward. The interest in and dependence upon traditional rhetorical devices and processes is doubtless one of the most important reasons why there evolved in the twelfth century the kind of historical writing that John Ward (1985) has called 'rhetorical historiography.'3" Those bare events that had occurred and that had been duly recorded were used by writers to 'harness history' so that it became a 'set-piece rhetoric for a cause (imperial, national, ecclesiastical, moral or the like)' (104). Ward warns at several points that the modern critic should always be wary about accepting events and occurrences in these writings as factual and instead should view those events and occurrences in terms of the matrix of rhetoric within which they were conceived. This kind of reformulation of events in Latin writings, studied also by Stephen Nichols in Romanesque Signs, demonstrates how powerful the tradition of rhetorical,

2.6 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid dialectical organization and argumentation was in the Middle Ages. The veracity of the fact or happening was not in itself as significant as the treatment, the process that was used in organizing and displaying the array of data, and the reason for which such an organization had been undertaken in the first place. But was our putative Cid-poet aware of these matters of the trivium that have relevance in regard to the composition of a literary piece? Did such an individual know about and appreciate the impact that a poetic work conceived as 'rhetorical historiography' might produce? These are questions I address in the following chapter.

2

The Dialectical and Rhetorical Education of the Poet

A poem in the vernacular such as the CMC with its 'civic message' (Smith 1983, 88), a poem with a hero who 'by his own actions ... has changed the world' (Hart 1977, 70), a poem that is 'una ceremonia exaltadora de la armonia social' (Montaner Frutos 161), a poem in which events are rewritten and rearranged in order to serve certain goals, must be seen as related in some manner to the process of creating rhetorical historiography that I have discussed.1 Although an analysis of such a relationship is not my primary objective in this book (see Burke 1984-5), I believe that the medieval world-view, which encompassed an acceptance of and reliance upon the rhetorical structures that John Ward (1985) discusses, is fundamentally important also for the evolution of a work such as the CMC.2 A difficulty particularly acute for the critic who is discussing the CMC is what knowledge of contemporary ideas and theories concerning literary composition an implied poet might have had. A writer in France or Britain, for example, lived in an environment where certain works were appreciated and where certain concepts were important - a substantial manuscript tradition from both those countries tells us this. But we have few manuscripts from twelfth-century Spain that may be said to refer to matters rhetorical, dialectical, or literary, and the situation improves only slightly for the next century. It is also necessary, in my view, to clarify precisely who this implied poet was. I take him to be the person who produced the written text as it has come down to us. I do not deny the possibility that oral versions of the poem circulated or that, as Duggan suggests (1989), a rendition may have been performed in the presence of the king in 1199 or 1200. But again, I do not think we can discard the possibility that the language

28 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid and thought patterns of a jongleur who appeared before the king were influenced, perhaps heavily, by aspects of written culture. If someone did take a complete oral song and render it in writing, this individual surely exercised more than a mere scribal function. My thesis is that this scriptor can be understood also as poeta et auctor, in the sense in which these terms were interpreted in the emerging culture of writing in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. From the time of Alfonso vi large numbers of people entered Hispania from the north; they doubtless brought elements of Gallic culture with them. Those intellectuals who did translations in Toledo in the middle of the twelfth century must have been aware of the most important trends of the time. In chapter 5 I discuss the treatise of an individual who worked in Toledo during this period and was certainly familiar with the basic philosophical ideas of his era - Dominicus Gundissalinus. In addition, natives from the Peninsula often went to France and to Italy, and if they returned, as many of them did, they brought much information back with them. But the fact is that we have little concrete knowledge about what ideas an intelligent poet from Castile, captivated by an appealing rendition from the oral tradition of memoria and determined to metamorphose this song into the developing tradition of the written, would have possessed. In such a case the prudent critic must assume the minimum for such an individual, and that is largely what I do. But I submit that this minimum encompasses a great deal indeed, and would have enabled our poet to elaborate the schemes I investigate in this book. Can we really be sure that the Cid-poet was familiar at least to some degree with the rhetoric and logic taught in the schools? Smith is convinced that the poet was educated outside of Spain, probably in France (1983,152), while Roger Wright (1982), accepting that whoever put the story of the hero in writing in the form we now possess must have been educated (233), thinks that he probably was trained in a school in Palencia before the establishment there of the studium generate (253). Even if one accepts Duggan's view that the writer was serving only as scribe, it is helpful to consider the possible educational background of a scribe intelligent enough to appreciate the charms of this poem when he received it, almost complete, in an oral version. What were schools in Castile like in this period? In his survey of the lower and middle schools in England and France, John Bliese says that the situation in Spain must have been different from what pertained to the north but gives no indication as to what that difference was (366).

The Dialectical and Rhetorical Education of the Poet 29 Of course one of the major points emphasized by cultural historians in such matters is that the constant warfare occasioned by the Reconquest produced a state of turmoil in Iberia far beyond what existed in areas disturbed only by strife between nobles and kings and the odd barbarian invasion. The information about these schools in the saints' lives of Berceo suggests little more as Faulhaber notes, than that they were places with elementary programs where reading and singing were taught (1972, 26-7). This would correspond to the first level of grammatical studies as described by Abelson and Bliese, where the young student spent two to three years singing Latin verses and learning to recite Psalms. Faulhaber mentions the very simple Versus ad Pueros, dated 1122 and probably written for use in monastic schools in Spain (24), which again must have been of the first type. We have no written records for Castile to prove that the student, after mastering the basic Virgil and Cato mentioned in the Versus ad Pueros, moved on to more difficult readers, as was the case in northern Europe (Abelson i7).3 But Faulhaber believes there were numerous cathedral schools in Castile by the end of the twelfth century (25). Such schools, more advanced than the basic ones described in Berceo, would certainly have required reading texts of a more sophisticated kind. Peter Such in his study of the origins of school rhetoric in the Libra de Alexandre has demonstrated that the texts used in such monasteries as Ona and Santa Maria de Najera in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries are nearly the same as those available earlier in Germany, which are typical for northern Europe (39-41 ).4 The presence of such auctores as Horace, Persius, Juvenal, Lucan, Statius, Boethius, and Martianus Capella suggests the kind of second level of study described by Abelson and Bliese, if, indeed, there was some variety of organized program in these monasteries. But at the very least there must have been adolescents resident there, and surely the more intelligent of them showed some interest in proceeding beyond the most elementary level of reading and singing the Psalms and perusing a few simple, moral tales. Even a basic school reader such as the Fecundia Ratis (composed 1022-4 at Liege) contained not only the fable material so admired by medievals but also excerpts from a host of writers, including Sallust, Lucan, and Ovid (Abelson 19-20). Smith believes that several of the battle scenes in the first Cantar of the CMC are an imitation of Sallust (Estudios cidianos 1977,109-23). There must have been readers similar to the Fecundia Ratis

30 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid in Castile to serve as sources for the Cid-poet, even if he never saw a full version of Sallust such as the one from Silos that was there in the mid-thirteenth century (Such 41). Such counsels wariness (10) in regard to the famous verses from the Libra de Alexandre (39-43) that imply that the young king was fully knowledgeable about the arts of the trivium as well as medicine and music. If Castilian middle schools in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century were at all similar to those in the north, such skills would have been readily attainable and we would not have to chastise the Alexandre poet for importing school curriculum along with his raw literary material. Certainly schools in Catalonia from early on provided a training similar to that given in France, England, and Germany. Osmund Lewry mentions that Gerbert of Aurillac, the future Pope Sylvester n (999-1003), polished his studies in mathematics, astronomy, and logic at the episcopal school in Vich (94).5 James Murphy points out that the earlier works used in the schools are really not prescriptive guides that teach composition as the art of preparing a coherent discourse (1981, 140). But the raw material for learning to do this can be found in these books. Once intelligent students, who had passed beyond the basic level, decided that they wished to learn to imitate examples of good poetry from classical writers, there were available in Europe, and surely in Spain also, examples of the various devices that could be used in such an exercise. Again, what we have in the artes poeticae is probably a kind of scholastic codification, a logical organization and presentation, of practices that had existed in various forms for many centuries. We do not necessarily have to presume that a poet in England, France, or Spain who at the beginning of the thirteenth century was using rhetorical structures, had acquired a knowledge of such by reading these works. The basic information, which doubtless was better set out and elaborated in the artes, had been taught throughout the earlier Middle Ages in the schools and could have been improved upon in a variety of ways by an intelligent individual. Many critics have commented upon the fact that these artes seem to refer in the main to the construction of the individual line and not to the disposition of the work as a whole, although most make some passing reference to the overall structure of the piece. If tradition taught that the person using the ars should rewrite or restructure pre-existing materia, it is understandable that the artes accepted that the form for the

The Dialectical and Rhetorical Education of the Poet 31 work was inherent in the materia and that it only had to be readjusted in the new creation. The kind of practice verse described by R.W. Hunt and Abelson, the exercise learned by imitating the auctores and by using the Praeexercitamina of Priscian and similar pieces, must have been what Curtius had in mind when he described the Carmen campidoctoris as 'eine kunstvolle rhetorische Schuldictung' (1938, i68).6 Later in the same article Curtius inquires concerning the CMC, 'Und steht es mit dem Cantar de mio Cid anders' (171). The great scholar is not implying, of course, that the CMC is a poem written by a schoolboy, but that the techniques apparent in it derive from a kind of artistry that has its roots in the classroom.7 Many critics agree that there is evidence of a knowledge of legal language in the CMC, which suggests that the poet had legal training: 'That he must have had extensive experience of the law and its written records is surely the conclusion to be drawn../ (Hook 1980, 52).8 The legal, technical idiom employed by lawyers is obviously related to other language forms of higher culture in the Middle Ages. An intimate connection of rhetoric with the study of law has been well established for the earlier medieval period and must be taken for granted also from the thirteenth century onward (see Abelson 61-2; Rand). In order to have attained a working knowledge of legal terms and the language to support it in context, the student would have undergone the kind of common educational experience that I have described above. James Powers points out that the Cuenca-Teruel family of charters, which appeared toward the end of the twelfth century, prove that in Leon and Castile the municipal codes of law had reached in regard to details a level unmatched anywhere else in Europe of the period (40). Such documents as the Fuero de Plasencia (early thirteenth century) provide evidence of the reviving classicism of the period, because in warning that someone should always be watching the gates of the city in the event of fire, the Fuero makes a pointed reference to the fall of Troy (146). The jurists who were composing and pondering documents such as these must have possessed relatively sophisticated skills in the art of writing of the period and some knowledge of the tradition of auctoritas that accompanied the learning of that art. The lives and careers of Spanish jurists and ecclesiastics who were to achieve success and thereby to be remembered in history provide us with some information and clues as to what Spanish students learned during the era in which the CMC was probably composed. Rodrigo

32 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid Ximenez de Rada (11807-1247), who became archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, studied law in Bologna and later theology in Paris. But he must have received his basic education in the Peninsula, probably in Navarre under the auspices of a distinguished prelate, Pedro de Artajona, who himself had taught in Paris (Gorosterratzu 24). Whether he was educated in a school or tutored directly by the sage we have no way of knowing, but he possessed all the basic information and training necessary to begin his studies in jurisprudence when he arrived in Bologna.9 The situation in Toledo itself in the years just before Ximenez de Rada became archbishop must be to some degree typical for the more advanced areas of the Peninsula. Records show that by 1190 a 'magister scholarum' had been appointed to the Cabildo in the cathedral (Gonzalez Palencia i, 59). But there is also evidence from wills that proves that private teaching took place in the city. Peter Such cites the will of Canon Esteban (dated 1193), which mentions among the books to be bequeathed 'quandam summam Prisiciani... Regulas artis Grammaticae de versibus... librum tabularum de Dialectica' (30) - (A summa of Priscian... the rules of Grammar regarding verse... Dialectics). Such concludes that the will implies a 'traditional and humanistic kind of education' (31). Marie-Therese D'Alverny and Georges Vaida have suggested that Marcus of Toledo, the translator of Ibn Tumart's 'Aqida, whose name appears for the first time as a diaconus in the cathedral in 1191, studied Priscian, Boethius, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium in the cathedral schola. Allusions in Marcus's work also demonstrate that he was familiar, at least from florilegia, with some of the writings of Virgil, St Ambrose, and St Augustine (107-8). During this period a distinguished group of Spanish legal scholars and teachers was working in Bologna, and one can imagine that their early training in Spain took place in ways analogous to that of Rodrigo Ximenez de Rada. There was Bernardus Compostelanus, author of the Collectio Decretalium, Laurentius Hispanus, who produced the great Appartum, the logician Petrus Hispanus, and Vincentius Hispanus, also a magnificent jurist (Post). The last of these, who studied and then taught canon and Roman law at Bologna in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, was interested in the kinds of political concerns that we see reflected in the CMC (Post 484). Post emphasizes the fact that Vincentius, although he later returned to Iberia, where he was bishop of Idanha-Guarda in Portugal

The Dialectical and Rhetorical Education of the Poet 33 from 1229 until his death in 1248, continued to think in terms of the entire Iberian Peninsula (485). Vincentius also was an advocate of the imperium in Hispania fifty years before the time of Alfonso x. For him the Spanish, not the Germans, possessed the virtues that allowed the ancient Roman heritage to flower again (491). Most scholars would probably argue that if there is an advocacy for imperial statehood in the CMC, it is elaborated in terms of Castile and not the Peninsula as a whole (for example, Lacarra 1980, 169). But it is not impossible that the Cid-poet already viewed Castile as the standard-bearer for all of Iberia and looked upon the future of this kingdom as crucial for the entire Peninsula. I am not proposing that Vincentius Hispanus wrote the CMC nor do I necessarily support Alonso Alonso's suggestion (1942) that the Cidpoet may have been the illustrious, contemporary chancellor of Castile, Diego Garcia, the author of the Planeta and himself a trained jurist. According to Lopez Estrada (45), Manuel Laza Palacios has even suggested that Gundissalinus may have been the author.10 I do propose, however, that at one extreme these represent the type of individual who composed the work if we take the other extreme to be a somewhat rude, uneducated singer of tales. In a middle position we encounter someone with the abilities of a trained scribe, possessing a fair amount of legal experience, and having perhaps served as a teacher in the newly founded 'Estudio palentino' that Fradejas Lebrero refers to in passing (56). This person would have been interested in matters both political and aesthetic, and he would have given form to his concerns in the poem that is our masterpiece. That he may have done so by utilizing material from the oral epic tradition of the vanishing culture of memoria does not seem an unlikely possibility. It has also been suggested that the CMC may have served in a kind of mediatory position in relation to the evolving sense of consciousness of law in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain.11 Our understanding of the manner by means of which a literary text can relate to the legal process has been advanced considerably by R. Howard Bloch's study Medieval French Literature and Law. Bloch sees the development of both literary and legal institutions in terms of an emerging polyvalent mental structure whose effects were felt in widely varied areas of cultural and social life (175); thus matters of legal procedure and the accompanying logical apparatus found echo in literary works. Bloch believes that there is no genre - narrative, lyric, or otherwise - that is not 'infused with at

34 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid least a smattering of formal debate' (167). Tony Hunt (1979) has given us an excellent introductory study that shows specifically how particular logical functions such as those employed in debate were utilized in the courtly literature of twelfth-century France. One of the first pieces of literature composed in Castilian is the truncated Disputa del alma y el cuerpo, which dates from around the year 1200 (Deyermond 1973, 138). This brief interchange between the body and soul after death, taken from a source in Old French, is by no means as interesting as later examples of the literary-debate genre in Spain and has only the most rudimentary of argumentative forms. Nevertheless, its existence demonstrates that the connection between the aesthetic work and the debate that Bloch has studied in France was appreciated by writers in Castilian from an early stage. The CMC is thus, I believe, a poem constructed on the basis of descriptive procedures and argumentative forms, which the poet learned through reading and analysing the auctores, either in some middle school or through an educational process analogous to that used in such a school. The imaginative, poetic syllogism, which to the modern critic seems a rather elevated concept, would have been readily understandable to the individual who had experienced the training that was usual in these schools. Although I cannot, of course, demonstrate that the Cidpoet was familiar with this form, I believe it is possible to show that the structure of the CMC depends upon configurations that must be taken as at least analogous to that of the imaginative, poetic syllogism.

3

Refashioning the Material: The Art of the Poet

In analysing the structure of the CMC I have adopted an approach that parallels in many ways the one Charles Fraker has used in regard to the Libra de Alexandre, a work most likely composed only some twenty years after the CMC. The poet who produced the Alexandre refashioned material largely in Latin having to do with the story of Alexander; Fraker has found that, in doing so, the poet took into account notions concerning composition and rewriting that prevailed during the period. In one article, for example, Fraker has shown how the poet who produced the Alexandre adds 'bits of motivation where they are lacking in the older texts' (1987,277), because of an interest in the rhetorical figure aetiologia - the assignment of a cause for something. Although there were themes, concepts, and ideas that suggested causal relationships in the source material, it seems clear that aetiology was a major concern of the poet who composed the version of the Alexander legend in Castilian. His contribution is an addition to, a reworking of, and an overlay to what previously existed. Fraker's work has also led him to many of the same medieval theoretical ideas that I consider important for the CMC, devices such as 'descriptions, inductions, the citing of examples, enthememes../ (1988, 363). Fraker believes that the design and layout of the Alexandre cannot be understood until the work is studied from the perspective of these artifices, ones obviously drawn from the dialectical and rhetorical tradition of the schools. In my opinion the same is true for the CMC. In a study of Celestina (1990), Fraker has made use of ideas such as these to argue that brilliant as the great masterpiece may be, it must also be understood as a kind of rereading or rewriting of Terence and the humanistic comedy in the manner common for the Middle Ages. In

36 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid other words Rojas, as a late medieval writer, took those preceding works as dialectical and rhetorical in nature and used the traditional structures inherent in them as models for rearranging whatever prima materia he used for Celestina. 'Terence was a school text, and if students from their first encounter with his plays were taught to see this detail as an enthymeme, that as an induction, a third as an exemplum, and still another as a set of arguments drawn from the topics of invention, they might well have ended considering those works very argumentative indeed' (76). Fraker's study implies that we must take the structures of the trivium to be as important in regard to the Tragicomedia as I think they are for the CMC. From a critical perspective the CMC and the Libra de Alexandre were in the past considered to be very different kinds of works, because the former was held to be mester dejuglaria, the art of the somewhat illiterate minstrel, while the latter was mester de clerecia, a product of the emerging culture of writing. Until quite recently it would have seemed exaggerated in the extreme to suggest that the structure of the CMC might depend upon the same kinds of rhetorical and dialectical forms deriving from medieval school exercises as does the Libra de Alexandre. My explanation of the 'making of the CMC' is that a skilled poet took previously existing material and artistically refashioned it, using the techniques common to the era, into an aesthetically pleasing masterpiece. I avoid the verb rewrote, at least initially, since this word suggests for the modern critic that the maker used some sort of written work as a basis for the new creation. This may, of course, be either partially or completely the case. However, because of the continued dependence upon memory in the period, the poet may well have undertaken the reworking largely in his mind, in the chambers of memorial It is difficult to be sure what procedures a medieval writer would have followed in ordering and reordering material. On occasion medieval thinkers seemed themselves uncertain which progression to follow in elaborating an extended, argumentative piece, whether oral or written. In my analysis of the poem I have of necessity had to establish and follow a particular sequence, and this may well be one that reflects my awareness of and interest in particular problems in the CMC. I shall attempt to indicate significant difficulties in the ordering of procedures as they arise. Critics during the past two to three decades have begun tentatively to suggest that one poet was largely responsible for the form and meaning of the CMC, and that this person might have had school training. It

Refashioning the Material: The Art of the Poet 37 is clear that Miguel Garci-Gomez (1977) believes that the individual who authored the poem had some acquaintance with formal rhetoric. In an article in 'Mio Cid' Studies, 1977, Colin Smith opines that a considerable amount of standard medieval Latin rhetoric as taught in the schools may have been utilized in the composition of the work (173). But he also thinks that rhetorical resonances in the CMC may be the result of 'una retorica comun de los siglos xn y xm, retorica no especialmente culta, accesible por muy diversos modos a muchos' (Estudios Cidianos, 1977, 2ii-i2).2 He further believes that the Cid-poet, who for him is Per Abad, created 'la retorica de la epica castellana' (1980, 422). The phrase 'una retorica comun' would probably be acceptable also to Alan Deyermond as a description for examples of rhetorical usage that he finds in the poem. He points out that the phrase uttered by the Cid in verse 1270, 'Si a vos ploguiere, Minaya, e non vos caya en pesar/ can be seen as an example of the rhetorical device oppositum. However, 'no es necesario clasificarlo como rasgo culto dentro del Cantar, puesto que ocurre naturalmente en el habla popular' (1987, 36-7).3 Smith tends to see the poet's inventive exercises in rhetoric as being a result of an unconscious use by him of techniques he acquired as he learned to use language: 'Within Latin, the tradition was both entirely alive and very ancient, for its elements stretch back through the language of the law... and of many literary texts both medieval and classical' (1983, 206). But Smith also credits the poet with a fairly sophisticated knowledge of languages other than Castilian, as well as a very good ear: 'My view of the process is that, as the poet read and listened in French and Latin, he simply absorbed rhetorical techniques (without specially identifying them as such) as he did all the other metrical and linguistic and episodic materials I have studied' (1983, 204). I agree with the views of Smith in part but would add one important point - it is difficult to believe that our poet could have learned to write in Castilian and to read and listen to French and Latin without at least some formal training at the basic levels in grammatica, rhetorica, and dialectical He might conceivably have garnered this knowledge largely on his own, but in such a case he would surely have had help and guidance from someone, and such assistance would have involved the traditional approach to the basic subjects of the trivium.5 In the introduction to his edition of the poem Pedro Catedra also asserts that the poet has used formal rhetorical structures in the elaboration of the work (xxiii). He even employs the word loci but clearly in the primary sense given to the term by Curtius (xxv).

38 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid In making such assumptions one does not necessarily conclude that the Cid-poet was expert in any of the three parts of the trivium or that he was interested in or appreciated the small points or subtle differences that fascinated those medieval scholars who have left us written records of their thoughts. I am not positing on his part a technical competence in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic much, if at all, beyond what a young arts student in the north of Europe possessed after finishing an intermediate school. His sense of poetry and his developed ability to mould and remake language is obviously something else again. If he had the kind of legal training for which Lacarra, Smith, and others see evidence, and in particular if that training was acquired outside of Spain, familiarity with the trivium should come to us as no surprise. Those who have accepted the approach to the CMC developed by Menendez Pidal and his followers have taken the poem largely as a product of an oral culture committed to writing only by accident.6 The debate between those who have continued to support, in one form or another, such views - the so-called neo-tradicionalistas - and the scholars who see the poem more as reflective of a conscious, intentional act on the part of an individual - the neo-individualistas - has produced a vast amount of writing, and I can do little more here than refer to the most salient features of the debate and then state my own position.7 The dispute was accentuated in 1983 by Colin Smith with the publication of his The Making of the Poema de mio Cid, the introduction to which makes absolutely clear the contours of his hypothesis: the poem is a masterpiece that can only have resulted from the conscious intention and efforts of an educated and very talented poet whose responsibility for the work as a whole is clear. But as we have seen in Smith's views on rhetoric discussed previously, he has been chary about suggesting that the poet possessed formal school training in the trivium, while he has continued to espouse the view that the author had some legal preparation. The latest rejoinder to the views of Smith, and the best in my opinion, has been offered by John S. Miletich, who in response to the question posed by Smith - 'could an illiterate have improvised such a complex and beautiful composition' - has replied 'yes' (1986-7, 193). In order to bolster such a point of view, Miletich draws upon evidence and conclusions presented in a series of articles in which he has compared the Hispanic epic to those of the South Slavic peoples. He thinks that the CMC is situated closer to a left pole of folk art than to a right pole that is the learned composition, and that so situated, it must be viewed

Refashioning the Material: The Art of the Poet 39 as a 'quasi-folk-style work' (1986-7,193). Miletich does not believe that the learned elements in the CMC result from an 'overlay ... in an orallycomposed text.' Rather, what we find there is 'a blend or fusion of techniques with its own separate poetics' (1981,194). Of course Miletich still argues that the CMC as a written text was destined for oral diffusion, but such would probably have been possible for most medieval texts in one way or another. Miletich has recently reinforced his views by comparing the medieval epic in Western Europe to the Muslim oral epic (i988).8 My placing of the CMC is much nearer to the right-hand pole of conscious poetic composition, and I think that the evidence that the poet had some learning is overwhelming. But because of the evidence brought forward by Miletich as well as by many others, it behoves us always to bear in mind some kind of oral origin or background for the CMC and the continuation of oral uses within it (see also Montgomery, 'Uses,' 1986-7). I believe there is a kind of 'separate poetics' for the poem, a poetics perhaps imitated later in other works written in Castilian. This separate poetics first flowered in the period 1200 to 1225 during which Rico postulates the existence of 'un nuevo estamento intelectual' in the Latin texts of the Peninsula (1985, 148). The CMC reflects also a new intellectual stage, but one in the vernacular, that anticipates in part what soon happened with the rise of cuaderna via. The language and in many instances the conventions of the poem are those of the folk-style epic. Themes and ideas that existed as figures of thought among the formulas of oral works of myth are carried forward by the language of the poem, sometimes modified in part by an intervening poet and sometimes not.91 find myself undecided as to whether a full blown oral epic pre-dated the CMC or whether in effect the Cidpoet wove together portions of verse to produce, if not Berceo's beautiful chasuble, at least a handsome coat of mail.101 am convinced that there must have been, before the composition of the poem, fragments of poetry in Castilian that referred to matters having to do with the hero and other epic happenings. It is possible that such fragments were first moulded into unity and ordered in the mind, the memory, of the poet.11 If the Cid-poet did use techniques learned in school to perfect his composition, if the poem subsumes within it imitations of previous pieces from the written tradition, it is just as likely that it is also in whole or in part an imitation in writing of poetry from a pre-existing oral tradition.12 In postulating a kind of 'separate poetics' behind the making of the

4O Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid CMC, one has of necessity to take into account certain major differences between this work and those of the later so-called mester de clerecia. Thomas Montgomery has made an important observation about the CMC in pointing out that there is much less conscious awareness of and reference to writing in the poem than exists in the early works of the mester de clerecia ('Uses/ 1986-7). He sees the poem 'at a turning point' between the oral tradition and the emerging culture of writing (184). It might be argued that an individual with some legal training who had completed basic studies in the trivium would have placed much more emphasis on writing as a concept than he did. However, if the Cid-poet was not writing and composing 'from scratch' as it were, but remoulding and refurbishing pre-existing materials in the manner customary in the Middle Ages, it is understandable that there are not more allusions to the new modes of procedure, since these would appear only where the intervener took the trouble to place them.13 Montgomery has also studied how the use of assonance in the poem tends to interact with vocabulary and with topics - in the general sense of the term - so that recognizable patterns emerge. His explanation for this phenomenon is as follows: '... the best resolution is found not by imagining a compiler of diverse written elements, but the growing together over the years in performance, of two variable poems, or the extraordinarily skillful revision and amalgamation in writing of those poems by an author steeped in the popular tradition (and curiously inattentive to the consistency of detail that marks most written composition)...' ('Assonance/ 1986-7,21). The consequence is something 'quite different... from the overly bookish language of the clerecia...' (ibid. 20). If Montgomery is correct, and if I am also, in assuming that there are structures in the work that result from an application of methods learned in or parallel to those taught in the schools, the Cid-poet either refashioned and refurbished a fairly complete oral amalgamation or reworked a written version of one. Peter Such and John Hodgkinson in the introduction to their translation of the poem refer to the technique described by theorists in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of using the narrative line as though it were a thread upon which a series of gemlike descriptions and episodes could be hung (28). Michael Roberts (1989) has demonstrated how this 'jeweled style/ so noticeable in the Alexandre but absent in the. CMC, developed in late classical Latin poetry. He posits that the similar practice in the Middle Ages was probably learned through imitation of certain late antique authors who had favoured such a procedure and who were

Refashioning the Material: The Art of the Poet 41 particularly popular among medieval theorists (154-5 n-15)- But Roberts also stresses the fact that another group of much imitated writers from the late-Latin era, the New Testament biblical poets, avoided the jeweled style and favoured a technique of narration similar, in my view, to that preferred by the Cid-poet (131). One thus infers that our poet, if he learned to compose by imitation, either retained a 'non-jeweled' style inherent in his oral subject matter or followed the approach of a classical writer who employed a simple technique. For example, themes in the CMC having to do with awakening and salvation, which I discuss in chapters 7 and 8, certainly resemble ones used by the early Christian poet Sedulius in his Carmen Paschale, although, of course, only a detailed comparison of the two works could tell us whether echoes from the Carmen resound within the CMC. But we do know that the accomplishments of those poets who often adapted material from the New Testament served as an important inspiration for writers in the Middle Ages, and thus it would not be surprising that their less adorned style was also imitated. The procedure used by the Cid-poet is, I think, in many respects similar to the one employed by other early medieval authors in the vernacular. Although we know that medieval writers depended upon previously existing materials and models for their work, modern critics and scholars have just begun to investigate and to understand the manner in which they utilized these materials. Such an exercise is both a continuation of and an intellectual advance beyond the elementary practice of composing a dictamen taught in the lower and middle schools of the Middle Ages.14 Douglas Kelly has furthered considerably our understanding of what one might term the medieval mode of advanced artistic composition (1978,231-51 and 1987,191-221).15 The author finds pre-existing materia that either already conveys or can be used to convey a meaning of the general type that Geoffrey of Vinsauf refers to as the archetypal (17), and proceeds to refurbish this material by replacing what was previously dismembered, corrupt, or incomplete with a form that is whole and coherent (1987, 193).l6 What an author hoped to accomplish with the refurbishing of previously existing material was to enhance meanings already resident in the materia as well as to contribute fresh ideas and information. There is also always the implication of a 'recovery' - that the author has the obligation to reweave the previously existing web of words so that themes inherent in its texture may be better appreciated and understood.

42 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid We do not as yet know enough about this process of reworking a previously existing text to be certain that the product necessarily demonstrated those traits associated with works of clerecia. In fact, it may prove impossible ever to be sure what the medieval reworker did, since it is difficult to obtain an example of the material that the compositorauctor used. My argument is that the Qd-poet could have refashioned and rearranged a previously existing text, whether oral or written, without necessarily producing a poem that reflected most of the emerging norms of the culture of writing. We have almost no information to tell us how the author discovered the archetypal meaning that would be used to refurbish and recondition source material, but I think it likely in many cases that such a meaning was drawn from or founded upon the basic logical exercises of definition and division. As discussed previously, one of the first things the student of medieval logic learned to do was to define and to divide. This elementary procedure, inculcated into the student by constant drill and practice, produced a habit of mind to be used later not only in more advanced logical undertakings but also in regard to practices based upon other parts of the trivium. By defining a thing, concept, or thesis seen as central to the meaning of a putative work, a writer ensured, because of the process of division that logically ensues from definition, a structure for the work. The way in which division results from definition can be seen in the classic explanation given by St Isidore of Seville in the Etymologiae for the human being (u, 25), an example transmitted forward from Aristotle that became, with some variations, the standard in the Middle Ages. It begins at the subaltern genus animal and continues thus: 'Homo est animal rationale, mortale, risibile, boni malique capax.' What happens with this definition, of course, is that a division is produced at every step that results in two contrasting entities. The animal, an animate corporeal substance, is termed rational and this action produces an opposite 'irrational' animal. One continues on the left side of the upside-down Porphyrian tree of substance by dividing the rational animal into mortal and immortal, followed by mortal animal split into one that laughs and one that does not; finally the one that laughs can be divided into one capable of good and evil and one not so capable. Or, more likely and a bit alogically, the division could be between the one capable of good and the one prone to evil. Laura Kendrick discusses the fact that in medieval poetry the practice of definition and division many times began even at the level of the

Refashioning the Material: The Art of the Poet 43 individual word (24-52). In Roman times there was no division of the line into words, and therefore the reader performed this act as part of the exercise of receiving the text. Kendrick postulates that in the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages there existed a kind of game or play in which the reader was invited to make varying divisions of a line to render different word sequences. But again such divisions would obviously depend upon how readers understood the line, how they defined the meaning therein. Arbitrary division would be no more than a kind of geomancy, producing combinations that would have to be interpreted after the fact. After the dialectician had achieved a definition and thereby division, the next step was the elaboration - within, of course, the structure of the relevant divisions - of the racionacio, the arguments of various types, proving or disproving whatever thesis the author of a work had decided to treat. These arguments were founded upon and drawn from the topoi. Evidence that some procedure analogous to this kind of logical practice was followed in regard to the production of literary texts exists in explanations having to do with the forma tractandi and the forma tractatus. These are terms used by late medieval commentators in describing the structure of a wide variety of written works. Allen, in his long discussion of the forma tractandi (1982), points out that frequently two of the first words used by commentators in regard to this forma are definitivus and divisivus. The author has defined certain concepts seen as central to the meaning inherent in the source material, and such definition has automatically implied a division in the material. The result provided a frame for the finished piece. Allen's arguments are complicated and difficult, and I cannot rehearse them or do justice to them here. But I think it worthwhile to discuss one point because I suspect that what he says, although not incorrect if understood properly, may be confusing. It will be recalled that Gundissalinus, following a typical practice for the period, places the act of division before that of definition. Allen also seems to give priority to division when he tells us that 'the crucial act of medieval criticism, then, is division. Division exposes the forma tractatus, constitutes the first step toward realization of the forma tractandi, and is the basis of any possible serious consideration of a text's wholeness, subject, or meaning' (1982, 126). This statement is true from the perspective of the commentator but does not, I think, express what was done by the author of the text. Both the forma tractandi and the forma tractatus were actively created as well as passively recognized. In a text whose structure reflects the dialectical

44 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid exercises of definition and division, in reality reverse sides of the same coin, the result of the act of division is obviously what is immediately most apparent, and this may well be what we see in the forma tractatus. However, one must not forget that a process depending upon definition has produced this form. From the practical perspective, and obviously to help the author to discover what resides in the materia, it was necessary to adopt novel approaches in the reworking. For example, Geoffrey of Vinsauf in his Documentum de arte versifandi lists four methods by means of which the significance of material can be found and then better re-expressed: 'Possumus enim materiam communem proprie dicere si quatuor modos observemus. Primus modus est ne moremur ubi moram faciunt alii; sed ubi moram faciunt, transeamus, ubi transeunt, moram faciamus' (Faral 309) (If we observe four systems, we can treat common material properly. In the first system, we should not delay where others delay; but where they delay, let us pass over, where they pass over, let us delay). It is impossible to know whether this exercise was designed just to help the renovator to be original or whether the implication is that previous authors have already squeezed everything from those places where they directed attention. Geoffrey's second point is 'ne sequamur vestigia verborum' (let us not follow the footsteps of words), which I take to mean not only that the recomposer should not be bound by the order of words and passages as they exist in the text but also that he should not be limited by that order of mind that both results from an arrangement of sentences and at the same time is responsible for it.17 The author must be free and eager to restructure the material so that it is improved in every possible fashion.18 Thus the author or recomposer moved through the material, looking for appropriate loci to place emendations. According to the medieval explanations of the process, the most important structuring tool he used, after defining and dividing, is the traditional topoi inherited from ancient tradition and handed down to the Middle Ages by the auctores. What are these topoi, and how did they function? How were they derived, and how did they operate within the work? I deal with these questions in the next chapter.

4

Finding the Topics

The points that interested new writers as they perused their source material were literally locations in the text that they saw as appropriate for the insertion or development of an argument based upon one of the traditional dialectical or rhetorical structuring topoi. Obviously the topic chosen for a particular spot had to be one that facilitated the elaboration of the meaning the new author hoped to convey (Kelly 1984; 1987). Already inherent in the structure of works from the classical period, Cicero's De inventione for example, are elements that suggest Curtius's interpretation of topoi as segments of content. In the section of De inventione that discusses the peroration of an oration, Cicero lists fourteen topics, in Latin loci, of the indignatio - one of the two parts of the peroration - that are based upon his empty rhetorical topics from character. But in the fourteen, content is by far the most salient feature. And as previously discussed, a category in Priscian's Praeexercitamina, one of the works used for hundreds of years to teach composition to students, was that of locus communis; the meaning here again had reference to content material. Such examples as these show that the idea of topos in the sense explained by Curtius was by no means unfamiliar to writers in the medieval period. Sister Joan Marie Lechner has pointed out that as early as the tenth century authors of hagiographical tales used loci referring to birth and infancy, to the youth and the holiness of the hero, and to various other stock motifs (54). The Ciceronian rhetorical loci of natura, victus, for tuna, and the like were filled with material, and the original empty place, as an element of structure, was carried along with the content. In discussing a medieval work, then, the critic must always be aware of the original

46 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid empty form of the topos but at the same time remember that such a form could move through the Middle Ages laden with content. Curtius and numerous scholars after him have given us detailed descriptions of what many of the content segments were and have shown how they were used in literary works. The difficult thing is to understand the relation between the notion of the empty topos as structuring device and the content that many times became traditionally associated with such topics. It is worthwhile to investigate some of the more important of these junctures. Insights provided by Bloch in his work Etymologies and Genealogies help us to understand how content material could, in the literary and artistic tradition, become related to and melded with concepts having to do with place or space. Bloch points out that from the time of the Latin grammarian Varro the verb loqui, 'to speak/ was seen as deriving from locus (55). In the work of Roman writers, therefore, speech is connected from the outset with location and with place. A word has a proper source in the sense of a location, and if scholars can identify this source, they can better understand the significance and implication of the word. Such thinking provides, of course, the foundation for the science of etymology, which so fascinated the ancients and the medievals. The Hebraic tradition held a similar idea, which it expressed in terms of a primordial naming accomplished by Adam in the Garden of Eden when the father of humanity imposed a perfect language while living in a perfect place. Although the original pristine state of language had been sullied by the Fall, speech had still managed to maintain something of its original proper connection with what it signified. Because mankind lost the perfect place Eden, one of the most basic tenets of the Christian dispensation was to seek to return there both in the sense of speech and of location. St Isidore of Seville, drawing upon both the Graeco-Roman background and the Hebrew, established etymology as one of the most important bases for knowledge for the period that followed. The idea of attempting to recuperate the lost origin of the word as well as the lost paradise recurs time and again in the works of writers throughout the Middle Ages. As Bloch points out (84), grammarians and rhetoricians used this belief that language still retained a certain proper reference to that of which it speaks in order to establish meaning and to assert that it was possible to identify a proper place from which to speak. The idea that a word

Finding the Topics 47 had a proper etymology tended to crystallize the early explanations (particularly those of Isidore), and therefore to construct the intellectual framework for the early Middle Ages. This is not to say that there were no deviations from the Isidorian or other paradigms, but the process was one of evolution by accretion and natural loss. Because it was so difficult and expensive before the advent of the printing press to maintain extensive records of the various processes having to do with human affairs, individuals in the Middle Ages were still forced to rely upon many of the most basic aspects of the culture of memoria. As medieval life became ever more complicated, memory, as a storehouse and as an organizing device, had to take on ever more elaborate functions. The concept of place in the sense discussed by Frances Yates became more and more important as a means by which humans could structure and interpret their environment. These architectonic places in memory, often filled with content material, could influence and interact with other types of places in the evolution of what moderns would term the literary work. When Judson Allen mentions that 'occasions... had... some topical significance' (1982, 263), I think he means that dates, happenings, and even significant moments served for medievals as a way of organizing reality and had for them a significance as depositories of meaning in a topical sense. This is the reason why a reference in a medieval work to the liturgical calendar, with its array of feasts and saints' days, or to the liturgical office with its compound of themes and imagery, must always be taken seriously. For example, when the text of the CMC says that the hero heard matins and lauds, it is likely that the poet viewed these offices as temporal loci that contained and carried with them information of importance for the message of the text, information that might relate to other topical bases functioning there. What the Middle Ages inherits from classical times is an array of processes and procedures that have some relation to topics or that are topically based. There are topics from the Aristotelian and Ciceronian traditions that provide elementary equations for structures of thought. Language itself proceeds from a proper topical base, and even temporal events were viewed as functioning topical referents. All such frames are overlaid with and integrated with accretions of commonplace material, themes, images, and even narrative sequences, which are never the same as the place that carried the material. The basis in the first instance for all this emphasis on retention and organization by topos, locus, place, had to be an outward psychological projection of the human mind as

48 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantor de Mio Cid compartmentalized storehouse - but a storehouse that, when perused, could provide the model for new structures. The reading of medieval writings should always involve an awareness of such an amalgam of combined topical references and the commonplace material associated with it. What surely happened in addition was that all the schemes and material having to do with topics became standardized in much the same manner as etymologies did. Thus the user of the topics was probably as constrained in linking fancifully new content material with traditional places as was the grammarian in inventing completely new origins for words. Tradition would always to some degree have governed the activities of both. The manner in which the Middle Ages saw the topics as related to the evolution of the idea of order is illustrated in a discussion in Francisco de Castro's De arte rhetorica, written in 1611, which has the form of a dialogue between master and student. The master asks: 'Quid est ordo?' The pupil responds: 'Compositio imaginum distincta in locis aptis../ (226) (What is order? The distinction and composition of images in suitable places). A few pages farther along the master says: 'Fac me velle meminisse Quid sit Rhetorica' (229) (Make me remember what rhetoric is). The student then analyses rhetoric by placing all its principal parts in a building following the kind of scheme described by Yates. What is outside is placed inside and what is inside can also be projected outward so that what has been learned can be reactivated. But the implication of the master's original question - 'Quid est ordo?' - suggests that the outward projections can also serve as models for new structures of order. This kind of process helps us to understand the enigmatic sentence in Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova that he uses in discussing the way in which the written piece is to be outlined: 'Mentis in arcano cum rem digesserit ordo' (Faral 199,1. 60), which Nims in her translation (1967) renders: 'When due order has arranged the material in the hidden chamber of the mind' (17). Geoffrey, like Francisco de Castro's student many years later, believed that the thinker actively devises a scheme that is then stored in memory for later retrieval and, doubtless, reworking. But as Yates herself realized, the very process of memorization with its attendant architectonic imagery could influence profoundly the structure of what was retrieved once it was to be actualized in some medium. She herself wondered whether the structure of Dante's Inferno was derived from a memory system (95-6).' In regard to the physical detail of the operation, we know very little

Finding the Topics 49 about how a medieval writer actually reworked pre-existing material. Because of the scarcity and cost of writing materials, the author during this period was considerably hampered as compared to a modern counterpart, even when the modern is equipped with no more than typewriter, scissors and paste (see Rand 5-6). Surely the earlier writer must have depended upon memory to a degree that for us is unimaginable. As Deyermond notes (1985, 123), Smith has implied at many points that he believes that the Cid-poet was working with written sources and that he was manipulating scraps of parchment as he composed the poem. I think Smith's case concerning sources and authorship is much stronger if one abandons the necessity for written sources and for practice book and accepts that the poet may have remembered much of his source material and may have done a great deal of composing in his head. John Dagenais in The Larger Gloss suggests that on occasion in the Middle Ages the reader becomes the text. If this is true, if it is taken as valid beyond being merely a metaphorical statement, it is correct because texts could develop in their entirety in the chambers of memory and remain there for consideration. Karin Fredborg has shown that the ubiquitous eleventh- and twelfth-century drill in analysing a text in terms of topics actually served itself as a system of mnemonics (1983,88).2 Thus a particular arrangement of the very topics themselves, especially if combined with content material, could cause a structure to evolve that at the very least produced the skeletal outline of a text. After the medieval writer had dealt with the problem of ordering the material (either leaving it as it was or arranging a new sequence), he or she next proceeded to find locations, literally places (loci) in the text of the pre-existing material. These are happenings in the flow of events recorded in words that for some reason attracted attention. The author then had recourse to one of the traditional empty loci from either the dialectic or the rhetorical traditions. This second variety of locus gives a form, an empty structure, a formula into which content may be poured in order to develop an argument. It is useful to review and to describe some of the more common dialectical loci as presented by Boethius. What I am discussing are really, of course, differentiae of topics that can be thought of - along with the accompanying maximal proposition - as overall framing principles for topics. The explanations in Stump's translation of Boethius's De topicis are essential for a proper understanding of this matter. There is one differentia based upon definition - that to which the

50 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid definition of the genus does not belong is not a species of the genus defined; another derives from genus - whatever is present to the genus is present to the species; one is taken from the whole, the complete thing - what suits the whole fits the parts also; a topic comes from parts of species - what inheres in the individual parts must inhere in the whole. Boethius lists a number of other differentiae or framing principles with their explanatory maximal propositions.3 Again, these topics are empty structures that can be filled with content material in order to elaborate the form of a argument and by implication that of a literary work. There are in addition other groups of topical structures, some relating to etymology and to physical place, others having to do with time sequences and calendar events, that could either be found or introduced to serve as places from which to amplify the text. The content material may either accompany the structuring devices as something regularly associated with them or may be something new brought in from outside. In this event we have the third use of locus and the one, of course, that Curtius gives to scholarship as the norm. As previously mentioned, Charles Fraker has demonstrated that the poet who composed the Libra de Alexandre had a great interest in causal connections and that he expanded in this regard upon the pre-existing Alexandrine material that served as his source. One of the structuring topics discussed by Cicero in his Topica (xiii, 58) and passed to the Middle Ages by Boethius (De topicis 1978,74-5; 127-8), is the topos 'from a cause/ One might say that what the Alexander poet did was to find places, loci, in his source where it seemed appropriate to introduce new arguments based upon causal relationships.4 For doing this he had the support of authority, which gave him the empty structuring device, and therefore it only remained for him to choose the content material appropriate for the elaboration of his argument. It is easy for the modern critic to see this kind of composition through the use of topoi as an artificial and even unnecessary exercise. The ancient and medieval speaker or writer could readily have constructed an argument as we do, without reference to and without being constrained by the loci. But the educational process that he underwent taught - and tradition demanded - that the topics have an important and decisive role in the evolution of discourse, whether of the type that we term literary or that which John Ward (1985) has called rhetorical historiography. The artistic rearrangement and re-elaboration of materia in this way is

Finding the Topics 51 what Horace referred to in the Art of Poetry as iunctura and what writers in Old French referred to as conjointure (Kelly 1978, 243).5 'Fundamentally, conjointure serves to elicit new meaning from old matiere by original arrangement' (ibid.).6 The writer then, in drawing out such new meaning, proceeds to adjust, rewrite, refine, amplify, and abbreviate the original materia. He can use the rhetorical colors and figures of thought at any point in this process to heighten the effect of what is to be conveyed (Kelly 1987,193), and exempla of various types can be worked into the flow of the renovated material. Eventually a new creation emerges, phoenixlike, from the remains of the pre-existing material, a new creation in which the scheme of topical invention has helped to make persons, words, and actions fit the context established by some variety of archetypal ordo.7 The concept of composition in the Middle Ages as a rereading and a rewriting of previously existing materials explained by Kelly and others helps to resolve the quarrel that has existed among the so-called neotradicionalistas and the neo-individualistas. In accord with such explanations one may envision a scribe or poet - or combination thereof - with one or several of the authorial categories described by Minnis (1984) finding pre-existing gesta material in an oral or written context. Then just as Marie de France took material from the matiere de Bretagne and reworked it into her Lais, so the poet refinished such materia in order to produce the CMC. It is difficult to know whether Marie was using written sources, oral sources, or some combination of the two. She doubtless invented the verse form in which she arranged and rearranged her matiere, and perhaps the Cid-poet did also, although I suspect that he preserved or modified one identical or similar to that of his source, whether such was in a dialect of the Peninsula or in Old French. The question of authorship in regard to the Lais can be taken as similar in other ways to that which pertains to the CMC, since Marie issues the usual denials of originality, implying that she is only a refurbisher of old and venerable materials (see Pickens). We cannot, therefore, really be sure what she did, but as Kelly so well states, if she acquired a knowledge of how to write by studying Priscian, 'what she learned was the ability to digress from the matiere at hand' (Kelly 1987,196) in order to place into it a new meaning that could be perceived and appreciated by her audience.8 Scholars and critics explain Marie's use of this matiere, which was seemingly divorced from the themes related to the translatio from Rome

52 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid to the West, by reminding us of the alleged connection between the words Britain and Brutus. By supposedly founding Britain, this son of the classical tradition had in a very real sense given a meaningful base to events that would transpire there. The matiere de Bretagne was then for Marie as firmly rooted in auctoritas as was material having to do with Troy and Alexander for other writers. I believe something analogous happened in regard to the legends and, perhaps, poetic renditions that have to do with the adventures of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar. By the end of the twelfth century this material could be taken by a poet as part of the heritage of auctoritas as it was perceived in Castile at that moment. The Cid as hero, in other words, could stand equivalent to and even more important than a figure such as Alexander, whose presence was clearly defined in the classical tradition. In dealing with a system that demanded the use of previously existing authoritative material as a basis for new composition, writers were, of course, often tempted to make up or counterfeit sources. Modern scholars seriously doubt, for example, that Geoffrey of Monmouth really produced his Historia regum Britanniae by translating an ancient Celtic book. Roger Ray suggests that Geoffrey's remark that Archdeacon Walter of Oxford, who supposedly gave the book to him, was a man knowledgeable in matters rhetorical 'may have been a teasing admission that the true source of the Historia was rhetorical inventiveness ...' (85). John of Salisbury even admits that his Policraticus contains certain 'mendacia' in regard to source material, two of which have been unearthed by modern scholarship (Ray 86). John's point of view was doubtless that his inventions might be true as they fitted perfectly within the paradigm of possible positive examples and served well the purpose of his book, which was written for the edification of his readers. Medieval writers who invented their sources in the modern sense of the term and who even admitted they were doing so were moving beyond the traditional medieval approach and were heralding the new age in which it was eventually thought much more clever to make up everything or to pretend-to do so - than to depend upon source material. One might also object that modes of composition used in the elaboration of the Lais or the works of Chretien are not appropriate models of comparison for the CMC since it is a very different kind of work from these works in Old French, which critics have argued were composed to serve as a speculum for the emerging, cultivated knightly class in twelfth-century France. I respond that the CMC is itself a kind of mirror

Finding the Topics 53 for a knightly class but one emphasizing a different perspective on what was a different kind of chivalry. Douglas Kelly has pointed out that the author of the Roman d'Eneas has expanded upon Virgil by introducing themes having to do with human affection residing in the chivalric, Ovidian language of the moment (1985, 22). The author has found empty places in Virgil, points unimportant for the great Roman writer, but begging for elaboration from the perspective of the medieval French poet, and has introduced new arguments (on what topical base?) having to do with the developing culture of romantic love.9 The world of Ovidian chivalric love is not one that impinged at all upon the consciousness of the Cid-poet. For him noble affections are those relating to family, to monarch, and to those basic Christian precepts that assist in establishing a more perfect commonwealth. The speculum that he composes is also for the edification of a knightly class, but not one that is affected to any degree by the passions evoked by erotic love.10 Whether Smith is correct that the Cid-poet consciously composed the work or whether we believe that he reworked pre-existing material, the existence in the piece of archaic forms of language and a preoccupation with traditional epic themes and motifs should not blind us to a central purpose in the work having to do with the developing ethical concerns of early thirteenth-century Spain.11 A number of excellent studies describe the finished literary work in terms of its completed configuration and form (Ryding, Vinaver, Allen 1982). But it is still not clear how the writer elaborated the structure that flowed from Geoffrey of Vinsauf's archetype, an archetype that I suspect may have been derived in many cases from a process founded upon logical definition and division. The medieval idea, of course, was that such an elaboration had largely to do with reordering some materia that the poet had decided to use. Some kind of definition in regard to the materia would cause or produce divisions that could yield the outline, the form of the new work. According to dialectical theory the writer could then proceed to the racionatio, where he or she would employ various structural topics in order to instill meaning in the text. Vance's discussion of these topics in his book From Topic to Tale and of the deductive and inductive forms that employed them, provides an explanation of how such configurations were achieved and how they functioned. A basic way of arguing and composing that every medieval student who finished an intermedi-

54 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid ate school had to master yielded a means of devising extended literary structures. The best concise example I know of the medieval debate, that zenith of scholastic culture, is a modern rendition found in Thomas Gilby's Barbara Celarent (282-93), a book that takes its name from the mnemonic words used to recall the first two moods of the first figure. The question to be debated is 'that human acts are free/ Once this thesis has been stated by the defender the opposition opposes by dividing 'human acts' into predetermined and non-predetermined acts and then sets up a syllogism in what I believe is Celarent, the second mood of the first figure: 'Predetermined acts are not free / but human acts are predetermined acts / therefore, human acts are not free.' Gilby then proceeds to provide an excellent model of the moves of the debate, as the two sides, by definition and division, narrow the scope of the argument and attempt to box each other in. Three things about such a debate are readily apparent to the modern critic. The first is that the debate proceeds in movements that are brief and to the point. Each portion of the argument is stated succinctly and concisely. Second, the basic material of the argument has the strong metaphysical and ontological orientation typical of the scholastic theological interest. Third, and finally, what is a proper or correct move in the debate depends largely upon the knowledge of and acceptance of a sophisticated set of rules having their original in Aristotle but modified by commentators. These rules are further complicated by an overlay of Christian metaphysical considerations that were recognized and accepted by both sides in the contest. It is pointless to undertake to study what we call the medieval literary work in the same context as this kind of sophisticated, elegant debate. There is a great deal of difference between the two, and it is this difference that has made it so difficult for critics aware of the enormous importance of dialectic in medieval culture to find a means to relate dialectic forms to those of literature. What Vance has done in From Topic to Tale is to show how proof from authority and experience was utilized by a medieval writer in a manner analogous to proof derived from reason. The dialectical topic provides for authority and experience a basic parallel to what the demonstrative theorem gives for mathematical, geometrical, or philosophical truth. By employing the dialectical topics as the middle ground for an argument to facilitate the process of conjointure in a work, the writer made sure that episodic material, themes, and ideas were related and interrelated

Finding the Topics 55 in a manner both aesthetically and logically pleasing. 'As metafiction, topical theory implies either the production or the perception of conjointure between two (or more) terms or episodes narrated in a story in such a way that the relationship between them has not been iterated, yet must be grasped (if only intuitively) for the story to be understood' (1987, 47). The author in the literary work often deals with what are really simple propositions, themes, or ideas, although such may be encased in a much fuller elaborated form. In order to convince the reader/listener of the validity of such a proposition from the psychological perspective, Vance suggests that the medieval writer posed such a proposition, with its surrounding elaboration, against other similarly encased propositions in a manner analogous to what happens in the syllogism. The middle, which ties the two together and thereby provides some variety of balancing or progression from one to the other, is one of the dialectical topics. Vance's explanation of how the dialectical topics were used to interrelate themes in a medieval work demonstrates an additional reason why the modern critic often finds such a work so puzzling. If the argument of the medieval work is predicated upon devices such as these and does not depend upon the causalities that we have come to associate with the word plot, it is readily apparent why a different approach to understanding and analysing these works is so necessary. What I take all of this to mean is that the medieval author counterposed ideas in a manner that is analogous - but only analogous - to what the debater did in the syllogism. The syllogism is basically a means of demonstrating that some statement should be accepted as true or untrue. But in regard to the literary work the situation is much more complicated. An author was dealing with a mass of material that had to be shaped toward some end. Logical reasoning could help in this process, but this reasoning had to be of a kind different from that employed in the scholastic debate. Chretien de Troyes found a variety useful to him, and in Spain the imaginative, poetic syllogism, which sought to obtain psychological assent from the reader or listener, must have seemed, as we shall see, an apt solution to thinkers such as Dominicus Gundissalinus and Herman the German. Having found somewhere his source material (and, perhaps, even having made up a bit of it), the Cid-poet defines in a certain manner what he sees the adventures of his hero to mean. He then proceeds to locate places in the material that, when properly dealt with and developed, can help to clarify his intention and to expand his text. There are

56 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid interesting turns of phrases and figures of thought in the original that the poet appreciates and leaves. His legal training and any wider reading - or listening - that he may have done have inculcated in him a particular kind of phraseology that reinforces and coexists with his own natural linguistic bent. This personal style moulds and remakes the original even as it expands upon it. Some of the places that he identifies seem to have much greater relevance for the meaning of the text as a whole than others, and it is these that he chooses as his major bases for argument and for interrelating the most important sections of the work. Here I disagree with Smith. He seems to believe that the poet is composing the work largely from scratch, imitating an epic style and using themes drawn from a wide variety of sources: '... the literary sources were on the one hand in Latin and French and on the other Peninsular in nature but not, I think, in any of the Peninsular vernaculars' (1983, 73). I certainly agree that the poet was probably reworking material from Latin and French, but I think some of his prototypes may also have been in Castilian. Many, perhaps the majority of, medieval texts do not follow the natural order, the linear mode of composition - beginning to middle to end - that is discussed in the artes poetriae. One work that does, however, is the CMC. Are we to take this sequential format, a chroniclelike recounting of the facts, as the most important aspect of the structure of the poem? Or are there other dynamics that shape the work and that help it to accomplish the ethical purpose that seems to have been the aim of the medieval writer? (See Allen 1982.) Again in parallel with the rhetorical historiography described by John Ward (1985), the natural order of events in the CMC adds an air of veracity and historicity, while at the same time traditional rhetorical structures - and I would argue also ones from dialectic - are more important in regard to what the poem actually signifies.12 Hardin Craig studied logical terms in Shakespeare and discovered that their use in most cases did not adhere to classical norms: 'With the terms proposition and argument one crosses the line between popular use, where it is difficult to tell whether the sense is a strictly logical one or merely a popular sense into which the logical meaning shades off (386). Such a shading off is doubtless characteristic of most medieval literary works whose authors maintained some kind of interest in dialectical or rhetorical forms. My opinion in regard to the CMC is that the use of logical and rhetorical categories and strategies in the poem resembles and is based upon

Finding the Topics 57 the technical forms in the sense that the poet must have been familiar with them to some degree and thus have viewed them - particularly in the case of logic - as a kind of ideal. Whatever his skills in manipulating these, his use in the CMC shades off toward the popular. But I also strongly feel that our understanding of the work can be greatly enhanced if we bear the classic forms in mind as we ponder those shadings off that most surely occur in the poem. It seems a certainty that our poet, while learning to read and write, undertook imitative exercises in grammatica that were based upon Donatus and Priscian, and that he worked with a handbook that contained elementary information concerning figures and tropes. Beyond this, I suspect also that he had some familiarity with three important books: Cicero's De inventione; the Rhetorica ad Herennium, which everyone at that time believed to be by Cicero: and Boethius's De topicis differentiis.*3 These works would have taught him a great deal about how to interpret those authorities whom he read and would have given him the rudiments of the old logic and of Ciceronian rhetoric and therefore the ability to practice turns in his own composition similar to those he observed in the masters. It is likely also that the basic concepts derived from Boethius and others were presented in summarizing handbooks little compositional vade-mecums to help the student to understand the topical devices listed, for example, but not explained by Conrad of Hirsau's master. That there existed in late twelfth-century Spain individuals who had done much more than what I have described above, and who had in fact mastered completely the logica vetus and understood a great deal about questions that were to be of capital significance in the next century, is a certainty. In the next chapter I provide some analysis of parts of the De divisione philosophiae of Dominicus Gundissalinus, which was written in Toledo in the period 1150-60. Gundissalinus was familiar with the logica vetus and knew that in the Arabic philosophical tradition Aristotle's Organon had been expanded by the addition of two sections, one on rhetoric and one on logic. In addition, he seems to have been aware of the ideas of Al-Farabi on rhetoric and logic and effectively to have combined elements from them also into his survey. Gundissalinus, in fact, provides poetry with its own particular kind of syllogism, a specific model for poetic composition that utilized methods of logical analysis. What the work of Gundissalinus demonstrates is that notions concerning the relation of dialectical procedures to the process of writing poetry were abroad in Spain in the mid-twelfth century.

58 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid I believe that the basic structure of the CMC derives from the manner in which the poet viewed the adventures of the hero, which he must have found described in raw material of some kind. In effect, the poet defines the Cid and his undertakings in two different ways, and this twofold definition results in a division of the poem into two major parts. According to medieval reasoning, it would then have been necessary to prove that such a definition and the resulting divisions were valid. This the poet did through the use of what I call - taking my terminology from Gundissalinus - an imaginative, poetic syllogism based upon the topos 'from definition.'14 The Cid-poet also had two major concerns to convey in his poem. One pertains to themes and motifs having to do with concepts of awakening, manifestation, relevation, and the like; the other is that of the hero as exemplary figure. These interests, which relate intrinsically to the 'civic message' (Smith 1983,88) of the poem are dealt with through the development of two additional imaginative, poetic syllogisms. The first, based upon either the topos 'from associated things' or the one 'from a cause/ moulds the motifs of awakening and manifestation; the other, drawn from the topos 'from comparison of a lesser thing/ is employed to compare and contrast the roles of the Cid, the Infantes de Carrion, and King Alfonso. The dialectical and rhetorical tradition of the schools taught that the topics should be routinely used by a medieval writer to establish a proper basis for whatever point he hoped to make. But the modern reader may well question, along with Deyermond and Maddox, whether the structures I propose are really in the poem, and may ask for additional proof. Evidence that the poet was knowingly using dialectical topoi to support his ideas is provided in one case by the way in which the hero is defined in terms of this world. This is accomplished, I believe, in the episode of the lion. The tradition that related the king of beasts to the superior man was well known from the early Middle Ages onward at a high level of cultural consciousness. There is also material that locates this relationship within a dialectical context. In addition, there was material within the dialectical tradition that interrelated themes and motifs having to do with those two major concerns of the poem that I have stated above. Examples such as 'a good day requires good words and positive actions' were made use of on occasion to underscore arguments in logic. The topic 'from comparison

Finding the Topics 59 of a lesser thing' likewise found wide use among ancient and medieval students of logic and argument. I propose that the three imaginative, poetic syllogisms work together to support what is the most important overall message of the poem in medieval terms. It is written in praise of the Cid and King Alfonso, at least after reconciliation has been achieved between the two, and in condemnation of the Infantes de Carrion.15 My argument in the following chapters is that the structuring of the poem that supports this praise and condemnation is elaborated from and largely dependent upon the interlacing dialectic configurations that I have described. I find convincing Joseph Duggan's arguments that the poem as moral example was composed to suit the circumstances of the reign of King Alfonso vui at the end of the twelfth century (1989). Our disagreement hinges upon the fact that he believes the work is an example of 'popular historiography' based in a still largely oral culture, while I assert that the poem is 'rhetorical historiography/ deriving its character also from the emerging culture of writing.

5

Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Imaginative, Poetic Syllogism

O.B. Hardison (1962) has discussed the adaptation that Dominicus Gundissalinus made of Al-Farabi's theories on poetry in his De divisione philosophiae and the statements concerning the construction of the literary piece found in this work.1 Gundissalinus, who was archdeacon of Segovia in the cathedral of Toledo, produced the De divisione in an attempt to classify the scientific knowledge of his day.2 He knew Latin and surely some Arabic,3 for he was able to deal effectively with difficulties of vocabulary encountered when translating the sophisticated works of medieval philosophers who wrote in Arabic.4 Although we have no certain information concerning his education or training, Marie-Therese D'Alverny says that judging from the information contained in his philosophical works, he must have been in contact 'avec les grands Studia de son temps' (1954-6, 39). Manuel Alonso Alonso (1959, 396) believes that he may have studied at Chartres under Bernard of Chartres. Charles Faulhaber, who has demonstrated that it is likely that Gundissalinus was using the Victorinus commentary on the De inventione and thus may not have known the original, reaches the conclusion that a reading of the De divisione does not suggest that the author had the kind of mastery of rhetorical detail that one finds, for example, in Matthew of Vendome or Geoffrey of Vinsauf (1972, 60-1). One could say something similar about his presentation of matters logical. As a philosopher Gundissalinus does, of course, maintain what might be termed a professional interest in dialectical ideas, but in reality he fails to advance the subject in the way that an innovative thinker such as Abelard does. There is thus nothing particularly original about his remarks on dialectic save for the fact that he obviously mixes the Western Christian tradition with that of the Arabs.

Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Imaginative, Poetic Syllogism 61 Bloch has pointed out that Gundissalinus divides grammar into two parts, one of which has to do with the rules of actual speech and the other with the science that studies the similarities between the functions of all languages (1983, 151). In this Gundissalinus anticipates to some degree the work of the speculative grammarians in the next century, but he gives no development to his insight. My reason for discussing the ideas of Gundissalinus is the interesting connection that the De divisione demonstrates between poetry and logic. Gundissalinus describes the close and interdependent relationship that the Arab philosophers saw between the two, a relationship that would not have seemed forced to medieval Christian thinkers. The explanations of Gundissalinus can be taken as illustrative of an old idea that had persisted for many centuries in both Arab and Western Christian thought - the idea that poetry could be conceived and expressed in ways that were analogous to the modes of dialectic. If Vance is correct in believing that Chretien employed logical structures in elaborating his Yvain and if my theories concerning the use of dialectic forms in the CMC are valid, then, at the very least Gundissalinus's ideas give us interesting examples for comparison and contrast. Although it is improbable that the Cid-poet knew the De divisione, it is likely that if he had some educational experience equivalent to that offered at a cathedral school and some legal training, he was aware of most, if not all, of the basic information in regard to logic that Gundissalinus discusses. During his schooling he may well have heard of an old idea such as the putative link between poetry and logic that was alluded to on occasion in the medieval Christian tradition. Gundissalinus followed the Arab philosophers who considered the matters of the trivium to be only preparatory to the more important study of physics. According to Weisheipl, Gundissalinus continued the Boethian classification of the speculative sciences as a carefully ordered hierarchy of realities descending from God through the mathematical sciences down to experiences of the senses (72). To start at the bottom and ascend, one would prepare oneself with the subjects of the trivium, pass on to physics, and from there rise through the mathematical sciences back to the Almighty. Gundissalinus, therefore, did not minimize the importance of the basic preparation contained in the trivium. Set quia ad consequendam futuram felicitatem non sufficit sola sciencia intelligendi quicquid est, nisi sequatur eciam sciencia agendi quod bonum est: ideo post theoricam sequitur practica, que similiter diuiditur in tres partes. Quarum una est sciencia disponendi conuersacionem suam cum omnibus

62 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid hominibus. cui necessaria est gramatica, poetica, rhetorica et sciencia legum secularium, in quibus est sciencia regendi ciuitates et sciencia cognoscendi iura ciuium, et hec dicitur politica sciencia et a Tullio ciuilis racio uocatur. (16) But since the science of understanding what something is does not suffice to obtain future happiness, if the science of doing what is good does not follow, for this reason, practice follows theory. Practice is divided likewise into three parts. One part is the science of conducting conversation with all men. For this, one needs grammar, poetics, rhetoric and the knowledge of secular laws in which the science of statecraft and the science of understanding civil law is found. This is called political science and is called civil reason by Cicero. The study of the matters of the trivium clearly was understood by Gundissalinus to be necessary for the ordering of the commonwealth, and thus his view is in line with the usual medieval idea of there being a relation between the arts of writing and ethics. Gundissalinus begins his explanation of the trivium with a traditional definition of grammar: 'Grammatica est ars uel sciencia gnara recte loquendi, recte scribendi (44) (Grammar is the art or practical knowledge of speaking and writing correctly). After a lengthy discussion, he proceeds to an explanation of an important subdivision of grammar: 'Poetica est sciencia componendi carmina metrice' (54) (Poetics is the knowledge of composing poems metrically). The material of poetry is 'aut res gesta aut res ficta' (54) (either a deed done or a deed imagined). Although there is no comment concerning whether such poetry is, when composed, oral or written, we can bear in mind 'recte scribendi' from his definition of grammar. We also, of course, have no way of knowing if Gundissalinus is referring only to works of the auctores or if he is thinking of writings in Latin by his contemporaries or of works in the vernacular. Gundissalinus then moves through a fairly traditional treatment of rhetoric and logic. Next comes a long discussion in which he follows AlFarabi by adding to the traditional six parts of the Organon a seventh and eighth, rhetoric and poetics respectively, so that logic has eight parts instead of the six in the Aristotelian canon. This is, of course, simply a different way of viewing the manner in which rhetoric and poetry relate to logic. In the European tradition one proceeds through grammar with poetry subsumed, on to rhetoric and then to logic. With the Arabs rhetoric and poetry are viewed as integral parts, species, perhaps, of logic.

Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Imaginative, Poetic Syllogism 63 It is important to note that, with this manner of understanding the Organon, what results is five species of logic, since the first three parts of the Organon are taken as only preparatory to the fourth, the Posterior Analytics, which is then followed by four other varieties. The device utilized for the fourth section of the Organon is the demonstrative syllogism. The fifth division, the 'topics/ employs the probable syllogism and the 'sophistic' the false syllogism. Rhetoric uses the sufficient syllogism or the enthymeme, while poetics has recourse to the 'imaginative syllogism.'5 Hardison states that he finds the explanation of the last term, 'imaginative syllogism,' to be 'unfortunately... rather vague,' and he feels that Gundissalinus does little to enlighten us concerning its significance (13). A close reading of Gundissalinus's text does, however, give us enough information to understand to some degree what he meant. The key passage deserves to be quoted in its entirety. Gundissalinus has proceeded through the first seven parts of the Organon, explaining how they function, to arrive at the final one: Proprium est poetice sermonibus suis facere ymaginari aliquid pulchrum uel fedum, quod non est, ita, ut auditor credat et aliquando abhorreat uel appetat; quamuis enim certi sumus, quod non est ita in ueritate, tamen eriguntur animi nostri ad abhorrendum uel appetendum quod imaginatur nobis. ymaginacio enim quandoque plus operatur in homine quam sciencia uel cogitacio; sepe etenim sciencia uel cogitacio hominis contraria est eius ymaginacioni et tune operatur homo secundum quod ymaginatur, non secundum quod scit uel cogitat, sicut hoc quod dicitur: mel uidetur esse stercus hominis. (74) Poetically, it is proper in one's discourse to cause something beautiful or foul to be imagined that does not exist so that the listener may believe and sometimes abhor or desire it. For though we are certain that it does not exist in reality, still our souls are stimulated to abhor or desire that which is imagined by us. The imagination sometimes is more at work in man than knowledge or reflection; for often a man's knowledge or reflection is contrary to his imagination. Then, man acts according to what is imagined rather than what he knows or thinks. As the saying goes: honey appears to be the dung of man.6

Immediately after this, Gundissalinus describes the kinds of syllogisms that go with the various parts of the Organon. Since he considers the first three sections of the Organon to be a preparation for the fourth, the five species of the syllogism he gives - 'certificatiua, putatiua, erratiua,

64 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid sufficiens, ymaginatiua' - must correspond, as Hardison notes, to the last five sections of the Organon, which he has described as 'demonstratiua, thopica, sophistica, rethorica, poetica' (73). It is thus that we have our 'imaginative, poetic' syllogism. And why is this last one useful? Because imagination is more powerful to the human mind than knowledge or sense data. The human will accept and believe an argument presented through this imaginative, poetic device even when reality is reversed, even when 'mel uidetur esse stercus hominis.' It is important, however, to note that this variety must be taken as positive, since the syllogism intended to deceive is the one called 'sophistica.' There follows in the De divisione a good deal of information that implies how such an imaginative, poetic syllogism can be utilized in the shaping and evolution of a literary work. We can assume that the demonstrative syllogism is the one of figures and mood familiar to us from the medieval mnemonic scheme that begins Barbara celarent. Since we know that a topic is a secondary framing postulate based upon commonly held opinions and ideas, the 'topics' obviously must be based upon such commonly held opinions that could support them. Gundissalinus does not make clear at this point whether his probable syllogism of the 'topics' would maintain the rigor of the classic figures and moods, but since he appears to be following Boethius in part of his work, it is likely that he would accept a departure from the classic syllogism in the same manner that Boethius did.7 A bit farther along in his treatise Gundissalinus approaches his subject from another direction.8 The 'officium' of the art of logic is, he says, using what Alonso Alonso (1959, 374) has shown to be a definition of rhetoric going back to Cicero, 'inuencio et iudicium' (75).9 'ludicium' can be divided into 'diuisio, diffinicio, raciocinacio,' (75) the last of which has three species: 'dialecticam scilicet, que est sciencia colligendi per probabilia, et demonstratiuam, que est sciencia colligendi per se nota, et sophisticam, que est sciencia colligendi per ea, que uidentur esse et non sunt' (76)10 (... dialectical, that is to say, the science of comprehending through probable things, and demonstrative, which is the science of comprehending known things through themselves, sophistical, which is the science of comprehending those things that seem to exist but do not). Since he has dealt with two of the five last divisions of the Organon with 'demonstratiuam' and 'sophisticam/ we can assume that 'thopica, rethorica,' and 'poetica,' must here be included under 'probabilia.' There is, therefore, a dialectical form of judgment dealing with probabilities

Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Imaginative, Poetic Syllogism 65 that differs from a demonstrative and a sophistic variety and that includes topical, rhetorical, and poetic forms of reasoning. As we have seen, this 'officium' of the art of logic ultimately derives from Cicero's Topica n, 6, where the Roman sage says that systematic argumentation 'duas habeat partis, unam inveniendi alteram iudicandi/ But Cicero in the De inventione also divided the art of rhetoric into five parts - 'inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio' (i, vii, 9) the first two of which relate to the form of the oration while the last three describe the manner in which the speech is delivered or, as in the case of memoria, provides examples to be used in the delivery. An orator made judgments as the oration was being delivered, and members of the audience performed a similar function as they listened. It seems clear that Cicero took these two points into consideration as he discussed the elaboration of the disposition; such indeed becomes obvious as one reads further in the De inventione. Cicero's ideas have to do with forensic oratory, and critics have felt that most medieval literature cannot be associated with this category (although I argue that there is an example of such in the CMC).11 Is the implication in the De inventione that the disposition of an oration necessarily involves judgment applicable also to works that were not speeches?12 Since in Gundissalinus poetry is clearly subsumed under logic (it has been added as the eighth and final part of the Organori), the conclusion that follows must be that for him the Ciceronian indicium of the inventio et indicium of the Topica had to be taken as applicable and relevant to the art of writing poetry. Although we cannot be certain that he also had in mind the inventio et dispositio of the De inventione, he must have understood the obvious fact that a poem requires a form. Surely this form, this structure, one involving an imaginative, poetic syllogism, included both the finding and the judging of arguments that the full Ciceronian tradition implied. In regard to the actual process, what Gundissalinus suggests is that indicium can be achieved through a process called raciocinatio, which has as one of its forms a dialectical argument based upon probabilities. The implication, if dispositio can indeed be accomplished through inventio et indicium, is that the form of a literary work can be attained through the kind of logical practices that the Middle Ages associated with the two. The instrument of logic, Gundissalinus tells us, is dual in form: 'Instrumentum autem principale huius artis duo sunt, scilicet sillogismus et

66 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid inductio' (77) (However, the principal instrument of the art is twofold, namely syllogism and induction). All that has been previously described can be arrived at by means of a structure that is either a syllogism or an induction. Both depend upon a topic and most likely do not observe the strictures of the classic form as seen in Barbara celarent. It needs to be emphasized that nowhere in the work does Gundissalinus move, when discussing an active undertaking, beyond reference to the oral, since he posits his explanations in terms of the living voice: 'id vero, quo uerifkat earn apud alium, est logos exterior cum uoce; logos autem qua uerificatur sentencia, antiqui uocauerunt sillogismum, siue sit fixa in anima siue sit exterior cum uoce' (79) (A voiced exterior argument is that with which one tests a proposition with another person; for reason is verified by a proposition which the ancients called a syllogism, whether it is fixed in the mind or exterior and voiced). We can infer that one can actively use this science to learn to prepare a splendid speech, while one can also passively appreciate the subtleties of the poetic composition: Inter sciencias autem eloquencie et sapiencie logica media est: cum enim grammatica necessitate loquendi prima ponatur, post grammaticam uero causa delectandi poetica sequatur, profecto sicut post poeticam studio persuadendi rethorica, sic post rethoricam necessitate cogendi sequitur logica. (81) The logic of eloquence and wisdom is among the sciences: it comes first with the necessity of speaking grammatically. Then, for the sake of enjoyment, poetics follows after grammar. Indeed, the rhetoric of persuasion, through study, follows poetics and thus the logic of thinking necessarily follows rhetoric.

Since we know that the medieval student transferred skills learned while passively savouring the literary works of the auctores, and since in his definition of grammar our author refers to 'bene scribendi,' we surely can assume that Gundissalinus means poetry composed in written form as well as that delivered orally. Logic is of such great importance because it is the tool that can aid humankind in its quest for perfection - the ability to learn right from wrong and to know if a thing is good or bad: Vtilitas autem huius artis est maxima: nam quia perfectio hominis - secundum quod est homo - est cognoscere uerum et bonum ad faciendum et ad acquirendum illud ... tune logica maxime utilitan's est, que sola est nobis uia et instrumentum ad deprehendendum in omni re id, quod est uerum et bonum. (80)

Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Imaginative, Poetic Syllogism 67 The utility of this art is very great: for, since the perfection of man - according to what man is - is to recognize the true and the good in order to do and attain it... logic is especially useful because it is the only means and instrument that we possess to understand what is true and good in all things. As a good logician, Gundissalinus is going to hold himself on firm ground and deal with the basics. He starts with the thing itself, that which is analysed in Aristotle's Categories, the first part of the Organon: 'duobus autem modis cognoscitur res, ymaginacione scilicet et credulitate: ymaginacione, et ex significacione sui nominis, et cum dicitur "homo" uel "animal" ../ (80) (A thing is recognized in two ways: namely, by imagination and by belief. By imagination, both by the meaning of the word itself and as when 'man' or 'animal' is said ...) He nexts moves to the proposition, the subject of the second part of the Organon, the De interpretatione: 'credulitate, ut cum dicitur "homo est animal"' (... by belief, as when 'man is an animal' is said). The mental processes that allow the individual to deal with the thing itself and the proposition are imagination and belief: 'ymaginacio autem necessario precedit credulitatem. nisi enim prius cognoueris significacionem huius nominis "homo uel animal," non credes hoc quod dicitur "homo est animal" ' (Imagination necessarily precedes belief. For it you do not first understand the meaning of the noun 'man' or 'animal,' you will not believe it when it is said 'man is an animal'). After a brief discussion of how imagination and belief can come either through intuition or by proof, Gundissalinus suddenly makes a most interesting logical leap: 'quod ergo inducit nos ad cognoscendas sciencias ymaginatiuas, uocatur diffinicio, et quod inducit nos ad sciencias credulitatis, uocatur argumentacio' (80-1) (Therefore, that which leads us to understand the imaginative sciences is called definition and that which leads us to the sciences of belief is called argumentation). In terms of the Organon, he abandons the Categories, retains the De interpretatione, and moves forward to the two Analytics. That which allows us to attain imaginative knowledge of the thing is definition, which is interpreted in logic as genus plus differences. Argumentation comes through the syllogism or by induction, and such argumentation is what produces belief. These points should be recalled later in regard to my discussion of the function of definition as it relates to the hero in the CMC. The example Gundissalinus has used for explanation is that widespread one that Vance in From Topic to Tale sees as an underlying topic in the Yvain, and that I suggest is of importance also for the CMC. As it appears in the De divisione philosophiae the proposition 'homo est animal'

68 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid is a very simple argument indeed. But if we infer that the author means to suggest more than this with the word argumentum, then we must attempt to understand how this proposition can be developed in a syllogistic form. Before we do this, however, we are obliged to interpret what our author means by 'sciencias credulitatis/ since this knowledge, if extended beyond that of the thing and the proposition, would ultimately lead to all those benefits flowing from 'perfectio hominis.' One hundred years after Gundissalinus wrote his opus, another masterpiece was produced at Toledo, the so-called translation by Herman the German into Latin of Averroes's rendition of the Poetics of Aristotle. Judson Allen (1982) has proved, I believe, that the Latin text conveys information essentially different from what is in Aristotle, in that Herman has given us what a thirteenth-century individual understood when reading Aristotle.13 Even if one disagrees with particular aspects of Allen's interpretations of Herman's text, this important point remains valid. Credulitates (beliefs) and consuetudines (customs) are for Herman the two most important of the six parts of tragedy as he defines them (Allen 1982, 26), and represent, then, for him the most salient features of a tragic, poetic text. Since, as Allen and others demonstrate, the medieval poetic text was grounded in ethics, it follows that the well-being of society, which the well-wrought medieval imaginative work sought to support, ultimately depended upon positive beliefs and customs. The manner by which the two are achieved is a kind of speech act: 'Speech which encourages consuetudo exhorts to the performance or avoidance of some action; speech which encourages credulitates exhorts to the belief that something is or isn't' (ibid. 26). These two things are generated in the minds of an audience - and, I would also suggest, in the mind of a reader - not by rhetorical persuasion but by 'sermonem representativum' (ibid.).14 This explanation given by Allen for credulitates makes much clearer the discussion by Gundissalinus of the same idea. After one understands through imagination the significance of a word, one can move to decide the truth of that word when it is combined with another word in a proposition: 'nisi enim prius cognoueris significacionem huius nominis "homo uel animal," non credes hoc quod dicitur "homo est animal." ' The major difference between Gundissalinus and Herman's translation produced some hundred years later, is that the later text does not proceed to argumentum at this point but to 'sermonem representativum.' To summarize, if one considers the Ciceronian background of Gundis-

Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Imaginative, Poetic Syllogism 69 salinus's work in combination with medieval theories concerning imagination and belief, it is not difficult to envision his imaginative, poetic syllogism in the form of an extended, argumentative, persuasive structure, possibly in writing, directed toward the improvement of the human condition and circumstances. This imaginative, poetic syllogism or a combination of such devices extended into a 'sermonem representativum' could represent the full-blown poetic text. Although, as I have previously remarked, it is unlikely that the Cidpoet knew the De divisione, he may well have been familiar with all the major precepts with which Gundissalinus was dealing, since such were presented in and associated with the basic educational curriculum of the Middle Ages. A knowledge of these ideas, obtained initially in his studies at the intermediate level, would have provided him with the means for the poetic elaboration of that which is our text. In the following chapters I attempt to demonstrate the manner in which he accomplished his task.

6 Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero

Maria Eugenia Lacarra has observed, as have other critics, that division of the CMC into three cantares is artificial and that a separation of the poem into two parts more likely reflects the meaning inherent in the structure of the work. In the first section the protagonist is largely the Cid alone, while in the second the role of the ignoble Infantes de Carrion also receives emphasis: 'El autor nos presenta el proceso progresivo del "menos valer" de los Infantes contrastandolo punto por punto con el "mas valer" del Cid' (edition 1982, 31). Lopez Estrada also sees two distinct 'orientaciones' in the work, ones that 'requieren diferente disposicion en el desarrollo argumental' (59). As set forth by him, these two orientations fit the respective parts of the poem as described by Lacarra.1 This division of the CMC into two parts by the poet accords perfectly with medieval schemes concerning rewriting and recomposing, since one of the first steps the medieval rewriter was obliged to take in order to realize eventually a new text was to find a means for rationally dividing - or dividing anew - the original materia that was to be used in the elaboration of the new work (Allen 1982, 126). But as we have seen, in logic the act of definition is prior to the act of division. What I think occurs in the CMC is this: the poet has applied a particular kind of definition to the hero and his circumstances, and this act of defining has resulted in the division of the poem into the two parts that critics have noticed. What occurs in the poem is a good illustration of a process described by Judson Allen in The Ethical Poetic in the chapters that deal with the existence of the forma tractatus and the forma tractandi in poetic works of the later Middle Ages. The definition of the meaning of the hero's life in two ways provides a division of the poem - one recognized by modern

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 71 critics - that pertains to the basic significance in terms of medieval culture of the Cid as role model. But the CMC is obviously also divided into three separate cantares, as can be seen in lines 1085 and 2276. What I suspect is that the definition that results in the division into two represents a view of the material imposed upon it by the original Cid-poet, while lines 1085 and 2276 suggest a definition of the adventures of the hero given by a later corrector or scriptor that has to do with the manner in which this individual understood the temporal flow of these events. At line 1085 the hero moves toward Valencia, and someone thought that a new definition of the trajectory of his life was appropriate. At 2276 the marriage of the Infantes to the daughters is accomplished, making this a good place to end that portion. The definition of the third cantar would be 'a section that shows what this marriage will bring to pass.'2 Gundissalinus said that two mental exercises were necessary in order to understand properly a simple proposition of the type 'homo est animal': 'nisi enim prius cognoueris significacionem huius nominis "homo uel animal," non credes hoc quod dicitur "homo est animal"' (80). Imaginative knowledge of the thing could be secured through definition: 'quod ergo inducit nos ad cognoscendas sciencias ymaginatiuas, uocatur diffinicio ...' (80-1) (Therefore, that which leads us to understand the imaginative sciences is called definition... ), while belief concerning the truth and validity of the entire proposition could be attained through argument:'... et quod inducit nos ad sciencias credulitatis, uocatur argumentacio' (ibid) (... and that which leads us to the sciences of belief is called argumentation). This explanation of Gundissalinus is a standard one, in line with basic and elementary logical theory concerning the defining of the terms of a proposition and the argumentative procedures that would verify the truth of the proposition itself. Any medieval student who had studied basic dialectic would have been aware of the background for these statements and would have understood the information in them. The only somewhat original point for the Western Christian scholar was the imaginative approach to an attaining of belief concerning the validity of the term and consequently the entire proposition. This idea, doubtless latent in the Western Christian tradition, had been emphasized by the Arabic philosophers in a number of related contexts, and Gundissalinus must have taken it from them.3 The definition given by St Isidore for the human being, the one that derives from genus plus differentiae, is an example of the classic and most

72 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid basic of definitions in the Aristotelian sense: 'Homo est animal rationale, mortale, risibile, boni malique capax/ There were varieties of definition practiced in the Middle Ages that might be characterized as merely 'descriptive/ but other kinds used by thinkers in the period clearly reflected or suggested in some manner other Aristotelian schemes that rationalized the function of the universe.4 The proposition 'homo est animal' as expounded by Gundissalinus is, of course, a truncated version of the traditional example of definition seen in St Isidore. Eugene Vance mentions the widespread use of this dictum as an example in logical treatises of the Middle Ages and says that it is so common that it can be taken 'as a kind of emblem, not only of a train of ideas, but also of philosophical discourse itself (1987, 54). Vance believes that the proposition is of basic importance in regard to the structure of Chretien de Troyes's Yvain, and I think that the same is true for the CMC. The term homo can be further divided into individuals, so that one finds the common medieval example 'Socrates est animal' or, for our purposes, 'Cid est animal.'5 A continuation with the full definition as given by St Isidore means that our hero is rational, and in fact the entire poem may be seen in a fashion as a demonstration of his superior exercise of reason. In addition he is mortal, but because of the Christian dispensation his is a mortality that has to be understood in very important and specific ways, since Christ taught that his body could be resurrected and rejoined to his immortal soul. In regard to his earthly dimension he is certainly 'boni malique capax,' and no student of the poem would have difficulty in determining which side of the equation was appropriate for the hero. One does not wish to make too much of the point, but the poet also makes sure that we know that the hero is 'animal risibile': as he views the increasing number of his troops after he leaves San Pedro de Carderia, 'tornos a sonrrisar'6 (2985). I believe that definition functions in the CMC so as to produce a division that offers two distinct perspectives concerning the role of the hero as a mortal, rational animal.7 At the beginning of the poem the Cid is in disgrace with the king, deprived of his possessions, and forced into exile without his family. The two parts of the poem allow the poet to emphasize two very different aspects of the process of recovery the hero must undergo in order to regain his honour and his well-being, a process that in effect constitutes the subject-matter of the text. But logically, if definition must precede division, then the poet must have had a reason linked to definition that controlled his division. Since

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 73 it is the appearance of the archangel Gabriel to the hero in a vision (405-12) that confirms that he will overcome his difficulties and achieve great successes, this reason must have a base beyond that of the events of this world. The sure promise of the Resurrection exercises a didactic function in regard to the conduct of the individual Christian during this life, but it is also significant because of the figural or typological mode of thought that was so prevalent in the Middle Ages.8 The person who behaved according to proper Christian precepts during this earthly existence could hope effectively to assimilate himself to the group of individuals who had formed and would continue to form the chosen company across the span of sacred history.9 Because the trajectory of sacred history was understood as essentially positive, it could also be expected that the earthly life of the individual might be influenced by the salutary thrust of this process. The first section of the CMC demonstrates that the hero should be viewed not only as an individual blessed by the Almighty but also as one who forms part of a group favoured in the process of sacred history. The poem obviously demonstrates in addition that the hero is a good man in terms of this earthly existence. The Cid is a knight, a warrior, and a noble, although at first not of the highest rank, in a hierarchically conceived society. The second section of the poem shows what such a definition as 'bonus homo' means in the context of this earthly life - in medieval Spain during the Reconquest. The Porphyrian tree of substance with its divisions down to the species human being is certainly well grounded and significant in regard to this world, but from the perspective of Christian eternity it was not valid. In order to define the Christian company of the saints it is necessary to utilize some other method that avoids the problems inherent in the mark 'mortal.' Thomas Gilby describes one of the secondary schemes for definition, which was dependent upon reference to the Aristotelian four causes and which was much used, for example, by St Thomas Aquinas (156-9). This particular kind of definition certainly seems appropriate to effect the division that the Cid-poet has accomplished. The final cause and the efficient cause were understood as standing outside the object; they were extrinsic to it, depending upon the perfection of God for their existence, and they gave the definition of the things 'according to their end' (Gilby 158). The other two - the formal and the material - stressed the importance of context and situation in regard to the thing being

74 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid defined and were viewed as intrinsic to it (ibid. 161). The first section of the CMC can then be understood as one defined from the base of extrinsic reasons, while the second depends upon intrinsic explanations. The Aristotelian four causes were much discussed by philosophers and thinkers in twelfth-century France, particularly among those at the School of Chartres. By the mid-thirteenth century these causes had become commonplace in Spain and elsewhere as a means for explaining not only the structure of the universe but also many of its secondary functions. As Minnis points out (32), the four causes were used to discuss the extrinsic and intrinsic aspects of a text, and even the prologues that were produced to head commentaries on the various works of different auctores were based on these causes (5). The date at which the CMC was probably composed, 1207, is early for Spain in regard to the kind of definition by the four causes that is discussed by Gilby. However, it is by no means unlikely that the Cidpoet, as a student, heard reference to these causes in a lecture as an explanation for some aspect of a work being read. The medieval teacher of necessity had recourse to matters covered by the quadrivium when discussing details in a text that had to do with the physical functioning of the world. I believe the Cid-poet used either the scheme of the four causes or one analogous to it in order to define the two periods in the life of the hero that correspond to the two sections of the poem. When the hero arrives at dawn at the monastery of San Pedro de Cardena, the abbot is singing matins, while Ximena, accompanied by her 'cinco duerias de pro' (239), is praying for her husband and for success in his undertakings: 'iTu que a todos guias val a Mio Cid el Canpeador!' (241). The long prayer she recites later while kneeling on the steps of the altar, which has the form of an induction or certainly one similar to that of an induction,10 must be understood in a way as a continuation of the earlier one. Ximena has established one group, 'todos/ which she identifies through a series of examples as those throughout sacred history who have been blessed and protected by the Almighty, and, by implication another group, those who were not so fortunate. With the plea 'val a Mio Cid el Canpeador/ Ximena implores that her husband be granted his place, in a metaphysical sense, in this great transcendental order of Christians, past and present, who have had a role in the ongoing process of sacred history. The group to which the hero is consigned at the monastery of San Pedro de Cardena is obviously not one arrived at by strict logical division from the genus 'substance'

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 75 or the subaltern one 'animal/ but it is of the type that certainly appealed to the medieval religious mentality. This group is analogous to the one represented pictorially in medieval art and called the Sacra Conversazione. Such an assembly, which begins to appear in the trecento in Italy, usually included the Virgin and Child in addition to various saints and represented 'a company which the believer hopes one day to join, through his good deeds in imitation of the saints, and through his prayers' (Thurlemann 749; see also Goffen). The basis for the idea of a holy gathering with which the devout may hope to be united in the next life is biblical, and was expressed in a variety of ways in the Middle Ages prior to its realization in painting in Italy. Gundissalinus tells us that the instrument of logic is for all practical purposes dual: 'Instrumentum autem principale huius artis duo sunt, scilicet, sillogismus et inductio' (77). He says 'principale' because he knows that in reality two other devices are routinely listed also as instruments of the dialectic art - the enthymeme and the example. But these are less important for argument than the syllogism and induction because an enthymeme is really only a syllogism with its most basic proposition missing, and an example, as we shall see, can be taken as part of induction. Boethius tells us that induction 'is discourse by means of which there is a progression from particulars to universals' (De topicis 44). An example is how one chooses a suitable ruler. If a pilot for a ship and a charioteer for horses are chosen in such-and-such a manner, and if 'similar [conclusions] are gathered in many [cases], then it results from these that for anything which one wants responsibly ruled or governed one finds a suitable ruler not by lot but by art' (44). But, of course, the particulars brought together can also prove another particular as well as something universal (44-5). Boethius then goes on to say that although this form of argumentation is not as certain as that of the syllogism, it is more readily believable (45). Since some variety of psychological assent is always the aim of argumentation when related to the literary tradition, induction then is more properly suited to the literary piece. The form of induction as explained by Boethius was the standard until topical logic began to be replaced by more sophisticated versions after the Renaissance. The following illustration from Thomas Wilson's late-sixteenth-century The Rule of Reason is a good example of the induction as it was used throughout the Middle Ages, and it is notable for the manner in which

76 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid it employs types from sacred history to make its point. I use it in connection with a work composed some four hundred years earlier because I believe that Wilson's purpose in his induction is remarkably similar to that of the Cid-poet. An Induction, is a kinde of argumente, when we gather sufficiently a numbre of propre names, and there vpon make a conclusion vniuersall, as thus. Abraham was iustified by his faithe. Likewise Isaac, Likewise lacob, Likewise Gedeon, Likewise David, And all the holie men besides without excepcion. Ergo al that be iustified before god, are iustified by their faith (78).

Wilson gives two other cases of induction, also with illustrations drawn from the Bible, to prove the respective points that 'Therefore all rebelles, and traitours to their Prince and king, shall die wretchedly' and 'Therefore the ende of wicked men is wretched' (79). What stands behind these inductions is a division of the subaltern genus animal, which eventually produces species such as 'holy men,' and by implication 'unholy men'; 'rebels and traitors' versus 'those who are not'; and 'wicked men' versus 'good men.' The implication for the reader who wished to be justified and not to finish wretchedly was that he or she should attempt to achieve an assimilation into one of the positive groups. Thus I believe that the Cid-poet uses a framing topic 'from definition' as the basis for an induction that leads the reader to understand the hero's participation in sacred history. The inductive paradigm that Ximena presents begins with Jonah: '[salvest] a Jonas quando cayo en la mar' (338b~9) and continues with the three other examples of Daniel, St Sebastian, and Susannah. The ergo yields something of the following: As you saved these four, now save (and because of typology I'm sure that you will) my husband, me, and my children.11 And, of course, Ximena eventually understands that this is what has happened: 'Sacada me avedes de muchas vergiiengas malas' (1596). But, of course, these examples are included in a long list of instances from sacred history. What one finally infers from all of these together is first, that Ximena hopes and believes that the fate of her husband and

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 77 by extension that of his family is related to and fits into God's plan for the world, and second, that some process in the poem will demonstrate how this is so. The appearance of the angel Gabriel to the hero at Figueruela shortly after he leaves San Pedro de Cardena (404-12) as well as a great number of other positive signs and symbols confirm that such is indeed the case. The hero has now been defined as belonging to a particular fortunate group, and belief in that definition has been secured through an induction. In the next chapter I argue that all this is embedded in another argumentative configuration, which aims to demonstrate that a process of manifestation and revelation is at work in the life of the hero, a process that ultimately results in his success at Valencia and in his return to the favour of King Alfonso. The poem could logically end with the events at Valencia, when the Cid has achieved so much, but it does not. Instead it continues with the marriages of the daughters to the Infantes de Carrion, the assault in the Robledo de Corpes, and finally the cortes in Toledo and the combat at Carrion. It might seem advisable to proceed at this point with a discussion of the argumentative form, which I believe supports the behaviour and function of the hero in the first section as he, defined as and demonstrated to be a member of a blessed company, regains the favour of the king and wins his victories. I shall, however, delay that discussion and go on to the second section, because of the nature of the dialectical structure that is present in the last half. Not only is there a great deal of evidence that supports the existence of this particular kind of argument in the Middle Ages, but also scholars have previously suggested that the Cid-poet was employing such topical disputation, although I think they have misunderstood the way in which he did so. At this point a discussion of the topos that informs the structure of the second section will facilitate later an explanation of the function of the other topical constructions in the work. It can be argued that the beginning of the second section of the poem occurs around line 1372, when the Infantes have just emerged on the scene, since it is also obvious there that the king's attitude in regard to the hero has changed completely for the better.12 But a much more important turn in events comes later, when the character of the Infantes begins to become clear. This happens in the episode of the lion (2278-310), where for the first time the text shows that the Cid's suspicions, expressed earlier, concerning his sons-in-law are well founded:

78 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid 'Ellos son mucho urgullosos e an part en la cort, / d'este casamiento non avria sabor, / mas pues lo conseja el que mas vale que nos' (1938-40). This is also the place where the characteristic of the Infantes that most concerns the hero, their excessive pride, receives the kind of topical treatment commonly related in the Middle Ages to overweening selfesteem and haughtiness. Bandera Gomez has understood this episode as central to the meaning of the poem, while David Hook, thinking that Bandera Gomez may have exaggerated the significance of the scene to some degree, also believes it to be of major importance, since there is a 'detailed reiteration' of it at the cortes (1976, 553). From the lion episode forward for some 250 lines the poem expounds a curious intermixture of the joy of the gaudium period, produced by the weddings and the success of battle, and the realization that a serious problem exists in regard to the Infantes. Line 2473 proclaims 'Mucho son alegres Mio Cid e sus vasallos,' while lines 2535-7, which comment upon the ridicule heaped upon the Infantes because of their conduct in battle, presage difficulty: 'For aquestos juegos que ivan levantando / e las noches e los dias tan mal los escarmentando, / tan mal se consejaron estos iff antes amos/ Brian Powell has commented upon the curious fact that although clearly the last half of the poem depends upon the marriages and the lion episode for its relevance, there is no mention of either of these occurrences in works such as the Historia Roderici or the Linaje del Cid (1983, 26). These sections must be inventions that, I would argue, were added by the poet, for whom it was necessary to find a manner to facilitate the defining of the Cid as hero in relation to his fellow man. Numerous studies have explicated the function of the lion in the poem and the reason why a poet might include it. Colin Smith has drawn attention to an episode in the De gestis Karoli Imperatoris and one similar in Berte aus grans pies in which a king confronts a lion. But on both occasions the king kills the lion (Estudios 138-9). Miguel GarciGomez (1975) provides the pertinent bibliography in regard to the episode in the CMC, and has also studied the long history of the lion that renders itself humble before a personage of venerable mien (172-206). Garci-Gomez points out that this humble lion is a 'commonplace/ and he discusses this tradition in part in terms of the explanation as given by Curtius (1963). He also understands that the commonplace or topic had an extremely important function in the construction of the ancient oration, and alludes to it, with references to Quintilian and Cicero, as a sedes argumentorum, that which the orator could utilize in elaborating the structure of a speech. By extension, of course, he implies that the

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 79 Cid-poet was using the lion as such a sedes in the CMC. But in following Curtius, Garci-Gomez falls victim to a confusion inherent in the explanation of this great scholar himself, who did not make sufficiently clear, as we have seen, the differences of sense that exist in the terms topos and locus. According to the ancient theory of the topics, the theme itself of the humble lion cannot be the seat of an argument. It can only be the material used by the poet as he employed one of the traditional and well-attested topics for constructing argument that were handed down to the Middle Ages from classical times.13 Possibly, however, the motif, carrying with it - or carried along by - the original empty structure that informed it, was used as a content place of the type described by Sister Joan Marie Lechner. In any event, in the CMC the subject of the humble lion is content material that has been shaped at some point or other by a particular topic of argument. Whether the motif was adjusted to the empty locus by the Cid-poet or whether he took it with his material is difficult to ascertain. Paolo Cherchi believes that the motif of the humble lion, which is another way of expressing the maxim leo sicut rex iustus et pius, is not found in the bestiary and has its first vernacular occurrence in a poem of Bertran de Born composed sometime after 1194 (17): 'Bo»m sap 1'usatges q'a»l leos, / q'a ren vencuda non es maus, / mas contr'orgoill es orgoillos' (Ar ven la coindeta sazos, no. 43, p. 433) Since Bertran in his poem 'Qan vei pels vergiers despleir' (no. 22, p. 281) expresses the hope that knowledge of one of his sirventes will be spread throughout Castile, 'e per Chastella 1'estenda/ it is not impossible that the Cid-poet knew of his work and learned of the motif through his poetry. Cherchi traces the origins of the theme back to Ovid, Lucan, and Claudinus (14) and shows how it evolved in the political sphere in relation to the idea of the king or emperor as lion.14 One of the best examples of the political sense of the expression comes in a poem quoted by Cherchi from the Archpoet, which suggests that the prince be tempered in his dealings with his people: Parcit enim subditis leo rex ferarum et est erga subditos immemor irarum, Et vos idem facite principes terrarum: Quod caret dulcedine, nimis est amarum. (76) For the lion, king of beasts, is clement toward his subjects And forgets his rages against them,

8o Structures from the Trivium in the Cantor de Mio Cid And you do the same, princes of the earth: That which lacks sweetness is too bitter. It is difficult to take these lines as a serious political statement, however, since they occur in the poem 'Estuans intrinsecus ira vehementi/ which contains the famous line 'Meum est propositum in taberna mori' (75). The Archpoet seems to be asking the prince to be forbearing toward a subject whose only interests are wine, women, and song. But the parodic use of the idea shows that it had assumed importance as a political motif, since the poem implies that the ruler, like a lion, should forgo wrath with the humble subject. Francisco Rico (1985,3 and n. 4) sees an echo of these verses in the line 'tenebrarum principi nimis est amarum' (it is too bitter to the prince of shadows) from the so-called Poema de Roncesvalles, composed around 1200 in praise of the hospice at Roncesvalles. If his intuition is correct, it demonstrates again that material in which the lion was associated with the humble and just prince was known in the Peninsula. The poem of Bertran de Born also had political overtones, since it was written in connection with the freeing of Richard the Lion-hearted in 1194. That Bertran associated Richard with the king of beasts is demonstrated in his poem 'Volontiers fera sirventes/ where he writes: Tapiol, tu sias cochos, di«n en Richart qu'il es leos' (no. 42, p. 427). The idea explicitly expressed in the poem of the Archpoet, 'Et vos idem facite principes terrarum/ could have served the Cid-poet well as a motif to suggest that the ira regia of King Alfonso should be tempered with a subject, Ruy Diaz, demonstrated in the poem to be the humblest of men and the most loyal of subjects. Garci-Gomez also discusses the theme of the humble lion in terms of the elaboration of structure in the poem, when he points out (1975,204) that both Pero Vermudez and Martin Antolinez refer to the episode while developing an argumentum concerning the dishonour of the two Infantes (3362-3). I agree with his assessment save that again I believe there stands behind this structuring the form of a topos, in this case a rhetorical one, which is not the same as the motif or content material of the humble lion. Eugene Vance in From Topic to Tale (1987) has reached conclusions that are extremely relevant, I think, to this question of the function of the lion in the CMC. Vance argues that a specific dialectical topic lies behind the overall structure of Chretien de Troyes's Yvain, a work in which the hero develops a unique relationship with a lion. This topic

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 81 employs particular motifs and materia that were traditionally associated with the animal and that thus could be used to elaborate the framework of the piece. Vance believes that the topic 'from genus' is the one of importance for the structure of the Yvain. The manner in which it is decisive is that a particular proposition growing out of this topic, a proposition that occurs again and again in medieval writings on logic, can be seen as furnishing an argumentative framework for the Yvain. This maxim, which Gundissalinus used as an illustration in regard to imagination and belief, is 'si est homo, est animal.' Thus, according to the topic 'from genus,' whatever is present in the genus animal also exists in all the subaltern species under this genus. Now an argument 'from genus' connecting man to animal is possible, as we have seen, from the perspective of logic because the two are related on the Porphyrian tree of substance. If we begin with the category substance and work our way down by division, we pass through corporeal substance, then animate corporeal substance, then sensitive animate corporeal substance (that is, an animal), then rational animal, and finally mortal rational animal - that is, man. All those attributes present above man in the tree exist in the human also. That which pairs with man is immortal rational animal, a god.15 But the level that contains the lion branches off at the stage rational animal versus irrational animal, and thus the king of beasts is on another branch of the upside-down tree. The problem in describing the structure of the Yvain in terms of the topic 'from genus' is that a means must be found to relate man and lion within logically permissible forms. Vance does this (1987,87) by moving from the restrictive model of the Porphyrian tree, where man and lion are on different branches, to the image of the heap as explained by Eco (108). The medieval bestiary mixes the differentiae of man and animal in a kind of 'whimsical and eclectic amalgam' (1987, 88), from which the author draws inspiration as well as material for his comparisons and contrasts. The difficulty with this recourse to the model of the heap is not only that it is an abrupt departure from the kind of logical reasoning prevalent in the Middle Ages but also that it depends upon the demonstration by a modern scholar, Eco, of the deficiencies in the Porphyrian tree and a suggestion for a replacement for it. The Porphyrian tree demands a certain rigour in formulating propositions about species such as man or lion, and the inconsistencies and disadvantages in regard to it discussed

82 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantor de Mio Cid by Eco are there, but medievals for the most part coped with such problems. The heap does have a medieval form that Vance recognizes and discusses - the bestiary, itself a part of a larger phenomenon, the encyclopaedia. I shall attempt later to show that these works played an important role in the use of topics and arguments. The usual way in which medievals dealt with the difficulties of comparing things on different branches of the Porphyrian tree was to formulate propositions that observed the strictures implied by its form. Once propositions were set, they could then be arranged into arguments that, although traditionally of four types, were usually in practice two, the syllogism and the induction. Vance is well aware that there is a set of rhetorical topics similar in nature but not identical to those of dialectic that could also be used for formulating arguments. But from the time of Aristotle these were taken as applying to specific cases and not for explaining structures of thought. Vance prefers to believe that Chretien was thinking in terms of the dialectic topic because he sees the poet as conceiving the work in terms of a more general structure of thought: 'I would propose that Chretien had come to accept dialectic as a metarhetoric and that he was himself (and wanted his readers also to become) aware of principles for inventing and evaluating fiction that are "topical" in a more abstract dialectical sense of that term' (1987, 46). Boethius in discussing the case, that which involves persons, times, deeds, and other circumstances and is therefore properly the ground of rhetoric and not of logic, gives an interesting example: 'Was Cicero rightfully thrust into exile at a time of uncertainty for the republic because he had put to death Roman citizens without the command of the people?' (De topicis 35). The analogy with the situation of the Cid is obvious; he had not put anyone to death, but he had done things that did not please King Alfonso, and as modern critics have determined, the king had reason to be vexed with his vassal. As single events, as cases, these examples are appropriate parallels for the material of the CMC, and might lead us to think that the argument of the poem is based upon the rhetorical case. But if the CMC is to be taken as more than just one single situation, the story of a vassal wronged who is then successful, if it is to be understood as exemplary in the broader sense, then commonly held opinions concerning the universalities of genus and species, properties and accidents, would have been more illustrative. 'Homo est animal.' What does this mean? How does the human being in general function

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 83 as an animal, and how is this the case with the Cid in general? How do the properties and accidents that affect him relate to his animality and then to the broader social and ethical sphere?16 Surely Vance is correct in believing that the dialectical topoi are more appropriate for the discussion of such questions than those of the rhetorical variety. In the CMC the poet seems to have had recourse to the topics from rhetoric when dealing with specific situations, while utilizing those from dialectic in regard to the overall structure of the work. I believe that the episode of the lion in the CMC functions with reference to a dialectic topic, but it is the one 'from definition,' which has been used by the poet in order to illustrate something basic and essential about the character of the hero. I have suggested that at the beginning of the work the poet has defined the hero extrinsically in regard to his particular place in sacred history through the use of an induction. What the poet does in the second section of the work is to designate the hero as belonging to a division of the subaltern genus animal, this one an earthly company, so that he may be compared and contrasted with other members of his class, in particular the Infantes de Carrion and his king. This is an intrinsic definition, and because this is a group that functions only within this world, the Aristotelian way of defining an animal, as passed on to the Middle Ages by St Isidore and others, is perfectly appropriate. The poet can compare the manner in which Cid, king, and Infantes exercise their respective roles in regard to the final aspect of the Isidorian definition of the human being, which says that each individual is 'capax boni malique.' The idea used by the Cid-poet in the pairing of lion and ruler is one that finds superb expression several centuries later in the famous tavern scene that follows the robbery in Shakespeare's 7 Henry IV. Scholars have noted that the character Falstaff presents his argument here in what can be seen loosely as syllogistic terms (see Craig 384-5). The scene is remarkable, not only as a demonstration of the durability of the theme of the reverent lion in the presence of a prince, but also because it proves that the motif was indeed interpreted in terms of a dialectical argument. Falstaff employs the theme of the interaction of the lion with the humble in the hope of proving that he is not a coward: 'Why thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules; but beware instinct; the lion will not touch the true prince. Instinct is a great matter; I was now a coward on instinct. I shall think the better of myself and thee during my life; I for a valiant lion, and thou for a true prince' (n, iv, 298-303, quoted by

84 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid Craig, 385). What we have in Shakespeare is one of the ways of defining what the true prince really is - an individual who possesses a group of positive attributes that can be recognized instinctively by the king of beasts. Juan Manuel, at the end of the epilogue of the Libro de los exemplos del Conde Lucanor et Patronio, lists humility as one of the basic characteristics of the successful ruler:17 'Et vos, sennor conde Lucanor, si queredes aver la gracia de Dios et buena fama del mundo, fazet buenas obras, et sean bien fechas, sin infinta et sin ypocrisia; et entre todas las cosas del mundo vos guardat de sobervia et set omildoso sin begueneria et sin ypocrisia, pero la humildat, sea sienpre guardando vuestro estado en guisa que seades omildoso, mas non omillado' (474). The 'estado' that Juan Manuel refers to here is, of course, the one pertaining to the ruler or noble in the hierarchical society of the Middle Ages, which he himself has described so well in his Libro de los estados. For him society is divided into 'defensores, oradores, labradores/18 Throughout medieval Europe, and especially in areas such as Spain where there were long periods of active conflict, the roles of defender and noble were synonymous. In logical terms, as we have seen, the definition of 'definition' is genus plus difference(s); one gives the genus to which something belongs and then those properties and accidents that make it different from other members of the same species. A possible result of dividing the species homo, human, thereby reconstituting it as a proximum genus, is something similar to the famous three estates as expressed by Juan Manuel. This is logically, perhaps, not the best of divisions, but an analogous exercise that separates human beings into professions is not uncommon. The technical explanation that pertains to the topic definition is, according to Boethius: 'that to which the definition of the genus does not belong is not a species of the genus defined' (De topicis 49). How does one know, then, whether an individual belongs to a particular proximum genus such as noble warrior, which is a species of the proximum genus human being? The answer according to the topic 'from definition' is to attempt to apply the definition that fits the proximum genus noble warrior to the individual. The conventional wisdom bound up in a proverb, which allows the king of beasts to make the decision whether the definition is applicable, is one way of making the test. In Valencia the lion from instinct recognizes who, from among the large group present, is the true prince, the individual with the attributes to be designated noble warrior. The reaction of the beast proves that the

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 85 Cid fits the role perfectly, although he was born into a family of much less standing than that of the Infantes. The text eventually resolves even this problem, when at the very end of the poem emissaries arrive from the kings of Aragon and Navarre to ask for the hands of the daughters in marriage for the sons of their respective lords. The fact that the episode defines the hero as true prince has, I believe, great significance for his role in the poem as compared with that of King Alfonso; I discuss this relationship in chapter 9. But how did a maxim that says that a lion can judge the true prince become associated in the medieval tradition with such a topic as 'from definition'? We see how this occurred in an example from Boethius, when the sage is discussing the Ciceronian dialectical topic 'from a similar/ whose accompanying maximal proposition is: regarding similars, the judgment is one and the same. The illustration that Boethius gives for the topic and maximal proposition is the following: 'Suppose there is a question whether rulers of state should be acquired by lot rather than by choice. It might be denied, since even for a ship a skilled ruler is selected not by lot but by choice. A ship is similar to a state, a pilot to a magistrate' (De topicis 66). The interesting point here is 'even for a ship a skilled ruler is selected not by lot but by choice.' Why is this deemed to be so? Because it is a commonly accepted bit of knowledge that has attained, as it were, the status of a principle. It obviously is not a first principle of the sort put forth in the Posterior Analytics, but for the Neoplatonic tradition that yielded the topics and that depended upon them as bases for argument it could serve practically as well. The same is true for the maxim that allowed the lion to judge the character of the noble. The long process of development of the motif in association with the idea of lion as symbol for royalty as described by Cherchi accorded the motif the status of a proverbial topic, a proposition whose truth and validity would now be commonly accepted. Richard McKeon has contrasted the logical methods used by Alfarabi, Abelard, and Maimonides: 'Alfarabi's method is, ancient because principles are found beyond the compositions of terms, propositions, and syllogisms by induction and transfer' (1975, 182). Abelard, however, has constructed his principles through a process of reduction by the dialectical devices of division and definition, while Maimonides, like the speculative grammarians of the Christian tradition, found principles in the shifting meanings of words. What McKeon means, I think, is that Alfarabi would have continued to use a statement from commonly

86 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid accepted wisdom, such as the one about pilots and ships, or lions and nobles, while the other two would have required a logically refined principle as a base. In the discussion period that followed the presentation of the paper referred to above, McKeon made a statement that neatly summarizes the problem of what the topoi are, how they relate to propositions and arguments, and finally, how what we deem a literary piece can evolve from all of this. It deserves to be quoted in its entirety: 'What I am saying about the Latin encyclopedia is essentially that it is an organization of arts which teaches how to use empty places (topoi) for purposes of discovery and memory, both parts of rhetoric, form them into propositions (logoi) which can refer to things or communicate or persuade, and modify them in thematic organizations in which narration in poetry and demonstration in geometry are modes (tropoi) of the same argumentative form' (186).19 The Latin encyclopaedia is the heap of which Eco speaks and that Vance utilizes as the basis for his discussion of the Yvain. I think that the information in this heap and other commonplace material is what was used as the authoritative ground underlying much topical argument in medieval literature. Whether it be that 'the pilot of a ship is chosen by choice' or 'the lion can recognize a true prince,' the wideranging encyclopaedias, or similar material of a traditional nature, were looked upon as storehouses containing information that was to be taken seriously. Leo Spitzer, in an article in 1938, discussed the tradition of the humble lion in connection with the poem and resolved it into an equation that is syllogistic in character - 'Le lion est a avec A, b avec B' (527). Other ways of presenting this statement are 'the lion is humble with the humble, and proud with the proud' or 'the lion yields to the humble but is formidable with the proud.' One can elaborate a syllogistic structure - removed, of course, from the strictures of Barbara celarent - from the episode of the lion in the manner that Spitzer did, which runs something as follows: the lion is fierce with the proud; the Cid is not proud; therefore the lion is not fierce with the Cid. Or, the lion is humble with the true prince; the lion is humble with the Cid; therefore, the Cid is a true prince. Such constructions do not, however, really answer any of the important questions concerning the hero's relationship with other principal characters in the poem. It is for this reason that Vance's view that a writer could have achieved conjointure by contrasting episodes through dialectical counterposition is so valuable. If the sense of an episode is taken dialec-

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 87 tically in connection with other sections in a work, then valuable insights can be obtained pertaining to the significance of the piece as a whole. The maxim of the lion helps to resolve the problem, much commented upon, of whether the Infantes are cowards. What the maxim demonstrates is that they are haughty, arrogant, and filled with that disdain that becomes more and more obvious as the poem moves toward its close. What mere mortal, unprotected by humility, can help but react in extreme fashion when faced with the king of beasts? That the Infantes later are not enthusiastic about fighting in the Cid's army does not prove them cowards, but again proudly unwilling to extend themselves on behalf of someone whom they consider to be their inferior. The remaining events of the poem flow from the episode of the lion, or, rather, the poet has used this episode to explain why the remainder of the poem is there. This is the reason given as to why the Infantes and their wives leave Valencia: 'Sacar las hemos de Valencia de poder del Campeador, / despues en la carrera feremos nuestro sabor, / ante que nos rretrayan lo que cuntio del leon' (2546-8). The awful attack on the wives is directly associated with what happened with the lion: Iran aquestos mandados al Cid Campeador, / nos vengaremos por aquesta la del leon' (2718-19). We have already seen how Pero Vermudez uses the episode in his denunciation of the Infantes in Toledo, and when it is Martin Antolinez's turn, he continues in much the same vein. In chapter 10 I argue that the long portions of debate exchanged between the Cid and his allies and those of the Infantes de Carrion in the cartes episode are based upon the model of the oration in the De inventione, and that the poet availed himself of the rhetorical loci that Cicero says should be used in the elaboration of such orations. One of these, the locus drawn 'from a name,' can with certainty be shown to be present when the poet says to Pero Vermudez, 'iFabla, Pero Mudo, varon que tanto callas!' (3302).20 And, of course, the name of the hero himself, derived traditionally from the Arabic sayyid, meaning 'lord/ also fits the rhetorical pattern of the locus that suggests that something significant can be proved about the circumstances, personality, and destiny of a character through reference to the meaning of his or her name. There are a number of cases in the CMC, besides the accepted relation of the name Cid to sayyid, that taunt us with the possibility that the poet may have known enough vocabulary and phraseology in Arabic to have elaborated other rhetorical puns 'from a name' in a manner similar to what he did in the case of Pero Vermudez. According to the text, but

88 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid not history, the king of Valencia, who was disturbed by the news of what the hero was accomplishing, 'por cuer le peso mal' (636), and who sent two of his entourage to rectify matters, was called Tamin, a word that an Arabist could associate with the verb tamana, in the second form 'to quiet, 'to calm' (Wehr 569). Lerchundi's explanation of the fourth form of the base verb 'se tranquilizo; se considero seguro (de un peligro)' (227) shows a word that portrays a state of mind the complete reverse of what King Tamin actually felt. Does the example of King Tamin represent a knowing use of antiphrasis on the part of the poet? The two kings who arrive to put matters right are Fariz and Galve (654). It is not difficult to connect the name Fariz with the Arabic noun jaras, 'horse/ or 'knight' (Wehr 704). The base verb is delightful in that it implies two contrasting meanings, as can be seen in Lerchundi's 'hizo pedazos' against 'fue habil en la equitacion' (302-3). King Fariz is supposed to be the flower of Moorish knighthood but has to flee the field after he is dealt terrible blows by the Cid:'... por la loriga ayuso la sangre destellando / bolvio la rrienda por irsele del campo' (762-3). The name Galve could derive from Arabic ghalaba, 'to conquer, vanquish, defeat' (Wehr 680), certainly an ironic designation considering what happens to the unfortunate king: 'Martin Antolinez un colpe dio a Galve, / las carbonclas del yelmo echogelas aparte, / cortol' el yelmo que llego a la carne' (765-7). This stem ghalaba was widely used in the Arabic of the Peninsula (see Lerchundi 287-8)21 and Galmes de Fuentes believes that the word campeador as applied to the Cid may be a caique on ghalib, 'conqueror' (53). He also thinks that the Cid-poet was familiar with the tradition of the Muslim epic in Spain: '... conocedor sin duda de la epopeya arabe, hubo de tener presentes modelos epicos arabes al idear la formula total Mio Cid Campeador' (55). If this is true, it would have been a pleasing, ironic touch for the Christian campeador to defeat a Muslim king whose name meant in Arabic the one who is victorious. A concord by antiphrasis of the meanings of these words in Arabic with the semantic field where they are employed may be nothing more than coincidence, but I think these examples imply to the critic that the possibility of topical argument from the loci associated with the name must be taken seriously in the CMC.22 Later I argue that the poem develops a major argument from the topic 'comparison of a lesser thing,' whereby the role of the hero is given as a corrective for the behaviour of King Alfonso. In order to make the comparison function well, the poem, I believe, connects the two through the figure of the lion, which as a general symbol signifies royalty. But

Defining and Dividing the Adventures of the Hero 89 since within the context of the work a specific lion accords the hero the kind of recognition normally reserved for the true prince, king and vassal are related in a curious proposition in which both are characterized by an association with the king of beasts. A suggestion by Mikel de Epalza raises the possibility that the poet, in having the lion recognize the Cid as true prince, may also have been indicating in other ways the presence in the hero of those exalted, leonine characteristics that truly pertain to the regal personality. Epalza has suggested that the word cid may be related to a root common in Arabic that meant lion, as well as one that meant lord: 'Varies diccionarios arabes suelen mencionar, por otra parte, el paso semantico de sid "leon" a sid "serior," en el lenguaje corriente' (yi).23 Even if Epalza is not correct in his assumption that the name Cid is the same as the derived form sid from 'asad,24 there is still the possibility that the poet, if he knew even some elementary Arabic, indulged in word-play on the basis of the similarity between sayyid and 'asad since the major radicals 'sin' and 'dal' are the same in both words.25 That the Arabic-speaking population of the Peninsula used the word 'asad in regard to their heroes is demonstrated by Galmes de Fuentes, who points out that the great warrior Ali in the Libra de las batallas is often referred to with the tag 'Asad, lion (53). And there is the reference to the hero as lion in the translation in the Primera Cronica General of an elegy for the city of Valencia, which laments the effects of the siege by the Cid: 'Si fuer a diestro, matar ma el aguaducho. / Si fuer a siniestro matar ma el leon' (Menendez Pidal 1904, 402). If the poet did see the word cid as associated in some manner with 'asad, it means that the existence of positive qualities in the hero usually associated with royalty are supported by a subordinate dialectical topical argument based upon his name. This secondary argument makes even more powerful and compelling the more general one taken 'from definition/ The hero is defined as true prince but also as bearing 'from the name' those distinct properties and attributes that the Middle Ages usually associated with the lion as a symbol for the ruler. I turn next to a discussion of the dialectical structure associated with themes of awakening and manifestation, which I believe characterizes the first section of the poem. In Chapter 9 I return to the important question of those relationships within the work that the image of the lion occasions, since I believe that the lion is the symbol that links the three poetic syllogisms that function in the poem.

7

Tan buen dia es hoy7: The Positive Frame of the Poem

At the very end of the text of the CMC there has been added by someone, whom Smith takes to be a presenter of the work in the fourteenth century (1983, 207), an explicit that is very difficult to read. The traditional rendering of these lines suggests that this person is asking to be rewarded with a bit of wine and some money for having pleasingly performed the work. I might add to those conjectures that the reward may also have been sought for emending the poem: 'El rromanz / es leido, datnos del vino; si non tenedes dineros, echad / Alia unos pefios, que bien vos lo daran sobr'ellos' (3733-5). A few years after the CMC was composed, Gonzalo de Berceo, at the beginning of La Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, presents a charming quatrain that associates the results of the work of a skilled poet with a good glass of wine: Quiero fer una prosa en romanz paladino en qual suele el pueblo fablar con so vezino, ca non so tan letrado por fer otro latino, bien valdra, como creo, un vaso de bon vino. (2)

It is easy to take this verse as nothing more than the assertion of a homespun, somewhat rude country priest, who naturally related his art to various aspects of rural life around him. The presenter of the CMC, if he had done his job well, may also have looked forward to some reward, and what better for the dry throat than a draught of wine? It is interesting that Francisco Sanchez de las Brozas, el Brocense, in the sixteenth century, takes the association of wine drinker and good

'Tan buen dia es hoy': The Positive Frame of the Poem 91 poet as the basis for an illustration for a syllogism to represent the figure baroco; / 'Scribentes bona carmina utuntur vino. / Petrus non utitur vino. / Petrus igitur non scribit bona carmina' (Obras i, 284). (Those who write good poems enjoy wine. Peter does not enjoy wine. Peter, therefore, does not write good poems). This dialectical association of the good poet with good wine is probably not original with el Brocense, since often such ideas were taken from tradition. The formation of a syllogism that related poetry of high quality to the drinking of wine of a similar nature may have depended upon the topic 'from associated things,' as evolved by folk wisdom and traditions such as that of the scholar in the tavern. Boethius says that 'associated things are those which have a common boundary (finitimum locum) so that in time sometimes they go before, as a meeting (congressio) before love, sometimes they go with the thing with which they are associated, as the noise of footsteps with walking, and sometimes they follow, as mental agitation follows a horrible crime' (De topicis 1978, 67). Or, there is the possibility that the framer of such a syllogism may have drawn the argument from the locus 'from a cause.' In such a case the drinking of a good wine would be taken as the reason why good poetry would be produced. From the point of view of the physical universe and its timeless laws, from the perspective of philosophy and theology, good wine and good poetry have no normal association, but the conclusions of the medieval poet may have been otherwise. The Archpoet in his 'Archicancellarie, vir discrete mentis' proclaims what must have been a favourite theme among medieval students: Unicuique proprium dat Natura donum: ego versus faciens bibo vinum bonum et quod habent melius dolia cauponum; tale vinum generat copiam sermonum. Tales versus facio, quale vinum bibo; nihil possum facere nisi sumpto cibo; nihil valent pentius que ieiunus scribo; Nasonem post calicem carmine preibo. (58-9) Nature gives to each his own gift: I, making verses, drink good wine which the taverners' jars have better; such wine produces an abundance of speech. The verses I write are like the wine I drink;

92 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid I can do nothing without nourishment;

the things I write when fasting are worth absolutely nothing; After a glass, I outdo Ovid in song.

This young poet, who can best Ovid after downing good wine, would certainly have agreed with the force of the syllogism as constructed by el Brocense. Such a relationship is also similar to that inferred to exist between wine and grammar by a certain monk, who after having imbibed a great deal, expounded: 'Quale vinum, tale Latinum/1 How early the association of wine and poetry and/or grammar might have been worked into a dialectic form is, of course, difficult to say, but there is the possibility that the idea for a long period formed part of the traditional content material used in the discussion and illustration of matters of logic.2 At the very least the syllogism from el Brocense demonstrates again that commonplace material of the type that Curtius explains, no matter how banal, was often connected to forms having to do with logic. Now the Cid-poet himself does not ask within the text of his work to be rewarded with wine or with anything else, and he never boasts concerning the quality of his efforts, although modern critics would doubtless agree that he has every right to have done so. What he does accomplish in the work is to construct a poetic universe that is ultimately positive, good, and pleasing.3 The Cid, of course, suffers his reverses, his arrows of adverse fortune, but these are only temporary difficulties that, as it were, make his eventual triumphs stand out ever more vividly. The hero himself is born and knighted at propitious moments. Again and again throughout the poem there are indications that the background against which the up-anddown action of the work takes place is as auspicious and positive as were the circumstances of the hero's two great initiatory moments. The description of the day and the weather when the Cid and his entourage prepare to attack Castejon, their first great undertaking within the context of the poem, is indicative of the settings that characterize the hero's enterprises throughout the work: 'Ya quiebran los albores e vinie la manana, / ixie el sol, iDios, que fermoso apuntava!' (456-7). And there is the hero's assurance to his uneasy wife when he and his troops are preparing to engage battle with the forces sent by King Yusuf of Morocco. As in the case of Castejon, the perfect day indicates the perfect moment for his encounter with the enemy: 'iTan buen dia es oy!' (1659). There is no reason at all for her and the daughters to be apprehensive:

'Tan buen dia es hoy': The Positive Frame of the Poem 93 'Non ayades miedo, ca todo es vuestra pro...' (1664). Throughout the poem it is clear that the Cid, born and knighted on positive occasions, will be privileged to conduct his affairs against a backdrop depicted as favourable. Even the unpleasant events of the Corpes episode fit into such a pattern in that they, although terribly painful for the hero and his family for a time, provide the reason for the eventual absolute exaltation of the group. El Brocense, at another point in the same work where he constructs a syllogism by associating good wine and a good poet, formulates another one to illustrate the figure barbara, but this time we know the origin of the theme he uses: / 'Bono die bona verba sunt dicenda. / Nunc prosper dies oritur. / Nunc igitur bona verba sunt dicenda' (Obras i, 296) (On a good day, good words should be said. Now a prosperous day dawns. Therefore now good words ought to be said). The editor has pointed out that this syllogism is based upon lines from Ovid's Fasti for the first day of January, which read in the original: 'prospera lux oritur: linguis animisque favete! / nunc dicenda bona sunt bona verba die' (71-2). Such a theme for the first day of the first month of the Roman solar year sets up a kind of positive and optimistic frame for the rest of the cycle. The concept that days can be either lucky or ominous grows out of the Roman awareness of the variability of spiritual phenomena and the manner in which such interacted upon the material world (York 13). Ovid completes and perfects the frame with the idea that the poet must strengthen this affirmative atmosphere by fabricating language that is complementary in tone to it. Again it would seem that the dialectical topic under which el Brocense's syllogism falls is 'from associated things,' since it would follow naturally, from the way in which the Romans viewed the concept of day, that a good day should produce good words. However, Thomas Wilson in his sixteenth-century rendering of traditional logic, The Rule of Reason, has given another locus, the one 'from cause,' as the basis for a similar argument that was much utilized in the dialectical tradition (113). This formulation, 'It is bright daie, ergo the Sunne is vp/ and others of its type can be seen as related to the syllogism that el Brocense sets, because if the adjective 'good' is substituted for 'bright,' it is possible to derive after the 'ergo' another conclusion that results in 'It is a good day, ergo it is a good moment for doing things.' By further expanding the initial proposition to include the theme of speaking good words, one achieves the syllogism set by el Brocense. As throughout this entire section of his work el Brocense takes classical

94 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid quotations and turns them into syllogisms, his modern editors are moved to remark that 'las paginas siguientes suponen una aportacion novedosa de Francisco Sanchez, como es la lectura de los autores clasicos (prosistas y poetas) en clave de argumentation silogistica' (297, n96). But, of course, el Brocense is really only following the hoary tradition of the Middle Ages, which often analysed writings in terms of learned rhetorical and dialectic structures. Time and again throughout the CMC, there occur, as is well known, phrases that most scholars take to be remnants of epic language and that are based upon some variation of the theme 'en buen ora fuestes nacido' (71). The idea that the hero was born at a propitious moment, that he was knighted at an equally positive time, and the like, is connected, I believe, to the grouping of motifs in the poem that includes the breaking of dawn, psychological awakenings, and revelations.4 The poem sees all these events as positively cast and presents them as interrelated.5 We cannot be sure whether the Cid-poet knew Ovid, although this has been suggested as a possibility (Deyermond and Hook 1981-2; Burke 1986), but in any case the idea of the 'good day' occurs in other contexts with which he would have been familiar, such as Vulgate Psalm 117: 24, which is used with slight changes as the Gradual for the Mass of Easter Day: 'Haec est dies, quam fecit Dominus: exsultemus, et laetemur in ea/ The versicle of the Gradual, 'Confitemini Domino, quoniam bonus/ even contains in a different sense the theme of 'favere linguis/ which the editors of el Brocense describe as a widespread topic in the Middle Ages (297 n. 96). Because the poem depends upon a Christian context, any variety of 'positive frame/ and any idea related to the theme 'prospera lux oritur/ however presented, must be understood ultimately in terms of the new dispensation realized by the death and Resurrection of Christ.6 Such a positive frame is the equivalent of the fundamental 'hypothesis' that Robert Ter Horst has described in the poem, which he sees as supporting the large number of hypothetical statements at work there. The ones that in particular interest him, those constructed with 'si/ set up the possibility for a fulfillment of a condition and imply that a hypothetical situation can be translated into reality, as in the case of the hero's promise to the Abbot Don Sancho in regard to the money that he leaves: 'si yo algun dia visquier, ser vos han doblados' (251). These 'si' clauses establish a kind of contract, either one that the hero completes or one that we see as realized within the context of the work.

'Tan buen dia es hoy': The Positive Frame of the Poem 95 Victor Turner has discussed the 'subjunctive mood' of 'as if (97-8), which governs and controls the ritual process, the framing situation of certain ceremonies in which societies allow variant models for behaviour and action to be proposed, considered, and consequently accepted or rejected (120). What Ter Horst suggests with his hypothesis is that a kind of parallel situation functions in the CMC. Since the status quo has been abandoned (the hero must go into exile), there is a possibility of the creation of an entirely new way of doing things, of the evolution of models that can affect not only his circumstances but also, by extension and by example, those of society as a whole. The two agreements that are violated in the poem - that is, a possible conversion or movement toward a positive outcome is not realized are the one made with Raquel and Vidas, which the hero does not honour, and the one involving the Infantes de Carrion. Ter Horst argues that Raquel and Vidas, because they must have looked into the chests, are guilty of a '... short-sightedness which has theological overtones ...' (222). In other words, they have no faith in the hero and are incapable of benefiting from the positive frame that informs the poem.7 The perfidious behaviour of the Infantes, born of a most noble family but not conducting themselves in the manner that becomes such rank8 provides the ground against which the final epiphany of justice and the law in the poem can take place. In his raw material the poet has epic tags of the type 'en buen ora fuestes nacido/ and numerous motifs and themes relating to dawn, awakening, rebirth, and the like. The living voice of the juglar, likely echoing still in his ears on occasion, was one that constantly evinced the vigour and force of the epic situation and circumstances. He accepts the idea of 'prospera lux oritur' because he knows Ovid or the Gradual for Easter Sunday or simply because he is a Christian optimist.9 If, in addition, he is familiar with treatises on rhetoric and dialectic from the school tradition, he remembers that such writings contain examples that provide him with a model. One of Boethius's favourite examples for illustrating various topical displays has to do with the concept 'day': 'If it is day, there is light / It is day / Therefore, there is light' (De topicis 44). The ideas of day and light worked into various kinds of syllogisms and dialectical formulations also occur many times in Boethius's commentary on Cicero's Topica, as can be ascertained by consulting the index in Stump's edition. And as we have seen from the case in Thomas Wilson, the same example continued to be employed throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.

96 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid The poet as rewriter found as places in his material such tags as 'en buen ora fuestes nacido' or ones similar. Then according to the scheme of composition usual for the Middle Ages, these places were elaborated according to a particular empty structural topos. Certain dialectical topoi such as 'from associated things' or 'from a cause' as well as rhetorical loci having to do with nature, manner of life, and fortune all implied ways by which the meaning inherent in these locations in the text could be developed. A tradition of auctoritas, both literary and liturgical, supported the idea that such use was valid and suggested other ways by means of which the idea of a good background mixed with good and successful actions could be amplified and exemplified in equally good words. An awareness of this frame of the good day helps us, I think, to understand a number of the more enigmatic lines in the CMC. At the beginning of the poem, as the hero and Alvar Fanez leave Bivar, the former utters the rather strange remark: 'iAlbricia, Alvar Fanez, ca echados somos de tierra' (14), which, as Garci-Gomez notes, 'resulta oscura, un tanto incongruente...' (1975, 61). Critical attention has focused on the description of the flight of the ravens mentioned in lines 11 and 12 in an attempt to demonstrate that the Cid interpreted these movements as positive signs that foretold his eventual success, and such is doubtless true. But I think that these are only signs that signal again the presence of this positive frame, since surely the flight of birds could not in and of itself produce the affirmative atmosphere that pervades the poem. The hero's statement can in its nuclear form be seen as resembling an enthymeme, if recast in the following form: 'We are forced to abandon our home,/therefore, rejoice!' If this is so, what is the understood middle left out of the enthymeme? In his De Rhetorica, which was so popular as a school text, Cassiodorus uses, in order to illustrate the first proposition of an enthymeme, an example whose meaning can be seen in basic terms to be almost the opposite of the idea we encounter in the CMC: 'si tempestas vitanda est, non est igitur navigandum' (Halm n, 499). The missing middle is 'the weather is bad' or 'the weather is good,' and the ergo would produce an appropriate outcome. The situation in the CMC, much more laden with symbolic significance than the simple example relating to the weather that we find in Cassiodorus, would result as follows, if cast simply in terms similar to those in Cassiodorus: 'If the moment is propitious, set out on a journey. / The moment is propitious. / Therefore let's set out on a journey.' In the

'Tan buen dia es hoy': The Positive Frame of the Poem 97 CMC the notion that the moment is propitious is implied by the word 'Albricia/ but the positive force of this word seems to be complicated and to be countered immediately by 'echados/ a term that would usually carry negative associations. The idea that expulsion can and will produce benefit is a strong motif throughout the liturgy of Easter, and is particularly marked in the 'felix culpa/ a phrase that rings forth in the Exsultet in the Praeconium of the Easter Vigil Mass.10 The culpa of Adam and Eve was felix because it resulted, after a long historical process, in the redeeming life of Christ. The Exsultet and the Vigil Mass refer again and again to motifs that recall the original event, the eating of the apple and the expulsion from Eden, the intervening history and the final outcome - the life of Christ with His death and Resurrection. The juxtaposition of all these themes in written form can result in very fine poetry indeed, as can be seen in this line from the Exsultet. 'O vere beata nox, quae exspoliavit Aegyptios, ditavit Hebraeos! Nox, in qua terrenis caelestia, humanis divina iunguntur/ (O truly blessed night, which plundered the Egyptians and enriched the Hebrews! Night on which the heavenly is joined to the terrestrial, the divine to the human.) Peter Dronke comments: 'In this pattern the Egyptians become the powers of night, the deliverance of the Hebrews, to let them attain their promised land, becomes the deliverance of mankind, freeing them from their captive night to let them attain heaven. Earth is no longer dark, it is radiant with the divine promise' (1968, 34). What one has in the Exsultet is a kind of to and fro between images of exile and loss on the one hand and recuperation and redemption on the other - a pattern that is also discernible throughout the entire liturgy of Holy Week. But then on Easter Day the 'Haec dies' of the Gradual in the Mass for that day implies not only that the moment is as blessed as the previous night but also that the process of redemption has become definitive. The Easter liturgical sequence influences the writing of poetry in the Middle Ages because the cycle of redemption could be and was understood in terms of the seasonal change, the return of spring (redemption) after winter (sin and exile). A short thirteenth-century poem, perhaps composed at the monastery of Ripoll, demonstrates precisely how medievals related the renewal of spring directly to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ: Cedat frigus hiemale, redit tempus aestivale,

98 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid iuventus laetatur. Ecce tempus est vernale, quo per lignum triumphale - inter ligna nullum tale genus hominum mortale morte liberatur. (Garcia Villoslada 132)The winter cold withdraws summertime returns youth delights. Behold, it is springtime in which, through the triumphant wood - no other such wood the mortal race of man is freed from death.11 The poem does not imply that spring would not occur had it not been for the redemption of the Cross, but the connection between the two events is made very close. One can readily imagine that a poet might have understood the joys of Easter as also necessary for and implying the kind of positive, optimistic atmosphere that I believe informs the CMC. The harm done by Adam and Eve and the redress given in the life of Christ as celebrated in the Paschal liturgy constituted for medieval man a configuration that was understood as occurring again and again in the lives of individual Christians. John Burt has analysed the opening section of the CMC in terms of what he has called the Exodus pattern. This pattern, which is one of the most important prefigurements of the life of Christ, is referred to and commemorated along with others on numerous occasions in the Easter liturgy. It is difficult indeed to believe that the sad expulsion of the Cid from his home did not remind a medieval audience of those themes of loss and exile that figure so prominently during Holy Week and Easter.12 Montaner Frutos is certainly correct in stating that there can be nothing 'mesianico' or 'cristico' about the hero (166) in the sense that the Cid was another Christ. But this is not to say that the pattern of his life was not understood by medieval people as similar to or assimilated to the pattern of the> life of the Saviour. In the CMC the idea of the propitious hour of the hero's birth and that of his knighting coupled to the themes of awakening and resurgence

'Tan buen dia es hoy': The Positive Frame of the Poem 99 prominent in the poem parallel the 'beata nox' of the Vigil Mass and the 'Haec dies' of the Mass of Easter Day. The hero is both redeemed and lucky, but he must undergo a period of trial and tribulation. The departure from Bivar is analogous to the 'felix culpa/ with many of its Old Testament associations. In syllogistic terms the equation is something of the following: The redeemed fortunate individual who must repeat the pattern of expulsion will be eventually successful. I was born and knighted at a propitious moment, I'm a Christian, and I've just seen a positive omen, therefore 'Albricia, echados somos de tierra.' The process is about to begin.

Evidence to substantiate that the poet was aware that he was undertaking a task of logical analysis of this variety comes in the episode where Gabriel appears to the hero in a vision. 'iCavalgad, Cid, el buen Campeador! / Ca nunqua en tan buen punto cavalgo varon; / mientra que visquieredes bien se fara lo to' (407-9). In this case all the elements of the equation are given. The ergo is 'Cavalgad.' The first term is 'mientra que visquieredes bien se fara lo to' (all your life you will meet with success!). Recast into the first proposition of a syllogistic structure to parallel the previous example and to some degree the one in Cassiodorus, this is 'if all one's life, one will meet with success (one should take action)/ 'Ca nunqua en tan buen punto cavalgo varon' (for no man ever set forth at so fortunate a moment) supplies the missing middle. Recast and expanded it is 'because no man ever set forth at a more fortunate moment (there is the implication that) you are such an individual.' The ergo follows 'Cavalgad.' That the Cid-poet understood that he was dealing with a cyclic group of experiences within an overall positive frame is borne out again after the hero has achieved his great initial successes - the conquest of Valencia and the return to the favour of the king. King Alfonso suggests that the Cid's daughters be wedded to the noble Infantes de Carrion: 'Esto gradesco a Christus el mio senor. / Echado fu de tierra, e tollida la onor, / con grand afan gane lo que he yo' (1933-5). The Cid submits to the will of his monarch in regard to the marriage of his daughters to the Infantes de Carrion, although he is suspicious of their intentions from the very beginning. After the episode of the lion when the young men decide to return to Carrion with their wives, the hero again sees omens in the

ioo Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid flight of birds, but this time these portents presage evil, as he well understands: 'Violo en los avueros el que en buen ora cinxo espada / que estos casamientos non serien sin alguna tacha' (2615-16). Nevertheless, the Cid does not attempt to impede the departure of the group since he realizes, as would his audience, that these signs, which must signal another downward turn in the action of the work, are necessary so that an even greater positive recuperation may eventually be realized. Thus it is that the hero, when he learns of what has befallen his daughters on the road to Carrion in the oak forest of Corpes, is not overcome with either grief or anger. quando ge lo dizen a Mio Cid el Campeador, una grand ora penso e comidio; algo la su mano, a la barba se tomo: 'Grado a Christus, que del mundo es senor, quando tal ondra me an dada los ifantes de Carrion ...'

(2827-31)

The hero, having thought long and deeply about the matter (does one dare say 'and having analysed it logically'?) again interprets the awful events within the terms of the overall scheme that controls the poem. The logic that pertains to him as the fortunate individual, born at a good moment and knighted at a propitious hour, comforts him with the thought that without doubt his distress of the moment will again be translated into joy. In the first major section of the poem, as we have seen, the positive frame, this hypothesis that negative events can be changed into positive ones, is paralleled by a nexus of images having to do with themes of awakening, revelation, manifestation, and the like. In effect these motifs not only complement and support this frame but also provide a kind of referential base for the argumentative topic - whether it be 'from associated things' or 'from a cause' - that helps to structure the first half. It is necessary to study these images of awakening and ones of a similar nature in more detail, since they occur time and again throughout the poem and thus provide a constant reminder of the ongoing importance of these themes for the work as a whole.

8

Themes of Awakening and Manifestation

Juri Lotman has proposed that a configuration of ideas having to do with awakening can be understood as a kind of protoplot in primitive works conceived in the matrix of myth. Donald Maddox has applied Lotman's findings to the poetry of Chretien de Troyes and believes they provide one explanation as to how these works are structured: 'There was no need, then, to discuss matters of plot configuration in poetic treatises of the Middle Ages, for, as the works of Chretien attest, there was but one Christian mythic configuration, eschatological in its synoptic form...' (1983, 47). The conclusions of both Lotman and Maddox suggest that plot in its mythic form and in its medieval manifestation is a kind of process whereby a certain meaning is either revealed or elaborated as the actions in a particular narrative sequence occur. In a foreword to Eugene Vance's study From Topic to Tale (x-xix) Wlad Godzich gives an excellent, brief discussion concerning the world-view that produced the kind of synoptic eschatological plot that has interested Lotman and Maddox. In the oral society the performance or telling of tales, the singing of songs, are essentially commemorative experiences through which the latent powers of memoria are revivified. In this treasure trove of discourses are located all the meanings that are important for the group. After reading Godzich's explanation the critic can more readily understand why a basic plot structure, one utilized time and again to give these meanings new form, was elaborated in terms of a series of awakenings, manifestations, and revelations. Whether the CMC may be seen in terms of the kind of political and ethical categories that I have described (1985) or as exemplifying the 'civic message' that Smith finds (1983, 88) is, perhaps, debatable. What appears to be indisputable is that an implied desire for change expressed

102 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid in the recurring epithet 'que buen vassalo, si oviesse buen serior' is realized within the context of the poem.1 At the end of the CMC the 'buen vassallo' hero serves undoubtedly an eminently 'buen senor/ The poem as a literary, rhetorical historical entity expresses an evolution, what is in effect the change in the attitude of the king, the manifestation of justice for the hero, and finally the appearance of a political situation propitious for the spread of justice and peace to all the inhabitants of the realm. The poem with its abrupt beginning, fortuitously or not, commences with a powerful visual image.2 With tears streaming from his eyes, the hero views the desolation that is his fortune of the moment: 'De los sos ojos tan fuertemientre llorando, tornava la cabega e estavalos catando; vio puertas abiertas e ugos sin canados, alcandaras vazias, sin pielles e sin mantos e sin falcones e sin adtores mudados ... (1-5)

After finishing his business in Burgos and in the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardena, he undergoes his dream-vision in which the Angel Gabriel announces to him that his period of tribulation is over, at least in the sense that the road to success is now open to him. The structure of the first section of the poem, then, is comic. It begins with a period of adversity, tristia, a section relatively brief and soon followed by the peripetia in the dream-vision, which signals the movement toward gaudium. The descent into tristia is punctuated by the forlorn scene witnessed by the hero before he leaves for Burgos. The transition toward the peripetia of the dream-vision takes place in what I think is a grouping of images of awakening and manifestation in the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardena.3 The Apostle St Peter, for whom along with St Paul the monastery at Cardena was named,4 is associated with themes having to do with the dawn and awakening in the episode in the Gospels that relates his denial of Christ. Deriving from this episode is a whole series of themes connected with St Peter and his place in salvation history. There are, in France for example, iconographic formulas that show the giving to St Peter of the New Law of Christ. This traditio legis, noted in the episode of the Greeks and the Romans in the Libro de buen amor, was effected for Western Europe when St Peter, returning after his death, gave the pallium to Pope Leo m, who then sent the banner of Rome and the keys

Themes of Awakening and Manifestation 103 of St Peter to Charlemagne, with the result that the medieval French saw themselves as God's chosen people (see Brault 290). What a traditio legis accomplished for the receiving group is an epiphany of the law, a manifestation of an advanced and more humane legal system, which had not previously pertained. Joseph Szoverffy has noted that throughout medieval Europe it is unusual to find more than one sequence hymn for the feast 'Petri ad Vincula/ which celebrates the liberation of St Peter from prison in Rome some time before his crucifixion. But this is not the case in Huesca in the first half of the twelfth century, a few years after the fall of the city to the Christians. Szoverffy believes that the Mass for this feast in Huesca had a number of sequences composed for it, because symbolically the inhabitants of the city related the freeing of the saint to the fact of their own liberation (67).5 There were, then, connected with the saint for whom the monastery at Cardena had been named,6 in Western Europe and in Spain, a whole series of themes that might well have supplemented those that Lotman has argued are naturally inherent in the eschatological plot. The Cidpoet begins with a mythic structure that in and of itself suggests that a plot must be elaborated in terms of awakening, epiphany, and manifestation. Associated with the life of his hero is a monastery dedicated to a saint whose tradition incorporates similar motifs. The result is a sequence in the poem that exemplifies this nexus and projects it as a model for the entire work. One curious and somewhat bothersome point in regard to this portion of the poem has to do with the fact that although this monastery was originally dedicated to both St Peter and St Paul, there is no textual reference to the latter. The silence of the text in this respect is puzzling, because in the Mozarabic tradition the apostle from Tarsus was always the more exalted of the two. For instance at the monastery of Silos, only some twelve kilometres from Cardena, St Paul appears in several representations in the privileged position to the right of Christ, and in a relief on the northwest pier he is even placed among the apostles in the Doubting Thomas episode, an event that he did not witness (Schapiro 1939, 348.) In early romanesque Castile St Paul was exalted as the apostle of individual revelation received through visions and the hearing of voices, because he had received direct, personal illumination on the road to Damascus. He seems, therefore, more appropriate than St Peter as a symbol for the kind of personal awakening that I posit for the Cid.7 We

io4 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid have to assume either that the poet was unaware of this tradition or that he both was aware of it and wished to avoid it. Jose Pijoan links this exaltation of St Paul to ancient heretical beliefs in the Peninsula, such as Priscillianism and Paulicism, which emphasized the importance of an understanding achieved personally by the individual in contrast to one dependent upon the teachings of the Church. This was an experience 'casi opuesta a la dogmatica de las Escrituras y Textos de los Santos Padres, representada por San Pedro' (118). Obviously these earlier traditions flourished during a period with a predominantly oral culture. By the time of the composition of the CMC there is a transition toward the written, in which the authority of the 'textual community' (see Stock) is coming to the fore. St Peter is clearly the apostle more representative of this new mode of perception, and the Cid-poet, even if he knew of the iconographic tradition that exalted St Paul, doubtless preferred the saint associated with the traditio legis, and with all other benefits that the culture of writing was perceived as bringing. The Cid arrives at the monastery at daybreak, while cocks are crowing and as the Abbot Don Sancho is saying matins.8 From the time of Prudentius and his dawn hymn Ales diei nuntius, this moment had been related in Christian tradition to themes of conversion (see Saville 56-79, i7i).9 Matins in Spain always began with Vulgate Psalm 3, the sixth verse of which is 'Ego dormivi... et exsurrexi, quia Dominus suscepit me' (I slept... and I rose up, because the Lord received me), a verse that, as Juan Llopis Sarrio points out, alludes to the Resurrection of Christ (366). Because it was also a part of the 'Ordo in finem hominis diei' (see Moralejo Alvarez 1985, 87 n. 31) it in addition presaged the resurgence of the individual Christian. In line with the mode of typological thought so common in the Middle Ages, the verse alludes in addition to events in the life of the human being as he or she struggles to merit that resurrection promised by Christ. Terlingen has shown that there is almost surely a reference to another liturgical office in verse 324, 'a los mediados gallos piessan de ensellar,' as well as later in verse 1701. This is the gallicantus or pullorum cantus, a use that had wide existence in early Christian times but had largely vanished by the twelfth century save in a few places such as Spain. This office took place between nocturns and matins, and it consisted1 of 'tres psalmi, laus benedictio' (288-9). Such an office surely also was evocative of the episode of St Peter and cock-crow, as is indicated in a French manuscript from the beginning of the eleventh century: 'Pullorum can-

Themes of Awakening and Manifestation 105 tus pro hoc cantatur, quando negavit sanctus Petrus ad passionem domini et recupervait postea ad fidem' (The song of the chicks is sung for this reason: when St Peter denied the passion of the Lord and afterward regained his faith).10 Since the Psalms play a central role in the liturgy, recurring frequently in a wide variety of situations, the question of their relation to the development of literature in the Middle Ages merits more attention than it has received. It is clear that medievals looked upon the Psalms as a typological presentiment, elaborated in highly poetic and figurative language, of the central events that were to take place in the New Testament. Because the meaning presented there in Old Testament time was melded with happenings in the life of Christ and projected forward into post - New Testament time, it is not strange that Christians saw events occurring in the Psalms as having significance for and referring to things taking place in their lives also. Thus it is, as Colbert Nepaulsingh points out, that some fourteenthcentury reader has copied the first verses of Vulgate Psalm 108 at the end of the unique manuscript that contains the CMC (31): 'In finem, Psalmus David. / Deus, laudem meam ne tacueris. / Quia os peccatoris et os dolosi super me apertum est' (At the end, the Psalm of David. Because the mouth of the sinner and the mouth of the cunning are open above me). One of the key ideas of the Cantar, 'For malos mestureros de tierra sodes echado' (267), seems to echo the next verse: 'Locuti sunt adversum me lingua dolosa, Et sermonibus odii circumdederunt me, Et expugnaverunt me gratis' (They spoke against me with a deceitful tongue. They surrounded me with speeches of hate and they overcame me easily). Nepaulsingh sees the CMC, as well as a number of other works from medieval Spanish literature, as part of what he calls the psalter tradition (25-31, 226-7). He does not, however, devote a great deal of discussion to how the Psalms are effectively converted into this psalter tradition. My sense is that this happens through what Dagenais in The Larger Gloss calls 'lectureture' - the response of the medieval reader (or listener) to any sort of text that was presented to him or her. The receiver could absorb it, more or less correctly, merge it with other ideas, and then retain it in memory as a new text. Subsequently this passive reader/ listener also could produce another text again on parchment or with concatenated meaningful sounds in the air. In order to describe this process, medievals used various metaphors, such as ruminatio - one 'eats' a given quantity of material and, after ruminating upon it, finally

io6 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid 'regurgitates' a new version.11 Although such imagery may not appeal to us moderns, it does present very accurately the medieval conception of the process of literary creation. Certainly many Christian medieval men and women were familiar with the singing of the Psalms in the Office, since all 150 were presented in the course of the year. They also heard over and over separate portions from the psalter as they rang forth in various masses throughout the liturgical cycle, and the unique and beautiful language of this sacred poetry surely impinged upon the consciousness of all those familiar with it. That imagery and phraseology from the Psalms such as that alluding to resurrection in Psalm 3 and exile in 108 exist as a kind of thematic subtext in a work such as the CMC is not at all unlikely. As the day passes the hero makes various arrangements, since he and his steadily increasing group of warriors must leave the monastery the next morning. As the bells are pealing out for matins the next day, the Cid and Ximena go to the church, where she throws herself on the steps of the altar. Jenaro Talens, who has studied Ximena's ensuing prayer from the point of view of semiotics, bids us consider why the sender has selected for the paradigmatic scale precisely those miracles that she mentions and why they have been combined as they have on the syntagmatic plane (91). Critics are aware that the structure and contents of this prayer are not original; it derives from and is related to a group of prayers for the dying known as the Ordo commendationis animae. Gimeno Casalduero in addition has suggested a link between this fragment and the Prayer of St Ciprian, which is a similar but more general plea for help and succour (18). I agree with the view of Peter Russell that the most immediate source, in at least one sense, for the prayer in the CMC is the Old French chansons de geste, where such invocations were inventions suited to the tone and atmosphere of the epics 'basandose en reminiscencias de la liturgia (y de otras formas de culto consagradas)' (153). Scholars have also long understood that a relationship exists between such prayers as the Ordo commendationis animae and certain scenes represented in medieval paintings and sculptures, although it is difficult to ascertain whether the prayers of this variety precede the visual image or vice versa.12 By the time of the composition of the CMC, however, both visual and written versions - in liturgical setting as well as secular - abounded, and an artist could have drawn inspiration from either. The art historian Francis Klingender has studied a number of great

Themes of Awakening and Manifestation 107 figural crosses from ninth-century Ireland, which are divided into panels on which are vividly depicted the stories of God's help in peril as presented in the Ordo prayer (138-9). If such a cross had been oh the altar at San Pedro de Cardena, Ximena could have been reading what she saw on the cross as she entreated the Almighty to help her and her family. Her emotional state might have led her to confuse well-known temporal orders so that the disposition of her prayer derived from how her eyes proceeded through the arrangement of panels on the cross.13 This is one way of explaining the enigmatic lines 'en el monumento rresucitest, / fust a los infiernos como fue tu voluntad' (358-9). It has been suggested, for example, that it is for reasons of a similar reading that the Creation follows the resurrection of Lazarus in a prayer of this variety in the Old French Aiol (Labande 63). There appears to be no evidence that crosses similar to those in Ireland existed in the Peninsula in the Middle Ages, but what can be found there is murals and sculptures that present the same material in the familiar programmatic fashion. Amando Represa has connected Ximena's prayer to such representations: Tero la oration de Jimena es lo que el campesino, el menestral o el burgues de las villas y aldeas castellanas podia aprender de la Biblia (lo mismo el A.T. que el el N.T.) "viendo" en la iconografia de sus iglesias los hitos mas sobresalientes de la vida y muerte del Senor' (130-1). In the twelfth-century church of San Baudel in the village of Berlanga (a town mentioned in the CMC, line 2877) there is, for example, a mural on the north wall that depicts the entry of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and the Last Supper. On the wall opposite the apse chapel are the Wedding at Cana and the Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness, while the south wall portrays the Resurrection of Lazarus, one of the curings of a blind man, and the three Marys before the tomb of Christ.14 Since many critics have expressed doubt that the poet was very familiar with the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardena, the question of whether Ximena was viewing a program of this kind, if such ever existed,15 may not be as important as the poet's own personal experience. If he had viewed elsewhere either murals or drawings of this variety, he might have envisioned the scene by incorporating material that he remembered. Anna Esmeijer points out that in the case of paintings of this type the observer, sometimes even portrayed as being within the paintings as well as viewing from without, was usually conceived as having a complementary role to play in the decorative program (29). What is striking

io8 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid about the prayer and the tradition from which it derives then is that both tend to incorporate, or assimilate - to use the term so well explained by Judson Allen (1982) - the person praying or the onlooker. I suspect that what we have in the church at Berlanga and in the analogous verbal picture rendered by Ximena is an example of what Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has called a 'festival arrangement.' In the Byzantine liturgy, icons called festival paintings are venerated on the particular feast of the church to which the icon corresponds. Although there is no such veneration of icons in the West, Lavin is correct in pointing out that on feast-days there were often verbal descriptions of the events commemorated on that day along with explanations of the ritual meaning of those events for the worshipper. Lavin posits that certain fresco cycles accomplish a similar purpose in that they not only show the events pictorially but also attempt to express the liturgical significance of those events (498).l6 The murals at Berlanga and Ximena's verbal description may refer not to a particular feast of the church but rather to the themes and ideas underlying a whole cycle of liturgical celebrations that begin at Christmas and end at Easter. In their totality these themes and ideas express the Christian belief in revelation in the sense that I have been discussing. Ximena - and by extension her husband and family - thus become one with the series of biblical and hagiographical figures who have received help in their distress. Although such aid is not in all cases presented directly in terms of an awakening or a vision, there is, because of the typological scheme implied, always a strong sense of something related or parallel - a liberation or the manifestation of an idea or event of great importance. The prayer begins with a reference to the Creation in Genesis that made manifest the will of God and the beginning of His plan for the world: 'Ya Senor glorioso, Padre que en cielo estas, / fezist cielo e tierra, el tercero el mar,/fezist estrellas e luna e el sol para escalentar ...' (330-2). In the Confessions of St Augustine, a work of great inspirational import for the Middle Ages, when the saint moves on from the section where he has recounted the story of his own life in order to discuss the Creation, he demonstrates clearly the relation between the Creation as manifestation and the future ordering of the world:'... ubi autem coepisti praedestinata temporaliter exequi, ut occulta manifestares et inconposita nostra conponeres' (369) (... when you began to pursue predestined things in this world with the result that you made evident hidden things and you put order to our disorder... ).17 The implication for the period of time

Themes of Awakening and Manifestation 109 afterward is that its happenings would unfold as a series of revelations that would not cease until the final great sequence as put forward in the book of the Apocalypse itself. After the long period of preparation recorded and explained in the Old Testament comes the birth of Christ, and it is not surprising that the poem next refers to this event: '... prisist encarnacion en Sancta Maria madre, / en Beleem aparecist como fue tu voluntad' (333-4). It is not necessary to attempt to explain the verb aparecer as a semantic variant of nacer - with its basic meaning it fits perfectly within a scheme of manifestation.18 The presentation next of the Three Kings who have arrived to adore the newly born Saviour is a continuation of the same theme, now presented in the theological terms of an epiphany, a fact signalled in the feast called by that name, which commemorates the visit of these Wise Men. The day also marks the divinity of Christ because the incense brought by the three was traditionally explained as alluding to His divine nature. Next the prayer introduces the examples of four holy individuals, three from the Old Testament and one from the hagiographic tradition. Again it may be possible to explain such mixing and the breaking of the temporal order by recourse to visual patterns: 'Salvest a Jonas quando cayo en la mar salvest a Daniel con los leones en la mala carcel, salvest dentro en Rroma al senor San Sebastian, salvest a Sancta Susanna del falso criminal' (338-42)

It is obvious how Jonah's new awareness before he escapes from the belly of the whale can be seen as an awakening and his actual emergence as a rebirth. Daniel's salvation in the lions' den is metaphorically similar to what happened to Jonah. It is important, however, to note that the lions, - at this point presented in malo, as negative symbols, an interpretation that the text will later reverse - are closely associated with the idea of liberation. John Burt believes that the implication of this particular supplication is to ask God to seal the slandering mouths of the leoneses, just as He has closed those of the lions to protect Daniel (24)Although it is not immediately apparent why the examples of St Sebastian and Susannah (beatified in the text) are relevant, examination of the tradition concerning them in the Middle Ages demonstrates that the poet may have seen their examples as being also connected to a

no Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid scheme having to do with manifestation.19 According to tradition St Sebastian, supposedly executed by being shot by many arrows, recovered and presented himself to the emperor as a sign of the power of God. The might of the Christian deity is thus revealed, made manifest, to the supreme Roman authority (see Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 466). Susannah, accused of adultery by the lascivious elders whom she has spurned, is saved from death by the wise cross-examination of Daniel, who has elected to defend her. Truth, as it were, is revealed in the end and innocence is made manifest (see Encyclopedia of Religion 75i).20 The passion of St Sebastian and the trial of Susannah are both illustrative of a process whereby positive facts concerning the experience of virtuous individuals become apparent. Next the text of the CMC suggests that it will recount the miracles of Christ, and does so in what is really a brief schematic sketch of major events in His life: '... por tierra andidiste treinta e dos anos, Senor spiritual / mostrando los miraculos por en avemos que fablar / del agua fezist vino e de la piedra pan' (343-5). The miracle of the changing of water into wine is another reference to the Epiphany, since this feast recalls events that took place at the wedding in Cana, where Christ, at the very beginning of His ministry, performed this miracle. The second half of the line seems to be, as Ian Michael has noted (PMC ed. 1976, 104), a confusion of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves in Matthew 14 with the episode of Christ's temptation in the desert (Matthew 4:3) in which Satan asks Him to prove He is the son of God by turning stones into bread. Despite the confusion, the brief phrase is a neat telescoping of several important facets of the manifestation of Christ's divinity. This divinity is demonstrated by the visit of the Three Wise Men when He is a baby; the miracle at Cana when He is a young man reaffirms His nature as does that of the multiplication of the loaves. The refusal of Jesus to turn stones into bread to satisfy His hunger is another sign of the strength deriving from His divinity. The temptation in the wilderness, which comes at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, provides for the liturgy a model for Lent. The miracle of the loaves takes place toward the end of His life, and the text of the CMC signals this temporal progression in the next line: 'rresucitest a Lazaro ca fue tu voluntad' (346). The miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11) occurs a week or so before Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. In the Mozarabic liturgy it was com-

Themes of Awakening and Manifestation 111 memorated during Lent a week before Palm Sunday on Lazarus Sunday - which in the Roman rite is called Passion Sunday - and for a few days before (see Burke 1973). The symbolism of awakening is obvious in the case of Lazarus and implied in the adventus of Palm Sunday, which is read as the Gospel for the First Sunday in Advent in the Mozarabic rite. Advent as the liturgical season that announces the forthcoming birth of Christ at Christmas is replete with images suggesting resurgence on a variety of levels. The text now moves to the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus and to the example par excellence of an awakening presented in the most literal sense: 'Longinos era ciego que nunquas vio alguandre, diot' con la lan^a en el costado dont ixio la sangre, corrio por el astil ayuso, las manos se ovo de untar, alc.61as arriba, llegolas a la faz, abrio sos ojos, cato a todas partes, en ti crovo al ora, por end es salvo de mal' (352-7)

The piercing of Christ's side, which results in the institution of the Sacraments of the Mass, has as a first sign of its future efficacy the restoration of the physical sight of the centurion and the granting to him of an insight that results in his salvation. The temporal order of the Resurrection and the Descent into Hell appear to be inverted in the poem (358-60). Robert Redfield argues that no mistake occurs here, as the poet was following a medieval tradition that taught that Christ descended alive into Tartarus. We can accept Redfield's explanation, or describe this as a lapsus caused by a moment of insouciance or carelessness in the scribal or authorial tradition, or - as I have already suggested - attribute it to a visual reading of counterposed mural programs. The line 'quebranteste las puertas e saqueste los sanctos padres' (360), which comes after the use of the word rresucitest in 358, may also offer a hint in regard to the poet's thinking here. Dom Leclercq says that the line is based on liturgical texts for the Feast of the Ascension (1989, 82 n. 32). If he is correct, then it suggests that the poet considered the events in hell to be a direct allusion to the final great awakening in heaven - the theme that I believe to be his primary concern here. These events, although based upon or parallel to the kind of eschatological

112 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid paradigm described by Lotman, effectively establish a new secondary scheme, which puts forward the same idea in post-New Testament time. Ximena now ends her prayer, and beseeches the patron saint of the monastery for help for her and her family:'... e rruego a San Peidro que me ayude a rrogar / por Mio Cid el Campeador que Dios le curie de mal' (363-4). John Burt feels that the overall sense of this prayer is to ask God to enable the Cid to resurrect Ximena from the purgatorylike situation into which she has fallen - a plea that is later granted in line 1596 when she proclaims 'Sacada me avedes de muchas vergiiencas malas ../ (1982, 26-7). Soon after this the Cid leaves the monastery to seek his fortune fighting against the Moors, and almost immediately afterward he experiences his vision at Figueruela, during which the angel Gabriel announces to him his impending success: '... el angel Gabriel a el vino en sueno: icavalgad, Cid, el buen Campeador! Ca nunqua en tan buen punto cavalgo varon; mientra que visquieredes bien se fara lo to/ (406-9)

The images of awakening and resurgence that characterized his visit to the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardena have served to prefigure what occurs at Figueruela and the subsequent transformation of the period of tristia in his life into gaudium from that point forward. Other images in the poem may be taken as continuing the nexus of themes that I have been studying. There is the magnificent image of dawn when the hero prepares to seize his first major prize, Castejon de Henares:21 'Ya quiebran los albores, e venie la manana,/ixie el sol, iDios, que fermoso apuntava!' (456-7). Valencia falls into the hands of the Cid and his army after a siege of nine months (1209), a number that may suggest a period of gestation followed by delivery (see de Vries). The encounter between the hero and King Alfonso, which results in their reconciliation and the final removal of the conditions of exile, occurs on the banks of the River Tagus: 'Sobre Tajo que es una agua mayor / ayamos vistas quando lo quiere mio senor' (1954-5). The word vistas occurs some five times in regard to this assembly (1899,1911,1944, 1948); in addition it is used by the Cid's daughters as a warning when they are about to be assaulted (2733), and finally by the hero himself (2914) at the cortes where his honor is restored. Thus both his initial

Themes of Awakening and Manifestation 113 reconciliation with the king and the episode that adjusts the damages done to him by the marriage instigated by the king are referred to by a word that is obviously and eminently visual. This may be no more than an accident of semantics. But as we have seen, the Cid-poet was likely sensitive to one of the more basic devices of dialectical and rhetorical construction, that of the topic 'from a name,' and this topic may have suggested to him the use of etymological word-play in elaborating his poem.22 And there is, of course, the reversal of the dawn symbolism, akin to the kind of reversal studied at length by Saville, which occurs in the Corpes episode. The Infantes spend the night with their wives only to assault them vilely after the break of day: 'imal ge los cunplieron quando salie el sol!' (2704) The narrative voice punctuates its recounting of the episode with an expression of desire for another kind of appearance: 'iQual ventura serie esta, si ploguiesse al Criador,/ que assomasse essora el Cid Campeador!' (2741-2, also 2753). This hope for an appearance that will result in security and salvation from the ordeal is realized only a few lines farther along when the young women awake to see their cousin, Felez Munos: 'Van rrecordando don Elvira e dona Sol, / abrieron los ojos e vieron a Felez Munos' (2790-1). According to Haines and to Silverstein the adjective felix was routinely applied in the Middle Ages both to individuals and to countries to imply or to suggest the pattern of loss of good fortune followed by restoration. We cannot be certain that the Cid-poet was alluding to such a tradition with the name of the hero's nephew, but fortuitous or not, the event certainly fits the scheme of awakening and manifestation that characterizes the poem in so many of its parts. The hero makes sure that he leaves the castle of San Servando to enter Toledo for the cortes in the very early morning just after the rising of the sun.23 It is in the cortes that one of the most important functions associated with St Peter is seen as valid for Spain. What occurs in Toledo as the Cid finds justice through the ministrations of the king and his court is in effect an epiphany of the law, which demonstrates that the traditio legis has been accomplished for the Peninsula. There follow the challenges, perhaps a kind of vestige of a more primitive means of determining matters under dispute, but it is really the legal decisions taken at the cortes that demonstrate that the absolute fullness of the gaudium period has been achieved in the life of the hero. What we have in the poem, then, is a nexus of themes and images pertaining to awakening, manifestation, revelation, and the like, which

ii4 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid constitute the positive frame that supports the dialectical argument drawn 'from a cause' or 'from associated things.' The hero himself and his adventures serve as a unifying thread throughout the entire work, but there is another symbol, one closely associated with the Cid on several occasions, that also interconnects the various episodes and happenings in the CMC. This is the figure of the lion, and I direct my attention to this unifying symbol in the next chapter.

9

The Lion as Symbol

The contrast in behaviour between vassal and lord, the Cid and King Alfonso, in the first part of the CMC, and between the Cid and the Infantes in the second part is an example of another major topic from the dialectic tradition, which is presented in Boethius as 'comparison of the lesser thing/ The instance that Boethius cites for this topic is the following: 'If Scipio, a private person, killed Gaius Gracchus, who was an unremarkable troubler of the state of the republic, why should the consuls not take vengeance on Catiline, who is eager to ravage the world with carnage and conflagration?' (De topicis 69). The illustration of the topic given by the medieval logician Peter of Spain is even more relevant to the actions in the CMC: 'A knight can capture the fortress; therefore, the king can also' (Kretzmann 1988, 241). What both these examples readily demonstrate is that from the medieval perspective the conduct of an individual of lesser importance can, in many instances, be taken as most relevant in regard to the behaviour of a person in a much higher category.1 In the CMC, the behaviour of the Cid, a man hierarchically much lower than the king and even than the Infantes, is a corrective for the conduct of both. At first glance there is no reason to suspect that a dialectical topic is involved here - such contrastive behaviour is commonplace in literature from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and right up to modern times. What makes one suspect that the comparisons of these individuals were conceived in a context of dialectical topics (in addition to the fact that medieval schools taught such) is the content material that defines the superiority of the hero. This material, the behaviour of the lion, is surely presented in terms of a contrast posed in dialectical terms. If the Cid-poet defined his hero in regard to his

n6 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid earthly role through the use of a dialectical topic, it is likely that he also elaborated his structure of contrasting roles in terms of another common locus employed for finding an argument.2 The image of the lion has a significance for the poem that extends far beyond the episode with the Infantes; it is a symbol that affects the meaning of the work as a whole and is basically what joins and unites its three topical arguments. As Michael Gerli (1980,438) has understood, the allusion to Daniel in the lion's den during Ximena's prayer toward the beginning of the CMC 'sets into play a complex system of leonine metaphors that are repeated and elaborated throughout the remainder of the work.'3 Thus at the point where I think the poet first defines the hero - as a member of the elect group to be blessed and protected by God throughout history - the symbol of the lion also makes its initial appearance. The name of King Alfonso's first kingdom, before he succeeded to the crown of Castile also, was Leon; and the poet notes this fact on several occasions, referring to Alfonso as 'el de Leon' (1927, 3536, 3543). The medieval mentality, with its preoccupation with assimilatio - the relating and interrelating otgesta etfacta - surely noted the coincidence between the name of the kingdom and that of the animal.4 The Semeianga del mundo, for example, contains commentary that demonstrates clearly how the medieval mind functioned in regard to such matters:'... Roma fue fecha e poblada a forma de leon. For esta razon que assi commo el leon es maior segun (comd) de rey de las otras bestias todas...' (84). And in the Poema de Almeria we do in fact find the kingdom explicitly compared to the animal: 'Florida milities post hos urbis Legionis, / portans vexilla, prorumpit more leonis' (11, 66-7).5 As the new culture of writing slowly emerged during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it brought with it a series of novel systems that effectively changed and reorganized the manner in which human beings perceived and utilized the world. Because military endeavours were becoming ever more complicated, it became necessary to find better ways to relate the parts of an army to one another in battle. The insignia that had become common in jousts provided a solution in that they could be assigned to various leaders as marks of identification. Then slowly those emblems that had first served to identify armed knights and later to locate their leaders in the midst of the fray began to take on a symbolic significance related to the evolving orders of consciousness. Eugene Vance has recognized that the symbolism of heraldry is significant in regard to the meaning of the lion in the Yvain, and has

The Lion as Symbol 117 devoted a long and useful chapter to this subject (1987). I think the matter is also important for an understanding of the imagery in the CMC that relates to the king of beasts and that thereby serves to give a kind of unity to the work by connecting the hero to the king and to the Infantes de Carrion. There are, as one would expect, many references to heraldic apparel in the poem. The banner of the hero is often presented as the symbol of his prowess in battle or of the success of his efforts, as is particularly clear in the scene where he divides the booty seized in Valencia: 'Alegre era el Campeador con todos los que ha / quando su sena cabdal sedie en somo del alcazar...' (i2i9-2o).6 But the text never tells us what, if anything, was on the banner, although it does give us the figure that decorated the pennant - and probably also the shield - of Bishop Jeronimo: Tendon trayo a core.as e armas de serial...' (2375)7 It is difficult to assess the significance of the symbolic bond between the heraldic decoration and the individual who bore the arms. Gerald Brault advises us, however, that such a connection must be understood as being associated with the pre-existing and contemporary iconographic and artistic traditions (5). The animals of the group within which the corza falls were all popular as heraldic emblems, and there are various explanations as to their significance (see Brault, Dennys 1975 and 1982, and Harris). At the moment when the text describes the pennant, the bishop is strongly expressing his desire to engage battle 'por sabor que avia de algun moro matar' (2372). One suspects that the word corqa refers to the Antalops of the medieval bestiary tradition, which was a confusion of the real antelope with other similar animals and which had a reputation for fierceness (Dennys 1975, 147). Although the text does not tell us what blazon was used by King Alfonso, it is possible historically and almost certainly from the perspective of the CMC that he employed the sign of the lion. Many princes from the north of Europe, where heraldry was becoming fully developed, visited the court of Alfonso vi and it seems likely that the Spanish sovereign imitated such usage. Before the twelfth century, however, the signs that decorated arms did not tend to be related systematically to the circumstances of the individuals who bore them as is demonstrated in the Bayeux Tapestry, where banners cannot be coherently assigned to their bearers nor referred to later more co-ordinated bearings (Bloch 1983)The study by Paolo Cherchi makes it clear that by the late eleventh

n8 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid century the lion was already a popular symbol for royalty throughout Europe. The coincidence between the name of the beast and that of the kingdom of Leon and its chief city would certainly have provided a strong psychological inducement for the use of the animal as the heraldic sign of king and realm. There are, however, no documents or coins from the reign of Alfonso vi to confirm this.8 From the era of Alfonso vi's grandson, Alfonso vn (1106-57), tne period during which the symbols of heraldry became systematized throughout the rest of Europe, Anton de Olmet says that there are extant many privileges and coins that show the image of a lion, the coins often bearing in addition the inscription Rex Leo Civitatis.9 As heraldic symbols began to be referred to those who used them for reasons having to do with iconographic and philosophical themes and ideas, the lion would have seemed an appropriate and obvious symbol for the kings of Leon; by 1207, when the CMC was most likely composed, tradition would certainly have associated Alfonso vi, kingdom, and city, heraldically and symbolically, with the lion. King Alfonso swears twice in the poem by 'Sant Esidro el de Leon' (1867, 3509), who had become a kind of patron of the city of Leon after his body was brought there from Seville in 1063 by Fernando i, the father of Alfonso vi (Perez Llamazares 1955,476.) Until the appearance of Peter Brown's excellent study The Cult of the Saints, it was difficult for the modern scholar to appreciate the importance that the physical remains of some holy and venerable person had for medieval civilization. Brown has demonstrated that the holy tomb was a place where heaven and earth met (3) and the vanished saint, whose praesentia flowed out to the faithful who had made a pilgrimage to the shrine, was an invisible companion who could succour and protect them (86-7). It is no wonder that the kings of Leon considered the possession of the body of Spain's great saint to have been of such significance, and that they proceeded to erect the imposing monastery of San Isidro el Real in Leon within which to place a royal pantheon. As protector of the kingdom of Leon, and viewed as its patron, St Isidore was called upon for succour in battle. For this reason there was fashioned, perhaps as early as 1147, tne famous Pendon de San Isidoro, which along with the figure of the saint bears the familiar royal shield with lions and castles (Viriayo 32). Afterward the banner was used in the struggles against the Moors to evoke the presence of the Spanish saint, who, in addition to St James, could be expected to help the Christians in the ongoing wars.10

The Lion as Symbol 119 By the early thirteenth century the heraldic and hagiographical traditions had melded Alfonso vi, St Isidore, city, and kingdom into a timeless amalgam along with the symbol of the lion. It seems unlikely that the Cid-poet remained unaware of this tradition, because the very name Leon would have constantly evoked it. The positive identification of the Cid with this animal, then, sets up a curious tension in the poem; the behaviour of the lion, in rendering to the hero the kind of homage usually reserved for 'the true prince/ signals that the Cid, born of the lesser nobility, conducts himself always in conformity with the finest precepts of the medieval Christian, chivalric tradition. It is also possible, if one accepts the suggestion of Mikel de Epalza, that the poet knew, and hearers or readers noted, that the very name of the hero was based upon or associated with a stem used in the Mahgreb to mean lion. The reader or listener, then, pondering the humility of the hero in contrast with the ira regis of his lord and observing his superior qualities and characteristics, would have understood the role of the Cid as a corrective in regard to the actions of King Alfonso.11 In his discussion of the eschatological plot Lotman has pointed out that in myth the archetypal hero often undergoes a name change as he assumes or adopts differing roles (164). An excellent post-mythic reminder of this is St Paul's change of name on the road to Damascus, where he abandoned his original name, Saul. What was achieved by a change in name in myth, Lotman says, was accomplished in later cultures by the division of the archetypal character into a number of figures. We, of course, know that King Alfonso and the Cid, from the point of view of logical historical fact and sequence, are two distinct and different individuals. However, as a pair, they represent what was in myth one figure - the wise, strong, hero-ruler so essential to the well-being of the group. Rodriguez-Puertolas has noticed that at the beginning of the poem it is the Cid who embodies and exemplifies all those positive virtues and attributes that tradition usually associated with the monarch: 'En el poema, es Rodrigo y no Alfonso quien centra en si todo aquello que normalmente deberia figurar en la personalidad del monarca' (1977, 157). But as the story progresses there is 'un evidente proceso de acercamiento entre el rey y el Cid ... un proceso de transformacion del monarca' (156), so that one can see by the end of the poem that King Alfonso is as perfect a representative of mesura, of fortitude et sapientia (Hart 1977) as is the Cid. Thus in the CMC two distinct historical personages can be seen to assume the parts that resulted from dividing the role of an archetypal

120 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid hero figure residing in memorial Such a division of the exemplar of the perfect ruler into contrasting personalities may have occurred during earlier stages in the oral culture and may have been elaborated partially in successive oral renderings. Eventually this evolving figure or figures achieved final polishing at the hands of an artist who was part of the emerging logical culture of writing in the early thirteenth century. A pairing of the Cid with King Alfonso allows the text to resolve another constant preoccupation of the oral society, one that was still problematic in early medieval times and was only beginning to move toward resolution in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Castile. Rene Girard in his book Violence and the Sacred has furthered considerably our knowledge of the role of the scapegoat in cultures where the force of memoria is still strong. Scholars have understood from the time of Frazer that primitive groups attempted on occasion either to purge themselves of problems and difficulties or to temper a cycle of wars and misfortunes by selecting a victim upon whom collective troubles could be projected. The expelling of this individual from the company implied also an assuaging of the bad luck. One of Girard's chief contributions to our understanding of this process is to show how and why, paradoxically, the ruler in particular is most useful and appropriate for such a role (103-18). As the leader of a group - and in primitive times any such group was always in peril of destruction and annihilation - the king, because of his exalted status, was the candidate par excellence to carry the burden of the society's problems. In the medieval period it would obviously have been difficult and frustrating to attempt to expel the king as a means of dealing with the difficulties that plagued Castilian and Leonese society. Even to remove a monarch who was not performing his duties well would have resulted in traumatic upsets for the social order. In providing a kind of double for King Alfonso in the person of the Cid, the text deals with both problems. The hero, who can be seen to share many of the attributes of the king, can also take on the role of the scapegoat whose ritual expulsion answers to the ancient psychological need for such an individual. But with this pairing of the king and the Cid, the poet had to avoid another problem that Rene Girard has also demonstrated in cultures of myth and memoria. Twins and doubles were looked upon with great apprehension, as were even brothers, because fraternal similarity stood as emblematic for the erasure of those distinctions and differences that are absolutely essential for the survival of any society. The loss of diver-

The Lion as Symbol 121 sity implied that those rules of rank and hierarchy, regulations concerning sexual relations and kinship and the like, tended to disappear, thereby opening the way for a constant and unending struggle among the members of the group for place and position. In the text of the CMC extraordinary care has been taken to indicate that the hero, despite his approximation to the regal role and his dramatic ascension, never attempts to put himself parallel to King Alfonso, as he surely could have done. He, after all, eventually rules in Valencia as would a king, and he has even availed himself of the privilege of a ruler by selecting and placing a bishop over the city.13 Yet there is never any suggestion of reprisal or revenge on the part of the hero. Retaliation is the action that, according to Girard, was most feared in primitive societies, because a first act of retribution could evoke a chain of reciprocal responses that might in the end result in the devastation of the group. When he meets King Alfonso the Cid, by kneeling and pulling up grass with his teeth (2021-2), makes it absolutely clear that he still considers himself the humble servant of the monarch and that he sees his allegiance completely unaffected by any wrong that King Alfonso may have done to him. The hero also, even when gravely offended by the Infantes de Carrion, does not seek revenge in any immediate and violent reprisal. Rather he finds retribution in an appeal to what must have been the model judicial process of the moment - the cortes of the king. As Girard points out, 'the overwhelming authority of the judicial prevents its sentence from becoming the first step in an endless series of reprisals' (27). The Infantes receive their punishment at the hands of the king and his assemblage and therefore, if driven to revenge, would have been forced to attack the entire system, one in which they have strong vested interest, rather than the individual. The motif of the lion, the important symbol that serves as the basic comparative link between hero and king, is also related to the eschatological theme of awakening and resurgence, derived from mythic origins, that is so apparent in the first part of the poem. In his discussion of the episode Bandera Gomez notes that the lion was often viewed as a symbol of vigilance because it was thought to sleep with its eyes open (93). The beast was also taken as referring to the idea of resurrection, as illustrations from bestiary materials demonstrate: 'The third feature is this, that when a lioness gives birth to cubs, she brings them forth dead and lays them up lifeless for three days - until their father, coming on the third day, breathes in their faces and makes them alive' (Book of

122 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid Beasts 8). It is because of descriptions such as this one that scholars have interpreted the lion that accompanies Yvain in terms of the Resurrection (Bednar 126). On one of the four sides of the Visigothic baptismal font that was moved to the Real Colegiata de San Isidoro de Leon, the carved figures of two lions face each other; the sculptors of the font must have understood these animals as relating to the sacrament of baptism. Perez Llamazares refers to the two as 'figura sencillamente el acto precursor del Bautismo' (1927,331). Baptism, particularly in the context of the Easter liturgy, was viewed as a resurrection or resurgence from sin. At Besalu in Catalonia, to the right of the south window of the village church, there is the representation of a small man who is being devoured by a terrible lion. To the left is a similar figure, perhaps meant to be the same man at a later time, who is being born, or resuscitated, between the paws of another lion. Examples of this same theme, which present the king of beasts as symbolizing the typical two-phase trajectory of the destruction of the individual followed by spiritual or physical resurrection or resurgence, can be found throughout Europe (Champeaux and Sterckx 277-8). The tympanum of the west door of the Cathedral of Jaca conveys the archetype of the just man, symbolized here and often throughout Spain as Daniel, by portraying a majestic lion pardoning a prostrate human form.14 The accompanying inscription reads 'Parcere sternenti Leo scit, Christusque petenti' (The lion knows how to spare him who is prostrate, and Christ the seeker), while another on an inferior moulding promises this individual liberation from a 'morte secunda.' Ignacio Malaxecheverria sees such figures not only as representing resurrection (128) but also in terms of the psychological struggle between good and evil, the psychomachia that takes place in the mind of the individual: 'Y tal es a nuestro modo de ver, anunciemoslo desde ahora, el doble sentido del leon navarro esculpido: por una parte representa al inconsciente agresor, que se ensenorea de la psique; por otra, la lucha fecunda de la razon contra las fuerzas regresivas del inconsciente' (136). What we have, then, is a tradition that associated the king of beasts with the the binary pair destroyer/restorer. Thus the lions who surround Daniel obviously represent a danger for him, but at the same time they portend his eventual release (Champeaux and Sterckx 275). The story of Daniel in the lions' den relates as figura to the Resurrection of Christ, to the final resurrection of all mortals, and, in addition, to particular

The Lion as Symbol 123 cases of resurgence that might occur in the life of the individual. In Ximena's prayer, therefore, the lion implies the momentary peril in which the hero finds himself, but at the same time also alludes to his eventual escape from danger.15 The beast, signifying on the one hand destruction and on the other awakening and resurrection, symbolizes a process, which when viewed from another perspective is analogous to the pattern of descent-ascent that the hero undergoes in the first part of the poem and that is repeated in a more symbolic mode in the second. Thus it is also possible to see that the king of beasts serves symbolically to link the first section of the poem, which is characterized by themes of awakening and resurgence, to the second, where at the beginning the hero is literally aroused from sleep to be accorded the treatment reserved for the true prince. When the lion escapes from its net and the Cid rises to find the beast loose in the palace in Valencia, the pattern established in the first part is transferred forward to the second half of the poem; the implication is that the hero again has to undergo a descent - this time symbolic in the form of the assault on the daughters in order to emerge fully and finally victorious after the cartes in Toledo and the duels in Carrion.16 The final proof that such a realization has occurred comes at the end of the poem, where we learn 'passado es d'este sieglo el dia de cinquaesma' (3726). Whether this information was put there by the Cidpoet or added later is unimportant; someone who understood that Pentecost is the feast above all others that reveals the workings of God for this world and that underlines the promise for the next decided to give closure to the life of the hero by having his death take place on that day.17 The lion, then, is the symbol that links the three important dialectic arguments of the poem; in addition, because of its association with themes of destruction and resurgence, it is emblematic of the idea of tristia-gaudium, of falling to rise, which characterizes the structure of the poem in both its parts. This pattern in the work is always taken in an optimistic sense, because it occurs in the context of the 'good day,' the 'propitious moment.' Because of the topic 'from associated things' or the one 'from a cause,' actions that happen within such an auspicious framework must eventually have a positive outcome. Once the Cid has been recognized, defined by the lion as true prince, he can serve because of his exemplary behaviour as corrective for the comportment of the king of Leon, who is himself associated with leonine

124 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid imagery in a variety of ways. The topic 'comparison of the lesser' sanctioned such an analogy for a poet who had studied the trivium in the middle schools of the later twelfth century. Gundissalinus, it will be recalled, used the phrase 'homo est animal' as an illustration of how the student might attain an imaginative insight in regard to the term, in this case homo, and acquire an acceptance, a belief in the truth of the entire proposition: 'ymaginacio autem necessario precedit credulitatem. nisi enim prius cognoueris significacionem huius nominis "homo uel animal," non credes hoc quod dicitur "homo est animal" (80). It was necessary first to define the term in order to secure an imaginative response to it and then to proceed to some variety of argumentative, persuasive exercise to induce belief in and acceptance of the proposition as a whole: 'quod ergo inducit nos ad cognoscendas sciencias ymaginatiuas, uocatur diffinicio, et quod inducit nos ad sciencias credulitatis, uocatur argumentacio' (80-1). If one applies Gundissalinus's reasoning to the CMC, the first thing to do with the restated proposition 'Cid est animal' is to define 'Cid.' This the text accomplishes first by demonstrating his place among the elect of sacred history with his consequent good fortune, and then in earthly terms by means of the episode of the lion, whose reaction correctly locates the hero as a member of the species 'noble.' The proposition now becomes 'felicissimus et nobillimus Cid est animal.' In addition to demonstrating how the hero can serve as exemplar for the king and his fellow members of the ruling class, the text must also explore other implications of the latter portion of this proposition. Vance observes that the dictum 'si est homo est animal' makes more than one cognitive demand of an audience, in that the text of Chretien's Yvain, through a variety of associative devices, aligns its hero with a whole series of animals in addition to the lion (1987, 91). He believes that Chretien de Troyes deals with the relationship man-animal in the Yvain by examining those properties that the human has qua human and by showing how the behaviour of the human being that results from the possession of these characteristics is distinct from that of beasts. The Cid-poet has no such ambitions. In the perfectly proper world in which his hero functions and that he helps to perfect, other members of the subaltern genus animal tend to be as faultless as he is. The only dangerous beasts in the work are those lurking in the Robledo de Corpes (2751, 2789), and these, if they did injury to the daughters and to Felez Munoz, would only be following their nature. Perhaps the poet wished to imply a connection between them and the cruel Infantes, but such a

The Lion as Symbol 125 comparison is not emphasized. There is, however, one other relationship between human and animal, in addition to the one with the lion, that did interest the Cid-poet. This analogy is accomplished, as Joseph Gwara has pointed out, by the extended series of comparisons implied between the hero and that emblem of chivalry, the horse. The CMC is not a poem particularly rich in metaphorical language. The majority of the examples present in the work are either similes, metonymies, or synecdoches, as in the famous example of the parting of members of the family 'assis' parten unos d'otros como la una de la carne' (375), a line that recurs in slightly modified form in 2642. Other types range from weapons for the warrior 'Albar Fanez, una fardida lan^a' (489), through 'tanta cuerda de tienda i veriedes quebrar' (1141) for destruction at a campsite, to 'boca sin verdad' (3362) and 'lengua sin manos' (3328) for ineffectual liars. The comparisons with 'como' are simple indeed in examples such as 'camisa ... tan blanca como el sol' (3087); or in the various things that by implication shine like the sun 'saca las espadas e rrelumbra toda la cort' (3177) or sound like thunder 'ante rroido de atamores la tierra querie quebrar' (696). On occasion the comparison takes place in a purely adjectival sense without the use of 'como' or any other intervening vocabulary, as in 'ya canes traidores' (3263). The CMC does not question directly the kind of presupposed authoritative, hierarchical bases of medieval culture that found expression in literary terms as the world as the book of nature (see Gellrich). As in the Chanson de Roland, where there is no crisis of representation whereby 'blasphemy, boasts, lies and jokes' subvert and call into question the referential power of linguistic signs (Bloch 1983, 102), so in the CMC language seems to function in harmonious connection with the world and its phenomena. The exploration of the open-endedness of meaning, the formulation of extended play in language that is so evident in the Libra de buen amor does not form part of the semiotic universe for the Cid-poet. It is almost as if he, aware of the problems that the extended semantic possibilities of metaphorical statement might imply for such a world-view, attempted to remain as close as possible to a proper base for that heightened language that he used.18 The only major, extended metaphorical play is that having to do on the one hand with leonine images and on the other with the association of the hero with equine symbols. It is of course difficult for the modern critic always to understand precisely why one metaphorical correspondence would have been

126 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid acceptable to a medieval thinker and another would not have been. As John Alford has remarked, 'The question of when tropes are permissible greatly exercised medieval writers on the subject' (1982, 752). There are numerous complaints, particularly after the twelfth century, concerning the practice of troping, the use of an aspect of grammar or syntax where such did not belong, or the application of attributes to objects and situations where they naturally could not occur.19 But, of course, without some troping no metaphorical or poetical language would be possible. Medieval writers seem to have struck a compromise by avoiding the extremes of catachresis, by attempting to find what one critic has called 'acceptable affinities between' objects (associations often established by tradition)20 and by adhering as much as possible to what was considered proper.21 Joseph Gwara has demonstrated that the image pattern of the horse recurs frequently throughout the work and that such imagery tends to clarify the function of the hero: 'The regularity with which the steeds, mules, and palfreys of the Cid's experiences are associated with his own characteristics, moods, and achievements falls well beyond mere chance; we cannot easily ignore the strict balance and coexistence which unite the horse with the Cid' (18-19). This association of a principal character, particularly one who is as exalted in virtue and conduct as is the Cid, with a horse (or even a lion for that matter) is not something that appeals greatly to the modern literary aesthetic sense. Gwara understands that the basis for such relationships in the medieval poem was a tradition that legitimized and recommended this kind of equation to the medieval writer.22 The use of the horse in such a comparative context depended upon the auctoritas of a whole series of epic animal-human duos such as Alexander and Bucephalus and Caesar and his mount (is).23 Gwara has noted that the Cid-poet has created an extraordinary image when the hero, at the vista with King Alfonso on the banks of the Tagus, kneels before his monarch and 'symbolically becomes the most dignified horse present' (16) by seizing grass with his teeth Tas yerbas del campo a dientes las tomo' (202.2). The presence of such a powerful image that implies comparison between man and beast in a poem not particularly rich in directly presented metaphorical constructions suggests that the poet intended his audience to take the association between the two species seriously indeed.24 Gwara believes that the kind of paralleling of human and animal that he sees between hero and horse involves more than what is evidenced in the phrase 'canes traidores.' What he shows is that the poem on

The Lion as Symbol 127 numerous occasions places the hero parallel with a patrician animal whose deep and intrinsic relationship with medieval nobility is proclaimed by the very name that in Romance the knight bears:'... Bavieca defines the Cid through association, and the displays of arms and teamwork in battle reveal this fact' (i4).25 It doubtless was not Gwara's intention to employ the word defines here in the technical sense in which it is utilized in logical context, because, of course, strictly speaking such would not be possible. As we have seen, the definition of the word definition in logical terms - one always used in conjunction with the predicables - is genus plus differentiae, a simple and basic explanation surely familiar to every medieval student who studied elementary dialectics in an intermediate school. The kind of metaphorical use involved in metonymy and synecdoche derives in logic from partition, when a whole substance lends its name to its parts (Martianus Capella n, 115). And, of course, the name of the part can be used to refer poetically back to the whole. This exercise is very different from that which occurs in division, which results in entities with differentiae usable in definitions.26 There is no difficulty in seeking to contrast through classical definition two entities such as horse and lion that belong to the same species, in this case defined as a substance that is corporeal, animate, mortal, and irrational. The two animals can still have differing properties and accidents that provide for interesting troping transfers. But if two things are not in the same species, when there is a mixture of species from diverse branches on the Porphyrian tree of substance, an attempt to compare by this kind of definition raises the difficulties encountered by Vance with his juxtaposition of Yvain and the lion. Obviously the association horse-man explores another aspect of the dictum 'si est homo est animal', in that it demonstrates that noble beast and noble man can be seen to share a common set of ennobling characteristics. The other powerful animal symbol in the work, the lion, is used to demonstrate what the essential place of the hero is within his species, and also, if Mikel de Epalza is correct, possibly to show that the two have features in common. Equine imagery does not indicate that the Cid is marked with differentiae that distinguish him from others in his group, but serves as a kind of mirror, a speculum, which reflects back the glory and prowess of its accomplished master and thereby provides a ground against which the worthy actions of the knight may be played. But has the Cid-poet produced here only a descriptive and metaphorical exercise of the same type one might find in modern poetry, or is he

128 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid exploring poetically yet another way in which the schools taught their students to examine logical relationships? Rosemund Tuve in her study Elizabethan and Metaphysical Images explains that often the basis for the fashioning of fine poetic tropes and metaphors in the Middle Ages and Renaissance lay in formal logic and that the exercise always depended to some degree upon logical definition: 'Indeed the formal defining element in any conceit, Elizabethan or medieval or Metaphysical in any poet or in any language, seems to me to be this use of multiple logical bases, upon all of which the comparison obtains' (264). What Tuve suggests is that there is a way in which things not in the same species can be understood logically as resembling one another and thereby be compared, which avoids the difficulties inherent in definition by predicable:'... the majority of images using tropes would be covered formally by the definition: two things seen to be in parallel predicaments or "places" ' (286),27 What Tuve means by this statement is explained by numerous illustrations, taken from Elizabethan poetry, that demonstrate how two very different entities, belonging to different species, can be portrayed momentarily and poetically as sharing the same spot in one of Aristotle's ten categories or predicaments. For example, for 'manner of doing' (action) Tuve chooses the line 'hand did quake like a leafe of Aspin Greene'; for 'manner of suffering' or 'action received' (passion) she selects the comparison 'women like vessels of brass oft handled.' Hand and woman are defined poetically in part by showing how each in the respective predicaments 'action' and 'passion' is similar to something else, which in these examples are leaf and pot. But, of course, it is a troping or transferring of an action and a passion appropriate for leaf and pot to hand and woman, where they normally do not belong, that establishes the comparative and illustrative equation. The basis for the use of definition as the foundation for metaphorical comparisons probably derives ultimately from Aristotle's view that in every judgment the predicate must be a definition or one of the other four predicables (Joseph 66). Such a formulation seems to have occasioned a kind of tension in the minds of subsequent thinkers between a judgment that demonstrates the essence of a thing - that is, a true definition, genus and differentiae - or one based upon some other Aristotelian formulation for the physical universe, and a type that is largely descriptive. For example, John of Salisbury says that Cicero and Boethius 'widened the extension' of the word definition to include what are really metaphorical descriptions. John complains that some descriptions of this

The Lion as Symbol 129 sort are completely useless while others appear to have some validity (182). As an example of the bad kind, he gives 'law is the //measure"or "image" of things that are naturally just' - not a good translatio because 'an image is something fashioned in the likeness of something else, but such is not an inherent characteristic of law' (ibid.). What I infer from John's subsequent discussion is that the kind of definition by predicament suggested by Tuve is one of the most valid and acceptable varieties beyond genus plus differentiae.28 Two entities, sharing some similar characteristics or accidents but differing in others, can be counterposed, thereby setting the stage for illuminating contrasts, poetic judgments on one or both of the two. But there has to be a reason why an accident pertaining to one thing can be poetically said to be possessed by another. Such a reason can find foundation by proper use and reference to the predicaments. For example, certain things can have measure, quantity, and these entities can have fashioned in imitation of their measure an image that properly depends upon quantity. But John of Salisbury's point is that such does not pertain in the case of the law. Boethius's views on the relative merits of various kinds of definition in connection with description are available in his commentary on Cicero's Topics (ed. Stump 1988). In my opinion, however, the best guide to an understanding of that variety of definition by reference to predicament as discussed by Tuve is Alcuin's chapter 'De specibus diffinitionum' (967-8) in his De dialectica, which is often referred to as a guide to what medieval theories on definition were. Alcuin surely knew Boethius, for many of his comments seem to echo phrases or explanations from the commentary on Cicero's Topics (93-6). Alcuin lists a number of ways by means of which an entity may be defined in a context of dialectics. He begins with the most common variety, genus plus differentiae, and then moves through a series of seven others, all of which, save the last two, can be immediately seen to depend upon either the predicaments or the predicables. These are definition by 'action' (and doubtless also by implication 'passion'), by 'quality', by 'difference' - for instance, that between king and tyrant, by 'privation' God is not all the following things, by 'indigentia' - a lack in a real or metaphorical sense, for example the question: What is a fourth? The answer: Where three-fourths are not. Alcuin's sixth variety is diffinitio per laudem, one not immediately clarified by his example 'dux est animus et disciplina civitatis' (The leader is the soul and discipline of the city). What he means is, in fact, precisely what the Cid-poet does in regard to the hero. In praising an individual

130 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid or entity one sets forth a series of characteristics, properties, and accidents that distinguish the entity from other members of its species.29 Although Alcuin does not refer to it, the same objective in a negative sense can also be achieved by blaming. 'Per laudem' as explained in this chapter is actually related to 'per differentiarn/ Only Alcuin's last kind of definition then, which he says is 'quasi juxta rationem/ can be seen as outside the tight regime of the predicables and the predicaments. This is 'cum majoris rei nomine minor res ostenditur; ut, Homo est minor mundus; et: Edictum est lex annua' (The lesser thing is shown through the name of the greater thing; such as, Man is a small world; and the law was promulgated year-by-year).30 But even this variety of definition, which seemingly approaches the freer associations that modern poets use, may depend upon the category 'relation/ which is usually taken in more arithmetical or geometric terms - it is double, half, greater, etc. In addition, this kind of example by analogy can usually be seen to rely upon a proverbial or traditional base for the judgment offered. From Gwara's discussion it is clear that the Cid-poet, in order to emphasize the prowess and outstanding fighting abilities of the hero, uses the image of the excellent horse in comparisons that depend largely upon the predicament 'quality': 'the hero requires a superior steed because he is a superior man' (13). But there are also examples that refer to other categories, as is clear when the Cid sends as his first offering to King Alfonso a gift of thirty horses: 'todos con siellas e muy bien enfrenados, senas de los arzones colgadas' (817-18). Gwara's comment that 'the equine gift reflects the Cid's own majesty' (15) is doubtless true in the sense of mutually shared qualities, but is also true in regard to another predicament, habitus or 'possession,' which in medieval times was often taken with the meaning 'appareling,' the wearing of armour and such. One recalls the great care with which the hero and his men dress themselves before entering Toledo for the cortes (3073-100). Magnificently attired horses support and refer to the sumptuous dress of the successful hero and his entourage. The kind of troping discussed by Tuve in relation to the quality 'action' also occurs in the CMC in the powerful image discussed previously, when the hero, at the vista with King Alfonso on the banks of the Tagus, kneels before his monarch and seizes grass with his teeth, 'las yerbas del campo a dientes las tomo' (2022). An 'action' - or perhaps a 'passion'31 - of the noble horse (the image of Bavieca hovers) is transferred to another species, the human being, where it does not naturally belong

The Lion as Symbol 131 but where, so dislocated, it can result in a powerful and moving metaphor. In addition, those few comparisons the poet makes that do not depend upon metonymy and synecdoche - where a connection is natural usually also result from the placing of two different things in a similar predicament. A shirt shares the quality 'white' with the snow. A sword shines by implication as brightly as the sun, and drums make the earth shake like thunder. Actio and qualitas blend in order to support images that, if not precisely innovative and original, are certainly valid. As the critic attempts to describe a putative logical base for images in the CMC, the same kind of question arises as the one asked by Donald Maddox in his review of From Topic to Tale - is it really necessary to analyse seemingly commonplace representations in terms of dialectical forms? Is it not exaggerated to insist upon discussing metaphorical relationships in terms of the topics, the predicables, and the predicaments? The answer is again, as Tuve points out, that until the Enlightenment, the tradition that dictated the manner in which a writer constructed his or her work implied that the rules of logical procedure had to be the basis of any true statement, poetic or otherwise, that the writer hoped to make {281-3). This was accepted as valid because the unique blend of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought that was the foundation of Western European culture taught that a recourse to such logical undertakings was the only means by which the structure of reality and the links between things could be understood and imitated in written works. At numerous points in her study Tuve suggests that a poet who developed comparisons that depended upon such strategies as reference to the predicaments would have learned his or her craft in the schools. A medieval writer who studied the predicaments, predicables, definition, and the topics in the middle schools would readily recognize and appreciate the problems concerning definition that I have been discussing. This kind of difficulty is by no means deeply metaphysical or ontological, nor does it involve an awareness of profound theological questions or of tentative solutions proposed for such. Any medieval who passed beyond the elementary stages of reading and writing, who had to some degree analysed the auctores, would be aware that definition for purposes of comparison was a practice circumscribed by certain rules. A talented poet would doubtless hope to create comparative structures grounded as much as possible in the ways accepted for describing and arguing in the period.

132 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid A further understanding of the kind of poetic correspondences that Tuve describes can be attained by consulting M.J. Woods's studies of the modes of procedure of such Golden Age authors as Gongora and Gracian. Woods shows that writers in Spain in this period, just as in England, in order to find and demonstrate links between objects and to express them poetically and artistically, still had recourse to topical theory (1968, 854-63). He also sees Aristotle's categories as important to these writers and explains for us what the difference is between the function of the categories and the use of the topics in literary composition. The topics are the basis for argumentative sequences and concern themselves more with the relation between things, while the categories, by lending themselves to more particular kinds of definitions and descriptions, serve to further inquiries into the nature of reality (861). By the end of the CMC resolution in all spheres has been attained; the hero, having achieved justice for himself and his family, with his daughters married to sons of kings, has ascended on high. King Alfonso is firmly and positively portrayed as the wise and just ruler so desired by medieval society because he has made sure that the Infantes and their family have been punished for their misdeeds and has re-established concord with his loyal vassal. The process of revelation and manifestation can now be understood as realized, as accomplished. It is, of course, the conduct of the hero as ideal figure, as standard in the evolutionary process, that has been ultimately the important catalyst in this process. The next chapter analyses the manner in which the poem underlines and emphasizes the depth of the hero's attainments.

10

Rhetoric and the Cortes Episode

As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the philosophical procedure that from the time of Aristotle governed the systematic treatment of discourse, both structuring and analysing it, had two parts. The first of these, invention, was the art of discovering new arguments so that new themes and modes of procedure could be drawn from previously existing material. The second, judgment, was the method for proving and demonstrating the soundness of those arguments and for showing that what they suggested was true (McKeon 1966, 367-8). Judgment in the sense of determination or of deciding was of great importance in any discourse intended to convey a message. If a writer used topical analysis to find arguments whereby certain points could be made and set forth, eventually he would have to decide whether such points had been established or proved. I have suggested that in the CMC there are three principal argumentative structures drawn from topical base; one, 'from definition/ establishes the place of the hero in sacred history and proves in regard to this world that he is the equal of kings and the higher nobility; another, 'from associated things' or 'from a cause/ shows that the adventures of the hero move along with and are supported by the positive frame of the poem; and a third, 'from comparison of a lesser thing/ makes the role of the hero exemplary for King Alfonso and the aristocracy. Vance (1987) may well be correct in thinking that Chretien in the "Yvain was concerned almost completely with dialectical argumentation.1 In the CMC, however, I believe that other forms offered by the trivium, such as those based upon rhetorical topics, are significant in both the invention of arguments and the judgment of conclusions implied by these arguments.

134 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid The principal judgment of the validity of the assumptions put forward by the three major arguments in the work occurs in the last portion of the poem, in a form that, somewhat ironically, is pre-eminently rhetorical in cast. This is the cortes episode, a section that is actually constituted as an exercise in juridical analysis and procedure. The Cid-poet, then, accepts the ancient and time-honoured dictum that all discourse consists of invention and judgment and projects this scheme into his opus in two ways. First, he elaborates his material by means of dialectical topical arguments that, because of the circumstances in which they occur, tend immediately to induce belief and therefore judgment. Then, in the last part of the work, he creates a kind of miseen-abyme, wherein a judging of these arguments is repeated and a final decision rendered concerning them.2 This judgment is carried out first in an atmosphere of judicial process and then in terms paralleling the judicial duel. In an article published in 1977 Garci-Gomez studies the Cortes episode, from the perspective of the Ciceronian genus narrationis quod in personis positum est from the Rhetorica ad Herennium (i, viii, 13), a work believed in the Middle Ages to have been composed by Cicero. Although he makes it clear that he thinks that both the De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium were known in Spain in the period, Garci-Gomez is chary about suggesting that the Cid-poet used them: 'No es mi proposito afirmar que estas obras fueron consultadas ...' (125). He implies that the poet is using the kind of 'retorica comun' that Deyermond and Smith see in the poem. Milija Pavlovic and Roger Walker (1983) have analysed the cortes episode in terms of the late Roman cognitio, a forensic procedure that used the formulary system found in the Institutes of the Roman jurist Gaius, and have shown how his four-part formulary division of the trial - the praescriptio, demonstratio, intentio, and exceptio - is reflected in the engagement between the hero and his rivals. I find convincing their explanations relating to the Cid's first two demands3 - that the gifts that he gave to the Infantes, his swords, and the three thousand marks be returned to him. But their analysis of the third demand, which has to do with his honour, I believe to be somewhat incomplete. They see the demonstratio, the facts and circumstances out of which the claim arose, and the intentio, the plaintiffs statement of claim, summed up in two brief lines: 'de los if antes de Carrion, quern' desondraron tan mal, / a menos de rriebtos no los puedo dexar' (3256-7). This

Rhetoric and the Cortes Episode 135 is followed by a long interrogatio on the part of the Cid, which is answered by an exceptio, the extenuating circumstances, from Garcia Ordonez. An exceptio can be countered by a replicatio from the other side, which can be answered by a duplicatio and then countered by a triplicatio and so forth. Pavlovic and Walker see the trial proper as ending with Count Garcia's exceptio, because after this point 'no new evidence is presented by either side' (103) and the formality of the courtroom 'gives way to the much less restrained procedures of the Germanic baraja, in which the rival parties ... address themselves exclusively to one another in violent and obscene terms' (103-4). They believe that Garcia Ordonez sets a trap for the hero with the mention of the beard - 'dexola crecer e luenga trae la barba, / los unos le han miedo e los otros espanta' (3273-4) - a trap into which the Cid falls when he reminds the cortes how he plucked the beard of the count at the Castle of Cabra. There can be no doubt that this third section terminates in a kind of slapstick (3377-89). But the long period of argumentation that leads up to that ending, although presenting no new evidence, serves an extremely important function; proof is established there for the argument 'from definition' about the Cid and the one 'from a comparison of a lesser thing' that shows his role as exemplary. The rise of the hero, his success against the Moors, and his re-establishing of ties with King Alfonso have already demonstrated in part the validity of the argument 'from associated things' or 'from a cause,' which shows that the adventures of the Cid take place within a positive frame. The hero, a redeemed Christian born and knighted at a propitious hour, has by dint of optimism and effort achieved what was portended by this positive frame that encompasses the events of the poem. The eventual marriage of his daughters to sons of kings and his death on Pentecost complete and give effective artistic and aesthetic closure to this affirmative atmosphere. But at the beginning of the cortes episode, the poet appears to signal again his argument 'from associated things' or 'from a cause' when he has the hero determine not to enter Toledo at nightfall but to delay his advent until the next morning (3043-51). While attending matins and prime (3060), the Cid and his retinue hear once more those verses from the psalm encountered near the beginning of the poem at San Pedro de Cardena, which proclaimed themes of resurgence and awakening. The castle of San Servando is thus one kind of locus, spatial, in which another

136 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid topos, occasional, the liturgical office, serves to repeat and reinforce themes carried by a third kind of place, the traditional structuring variety from the dialectical tradition. The portion of the juridical dispute between the Cid and his entourage and the Infantes and their group that follows the hero's acceptance of the payment in kind from the Infantes (3250-2) is loosely based, I believe, upon the tradition of the Ciceronian oration, which was intended as a guide to teach effective methods of argument for the courtroom. Cicero was surely regarded as the ultimate auctor in such a matter. That the poet utilized the Ciceronian oration in devising a repetitio, duplicatio, and so on is not at all far-fetched if he understood and appreciated even to some degree the subtleties of legal procedure.4 The first seven chapters of book i of the De inventione, which put heavy emphasis upon the process of finding an argument fit for use in juridical circumstance, define the concept of the subject that pertained throughout the Middle Ages (Camargo 102-3). Both the De inventione and the Khetorica ad Herennium were read and commented upon in the middle schools of the Middle Ages (Abelson 59); both were in Spain by the first quarter of the thirteenth century (Faulhaber 1972, 40-1) and likely were available there earlier. In addition, a commentary tradition had evolved in regard to the basic Ciceronian opera and various works from this tradition were studied. Faulhaber, for example, points out that Gundissalinus in the De divisione philosophiae was probably following a commentary by Victorinus (1972, 60). Karin Fredborg in her edition of Thierry of Chartres's commentary on the De inventione warns us that such commentaries were 'confined to the classroom' and that it is difficult to know what relation they had to the general medieval tradition of rhetoric, particularly as applied to such things as poetics (30). If one is uncertain in regard to France, one is much more so in the case of Spain. But medieval poets who received some training in the classroom surely studied the original text, medieval commentary on the text, and/or handbooks that summarized the information found in the text. In such a situation it is highly probable that a poet or writer would use structures suggested by a figure of such authority and majesty as Cicero. The text of choice in the north for teaching rhetorical exercises may also have been a compendium that combined excerpts from a number of authors whose work derived from the Ciceronian tradition. In many cases students simply memorized the six pages of Cassiodorus's De arte

Rhetoric and the Cortes Episode 137 rhetorica, which presents a kind of outline of the information in De inventions (Abelson 54-8). I suggest that the resemblance of the structure of the third interchange in the cortes episode to that of the Ciceronian oration is too great to be coincidental and that at some point in his training the Cid-poet worked with an example from this tradition. For convenience and because of the ready availability of texts, I shall analyse the argument in terms of the explanation of the oration presented in the De inventione and in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, with occasional reference to examples from the commentary tradition. The Ciceronian oration consisted of six parts: exordium, narrative, partition, confirmation, refutation, and peroration (De inv. i, xiii, 19). In its fullest form as described by Cicero, it has a complicated and lengthy structure in which the six parts, all depending heavily upon a knowledge and use of the rhetorical topics,5 can be developed and related to one another in a variety of ways. Obviously the Cid and his adversaries, during the rapid interchange at the cortes, could not have indulged in the lengthy and flowery speech that would have resulted from an imitation of the Ciceronian oration in toto. A poet using Cicero's description of the oration would have chosen those aspects best suited to his purpose. The poet could have taken an understanding of the dispositio of the oration from the Ciceronian tradition or even from a writer in Romance who had followed this tradition. Alcuin's De rhetorica et de virtutibus, cast in the form of a dialogue between Charlemagne and the master, offers an excellent example of the Latin tradition. It is based upon De inventione and was probably designed to help the ruler to learn to judge and decide (Abelson 58, n. 2). Here we have the courtroom situation fully if somewhat allegorically, portrayed: 'ludex sceptro aequitatis armandus est, accusator pugione malitiae, defensor clypeo pietatis, testes tuba veritatis' (Halm n, 534) (The judge must be armed with the sceptre of antiquity; the accusor with the dagger of malice; the defender with the shield of piety; the witness, with the trumpet of truth). The case is argued in terms of the Ciceronian oration: 'Sex enim sunt partes, per quas ab oratore ordinanda est oratio causae' (ibid.) (There are six parts into which the trial speech should be organized by the speaker). The presentation of Cicero's ideas is, although highly condensed, certainly representative. The later medieval examples that purport to depend directly upon the Latin prototype are frequently not too helpful in showing us how

138 Structures from the Trivium in the Cantar de Mio Cid the writer in the period may have used Cicero. There is, for example, the model done by John of Garland in his Parisiana poetria, which was composed a few years after the CMC (68-72.) But as the editor of the work comments, 'This poem is an attempt to create a work of art and to illustrate the six parts of an oration at the same time; it cannot be said to succeed at either' (244). An example in Romance from the poet Marcabru (c. 1129-50) is clearer. Marcabru spent time at the court of Castile during the reign of Alfonso vii and may even have composed his tornada 'Desirat per desirada' to celebrate the promise of marriage between the young Sancho m (desidembilis Sancius) and Princess Blanche (Paterson, 52, n. 4). In his song 'Per savi.l tenc' Marcabru demonstrates a particular knowledge of the Ciceronian oration when he attempts to illustrate the difference between true and false love (Paterson 17-18). According to Ciceronian precepts the first task for an orator was to establish the genus cause of what he was going to speak, whether the subject should be considered as demonstmtivum, deliberativum, orjudicabile. He then was to proceed to isolate the particular constitutio concerning the issue to hand (De inv. i, viii). Evidently medieval writers who followed Cicero's model in their work did not always do this. For example, in England around 1100 the archdeacon of Thetford wrote a Miracles of St Edmund in which he bypassed these first two steps and the exordium to proceed directly to finding a locus ab auctoritate (Ward 1972, 367-8). Even more interesting considering the themes in the CMC, is the substitution that Alcuin made for the genera in his De rhetorica et de virtutibus. This little work clearly has political and judicial overtones, since it purported to instruct Charlemagne in 'civiles mores.' Here the genera become honestum, admirabile, and humile (Abelson 58). Rhetorical divisions based upon type of situation have been metamorphosed into ones having to do with the qualities of character necessary for the perfect ruler.6 In the CMC the poet did not concern himself with the genera, but proceeded directly to a variety of the traditional exordium. Since the exordium is a passage that puts the audience in a proper frame of mind to receive the rest of the speech, it is logical that in it the speaker should attempt to capture the goodwill of those listening. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. The one chosen by the Cid-poet, derived, I think, from Cicero, seeks sympathy by implying that the opponents have committed cruel and malicious deeds (i, xvi, 22): 'Oidme toda la cort, e pesevos de mio rnal: / de los if antes de Carrion, quern' desondraron tan

Rhetoric and the Cortes Episode 139 mal, / a menos de rriebtos no los puedo dexar' (3255-7). The hero then delivers a short impassioned speech in which he appears to conflate the narration, confirmation, and partition of the oration. The narration was the presenting of the facts of the case, and in the confirmation the speaker was supposed to establish these either by a method of induction or by syllogistic deduction. The partition contained a statement of the opponent's case. In the poem the hero's first question effectively denies that the Infantes have a case. If this is true, then the Cid is free economically to combine the narration and confirmation into one. He begins by asking what he did to the Infantes to merit the treatment that he has received: 'Dezid, !33; division of, 23; associated with beliefs and customs, 67, 71; as sermonem representativum, 68; from enthymeme in Chanson de Roland, i68n6; equivalent to plot, i82ni3 Aristotle, 4, 5, 9, 12, 13,16, 17, 19, 22, 24, 25, 42, 47, 54, 57, 67, 68, 72, 83, 133; categories as basis for tropes, 128 Armistead S.G., rhetorical questions in Mocedades de Rodrigo 174^ artes poetriae, 3, 18, 21, 30, 56 assimilatio: of hero, 73-7; accomplished in painting, 108; in Ximena's prayer, 108; of hero, Kingdom of Leon, lion, and Alfonso vi, 116, 118; of individual to symbol, i82ng; of time periods, i8gn4 assonance, interaction with vocabulary and topics, 40 assumptio, 23-4 attributes of a person, attributes of actions as rhetorical topics, i4off auctoritas (authority), auctores, 10, 19, 21, 31, 34, 44, 52, 54, 62, 96; ones known in Castile 29; diminution of importance of in CMC, 155 Augustine, St, 32; on signs, 151; hermeneutics of signs, i8sn6; exegesis of Creation, i88ni7

authorial categories, 8, 42 authorship of CMC, 6 Avengalbon, name derives from ghalaba, 'to be victorious' in Arabic, i83n2i Averroes, version of Aristotle's Poetics, 22, 25, 68 awakening, 3, 4, 41; at Easter, 98-9; in Confessions, 108; Genesis Creation as, 108; biblical examples of in Ximena's prayer, 109; Lazarus and Palm Sundays, examples of, 111; Crucifixion and Longinus story, examples of, 111; vistas as motifs of, 113; lion as symbol of, 121-3; a* San Servando, 135-6; and Book of Revelation, 187^ Baldwin, T.W., order of invention and judgment reversed, 17 ballads contemporary to CMC, i75n8 Bandera Gomez, Cesareo: lion episode central to poem, 78; lion and awakening, 121 baptism, lion associated with, 122 baraja, Germanic dispute, 135 Barbara celarent, mnemonic scheme for figures of syllogism, 54, 64, 66, 86 Bavieca, derived from bava, 191^5 Bayeux Tapestry, no systematic interrelation of symbols therein, 117 beard of Cid: used in argument as rhetorical device, 135; and sarcasm, 143; and Count of Cabra, M5 Bede, and sarcasm, 143 beginning, of CMC, i86n2

Index 223 Berceo, Gonzalo de, 4, 39; information on schools in saints' lives, 29; good wine and good poetry, 90 Berlanga, church murals and figures in Ximena's prayer, 107 Bernard of Chartres, 15; may have taught Gundissalinus, 60 Bernardus Compostelanus, jurist born in Spain, 32 Berte aus grans pies, 78 Bertran de Born, and humble lion, 80 biblical epic, Christian, 14, 41; optimistic in tone, iSsng Bliese, John: kinds of schools, 14, 28; description of schools, 29 Block, R. Howard, 33, 46, 61; crisis of representation in Chanson de Roland, 125; family as reliquary, 154; money and dialectics, 157 Bloomfield, Morton W., on pride, 195^13 Boethius, 9, 10, 16, 18, 22, 29, 32, 49, 50, 57, 64, 75, 84, 115; classification of speculative sciences, 61; definition of case, 82; topic 'from a similar,' 85; 'from associated things,' 91; concept of 'day,' 95; views on definition, 128-9; views on division, i7oni6 Bond, Gerald A., Ovid as central text, i77n9 Book of Beasts, lion and awakening, 121-2 book of nature, 125 Brault, Gerald J.: French as God's chosen people, 103; ideas on heraldry, 117 el Brocense, Francisco Sanchez de

las Brozas, framer of syllogisms, 90, 91, 92, 93 Brown, Peter, importance of body of saint, 118 Brutus, and Britain, 52 bull as St Luke, assimilation of preacher to, i82n9 Burke, James F.: Qd-poet knew Ovid, 94; scars as signs, 148; images relating to Pentecost, i9ini7 Burt, John, 98; lion's den related to leoneses, 109 Bynum, Caroline, concept of individual, i8in5 caballero victorioso, igonis Caesar, De Bella Gallico, i89n6 Cain, his crime example 'from a lesser cause,' i8gn2 Camargo, Martin, on finding an argument in De inventione, 136 Cantarino, Vicente: sophistical argumentation in LBA, 175ns; imagination in Arabic tradition, i8ins Carmen Campidoctoris, 31; as rhetorical historiography, i72ni; not product of schools, i73n6; shield of Cid has dragon, 189^ Carreno, Antonio, shame culture in Conde Lucanor, i94ni5 Carrion duels, 77, 123 Cassiodorus: basic school author, 15; on assumptio, 23, 24; enthymeme on good weather, 96, 99 Castro, Francisco de, 48 Catedra, Pedro, Cid-poet used formal rhetorical structures, 37 categories (predicaments), of Aris-

224 Index totle, 19, 67; and Posterior Analytics, 85; as basis for metaphors and tropes, 128-30; actio-qualitas, 131; explanation of, i9i-2n27 cathedral schools, 29 Celestina, medieval mode of composition used in, 35 Champeaux, Gerard and Sebastien Sterckx, Daniel in lions' den as figura, 122 Chanson de Roland, a rewriting of pre-existing materials, i76ni4 Chartres, School of, 74 Cherchi, Paolo, lion as symbol, 79, 85, 117-18 chests: as symbols of commercialism and exchange, 154; as hoard, 154; did Raquel and Vidas look into them? i8sn7 chivalric love, 53 chivalry and commercialism, 153 Chretien de Troyes, 9, 52; used syllogistic form, 55, 61, 72, 80; used dialectical topics, 82; themes of awakening, 101 Cicero, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 45, 47, 57, 64, 68, 78, 85; De Officiis, 17; Topica, 20, 65, 145, i79-8on9; on definition, 128, 129; In Verrem, 140; on topic 'from a name,' 145 cinquaesma (Pentecost): demonstrates Cid as finally victorious, 123; gives closure to CMC, 135 Clark, Donald, summaries and discussions of Praeexercitamina, 14, 20, 21 Claudinus, and lion material, 79 closure, artistic ending of CMC, 165 coinage, 158 commentary tradition, in Ciceronian opera, 136

commonplaces, see topics composition: of CMC, 49, 70, 96, i78nn, iginnn, 13; of literary work, 27, 39, 49, 55, 56, 61, 65, 66, 70,131 Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, no Conde Lucanor, humility as characteristic of ruler, 84 conjointure, 51, 54, 55, 86; compared to compilatio, 177116 Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogue of the Authors, 14, 19, 22, 57 content material, 45; humble lion as, 78; joining of structuring topic to content material, 45 Corbacho, 'esthetics of the contrary' in, i8oni3 Corfis, Ivy A., French customary law in CMC, i74n8 corpes episode, CMC could end before, 77 cartes episode, 4, 123; and themes of awakening, 113; significance of Cid's dressing for, 131 corza, animal on Bishop Jeronimo's shield, 117 Craig, Hardin: logical terms in Shakespeare, 56; syllogistic form in Shakespeare, 83-4 crecer, controlling verb in latter part of CMC, i6iff credulitates and consuetudines, lead to understanding, 67-8, 71 Cronica najerense, St Peter and victory of Alfonso vi, 186-7^ Crucifixion, related to spring, 97 cuaderna via, 39; invented for achieving rhetorical effect, i78nn Cuenca-Teruel charters, 31 culture of print, 8, 47

Index 225 culture of resonances, 7 culture of writing, 36, 40 Curtius, Ernst: theory of topos not fully explained, 17; topos as content material 20, 37, 45, 46, 78, 79, 92; Carmen campidoctoris as school poem, 31 Dagenais, John: interaction between text and reader, 6; reader becomes text, 7, 49; 'lectureture,' 105 D'Alverny, Marie-Therese: Marcus of Toledo studied auctores, 32; Gundissalinus in contact with major movements of his time, 60 Daniel, as symbol, i9oni4 Dante, Inferno derived from memory system, 48 date of CMC, 6, 74 day, concept of as basis for topical displays, 95 debate, scholastic, 54 De Chasca, Edmund, division of CMC into two parts, iSoni, i82ni2 De divisione philosophiae, 12, 24, 57, 60-9 deduction and induction, 5, 53 definition and division, 5, 17, 21, 42, 43' 53/ 58/ 70; how Cid's adventures are defined, 72-3, 116; definition of definition, 84, i8in4; how related to topic 'from definition,' i78-9ni4; as problem for medieval thinkers, i8onio; by praise, 192^9 De gestis Karoli Imperatoris, 78 De inventione, 13,18, 45, 57, 60, 65, 87,134, 136; refutation treated, 142; when known in Castile, i78ni3

Delhaye, Ph., medieval work grounded in ethics, 5 Dennys, Rodney, on heraldry, 117 descriptio, 3, 21, 35; in The Saint-Omer Art of Poetry, i69ni4 De topicis differentiis, 9, 16, 18, 20, 49, 50, 57, 84, 85, 91, 95, 115; definition of induction, 75 Deyermond, Alan, 9, 10, 34, 37, 49, 58, 134, i75n7, i88n2i; Cid-poet knew Ovid, 94; pre-existing epic fragments, i75nio; meaning of '... que buen vasallo ...' i86ni dialectic, see logic Diaz y Diaz, Manuel C: libraries in ~La Rioja, 173^; schooling by individual tutoring, 174^ dictamen metricum, 19, 41 Diego Garcia, author of Planeta, 33 Diego Gonzalez, uses 'from nature' topos, 147 differentiae, of topics, 49, 50 dispositio, of literary work, 65; no Ciceronian influence on, i8oni2 Disputa del alma y el cuerpo, earliest work in Castilian, 34 division of CMC, into two or three parts, 70-1, i8om, i82ni2 Dominicus Gundissalinus, 3, 6, 12, 16, 17, 22, 24, 28, 33, 43, 55, 57, 58, 60-9, 72, 75; knowledge of logic, 60; understanding of grammar, 60; definition of man, 71; definition of sophistical reasoning, 157; reverses order of definition and division, I7oni5; knowledge of Arabic, i79nn3, 4 Donatus, Ars minor, Barbarismus, basic school texts, 15, 57 doors and cloaks, images of in CMC, i86n3

226 Index Dronke, Peter, comments on Exsultet, 97 Dufourcq, Charles E. and J. Gautier Dalche, devaluation of 'morabetino' around 1200, 158 Duggan, Joseph J., 13, 27, 28, 59; concept of menosvaler, 142; on Cid's lineage, 144; rejects use of term 'lawyer' for CMC, i74n8; implication of 'from comparison of a lesser thing' in CMC, i88ni; legal procedures of Rome and those in CMC, i93n4 Dutton, Brian, legal phrases in CMC, i74n8 dysphoria, in Old French poetry, I96ni7 Easter, rebirth at, i86ni2 Eco, Umberto, concept of 'heap/ 81-2, 86 Eden, Garden of, 46 education, medieval, 169^19-14; at St Gall, i73n4; sixteenth-century education in England analogous to medieval, 173^; personal tutoring in Spain, i74ng education level of poet, 28, 38, 39, 61, i74~sn4 Edward vi of England, education of, 173^7 Edwards, Robert R., Chanson de Roland a rewriting of previous materials, i76ni4 encyclopaedia, 25; medieval version is Eco's 'heap,' 86 Encyclopedia of Religion, no Enders, Jody, argumentation from enthymeme in Chanson de Roland, i68n6 England, John, Cid makes progress

while Raquel and Vidas do not, 160 enthymeme, 23, 35, 36, 75, 96 Epalza, Mikel de, 127; name 'Cid' from Arabic word for lion, 89,119 epic: South Slavic, 38; Muslim, 39; as folk-style work, 38-9; fragments of > 39/ !75n8 epic tags, 95,101 epichireme, 23 Epiphany: and the demise of winter, iSsnn; called Aparicio Domini, i88ni8 'escarhno e de mal dizer,' CMC as example, i96ni4 escribir, meaning of in CMC, i73n2 Esmeijer, Anna C, onlooker portrayed as being in painting, 107 Esteban, canon of Toledo, bequeathed texts of auctores, 32 'esthetics of the contrary/ i8oni3 Estoria de Espana, concepts of love in, i78nio ethics, relation to writing, 62 ethopoeia, description of character or place, 21 etymology, 50; vocabulary, proper source of, 46; physical place as structuring topos, 46 Eugenius of Toledo, use of school exercises, i69n8 Evans, Gillian R.: divine Scripture has syllogistic form, 14; literary authors used techniques based upon logical forms, 24 exempla, 35-6, 75 Exodus pattern, 98 , exordium, Ciceronian variety used in cartes episode, 138 expulsion, liturgy of Easter, 97-9 Exsultet, in Easter Vigil Mass, 97

Index 227 extrinsic definition, 73, 83 fall of Troy, 31 fallacia secundum non causam ut causam, 159 familiaritas-traditio corporis et animae, i87n6 family, as reliquary, 154 Faral, Edmond, 44, 48 Faulhaber, Charles: elementary forms of education in Berceo, 29; Gundissalinus used Victorinus commentary, 60; De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium known in Spain in early thirteenth century, 136 Fecundia Ratis, medieval reader, 29 Felez Munoz, name connected to restoration of fortune, 113, 124 felix, word that suggests pattern of loss of good fortune followed by restoration, 113 felix culpa, 97; and 'loss-to-recovery' paradigm since Virgil, iSsnio festival arrangement, verbal pictures described during church feasts, 108 figural or typological mode, 73, 98, 104 I Henry IV, use of logical terms in, 83 flight of birds: portends good, 96; portends evil, 100 Fontaine, Jacques, school exercises in Isidore of Seville, i68n8 forma tractandi, forma tractatus, 6, 21, 43, 44, i8in2 fortitude and sapientia, qualities of Cid, 119 four causes, 73-4 four technical places in use of art, i7in22

Fradejas Lebrero, lose, 33; 'cantilenas' contemporary to CMC, i75m o Fraker, Charles F., 9; how Alexandre poet refashioned materials, 35, 36; Alexandre poet had interest in causal relationships, 50 framing devices for rhetorical topics, 141 Fredborg, Karin Margareta: mature reader analysed by topics, 18; students learned topics by reading, 20; topics used as mnemonic devices, 49; use of commentaries confined to classroom, 136 French as God's chosen people, 103 'from a cause,' 50, 58, 91, 93, 96, 100, 114, 133, 135; see also aetiology 'from a name,' 18, 87, 89; Pero Vermudez's use of, 145, i93mo 'from associated things,' 58, 91, 93, 96, 100, 114, 133,135 'from character/ 45 'from comparison of a lesser thing,' 58, 59, 88, 133; contrast in behaviour between Cid and Alfonso vi, 115; examples of, i&9n2 'from contraries,' 9 'from definition,' 58, 76, 83, 89 'from designation,' notatio, same in dialectic as 'from a name,' i83n2o 'from genus,' as basis for Yvain, 81 'from nature,' a natura: rhetorical topic, i44ff; and duty of noble, 146 Fuero de Plasencia, and evidence of reviving classicism, 31 Gabriel, archangel, 73, 77; and tristia-gaudium pattern, 102, 112

228 Index Gallo, Ernest, how Geoffrey of Vinsauf used sources, 1711124 Galmes de Fuentes, Alvaro: campeador caique on Arabic word, 88; on lion in Libra de las batallas, 89 game of division, 43 Garci-Gomez, Miguel, 37, 78, 79, 80; Ciceronian genus narrationis in cartes episode, 134; on wordplay with name of Count of Cabra, 145; and homo rhetoricus, 152; new enterprises in twelfth century, 153 gaudium-tristia period, 78, 102 Gellrich, Jesse M, the book of nature, 125 genealogical concerns in chansons de geste, i95n9 General Estoria, explanations of trivium and quadrivium, i96ni5 Genesis, Creation as awakening, 108 genus cause, can be skipped in Ciceronian oration, 138 Geoffrey of Monmouth, may have made up material, 52 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 24, 41, 44, 48, 60; and oppositio, 146; name derived from 'good wine'? i84n2 Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester n), studied at Vich, 30 Gerli, E. Michael, Ximena's prayer and leonine images, 116 Gettings, Fred, assimilation of individual to symbol, i82ng gifts, symbolic exchange of, i96ni9 Gilby, Thomas: on definition, 16; example of medieval debate, 54; secondary scheme for definition, 73, 74, 159; sophistical argumentation, 163 Gimeno Casalduero, Joaquin, and

Ordo commendationis animae related to Prayer of St Ciprian, 106 Girard, Rene: ruler as scapegoat, 120; twins as violation of hierarchy, 120-1; retaliation as problem, 121; judicial system prevents reprisals, 121 glosses and scholia, 8 'God' on Porphyrian tree, i82~3ni5 Godzich, Wlad, culture of memoria, 101 Goffen, Rona, explanation of Sacra Conversazione, 75 Gongora, Luis de, construction of metaphor, 131-2 Gonzalez Palencia, Angel, magister scholarum at Toledo, 32 Gracian, Baltasar: construction of metaphor, 131-2; used form analogous to imaginative, poetic syllogism, 172^9 Gradual, for Mass of Easter, 94, 95 grammar, 5, 11, 12,15, 19, 32, 37, 57; poetics a subdivision of, 62 grass, chewing of, 191^4 Greeks and Romans episode in LEA, 102 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, study of social conditioning, i78nio Gundissalinus, see Dominicus Gundissalinus Gwara, Joseph J., Jr, relation between Cid and horse, 124-30 hagiographical tales, 45 Halm, Carolus, 23, 96 handbook, in teaching composition, 57 Hardison, O.B., Jr, comments on De divisione philosophiae, 3, 60, 63, 64 Harris, R., on heraldry, 117

Index 229 Hart, Thomas R.: hero changes world, 27; fortitude et sapientia in Cid, 119; hierarchical patterns in poem have typological base, i82n8 Harvey, L.P., possible pun in Arabic, i83n22 heraldry, 116-18, iSg-gonny-io heresies, Priscillianism and Paulism, 104 Herman the German, 22; version of Averroes's translation of Aristotle's Poetics, 25, 68; on securing psychological assent, 55 hero-Cid: as exemplar, 4; name 'Cid' from Arabic, 87-8; as lion in PCG, 89; born at a propitious moment, 94-5; his banner, 117; defined as most blessed and most noble, 123; illegitimate birth, 144; asleep in poem, i9oni6 Historia Roderici, 78; artistic lineage of Cid, 155 hoard, importance in epic, 154 Hodgkinson, John, narrative line as a thread upon which episodes may be hung, 40 Holmes, Urban T., Jr, medieval school in London, 19 Holy Week, 97-8 homo rhetoricus, 10, 152,179; existed in early Middle Ages among oradores, i94n3 honor (material possessions) vs honra (fame, reputation), 160 Hook, David, 31, 78; Cid-poet knew Ovid, 94 Horace: as school author, 29; iunctura, 51; presence in Spain, 1771*5 Horrent, Jules: Carmen campidoctoris

not product of schools, i73n6; on division of CMC into two parts, i8oni; difference between Chanson de Roland and CMC, i8i-2n7 horse: as symbol, 125-30; Alexander and Bucephalus, 126; in relation to 'caballero victorioso,' igin22 Howell, Wilbur, medieval concept of world as series of agreements, 14 Hugh of St Victor, invention and judgment as parts of philosophy, i7oni7 humanistic comedy, 35 humility: greatest virtue of prince according to Juan Manuel, 84; prevents retaliation, 121 Hunt, R.W.: infiltration of grammar by logic, 19; description of practice verse, 31 Hunt, Tony, logical functions in courtly literature, 34 Huot, Sylvia, ideas on conjointure, i77n6 hypothesis-thesis, 23 Ibn Tumart, 32 imagination, 63-7, 71; power of conversion, 63; and desire, i8in3 imperium in Spain, 33 Impey, Olga, use of topoi in LBA, 175^5 implied reader, 7 impositio ad placitum, 151; in regard to chests of sand, 160 indignatio, 45; fourteen loci in De inventione, 146; in poem of Marcabru, i94ni3 individual: concept of, i8oni4; derived from Porphyrian tree, i8in5; linked to pride, i95ni3

230 Index induction, 23, 35, 36, 74-6, i82mo Infantes de Carrion, 4, 58, 59, 70, 77, 78, 83, 99, 117; cowards or not? 87, i96n2o; marry Cid's daughters to gain wealth, 155; decide not to fight, 162 Inferno, of Dante, constructed on memory scheme, 48 intentionality of poet, 6, 38, i68ns intrinsic definition, 73-4, 83 invention and judgment, 4, 16, 133, iSsnig; as officium of logic, 64-5 ira regis, of Alfonso vi, 80, 119 Isidore of Seville, 15; definition of man, 42, 71, 72, 83; establishes etymology as category of thought, 46,47 Isidore, St, 'el de leon/ 118-19; body as sacred relic, 118 James, St (Santiago), helper of Christians in battle, 118 Jeronimo, bishop, his banner, 117 'jeweled style/ 40-1 John of Garland, model of Ciceronian oration, 138 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 15, 52; said that Cicero and Boethius widened meaning of definition, 128; definition of sophistic, 157 Juan Manuel, humility in Conde Lucanor, 84 judicial system, prevents reprisals and retaliations, 121 Juvenal, as school author, 29 Kay, Sarah, rhetoric in chanson de geste, i68n3 Kelly, Douglas: on medieval

composition, 41, 45, 51; Ovidian themes in Roman d'Eneas, 53; on attribute of an action, 140 Kendrick, Laura: definition and division at the level of the word, 42, 43; how Provencal troubadours learned Latin, 175 kinds of proof (reason, authority, experience), 5 kings of Aragon and Navarre, 85, 164 Klingender, Francis, Irish figural crosses with same figures as Ordo commendationis animae, 106-7 Kretzmann, Norman, topic 'comparison of a lesser thing' in Peter of Spain, 115 Labande, Edmond-Rene, Creation and Lazarus story reversed in Old French Aiol, 107 Laberinto de fortuna, use of memory in, i76ni Lacarra, Maria Eugenia, 38, 70; social, political, and economic circumstances behind CMC, 152; dangers of entrepreneurial system to nobles, 155; meaning of phrase 'que buen vasallo ...,' i86ni; poem as example of 'escarhno e de mal dizer,' i96ni4 Lafleur, Claude, continuation of the tradition of the division of the sciences, i79n2 Lais of Marie de France, mode of composition, 51, 52 language: in harmony with world in CMC, 125; in crisis, 154; open to negotiation, 155

Index 231 languages, knowledge of, 37 Lanham, Richard A., characteristics of the homo rhetoricus, 10 Latin, knowledge of, 174-5114 Latin comedies of the Loire Valley, i7in2i laughter, capacity for as definition of man, 71-2 Laurentius Hispanus, medieval jurist born in Spain, 32 Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, festival arrangement in churches, 108 law: study of, 8; language of in CMC, 31, 173-4^; Bologna as centre for study of, 32; consciousness of in CMC, 33-4; and literature, 33-4; correspondence between legal procedures in CMC and Roman tradition as coincidence, 193^ Lawrance, Jeremy N.H., 'courtly scholasticism' in LEA, 175^ Laza Palacios, Manuel: suggests Gundissalinus as author of CMC, 33 Lechner, Sister Joan Marie, loci in hagiographic tales, 45; loci as content material, 79 Leclercq, Dom Jean, texts for Ascension used in CMC, 111 'lectureture,' response of medieval to text, 105 Lerchundi, Fr Jose, 88 Lewis, C.S., kinds of proof, 5 Lewry, Osmund, Pope Sylvester n as youth studied in Catalonia, 30 Liber Catonianus, compendium of ancient texts, 173^ libraries in La Rioja, 173^

Libra de Alexandre, 29, 30, 35, 36, 40, 50; school exercises in, 171^3; topics from De inventione used in Darius episode, 193^ Libro de Apolonio, 24; dialectic and rhetoric in, 175^ Libro de buen amor, crisis of language in, 125,154; 'courtly scholasticism' in, 175ns; sophistical argumentation in, 175ns; 'esthetics of the contrary' in, i8oni3 Libro de las batallas, hero referred to as 'lion,' 89 Libro del Cavallero Zifar, and liturgy of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, i86ni2 Linaje del Cid, 78; aristocratic lineage of Cid, 155 lion: renders itself humble before superior being, 78; judges from instinct, 84; used to judge Cid, 116, 147; as symbol for kingdom of Leon, 117-18; as symbol for baptism, 122; as symbol for destruction-resurrection, 122; pardons prostrate human, 122; links two sections of CMC, 123 lion episode in CMC, 77; causes cortes episode, 78; as symbol of awakening, 121-3; word in Arabic for, i83-4nn23~5; as heraldic symbol, igong Llopis Sarrio, Juan, Psalm 3 alludes to Resurrection of Christ and of individual, 104 locus, see topics locus amoenus, used as attribute of an action, 140-1 logic, 11, 12-15, a7' *9/ 22/ 25' 2&' 32'

232 Index 37' 42' 57/ explanation of lyoniS; new logic, 23, 179^; old logic, 57, i79n2; definition of, 23; relation to poetics, 6iff; species of in AlFarabi's version of Organon, 63; instrument of, 65-6, 75; and quest for perfection, 66; associates wine and good poetry, 90-1; associates good day with good words, 93 Longinus, piercing of Christ's side as example of manifestation, 111 Lopez Estrada, Francisco, 33; two distinct orientations in CMC, 70; on the Cid's honour, 158 losengier, function of in Chanson de Roland, 196*117 Lotman, Juri M.: themes of awakening, 101, 103; change of name of hero, 119 Lucan, 29; lion material in, 79 Lutz, Cora E., education at St Gall, 173*4 Maddox, Donald, 9; questions existence of topical use in Yvain, 58, 131; themes of awakening, 101 Maestre Yenes, M.A., use of school exercises in Eugenius of Toledo, i68-9n8 Maitre, Leon, medieval schools, 14 making-up, of material, 52, 55, 56 Malaxecheverrfa, Ignacio, lion as representative of psychomachia, 122 man, definition of, 42, 67, 71; related to dialectical topic, 83 man-world correspondence, 192 manifestation: example seen in St Sebastian and Susannah in

Ximena's prayer, 109; Epiphany as example, no; Christ's temptation in desert as example, no manuscript tradition, 9 Marcabru: model of Ciceronian oration, 138; use of indignatio, i94ni3 Marcus of Toledo, knowledge of auctores, 32 Marie de France, 51; use of Priscian, i77n8 Martianus Capella: elementary treatment of figures and tropes, 15; as auctor, 29; on partition, 127 Martin Antolinez: use of lion for argument, 80, 87, 88; his 'maestria psicologica,' 159 materia, 41, 50-1, 70 matiere de Bretagne, 51, 58; and Alexander legend, 52; related to lion episode, 81 matins and lauds, 47, 104, i87n8 Matthew of Vendome: topic 'from a name,' 18, 21, 60; attributes of an action in Cicero's In Verrem, 140 McKeon, Richard, 16, 19, 20, 133, i83ni9; contrasts logical methods of Al-Farabi, Abelard, and Maimonides, 85; explanation of how topics used materials from encyclopaedias, 86; relation between old and new logic, I79n2 meaning of CMC, 27 memory, 17, 28, 33, 36, 47, 120; places of, 27, 47, 49; in oratory, 65; culture of memoria, 101; such a culture precludes exchange, 153; as used by St Thomas Aquinas, 176™.

Index 233 Menendez Pidal, Ramon, 38, 89; two poets wrote CMC, 167114 menosvaler (epic concept), 142 mercator: as species of human being, 152-3; as 'seller of skins' in Italy, 1 n 95 5J merchant class evolved first in Italy and Netherlands, 195^5 mester de clerecia-mester de juglaria, 5, 36, 40, 42 metaphorical language, in CMC, 125 metaphors, medieval construction of, 128-30 metaphysics, 22 Michael, Ian, comments on promise Minaya makes to Raquel and Vidas, 160 Miletich, John, 38; South Slavic epic compared to Romance epic, 39 Minaya Alvar Fanez, 96; suggests Infantes are lacking in manliness, 149 mind, as storehouse, 48 Minnis, A.J.: on medieval authorship, 6, 7: on authorial categories, 51; on four causes, 74 Minnis, A.J. and A.B. Scott, essays on and examples of material on medieval authorship, 6, 7, 14, 19, 22, 25 mise-en-abyme: judgment in cortes treated as, 134; explanation of, i92n2 Mocedades de Rodrigo: product of ecclesiastical culture, i73n6; rhetorical questions in, 174^ monasteries, 29; Ona, 29; Santa Maria de Najera, 29; Silos, 30 money, and dialectics, i57ff

Montaner Frutos, Alberto, 27; Cid neither 'mesianico' nor 'cristico,' 98; division of CMC into two parts, i8oni Montgomery, Thomas: oral background for poem, 39; interaction of assonance with vocabulary and topics in CMC, 40; CMC as two poems, 167-8114 morabetinos, Alfonso vm produces his own, 158 Morale] o Alvarez, Serafin, Psalm 3 linked to resurrection of individual, 104 Murphy, James J.: logic furnishes topics to writers, 14; course of study in middle schools, 21; early works used in schools, 30 name change, of Cid, 119 names from Arabic: Cid, 87; Tamin, 88; Fariz, 88; Galve, 88; campeador, 88 Neoplatonic world view, 131 neo-tradicionalistas and neo-individualistas, 38, 51 Nepaulsingh, Colbert I.: tradition of Psalms, 105; Herman the German and 'esthetics of the contrary,' i8oni3 Nichols, Stephen G., reformulation and rewriting of events in chronicles, 25; connection between verbal and visual narratives, i87ni2 Nims, Sister Margaret F., 48 Obrist, Barbara, memory and syllogism, i76n2

234 Index occasions, as topoi, 47 Old Testament figures, used in inductions, 76 Ong, Walter J.: Aristotle and chirographic milieu, i68n2; oration as paradigm for discourse, iSonii oppositio-oppositum, 37, 146 oral composition, 27 orality, with relation to literary work, 65, iSonn; cortes episode, 87, i36ff oration, Ciceronian, 137 ordering of material, 36, 48, 51, 56 Ordo commendationis animae: in CMC, 106; in chansons de geste, 106; on Irish cross, 106-7 Organon, 22, 25, 57, 63; rhetoric and poetics as the seventh and eighth parts of, 62; Posterior Analytics, 63; kinds of syllogism in, 63; parts of used in CMC, 156-7 Ovid, 92, 95; and topic 'from a name,' 18; as auctor, 29; and chivalric love, 53; lion material in, 79; good day and good words in Fasti, 93; Cid-poet may have known him, 94; as central text, i77~8n9 Palencia, studium generale, 28, 33 Parisiana poetria, model of Ciceronian oration, 138 partition, base for metaphor, 127 Patterson, Lee, 'preemptive nature of interpretation' in Augustinian hermeneutics, 184-5^ Paul the Apostle, 14; San Pedro de Cardena also named for, 103; most exalted in Mozarabic tradition, 103; name change from Saul,

119; and conversion of Spain, i87n7 Pavlovic, Milija N., and Roger M. Walker, late Roman cognitio in cortes episode, 134 Pendon de San Isidoro, 118 Pentecost, 123, 135; imagery of, i9ini7 Per Abad, 6, 8 Perez Llamazares, Julio, 118; lion as symbol of baptism, 122 peroration, 45 Pero Vermudez: use of lion episode for argument, 80, 87; and argument 'from a name,' 145, i93nio; uses menosvaler, 147 Persius, as auctor, 29 'Petri ad Vincula,' feast of, and sequence hymns at Huesca, 103 Petrus Helias, gloss on Priscian, 19 Petrus Hispanus, 32; topic 'comparison of a lesser thing,' 115 phenomenology, 6 Pickens, Rupert, Marie de France claims only to be a rewriter, 51 Pijoan, Jose, exaltation of St Paul linked to Priscillianism and Paulicism, 104 Poema de Almeria, kingdom of Leon compared to lion, 116 Poema de Ferndn Gonzalez, as rhetorical historiography, i78nn Poema de Roncesvalles, 80 poetics, 12 Poetics of Aristotle, 22, 67; relation to logic, 61 ff Policraticus, of John of Salisbury, 52 popular historiography, 59, 172^0 Porphyrian tree, 42, 73; problem of use for comparison, 81, 127

Index 235 Porphyry, 24; predicables studied in basic schools, 19 Post, Gaines, Spanish jurists who worked abroad, 32 post hoc ergo propter hoc-reductio ad absurdum, 163 Powell, Brian, 155; no mention of marriages or lion episode in Historia Roderid, 78; Ximena of royal blood, 150; songs sung about hero before 1207, i76nn Powers, James F., Cuenca-Teruel family of charters unmatched in quality, 31 practice verse, 31 praelectio, 15 praise and blame, 59, i79ni5 predicables, 19 presenter of poem, 90 pride as problem in Middle Ages, 78; in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 156; linked to excessive individualism, igsnis Prill, Paul E., examples 'from a lesser thing/ iSgna Primera Cronica General, 89 Priscian, Institutiones, 15, 19, 20, 21, 31, 32, 45, 51, 57; availability in Middle Ages, 171^3 process of recovery for hero, 72 prologues, 15,16; from university tradition, i69ni3 proposition, 24, 56; relation to Porphyrian tree, 82 proprietas, concept of, i9in2i proverb, used as propositio, 24 Prudentius, daybreak song, 104 Psalms: Psalm 117:24, 94; Psalm 3, and theme of awakening, 104, 106; and literary composition, 104;

figural use of, 105; Psalm 108, at end of CMC manuscript, 105; familiarity with, 106, 108 psychological assent, 25, 75 Pullorum cantus, linked to St Peter in CMC, 104-5 quadrivium, explanation of in General estoria, i96ni5 'que buen vasallo ...,' meaning of phrase, i86ni Quintilian, 78 raciocinatio, 23, 24, 43, 65 Ramus, reforming logician in sixteenth century, 17 Rand, E.K.: rhetoric connected to study of law, 31; ideas on memory, 49, i76ni Raquel and Vidas, 4; as representing species mercator, 152-3; looking into the chests, 185^ ratio disserendi, 16 Ray, Roger, Geoffrey of Monmouth as rhetorically inventive, 52 Read, Malcolm, clarity of signs in CMC, i95nio reader as text, 49 reasoning by contraries, in cortes episode, 139 recovery of meaning, 41 The Recovery of the Holy Land, and medieval schemes of education, i69nio Redfield, Robert L., inversion of Resurrection and Descent into Hell in CMC, 111 refutation, in oration, 142-3 relationship between logic and literature, i72n28

236 Index re-oralizing of written material, 174n1 Represa, Amando, biblical murals in Spanish churches, 107 Resurrection, 73, 94; related to spring, 97-8; inverted in regard to Descent into Hell episode, 111 retaliation, disturber of culture, 121 revelation, see awakening rhetoric, 11, 12, 15, 17, 25, 28, 37, 48, 57; figures and tropes of, 21; definition of, 23; rhetorical historiography, 25, 27, 50, 56, 59, 101, i72n3o; and study of law, 31; retorica comun, 37, 134; rhetoric of Castilian epic, 37; case, 82; topic habitus, 130; taught in compendium, 136; rhetorical categories switched, 138; topics as attributes of a person or attributes of an action, i4off; topic victus, 149; in chanson de geste, i68n3; in Catalonia, 173^; explanation of, i74n2; in criminal case, i93ns Rhetorica ad Herennium, 13, 32, 57, 134,136,139; when known in Castile, i78ni3 Richard the Lion-hearted, 80 Rico, Francisco: new cultural awareness in Latin texts in Peninsula, 39; lines from Archpoet in Poema de Roncesvalles, 80 Ripoll, monastery, early centre of learning, 97 Roberts, Michael, 14, 40; optimistic mood of Christian biblical epic, iSsng; examples of 'from a lesser thing,' i8gn2 Rodriguez-Puertolas, Julio, Cid as

embodiment of virtue at beginning of poem, 119 Rojas, Fernando de, used traditional methods in writing Celestina, 36 Roman de la Rose, 140 Roman d'Eneas, 53 Rouse, Richard H. and Mary A., when forma tractatus and forma tractandi first used, 21 Ruiz Maldonado, igoms ruminatio, as reader response, 105 Russell, Peter E., Cid-poet took idea of use of Ordo commendationis animae from chansons de geste, 106 Ryding, William W., construction of medieval text, 53 Sacra Conversazione, 75 sacred history, 73; related to St Peter, 102 The Saint-Omer Art of Poetry, earliest available art of poetry, i69ni4 Sallust, 29, 30 Salvador Miguel, Nicasio, Raquel and Vidas err in believing accusations against Cid, 159 San Pedro de Cardena, 72, 74, 77; awakening themes related to, io2ff; founding of, i86n4 San Servando, Castle, spatial locus connected to theme of awakening, 135 sarcasm as rhetorical device, 143 Saville, Jonathan, dawn songs and reversal of dawn symbolism, 104 Schaffer, Martha E., counters Smith's ideas on author, date, and composition of CMC, 167^ school exercises, 15, 19, 20, 21, 30,

Index 237 31, 36, 45; examples of 170-11121; in Isidore of Seville, i68n8 schools, medieval, 4, 12, 14, 19; in Castile, 28; reader used in, 29; in northern Europe, 29, 38; in Catalonia, 30; in Toledo, 32; poet learns use of Categories in, 131 Schultz, James A., dispositio does not show Ciceronian influence, i8oni2 scriptor, 14, 28 Sebastian, St, and Susannah as figures of voluptuousness, i88ni9 sedes argumentorum, 24, 78 Sedulius, Carmen Paschale, same kind of themes seen in CMC, 41 Semeianqa del mundo, 116 'separate poetics' for CMC, 39 sermonem representativum, 68 Shakespeare, William, 56; use of logical terms, 83-4; definition of true prince, 84; good drink, good poetry, and blessedness, i84ni shame culture, 148; applied to Conde Lucanor, i94nis Shoaf, R.A.: uneven contest between chivalry and commercialism, 153; Sir Gawain and excessive pride, 156; money and poetry as fictions, 157 'si' clause, allows a hypothetical situation to be realized, 94 Siete partidas, concept of menosvaler in, 142 sign: definition according to Cicero and Thierry of Chartres, 148; scars as signs, 148; established ad placitum, 151; signs in CMC signify clearly, i95nio

signans and signatum, St Augustine places intermediary between, 151 Silos, monastery of, St Paul appears in 'Doubting Thomas' episode, 103 Silverstein, Theodore, Brutus in the legend of the founding of Britain, 184 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain and excessive pride, 156 six parts of tragedy, 68 Smith, Colin, 6, 27, 28, 29, 37, 38, 49, 53/ 56, 58, 78, 9°/ 101,134,150 social conditioning, in thirteenthcentury Castile, i78nio sophistical arguments, 4 sophistics, use of in CMC, i57ff speculative grammars, 61 speculum: literary work as, 52; horse as, 127 Spence, Sarah, Provencal albas and Book of Revelation, 187^ Spitzer, Leo, syllogistic analysis of lion episode, 86 Spufford, Peter, Alfonso vm forced to mint his own 'morabetinos,' 158 Statius, as auctor, 29 Stock, Brian, 'textual community,' 104 Stolz, Peter, school exercises, 19 Stump, Eleonore, commentary on and editions of ancient texts of logic, 9,18, 22, 49 Such, Peter: school rhetoric in Alexandre, 29, 30, 32; thread in work on which episodes might be hung, 40 Susannah: and St Sebastian as figures of voluptuousness, i88ni9;

238 Index as figure of miraculous delivery, 1881120 syllogism, 22, 24, 25, 34; form 14, 55; imaginative, poetic, 4, 6, 58, 60-9; figure baroco, 91; figure barbara, 93; uses 'felix culpa' motif, 99; analogous form in Gracian, i72n29; type used in literary constructions, i79n/ Szoverffy, Joseph, sequence hymns for 'Petri ad Vincula' in Huesca, 103 Talens, Jenaro, semiotics of Ximena's prayer, 106 Tate, Brian, intentionality of poet, i68ns technical logician, aims, 171^5 Terence, his works partly rewritten in Celestina, 35, 36 Ter Horst, Robert: idea of hypothesis, 94-5; theological 'short-sightedness' of Raquel and Vidas, 95 Terlingen, Juan, office of pullorum cantus, 104 Thierry of Chartres, 17; on five-part syllogism, 139; use of 'framing topics,' 141 Thomas Aquinas, use of four causes, 73 Thorndike, Lynn, medieval scheme of education, i69nio three dialectic arguments in poem, linked by figure of lion, 123 three estates, 84 Thurlemann, Felix, on Sacra Conversazione, 75 title of CMC, 8 topics, 14, 16, 17, 18, 37, 43, 44, 46,

82, 115; dialectical, 9, 45, 54, 96; rhetorical, 10, 18, 45, 47; definition of, 19-20, 50, 53; different senses of, 79; what kind in Cicero's Topical i79-8on9

topoi, see topics tradition, both valued and questioned, i95nn

translatio-traditio, 51-2: traditio legis, 102; in LBA, 102; in cortes episode, 113 trivium, 5, 12, 36, 42; ascent from to higher sciences, 61-2; explanation of in General estoria, i96ni5 tropes, problems with, and when permissible, 125-6 Turner, Victor, 'subjunctive' mood in ritual process, 95 Tuve, Rosemund, on metaphors and tropes, 127-31 twins, as problem in regard to hierarchy, 120-1 two poets in CMC, 167^ unde locus?: what is the topic being used? 145; example of, i93ng universals, 22 Vaida, Georges, Marcus of Toledo studied auctores, 32 Vance, Eugene, 6, 18, 21, 53, 54, 55, 61, 82, 86, 101; use of lion in Yvain, 80-1, 124; dialectical topoi in Yvain, 83, 133; ideas on heraldry, 116; discussion of mercator, 152-3; heroic memory precludes negotiation, 153 Vaquero, Mercedes, loss of rhetorical force in chansons de geste, i78nn

Index 239 Varro, loqui derived from locus, 46 Vickers, Brian, education in sixteenth-century England, i73ny Victorinus, 19; commentary on Cicero's works, 60 La vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, 90 Vinaver, Eugene, structure of medieval literary work, 53 Vinayo, Antonio, symbols on Pendon de San Isidore, 118 Vincentius Hispanus, jurist born in Spain, 32 Virgil, 32, 53; not central text after twelfth century, 177119 vistas: as motifs of awakening, 112-13; associated with weddings, i88n22 visual imagery, at beginning of CMC, 101 visual readings, 107-11 Vitz, Evelyn Birge, re-oralizing of written materials, i74ni Von Richthofen, Erich, pre-existing fragments of epic, I75n8

Gundissalinus's idea of the sciences, 61 West, Geoffrey, CMC unified narrative done for artistic purposes, i78ni2 Wibald of Corvai, analysed what he read in terms of topics, 18 Wilson, Thomas, 93; use of induction by means of religious figures, 75-6; use of concept 'day' in syllogisms, 93, 95 wine and good poetry, 90-2 Woods, M.J., how Gongora and Quevedo linked objects poetically, 131-2 Wright, Roger, 28; pre-existing epic fragments, i75n8

Walsh, John K., function of image of lion in CMC, i8gn3 Walter of St Victor, divine Scripture contains syllogistic forms, 14 Ward, John O., rhetorical historiography, 25, 27, 50^56 Webber, Ruth1 H., vistas associated with weddings, i88n22 Wehr, Hans, 88 Weisheipl, James A., on

Yates, Frances A., on memory systems, 17, 47, 48 York, Michael, symbolism of Roman days, 93 Yvain, 61, 72; meaning of lion in, 80-1, 86, 124; heraldry in, 116

Ximena: her prayer as induction, 74-6; 'reading' her prayer, 107; of royal blood, 150 Ximenez de Rada, Rodrigo, was tutored individually as a boy, 31-2

Zanoni, Marie-Louise, use of Priscian by Marie de France, i77n8