SOURCE: Gerli, E. Michael. “Liminal Junctures: Courtly Codes in the Cantar de Mio Cid.” In Oral Tradition and Hispanic Literature: Essays in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead, edited by Michael M. Caspi, pp. 257-70. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995.

In the following essay, Gerli explores what he sees as one of the non-epic voices in the Cantar de mio Cid and argues that the poem shares many common techniques, thematic concerns, and issues found in medieval romance.

The Cantar de Mio Cid is different. It is, as Colin Smith remarks, a work which “departs greatly from epic stereotypes” (The Making, 87). In fact, if there is one thing critics agree upon it is that the poem, composed as we know it near the beginning of the thirteenth century, fails to conform to most notions of the medieval Romance epic and continues to violate what Jauss calls the horizon of...