Hispanists have frequent occasion to refer to the loss of much medieval literatura, and to recognize that the extant texts are not necessarily typical. There is no Hispanic equivalent of R. M. Wilson's The Lost Literatura of Medieval England 1 , but a similar, though less extensive, work could undoubtedly be compiled for Spanish, and Ramón Menéndez Pidal showed us how evidence for the contení, and sometimes the actual words, of lost epics could be discovered by cióse attention to chronicles and ballads. The study of literature which no longer survives has obvious dangers, and the concentration of Hispanists on lost epic and lost drama has occasionally gone further than the evidence justifies, leading to detailed accounts of poems or traditions, which, in all probability, never existed: for example, the supposed epic on King Rodrigo and the fall of Spain to the Moors, and the allegedly flourishing tradition of Castilian drama between the Auto de los reyes magos and Gómez Manrique. Nevertheless, many lost works can be clearly identified and set within the pattern of literary history. The study of lost literature can produce important modifications in that pattern, but changes of equal importance may result from a reassessment of extant works. There is a growing realization that medieval literature has been very unevenly studied, and the contrast between widespread interest in a few works and almost universal neglect of many others is especially acute in Spanish 2. I propose to deal here with a particularly striking example of that neglect, which has been carried to the point where the existence of an important genre is overlooked. That genre is the romance: not the romance, or bailad, but the dominant form of medieval fiction. If we consider the types of narrative to be found in the Middle Ages, the discrepancies referred to above become painfully apparent. The bound-1 London, 1970 (first edition 1952). 2 The point has been eloquently made for English by WILLIAM MATTHEWS. «Inhcritcd Impediments in Medieval Literary History». Medieval Secular literature: foiir es.inys. ed. Mallhews (Contnbutions of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1.
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