Kinship and Polity in the Poema de Mío Cid

Download or read book Kinship and Polity in the Poema de Mío Cid written by Michael Harney and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the social content of the only Spanish epic surviving in more or less complete form provides a means of assessing the motives and intentions of the protagonist and of other characters. Chapters are devoted to such themes as the significance of kinship and lineage; amity as a system of fictive kinship, personal honor, and public organization; the importance of women and the meaning and function of marriage, dowry, and related practices; the emergence of polity as the result of a rivalry of social, legal, and economic systems; and the implications, within an essentially kin-ordered world, of the poem's notions of shame, honor, status, and social inequality.