El ataque con la lanza como motivo transgenérico: de la épica francesa a los libros de caballerías

Abstract

This work analyses the framework and the formulaic materialization of each of the phases of the “couched charge,” an offensive technique performed with a lance that appeared at the end of the 11th century. The corpus studied is formed by twenty-five French epic poems, the entire corpus of Castilian epic, Castilian texts of an epic tonality (the Poema de Fernán González and the Libro de Alexandre), and more than twenty prose works of the 14th-16th centuries. Given the geographical breadth and recurrence of the formulas and formulaic expressions, we have established a classification and a subsequent analysis of three types of units: those which are repeated in several works, those present in more than one work but never repeated within a same work, and those unique to one work. Based on this guideline, we study the generic compositional practices (some of them transgeneric) and the particularities that the authors occasionally portray in the formulaic actualization of this motif.

Keywords

• Epic motif
• lance attack
• French epic
• Castilian epic
• books of chivalry
• formulas