SOURCE: Webber, Ruth House. “Jimena's Prayer in the Cantar de mio Cid and the French Epic Prayer.” In Oral Tradition and Hispanic Literature: Essays in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead, edited by Michael M. Caspi, pp. 619-47. New York, N.Y.: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995.

In the following essay, Webber assesses the origin and development of the biblical prayers used in romance epics and explores the prayer spoken by Dona Jimena in Cantar de mio Cid

To say that the prayer is a topos of the medieval Romance epic, albeit true, is an understatement.¹ The prayer is a topos of all medieval European literature in an epoch in which the Church played a dominant role in every aspect of life. It was the single unifying force in lands inhabited by people of varying ethnic backgrounds who lived in small rival domains with ever-changing frontiers and spoke a multitude of...