Narrative prayer or meditative digression? : analysis of a complex speech in Loores de Nuestra Señora

Abstract

Loores de Nuestra Señora is a Marian poem by Gonzalo de Berceo, which has generally been regarded as one of his minor works as well as marked by the significant textual heterogeneity that distinguishes it at first sight. In the frame of a major research about its textual configuration and on the assumption that Loores is a complex prayer of praise and request as a macrotext, this study will focus on a narrative subsequence embedded in the narrative-argumentative section of the macrotext. This subsequence —stanzas 78 to 98— has typically been defined as a “narrative prayer” by the critics and it has been likened to a peculiar kind such as Doña Ximena’s in Cantar del Mio Cid. The main objectives of the dissertation are, firstly, to resume the indispensable and distinctive features of the narrative prayer in order to reveal the inaccuracy of employing this designation for these stanzas; secondly, to propose a new definition of the text type of the subsequence given its superstructure based on a microtextual approach, which comprehends not only elements from text grammar and classical rhetoric but also from narratology; and, thirdly, to examine its articulation with the major narrative sequence that encloses it.