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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Illustrating El Cid, 1498 to Today by Lauren Beck Luis F. López González Beck, Lauren. Illustrating El Cid, 1498 to Today. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019. Pp. 272. ISBN 978-0-77355-725-3. Lauren Beck’s Illustrating El Cid, 1498 to Today studies the progression and evolution of the visual representations of El Cid from the first artistic engravings in the 1498 edition of the Crónica popular to contemporary drawings. Despite the great wealth of illustrations inspired by Rodrigo Díaz and the cidian literary tradition, the paratextual component of visual media has received scant scholarly attention. This academic disinterest in the graphic arts—at least in the illustrations that stemmed from, or came with, the medieval text—is hardly circumscribed to El Cid scholarship. With noteworthy exceptions, such as King Alfonso’s Cantigas de Santa Maria, whose highly aesthetic miniatures were created concurrently with the written poems and have generated significant analyses, Hispanists have by and large overlooked the importance of coalescing narrative and image not only as a method to reach deeper levels of meaning in pre-modern literature, but also to gauge the cultural import, modes of perception, and chronological development of a given book or tradition. Beck’s monograph, which looks at and is rooted in the intersection between text and image, helps fill in this scholarly gap in El Cid’s literary corpus. Her study, therefore, represents a welcome contribution to further understand the cultural and political impact that the Castilian hero has had throughout time in Spain and around the world. Beck’s book is a pleasant, yet informative, read. The author eschews the affected terminology that plagues many academic texts, rendering them less enjoyable—if not less effective. Both the Prologue and Introduction offer a concise and forthright context in which to understand the purpose of the study. Beck frames her monograph with reader-friendly descriptions of El Cid’s biography and historiography, as well as the evolution of the cidian artistic tradition and its instrumentality in the formation of the Spanish national identity. In the Introduction, Beck gives the reader the epistemic tools to understand how the Cid’s figure evolved from being an impoverished outcast in King Alfonso VI’s court to a national hero who embodied all human virtues. Over time, his image is rendered pliable in order to fit the mold of a saint-like personage who helped defeat Islam, and also a perfect husband and father whom all post-medieval young [End Page 419] readers should aspire to imitate. This trajectory, which includes the artistic confluence of Mio Cid and Spain’s Patron Saint, Santiago Matamoros, results in the deployment of the Campeador’s image not only as a symbol of national unity in twentieth-century Spain, but also of identity politics in Francisco Franco’s dictatorship during and after the 1936 Civil War. Beck develops her argument in six chapters, structured around six overarching themes, none of which are particularly original in Cantar de Mio Cid scholarship. The originality of her monograph, however, stems from the hermeneutic approach employed to frame her inquiry, namely merging the written text with its ensuing iconography to achieve her objective. Chapter 1 explores the portrayal of Rodrigo Díaz and his enemies from the first engravings to contemporary illustrations, paying close attention to the progression of the Cid’s pictorial representations from a secular warrior to a saint-like character: “over time the Cid acquires a saintliness that seems directly related to the Matamoros meme” (40). The pictographic “sanctification” of the Campeador coincided with the caricaturization of his enemies. Chapters 2 and 3 look at the discourses of gender in Per Abbat’s 1207 Cantar de Mio Cid and the artwork depicting marks of masculinity that distinguished the Cid from his rivals, as well as the progressive sexualization of Rodrigo’s daughters, Doña Elvira and Doña Sol. Chapter 4 studies the orientalization of the Cid and Spain in the European imaginary. Beck grounds her theoretical framework in Edward Said’s influential theory of Orientalism alone, yet this minimalist approach bestows upon her book a sense of fluidity in her narrative, unencumbered by an...
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it