Peasant and noble, peasant and urban: the interweaving of popular and elite culture in the plot of the Mediterranean ballad, the noble shepherdess

// ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: The plot of the Mediterranean ballad in the Romance tradition, known under the title of The Noble Shepherdess, is analysed in this article, largely on the examples of Castillian and Dalmatian variants. It is emphasised that this ballad is one in which philological criticism has identified the existence of genetic affinity between Greek, Albanian, Croatian, Italian, French and Hispanic ballads. This fact is exceptionally important for analysis of the plot, since similar ballads can have a different plot dynamic and shaping of the personage components. This is a ballad that places the the emphasis from the very beginning on development of a twofold thematic aspect of the female personage, thus formed as a family member, and also as a member of a particular social class. However, the process of ambiguous focalization also confers ambiguity on the female personage so that she can be comprehended as being within both the peasant and the aristocratic context or, in other words, in the oppositions of peasant/urban. The twofold thematic aspect of this female character is not solved in a definite way, so that her actual status most frequently remains concealed. The ballad intensifies the blurring of identity by stressing the synthetic aspect of the character through the process of anagnorisis and the disguising of the protagonists, as is found particularly in Hispanic romances. Such status of the female personage serves as an impetus for renewed philological interpretation of the origins and ethos of the ballad. The ballad's unclear origin leaves open the question of whether it adopted some of the topics on the evil mother-in-law that are customary in European folklore, or whether it 'familiarised' content that had once belonged to so-called high culture (chivalric novels, the epic of Kudrun). The presence of references from the aristocratic world in the form of objects of material culture resulted from the 'fascination' of narrators with the aristocratic world. If the characters were members of the noble stratum with whom tale-tellers identified, familiarising the aristocratic life models and altering them within a rural context, with wealth, and the privileged position of women in the family, the universal metaphor of the noble origin of woman was the fortunate solution of the exogamy issue. The indefinite borders between genres in Mediaeval culture makes possible hybridisation of the 'rural' or folklore and the aristocratic origins of the