Medieval and Pre-Renaissance Spanish Literature
Medieval Literature: Poetry
Traditional or Popular Lyric
The traditional lyric comprises anonymous songs transmitted orally, expressing feelings of love.
This poetry is anonymous, resulting in compositions with variations or several variants.
Structure: In many European cultures, traditional lyric is based on rhythmic structures and parallel choruses.
Theme: The theme of popular traditional literature is love, perhaps more abundant from a female perspective than a male one.
Style: The style of the traditional lyric is usually straightforward and condensed. In general, these short poems are intense and emotional, expressing subjectivity and emotion through exclamations, questions, and diminutives.
Meter: Traditional lyric poetry is often expressed in various forms of rhyme and assonance.
Cultured Lyric: Troubadours and Minstrels
Cultured and courtly lyric poetry has a known author, the troubadour, and is transmitted through writing.
The first opera in a learned language was the Romance of Provence.
The cultured lyric poet who writes the lyrics and music of their compositions is the minstrel, the name adopted by some learned Catalan, Galician, and Castilian poets in the Middle Ages. Sometimes, the troubadour would give their compositions to a professional, lyrical juggler to sing.
Hispanic Lyric
We discuss four topics of poetry, corresponding to four Romance languages: Mozarabic, Castilian, Galician, and Catalan:
Mozarabic Lyric: The jarchas are short poems written in the Mozarabic language, dealing with the theme of love from a female perspective. Exclamations and questions abound.
Galician-Portuguese Lyric: It achieved great development in the Middle Ages with three types of compositions or cantigas: Cantigas de amigo where the theme was the love of friends, cantigas de amor where the author is the speaker and laments his lady, and cantigas de escarnio e maldizer which are satirical poems directed against other poets and courtiers.
Castilian Lyric: The carol and two types of lyric, the educated and traditional, are emphasized. In educated lyric, the influence is Galician, Provençal, and Italian, reflecting courtly love and speaking of love as homage. This is followed by the songbooks in the fifteenth century. In traditional lyric, the main theme is love, both feminine and masculine. A very common composition is the carol.
Catalan-Provençal Lyric: Much of the learned poetry was written in Provençal, and the traditional lyric shows common European forms, such as parallels and choruses, with the theme of love.
Medieval Literature: The Narrative and Theater
The Oral Narrative: The Mester of Minstrelsy (12th Century)
The minstrels were professional actors who traveled to courts, castles, religious festivals, and roads, reciting or singing poems. This profession was called the Mester of Minstrelsy. Of all the jugglers, the most numerous were the epic jugglers and minstrels of chivalry who recounted the exploits of local heroes.
Epic Poetry and Epic Poems
Epic poems are long narratives in verse recounting historical and legendary events around a hero who represents the values of a people.
Epic songs always have a heroic tone, glorifying the exploits of a warrior, hence the name of feats (hazañas).
The Castilian Epic
In the Castilian epic, only three songs are preserved. Among them is the Cantar de Mio Cid, the longest poem, which is virtually complete in a fourteenth-century manuscript.
El Cantar de Mio Cid
The document is a typical minstrel manuscript of the fourteenth century. It is signed by a copyist, Per Abbat. The date of composition is placed at the beginning of the 13th century.
The author of the poem is unknown; therefore, it is an anonymous work.
The plot, like other epic poems, tells a story that begins with enormous difficulties and ends just as gloriously. The poem is divided into three parts: The Song of Exile, The Wedding Song, and The Song of the Affront of Corpes.
The central theme is the restoration of honor in two areas: social honor as a vassal and personal honor as an injured father.
The protagonist represents the model of the epic knight broadcast in the Middle Ages.
The style presents verses of varying length with assonance rhyme. There is a pause in the middle of the verse that divides it into two parts.
The Educated Narrative: The Mester of Clergy in the 13th Century
Given the success of the minstrels with their epic poems, Gonzalo de Berceo began the Mester of Clergy in the thirteenth century, whose narratives were characterized by the following features:
Romance narratives are written by cultured authors.
They have a moral and didactic purpose.
The stanza used is the cuaderna vía, four lines of fourteen syllables, with a strong caesura in the middle of the verse and consonant rhyme.
It uses the term mester.
It combines themes of popular and cultured tradition.
Gonzalo de Berceo
He is the first Castilian author whose name has been recorded. He began the Mester of Clergy with narratives on religious subjects written in a cultured metrical form, the cuaderna vía. To reach an illiterate audience, he expresses himself in relatively simple language with minstrel expressions.
The Mester of Clergy in the 14th Century: The Book of Good Love by the Archpriest of Hita
Juan Ruiz wrote the most brilliant and original work of the century.
Theme and Structure: It is a play written in verse, with a predominance of the cuaderna vía. It autobiographically recounts several love episodes. It also includes very different texts.
Originality: The most innovative aspect is the mixture of apparently contradictory elements, the religious and the secular vitalism.
The Narrative Prose in the 14th Century
In the fourteenth century, narrative prose began to develop in Castilian, with stories on topics covered by chivalry.
Novels of Chivalry
Collections of apologues or examples
The Count, Don Juan Manuel
Don Juan Manuel is the author of Count Lucanor, a collection of stories linked by two characters, Count Lucanor and his servant Patronio. This work, from the fourteenth century, is considered the first prose fiction by a known author in Castilian.
The structure of the narratives or examples always follows the same pattern:
The Count asks his servant Patronio about a problem.
Patronio replies that he remembers an example or story on the same subject and explains it; a teaching is derived from that narrative.
It is said very briefly that the Count put the advice into practice and did well.
The author summarizes the idea in a moral teaching.
Medieval Theater
There are very few records of medieval drama on the Peninsula. However, we know that the original theater was born together with religious ceremonies. The subjects referred to the Virgin Mary.
The Pre-Renaissance
Translation and Literary Renewal
Fifteenth-century literature covers topics and genres in ways that combine medieval and humanist features. The literary influences of the period are the Italian humanists Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio.
Learned Poetry: The Songbooks
Learned poetry from this century has a conceptualist style and discusses various topics. It is also called cancionero poetry because it is preserved in the songbooks of the time.
Love poetry is modeled after medieval courtly love, following the Provençal troubadour tradition; the lyrical moral issue mimics the allegorical Italian stream of Dante.
Jorge Manrique: Verses on the Death of My Father
Jorge Manrique was one of the last representatives of the war aristocracy who still held many medieval ideals, and an educated man, as required by the humanist model. Jorge Manrique composed the Verses following the death of his father. The poem is an elegy, a composition that expresses the poet’s pain.
The theme develops around death: it starts from a general meditation on the transience of life and ends with the death of the poet’s father.
Structure: The composition consists of 40 stanzas of 12 lines: the verses are of pie quebrado, formed by a double sextilla of verses of eight and four syllables, called manriqueña in honor of the poet. The book is organized into three parts:
Reflection on the transience of life and the certainty of death.
Evocation, emotional and nostalgic, of the past and the disappeared, with concrete examples of the general ideas above.
Individualization around the figure of the father, Don Rodrigo, presented as an example for his virtues.
The style: The naturalness of the language contrasts with the seriousness of the theme, with simplicity and depth.
Meaning of the Verses: The figure of his father, the protagonist of the poem, embodies the chivalric and Christian virtues of the Middle Ages.
The Ballads
The ballads are classified according to their origin into old and new ballads.
The old ballads are anonymous ballads that were transmitted orally and therefore have variations of the same poem; in the fifteenth century, they had wide circulation.
The new ballads or artistic ballads are compositions written by known authors in imitation of the old ballads. Ballad books include both old and new ballads.
Features of the Ballad
The ballad is a lyric-narrative composition created to be sung. It consists of eight-syllable lines with assonance rhyme; the even verses rhyme while the odd ones are left loose.
It is a lyric-epic composition with expressive, emotional language, such as exclamations, questions, epithets, repetitions, and simple syntax. It has an antiquated language and a fragmented nature; that is, we have a scene with no beginning or end.