Medieval Literature: Characteristics, Poetry, and Prose
General Characteristics
The Middle Ages is a historical period that stretches from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance.
Medieval thought is steeped in a deeply religious worldview: God is the center of the universe (theocentrism), and earthly life is but a path to eternal life.
Medieval literature reflects the interests of different social groups at that time:
- The Nobility: A privileged group dedicated to weapons and farming, expressed through epic poems, lyric poetry, cultured works, and storytelling.
- The Clergy: Also a privileged group whose main occupation was preaching Christian doctrine. They wrote didactic works covered by the Mester de Clerecía.
- The People: Working for the nobility and the clergy, they possessed no privilege and expressed themselves through popular lyric compositions.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in the medieval world.
Literary texts also echoed the progress of the Reconquista.
Medieval Poetry
In medieval literature, there are two traditional forms of lyric poetry: traditional and cultured.
Traditional lyric poems are brief and anonymous, characterized by the repetition of words or ideas, sung by the people and transmitted orally.
Various types of compositions exist within traditional lyric poetry:
- Jarcha: Short Mozarabic compositions in which a young man expresses his concerns about his love affair to his mother or sister.
- Cantigas de Amigo: Galician-Portuguese compositions in which a girl laments the absence of her beloved in nature.
- Carol: Written in Castilian, dealing with themes of love and work.
- Lyrical Ballads: Castilian texts expressing feelings.
Cultured lyric poetry has a known author and addresses issues such as love, morality, philosophy, and society.
The Epic and the Mester de Juglaría
The Mester de Juglaría is the office of the minstrels, characters who made their living entertaining the public.
Entertainment included the jugglers’ epics, epic poems that recount the exploits of medieval knights.
These are composed of verses of irregular rhyming assonance.
Key features include:
- Direct Style
- Minstrel Formulas:
- Appellate Formulas: Serve to introduce the public to the story.
- Epic Epithets: Fixed expressions extolling the hero.
Songs of deeds usually incorporate real data to make the story more believable.
The most important Castilian epic poem is the Song of the Cid, in which the author, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known as El Cid, loses and regains his honor in the late tenth century.
There are three parts to the Song of the Cid: the banishment, the wedding, and the indignities of Corpes.
Mester de Clerecía
The Mester de Clerecía is the set of narrative works written by clerics during the 13th and 14th centuries, presenting a number of features:
- Metrical Composition: Written in cuaderna vía (four-line stanzas with monorhyme).
- Purpose: Didactic.
- Content: Religious and ethical writings.
- Transmission: Transmitted orally, although written.
The first Castilian poet of this style was Gonzalo de Berceo.
He composed the Miracles of Our Lady, where twenty-five miracles are narrated. Each miracle consists of a presentation, the exhibition, the apparition of the Virgin, the miracle itself, and a general reflection.
Medieval Prose
Medieval prose was born with the aim of imparting knowledge.
The first examples are the legal, historical, and scientific works of King Alfonso X, as well as collections of stories of Arab origin.
The highest representative of 14th-century didactic prose is Don Juan Manuel, with his work The Book of the Count.
All stories have the same structure: Count Patronio presents a problem, and a reflection is extracted with a moral applicable to the situation.