Poetry

at

Court

in Trastamaran Spain:

From

the Cancionero de Baena

to the

Cancionero General

cneDievAL & ReMAissAMce

TEXTS & STuOies

Volume 181

Poetry

at

Court

in Trastamaran Spain:

From

the Cancionero de Baena

to the

Cancionero General

edited by

E.

Michael Gerli

& Julian

Weiss

CDe)l6VA.L

& ReMAlSSAMCe T6XTS & STuDies

Tempe, Arizona
1998

generous grant from The Program for Cultural Cooperation Between

Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States' Universities has assisted in

meeting the publication

costs

of

this

volume.

Copyright 1998

Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poetry
at

court in Trastamaran Spain

/ edited

Cancionero general
p.

cm.

(Medieval & Renaissance

from the Cancionero de Baena by E. Michael Gerli & Julian Weiss.

:

to the

texts

&

studies

v.

181)

Papers from a conference held at Georgetown University, Washington,

D.C., 11-14 Feb. 1993.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-86698-223-X (alk. paper) 1. Spanish poetry To 1500 History and

2.

Love poetry, Spanish

I.

zation, Medieval, in literature

History and Congresses.

II.

criticism
4.

Congresses. Congresses.
criticism
.

3. Civili-

Courtly love in literature

III.

Congresses.

Gerli, E. Michael.

Weiss, Julian, 1954-

Series.

PQ6096.C3P64 1998 861 2093543dc21

'.

98-8302

CIP

This book
It is set

is

made

to

last.

Bembo, smythe-sewn and printed on acid-free paper

in

to library specifications.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction (Julian Weiss)

vii

I.

Cancioneros: Compilation and Cultural Meaning

Cancioneros:

The Typology and Genesis of the

19

Compiling the Materials (Vicenf Beltran Pepio)

In Praise of the Cancionero: Considerations on the Social

Meaning

47

of the Castilian Cancioneros (Michel Garcia)

II.

Traditions: Rupture and

Renewal
59

Francisco Imperial and the Issue of Poetic Genealogy

(Marina

S.

Brownlee)

Silent Subtexts

and Cancionero Codes:

On

Garcilaso

79

de

la

Vega's Revolutionary Love (Aurora Hermida Ruiz)

III.

Courtly Games
Letra, Divisa,

The Game of Courtly Love:

and InuenciSn

at

the

95

Court of the Catholic Monarchs

(Ian

Macpherson)
Cancioneros

Role Playing

in the

Amatory Poetry of the

111

(Victoria A. Burrus)

IV:

Questions of Language
Its

Bilingualism in the Cancioneros and

Implications

137

(Alan Deyermond)

Reading Cartagena: Blindness,

in a Cancionero

Insight,

and Modernity

171

Poet

(E.

Michael Gerli)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
V: Politics, Society,

Culture
187

Jews and Conversos in Fifteenth-Century Castilian Cancioneros: Texts and Contexts (Julio Rodriguez Puertolas)

Power and Justice in Cancionero Verse (Regula Rohland de Langbehn)

Male Sexual Anxieties
to in Carajicomedia:
F.

199

Response

221

Female Sovereignty (Barbara

Weissberger)

Cultural Studies on the Gaya Ciencia

235

(Mark D. Johnston)

Bibhography
Index

255 289

Acknowledgements
The

editors

ence: the

States' Universities, The Embassy of Spain in Washington, D.C., the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Georgetown

Program Culture and United

wish to thank the following institutions for sponsoring the conferfor Cultural Cooperation Between Spain's Ministry of

University. Final revisions to the majority of the essays were completed during

1995; since then, it has been possible to update the bibliography only in a couple of instances. The editors are therefore deeply grateful for the forbearance of the contributors during the long editorial process.

JWandEMG

In memoriam Brian Dutton

Poetry

at

Court

in Trastamaran Spain:

From

the Cancionero de Baena

to the

Cancionero General

Introduction

JULIAN WEISS

Beginnings

The

essays that

make up

this collection

national research conference held at

were originally presented at an interGeorgetown University, Washington

D.C., under the

cionero de

title "Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the CanBaena to the Cancionero general" (February 11-14, 1993). The con-

ference,

which now provides

the

title

for this

book, was,

we

believe, the

first

of its kind devoted exclusively to the

late

medieval Castilian poetry

now com-

monly known

as cancionero verse.

is claimed by this statement? "A beginning," accord"immediately estabUshes relationships with works already existing, relationships of either continuity or antagonism or some mixture of both" (1975, 3). For reasons that will become evident in the course of this

What

kind of priority
Said,

ing to

Edward

introduction and the essays themselves, the relationships this book establishes with the past are complex and various. However, Said goes on to add that a beginning "generally involves also the designation of a consequent intention"
(1975,
5).

In organizing the conference, Michael Gerli and

did not ask the

participants to prepare specific topics according to a preconceived scheme;

neither the collection nor, a fortiori, the conference were intended to be nar-

rowly programmatic. Hence, ours is not a beginning that leads to a specific set of clearly defined conclusions. Our intentions are more general and answer a

more fundamental need: to create a forum in which readers can take stock of some of the major current approaches to cancionero studies and begin critical reflection upon past achievements and future possibilities in this field. And in some areas the achievements of the recent past have been considerable. Although the trend predates the 1980s, the last fifteen years have witnessed extraordinary advances in our empirical knowledge of the caruioneros}

'

The opening

pages of Vicen^ Beltran's contribution provide ample bibliographical

documentation.

INTRODUCTION
Brian Dutton's Catdlogo-indice (1982), itself a monument to bibliographic scholarship, has culminated in the staggering achievement of the multivolume
series

published in Salamanca (199091). This will be

as essential a

research

tool for the twenty-first century as Foulche-Delbosc's Cancionero castellano has

been (unfortunately in many respects) for the twentieth. Many others besides Dutton, however, have increased the sheer availability of cancionero verse and enhanced our ability to appreciate these anthologies from a wide range of social and literary perspectives. The last fifteen years have also seen a distinct improvement in accessible and high-quality editions of the complete oeuvres of single poets: the canonical triumvirate of Santillana, Mena, and Jorge Manrique are the ones to benefit most obviously firom the skill and downright dedication of such scholars as Miguel Angel Perez Priego, Angel Gomez Moreno, Maxim Kerkhof, Carla de Nigris, and Vicen? Beltran. But clearly, much more needs to be done in the editorial field, where progress has been sporadic and uneven. Other basic research tools have been created by Ana Maria Gomez Bravo, whose metrical catalogue of cancionero lyric will soon take its place on the
scholar's shelves alongside Tavani's Repertorio metrico
lyric

of the Galician-Portuguese
Beltran's study

(1967) and Istvan Frank's catalogue of Provencal (195366). Equally

indispensable documentation has been provided

by Vicen^

(1988a) of the syntactic and metrical structures of the Castilian cancion?

Two

book-length studies oi^ cancionero verse by Casas Rigall (1995) and Crosas Lopez (1995) also provide valuable documentary evidence for understanding the poetic use

of rhetorical techniques and

classical

motifs respectively.
interpretative
is

The boundary between documentary and

one, but
it

work

(enshrined in
a blurred

the quaint distinction between "scholar" and "critic")

as

we know

main achievements of the past decade or so have lain in the former, rather than the latter category. Although there have been many fine articles on isolated topics, there is a relative scarcity of broadbased monographs that offer extended critical readings of poems, poets, themes, genres, or sociocultural issues. One has to go back over fifteen years to find the two books that (in my opinion) offer the most innovative attempts to conceptualize the poetics and cultural meaning of cancionero verse: Roger Boase's Troubadour Revival (1978) and Keith Whinnom's La poesia amatoria (1981, though his project began in the mid-1960s). My impression is that at least here in the United States, cancionero verse still labors under a certain stigma. Whinnom's pioneering work (1966) was a forceseems to
that the
ful

me

reminder that

cancionero lyric has played, so to speak, a "negative function"

The
it

fruit

of twenty years bbor,

its

methods

are inspired

by Russian Formalism and

is

Structuralism and modulated by the "noble" science of statistics (the adjective

I

the author's).
else, to

hope

does not take another twenty years for Professor Beltran, or someone

take

up the challenge of Russian Formalism and show how cancionero verse "might be said to defamiharize, make strange or challenge certain dominant conceptions ... of the social world"
(Bennett 1979, 21).

JULIAN WEISS

in Spanish literary historiography.

But

in spite

of

his insights,

much of

the

work done on

the cancioneros

is still

rooted in largely unexamined assumptions

about literary canons, esthetic, social, and political categories and values. This is poetry that since the early nineteenth century has occupied a liminal space in the minds of critics. It has been the terrain upon which critics have staked out the boundaries separating pairs of contrasting conceptual categories. Culturally, for example, it has been read to locate the difference between medieval and Renaissance (or early modern); esthetically, the "insincerity" and artificiality
create

of the court

by contrast

the poetic authenticity of canonical

lyric has

been invoked to demonstrate

texts

or

should say

(whether they be

Manrique's Coplas, or Garcilaso's verse)? The history of cancionero studies is a measure of our evolving notions of "literature" and "culture," since much of the interpretative criticism has been designed to vindicate
Santillana's serranillas,

or deny

its

status as "art." It

would hardly be appropriate

to say that cancionero

verse has been neglected. Rather, as "literature's" Other, its uncomfortable yet necessary presence looms large in modern literary historiography, as "traditional" in its alterity as the Traditional Lyric has been in its easy canonicity. To foster debate on cancionero verse, its poetics and cultural significance, we have tried to gather together a representative cross-section of current work, produced by scholars writing at different stages in their careers, some of them

renowned

specialists in

medieval

lyric,

others publishing for the

first

time on

The contributors do not follow a homogeneous line, in theme or method. They write from different critical positions and work within (and in some cases across) an international range of academic institutions whose structures and conventions so often exert an unseen pressure upon the kinds of
the subject."*
criticism

we

practice. In this sense,

is

and without wishing to labor the point,

as a

this collection

sample of the range of criticism practiced within contem-

porary hispanomedievalism.

The volume

whole, therefore, can be used to

explore not just cancioneros but the assumptions and methodologies

the task of literary and historical criticism.

we

bring to

However, although we
collection
is

stress diversity as a positive

value of the book, the

fell

not amorphous.

The

original submissions to the conference

into fairly clear discussion groups based around the following research topics:

codicological studies; literary traditions; questions of language; courtly love

play;

as

and

sociopolitical issues.^

With only

slight modification, the

book

retains

For

a single

example that combines both these age-old

casts the nonlyrical,

critical

maneuvres, see Di
as a

Camillo (1976, 69-106), which

*

"unpoetic" cancionero esthetic

back-

drop, a medieval "other," against which he defined his Spanish Renaissance humanism.

This collection contains a considerable amount of work in progress.

Many

essays (e.g.,

those by

Deyermond, Weissberger,
issues

Beltran,

Macpherson, Hermida Ruiz, Burrus) are samples

are

of more ambitious projects currently

^

in preparation.

Two
is

not treated in

this

volume

music and textual

criticism.

The

latter

omis-

sion

especially regrettable, because the past twenty-five years

have witnessed

a significant

INTRODUCTION
the conference grouping; and needless to say, within each area, each essay
stands alone as an individual contribution in
tions
its

own

right.

However, the

sec-

of the book are not watertight categories: they overlap, and therein lies much of the power of the book to generate further thinking about the field. For like any anthology whether this volume as a whole amounts to more than the sum of its parts depends upon the ability of its readers to make connections between the papers: to read the entire book not as a product but as a process. So rather than limiting myself to the usual introductory style of summarizing too often in bland agreement each of the papers, I shall attempt something less perfunctory, which is to offer a personal reading of the connections between the essays and to identify some areas for future thought and debate. I hardly need emphasize that the course I plot through these papers is shaped by my own critical concerns. I encourage other readers to follow the spirit of the collection and, by drawing their own intersections between the themes and methods outlined here, to pursue new lines of inquiry or renew

their

own

research.

Anthologies by their very nature select and arrange; in the process of selection and arrangement, they can sometimes by accident, sometimes by design create new ways of looking at the material. I hope that this anthology

about anthologies will do the same.

Cancioneros:

Compilation and Cultural Meaning

at

In a paper originally presented

the conference but

now published separately,

Dorothy Severin (1994) argued that the term cancionero ("songbook") is a misnomer for anthologies that include such a heterogeneous range of literary genres, in prose and verse, copied for a variety of private and public purposes. Whatever one thinks of the usefulness of this catch-all term, her arguments highlight the urgent need for an empirical survey of the available corpus. This is precisely the project undertaken by Viceng Beltran: as part of his continuing research on the organizational techniques of the anthologies, the present contribution studies their underlying processes of compilation, which are so often hidden from view when we consider the cancioneros merely as finished
products.
''

To

classify, therefore,

what he

calls

"their genetic typology," Beltran draws

upon an impressive

array of codicological evidence.

Although we possess some

generous bibliography

manuscript studies of individual

cancioneros (as Beltran's

growth in

critical editions

of the major

cancionero poets (Santillana,

cancioneros themselves.

Mena, Jorge Manrique,

to

San Pedro) and, to a

lesser extent,

of the

Although much remains

issue

be done, these achievements have

set the stage for a critical

review of those problems that

is all

may be
''

associated specifically with editing cancionero verse.

The

the

more

pressing

given the recent advances in computerized editions (on which see Faulhaber 1991).

The

original conference also included an important paper

on

the compilatory process

by Fiona Maguire.

JULIAN WEISS
of the Casfounded upon a rigorous accumulation of codicological data, and each piece of evidence seems to have its own singular tale to tell. Beltran reconstructs with special care the stories behind the structural components of each cancionero as well as those of the uniquely documented texts (in our quest for the canonical we usually esteem the poems that were most widely disseminated). However, the wealth of documentary detail so necessary for Beltran's project should not obscure the value and overall function of the evidence adduced: this is to emphasize the preeminently social nature of these volumes. He shows what happens when a textual "nucleus" (a single work, group of poems, or prexisting cancionero) passes beyond its original readership and is reconfigured, whether by chance or design, to suit new needs. A significant group of cancioneros are then best seen as products of a cumulative process: diachronic collaborations of successive owners and literary circles. A crucial problem for the literary historian is how to relate seemingly anonymous cancioneros to specific centers of literary production. As Beltran emphasizes in his conclusion, this fundamental point (whose implications I explore below) cannot be appreciated unless we shift our gaze firom the contents of the anthologies to the manuscript "container" itself. Michel Garcia takes up the challenge to make the cancioneros themselves a primary object of study in an essay that complements and extends many of Beltran's conclusions. Speculating upon their sociological and literary implications, he argues that cancioneros should be seen as "literary" objects in their own right. This insight is implicitly supported by recent critical approaches to the history of the manuscript and early printed book. Scholars such as Roger Chartier (1993) and Sylvia Huot (1987) have shown how the materiality of written works both generate and are reinforced by new literary concepts and categories. In this case, the physical form of the cancioneros and the essentially posthumous nature of their compilation (according to Garcia) signal the existence in vernacular culture of those categories now enshrined in such terms as "book," "literature," and "literary tradition." Just how these categories give structure and meaning to a specific anthology is shown in Garcia's case study of the Cancionero de Onate, which seems to have been compiled as a coherent record of Castilian literary production. The importance of manuscript evidence for understanding the historical development of these categories is thrown into even greater relief when we set these two codicological studies side by side and reflect upon some of their common assumptions and different perspectives. Take, for example, the categories "tradition" and "author." Beltran's study of cancioneros as a textual process provides a suggestive contrast with Garcia's emphasis on the essentially posthumous nature of their compilation. This difference in emphasis should not be resolved in favor of one or the other, because it shows how the remarkable intensity of compilation during the fifteenth century contributes to an emerging sense of "tradition," whose basic dynamic is renewable membership in a (selective) past. Thus, Beltran's research into the centers of literary pro-

makes

plain), this

is

a pioneering attempt at a broad-based survey

is

tihan material. His essay

INTRODUCTION
duction acquires a

new

relevance for a social reading of cancionero verse:

traditions,

who
the

were the patrons of these emerging

whose

interests did

they serve?

The

conclusions of both essays hinge implicitly and explicitly

as a collective

upon

category "author." Garcia views cancionero verse

which the concept of originary "authorial" creation is ronism. Yet the validity of this concept is an unspoken assumption of Beltran's concluding argument that codicological and textual studies of cancionero verse should follow the work done on Renaissance manuscripts of Livy, which is predicated on recovering the original authorial intention. My point is not that Garcia is incorrect to downplay the category "author" (though some evidence suggests that it had a powerful appeal for some late medieval writers [Weiss
1990, Minnis 1988]) or that Beltran
verse the
lyrics
is

production in something of an anach-

unwise to appropriate for

a state

cancionero

methods of textual criticism applicable to a Latin might more accurately be portrayed as existing in
of fixed authorial text). complexity of the historical process

auctor (since courtly

of mouvance

antithetical to the notion solve, the full

To

render, rather than re-

{process

being the key term)

we need
or

to recognize
are not

how

the categories author, literature, literary tradition,

ready-made interpretative templates to be forced back upon They are historical constructs and for the period in question are not dominant but emergent ideas or even what Raymond Williams has called "structures of feeling" that "exist on the edges of semantic availability" and as such are documented or articulated often in hesitant and contradictory fashion.^ The intersections between the studies of Beltran and Garcia open up a space in which to explore how codicological analysis sheds light on the historical development of those conceptual categories that provide the most common framework for our discussions of literature. Future research into these issues would need to be conducted on equally rigorous empirical and conceptual levels.^
the historical data.

book

'

On the notions of the dominant and emergent,

is

see Williams (1977, 121-27). WiUiams's

it is

concept of structure of feeling

more complex, but

evidently and

a theoretical category designed to

identify "social experiences in solution, as distinct

from other social semantic formations which

have been
"

precipitated
at

and

are

more

more immediately

available" (see

WiUiams
areas.

1977, 128-35,

133-34).

In this respect, Garcia's paper should stimulate discussion in the following

two

Firsdy,
palacio

he suggests that the

a

earlier mester de clerecta provides

cancioneros in

in the shape

of the Rimado

de

precedent for conceiving

terms of a "book" (with

its

connotations of

overarching unity). This view needs to be developed in the light of the arguments of

Orduna

(1988) and Dagenais (1994): the former compares the textus receptus of the

LBA

with

a cancionero,

while the

latter argues against

viewing the

poem

as a

work informed by modem

notions of textual and authorial coherence.

the cancioneros and the

standing of the

However problematic, the comparison between two earlier cuadema via compilations is crucial for any historical undermethods and underlying assumptions of vernacular compilation during the
is

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Castile. Equally crucial

into

to bring the Castilian evidence

much

closer dialogue with the

French and

Italian material discussed

by Huot (1987).

JULIAN WEISS
Traditions: Rupture and Renewal Though with different emphases, both studies of cancioneros touch on the concept of hterary traditions. Their combined evidence shows how the act of recording verse roots the present in the past and simultaneously creates and
satisfies a

need

for an authorizing tradition.

However, Garcia

also looks to the

future and suggests that the continued popularity of cancionero verse well into

the sixteenth century derives from the perceived "literary quality of the texts."

The concept of
studies

tradition,

therefore, creates a suggestive link with the

by Marina Brownlee and Aurora Hermida Ruiz, who both adopt a diachronic perspective and examine the complex relations of cancionero poets with those who preceded and followed them. Brownlee's analysis of the poetic genealogy of Francisco Imperial's famous Dezir a las siete virtudes breaks new ground in the study of Castilian poets and their French and Italian predecessors. This is no conventional study of source and influence (the genetic criticism practiced by earlier generations of scholars has told us all it can). Brownlee draws on Jacqueline Cerquiglini's theories of the French dit to argue that Imperial w^as trying to establish the Castilian dezir as a form of "second-degree literature": a metaliterary form, characterized by a self-conscious play upon previous texts and the primacy of the enunciating subject. Brownlee puts these
ideas to

work

in a detailed explication

besides elucidating the complexities of the Castilian

of Imperial's reading of Dante, which, poem, shows how Imof Beltran and Garcia to consider the our understanding of Imperial's proj-

perial fashioned the seemingly paradoxical authorial persona, poeta/ dezidor!^

How would following the injunctions

poems
in their manuscript context affect ect? Setting the

poem

alongside the other visionary narratives in Baena's

anthology would certainly put into sharper perspective Imperial's challenge to

the contemporary horizon of expectations.
It

would

also offer a practical

op-

portunity to

viewed as poets. Moreover, Brownlee's methods could well be applied not just those of the Cancionero de Baena. My hunch is that
tive dezires (and

Steven Nichols's argument (1989) that the manuscript be a "matrix" of the competing interests of scribes, compilers, and
test

to other poets

and

Santillana's narra-

not only

his) will display characteristics similar to

those found

in Imperial's

poem: and not

necessarily, or

even

at all,

because of putative

Secondly, for the purposes of cultural analysis

much more work

needs to be done on the

I

assumptions implicit in Garcia's conceptualization and use of the term "literature."

wonder

how

possible

it

will

be to sustain "literature"

as

an autonmous category

(as in

"the specific

values of literature"), unrelated to the ideological interests of the social formations and institutions that

produced

it

as such.

return to this problem

below

in

Johnston's paper; see also the concluding paragraphs to

my

study

my comments on Mark on Heman Nuiiez's com-

mentary on Juan de Mena (1993). The paradox rests on the conjunction of two hierarchically structured, though over'^

lapping, concepts of poetic creativity: poetry as philosophy (poeta), and poetry as rhetoric
{dezidor).
its

The

opposition

is

articulated in the critical prefaces

of Santillana and Encina but has

roots in antiquity; see Weiss (1990, 104, 190, 196) for discussion

and bibliography.

INTRODUCTION
knowledge of French poetic
practice (to assume this

would merely
la

replicate

Le
dit

Gentil's fatuous dismissal of Spain as "fille spirituelle de

France").

more

probable working hypothesis

as

is

defined by Cerquiligni
(and English,

the the Casand Catalan ). The long shift firom oral modes of composition and thought to those generated by literacy provides, as Brownlee emphasizes, the essential context for Imperial's fascination with the dynamics of intertextuality, particularly his belief that (like Juan Ruiz) "intertextuality is inevitable." In making this point, Brownlee cites Zumthor's remark that "oralite et ecriture s'opposent comme le continu au discontinu." Leaving aside the problems associated with Zumthor's binary formulation, the association between writing and discontinuity or distantiation suggests that there is a social dimension to Imperial's latent contilian dezir Italian,
. . .

those of written discourse

psychodynamics of move independently shape development of

the
firom the

that the

same

social forces that

produced the

orality to

cern for "inevitable intertextuality." Perhaps the underlying consciousness that

word is alienating entails a dialectical need to preserve the community and continuity of orality by emphasizing open texts and a dialogue with future readers. At this social level, one could make thematic connections with the extraordinary urge to gather and preserve poetic writing, described by Beltran and Garcia, and with Michael Gerli's account of language and alienathe written
tion in the courtly lyrics of Cartagena (discussed below).'''

Brownlee's primary concern

previous
texts.

is

with intertextual relationships; in that sense

"backformations," texts in dialogue with Aurora Hermida Ruiz, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with the social meaning of literary traditions: texts in dialogue not so much with each other as with a world outside the text (for some, a questionable notion). She asks what happens when new writers emerge and selfconsciously proclaim a break with the past? How "revolutionary" was Garcilaso's love? Hermida Ruiz begins to answer these questions by surveying the w^ays Garcilaso's concepts of love and poetry have been thought to relate to cancionero verse. In spite of the work done on the relation between the Italianate forms and their cancionero predecessors, much still remains to be done on an ideological level (two recent books on Garcilaso, by Heiple [1994] and
literary traditions are, so to speak,

a preliminary case study into the ideology

Navarrete [1994], leave the terrain free for exploration). Hermida Ruiz offers of love, by focussing on the way the
courtly topos of secrecy
Garcilaso's CanciSn

is deployed in some coplas by Jorge Manrique and in ("Ode ad florem Gnidi"). This topos is an ideological

bridge across esthetic difference, since

strategy to confront

it provides both male writers with a and negotiate the feminine "other" and in the process to assert the supremacy of the masculine self As evidence for the historical construction of gender, with its asymmetrical

'"

For a useful overview of medieval ideas about the alienation produced by

language, especially writing, see Jager (1993).

fallen

human

JULIAN WEISS
distribution of power,
part of a whole

Hermida Ruiz approaches

the love lyric as a

metonymy:

from a different perspective as in Barbara Weissberger's contribution). Detailed study of the textual strategies whereby the woman's voice is silenced is therefore an essential part of any attempt to tackle the complexities behind Joan Kelly-Gadol's lapidary question, "Did women have a Renaissance?" (1987 [1976]). While they are a necessary corrective to the idealism of formalist studies of style, or to approaches based on the history of ideas, literary studies that highlight the continuity of patriarchy need to be carefully formulated. As Hermida Ruiz herself points out, this continuity is not the result of monolithic and unchanging gender roles but the result of a continuous process of renegotiation: "masculinism" (the ideology of masculine dominance) is dynamic, not static. It is at this point that the formal study of the cancionero and Italianate styles needs to be reintroduced, because changing conventions and genres entail different ways of constructing the world, not simply different expressions of the same unchanging reality.''
social process (an idea explored

Courtly Games Hermida Ruiz draws on the notion of love as a game, though one with serious ideological meanings. Yet the current state of scholarship is such that much practical work remains to be done on the primary texts themselves: to improve
our basic understanding of the
rules

of the game,

its

language, and the very

meaning of many poems, even on the most literal levels. In this respect, the essays by Ian Macpherson and Victoria Burrus make important contributions, and they do so in complementary fashion: the former offers microanalyses of
specific texts

and the

latter a

macroanalysis of a paradigm. Their

work

is

exciting, not least because they are able to exploit recent bibliographical re-

search and explore a far wider range of material than was hitherto available.

This point

is

especially noticeable

when one compares

Burrus's essay

on

role

playing in the courtly love lyric with the panoramic studies of courtly love by

O.H. Green

(1949) and Aguirre (1981),

basis

who

also tried to construct a totalizing

paradigm on the

of motifs extracted from a range of poems. Burrus also goes beyond these earlier scholars by emphasizing the shaping influence of
court society, the inescapable context of cancionero verse.
studies

Drawing on the

of courtliness by Elias and Jaeger, she opens her account by stressing the importance of creating the "proper image" at court. This entailed negotiating the "sometimes subtle shifts in the dynamics of social power relationships" and in the process deliberately blurring the boundaries between literature and life. In the bulk of her essay, Burrus sketches the principal features of

" For further

critique

materialist perspectives

on form, developed

in large

measure through

of the

ahistorical abstractions

of Russian Formalism, see Medvedev and Bakhtin

of the relation between the ideological and cogsocial process (1979,

(1978) and Williams (1977, 173-91). However, according to Bennett, "the lost heritage" of

Russian Formalism
nitive properties

is

precisely the analysis

of form and the changing

95-97; see also 18-36).

10

INTRODUCTION
image and
fleshes
it

this

out with

much new

evidence. Although she recogis

nizes role playing as a

means of gaining
it is

prestige at court, social competition

not her main concern. Rather,

of this form of social interaction between men, as well as between the sexes. For the duration of the game, the rivalries of the outside world are set aside in nonto bring out the basic conviviality

threatening entertainment. Implicitly extending Jaeger's basic thesis, therefore,

she views this courtly role playing
as part

of the

civilizing process

of the

warrior

class.

Macpherson approaches the game of courtly love through the perspective of the most obviously social of the lyric genres, the letras, divisas, and invenciones composed for that special arena of aristocratic wealth and power, the tournament. After salutary warnings against adopting a too generalized approach to that "catch all" phrase courtly love, he encourages us to explore the historical specificity of each manifestation of the "genre" (though whether the notion of courtly love can usefully be regarded as a genre is not a problem to be addressed here). Like Burrus, he finds specificity in social context (in this case that of the "closed community" of the Isabeline court), where the ludic quality of courtly love acquired a peculiar and defining intensity. This ludic intensity betrays "a fascination with the multiple possibilities offered by words at
work," an awareness of the "plasticity" of language and of "relationships between objects and ideas which might hitherto have passed unnoticed." These conclusions, which flow logically from Macpherson's subtle analyses of selected invenciones, are developed within the conceptual framework of Huizinga's Homo ludens. This means that "these literary and sporting activities are part interludes, of the world of the imagination and are also related to real life: designed to stand outside 'ordinary' life, interdependent games with their own rules and vocabulary, played for a fixed duration and within an agreed field of
. . .

play."

This

is,

by and

large, similar to the position

adopted by Burrus,
"reality"

who

also

comments on

the blurring of boundaries

between

and "fiction" and

regards the verse as an interlude from the real business of politics.

sonal standpoint,

consider that this

life

common ground

writing and "ordinary"

in terms

From

a per-

the relation

between

poses the greatest challenge to cancionero studies,

of both conceptualization and practical analysis. It is a problem faced by anyone who wishes to understand cancionero verse as a social practice, and, as we shall see, it forms a connecting thread with other essays to be discussed below.

Questions of Language
Alan Deyermond addresses "Bilingualism in the cancioneros and its implications." The title belies the bibliographical scope of the paper. Deyermond sets bi- and multilingual Castilian cancioneros within the much larger context of European poetic anthologies of the Middle Ages, with occasional side-glances at lyric traditions of other cultures and periods. The broad perspective adopted here opens up tremendous possibilities for detailed case studies of the use of

JULIAN WEISS
different languages within specific anthologies, at specific courts,
cific poets.

11

and by speBut above and beyond this invaluable bibliographic service, Deyermond's panoramic overview also suggests ways in which language use may further cultural, gender, and political analysis (one relevant study, by Menocal [1994], was published too late for it to be considered by the author). These broader interpretative issues, however, cannot according to Deyermond be adequately treated without a firm philological and bibliographical foundation. And in this area, much remains to be done; some of the tasks are listed in the final section of the essay. As Deyermond concludes, "Even though the percentages of bilingual poems, or poets, or candoneros are relatively low for instance, about 1012 percent of all late medieval poetic anthologies within a given linguistic tradition seem to be to some extent bilingual they are high enough to make nonsense of any attempt to study the late medieval lyric tradition of any language in isolation." In other words, we need to estabUsh patterns of lyric traditions (even perhaps beyond the confines of Europe) and reconstruct the "web of relationships" between them. Deyermond's emphasis is fundamental and timely, given the scarcity of comparative studies of the late medieval court lyric and the conditions of its

production within an international court culture. His call for more collaborative work and his arguments in favor of a union catalogue of European
lyric anthologies are utterly
at this early stage
is

compelling.

The only problem

I

that intrigues
it

me
far

a procedural
rest

one (and

cannot answer

here):

how

will

our conclusions

upon our

definition of "bilingualism"? Will occa-

"web of relationships" enviDeyermond? At what point in our research will we need to pause for critical reflection upon that key term "bilingual"? On one level, Deyermond's paper intersects with those of Macpherson and Burrus, since they all comment on the ways in which courtliness entails a fascination with different forms of Hnguistic display. A different perspective on
sional references to other languages sustain that

sioned by

is offered by Michael Gerli, who explores the linguistic and epistemological underpinnings of the verse by Pedro de Cartagena. In one respect,

the matter

work of Keith Whinnom as a vindication misunderstood poetic school through a close reading of its immanent poetics. Developing one of his own earlier observations (that cancionero poetics
Gerli's study follows the pioneering
a

of

are characterized

by "the view

that truth resides solely in linguistic percep-

tion"), Gerii tries to recover the lost significance that Cartagena's

early

vene held

for

modern

readers.

He

locates

it

in the poet's "obsession with the contra-

dictions of signification
lishing an

and the emptiness of language the difficulty of estabagreement between signs and their meaning that seems to shape

fifteenth-century Spanish courtly culture."

finds in Cartagena's verse speaks to

The underlying aHenation that

sensibilities as

Gerli

our modern

well

as to

those

of the poet's early modern readers. He is thus a writer poised on the threshold of modernity, who forces us to reflect upon our own concerns over language.
Gerli's attempt to

map

broad cultural terrain through close textual analysis

of

specific

poems

has an interesting point of comparison with Brownlee's

12

INTRODUCTION

discussion of Imperial. The metaliterary concerns of both poets seem to be shaped by a heightened awareness of writing within a community of readers. Yet Cartagena seems less at ease than Imperial with the prospects of polyvalence: for him, the notions of the "primacy of the enunciating subject" and

tial

of distantiation" would carry a much more existenfrom other readings of the world by withdrawing into the primacy of his own self. As Gerli puts it in his conclusion, Cartagena suggests that "in order to understand visual, spoken, and written
"second-degree
force.
literature

He

distances himself

images, the

mind needs

to reconstitute itself in the seclusion of

its

own
is

lan-

guage." Further research could

show how
is

this alienation

from consensus

part

of that

dialectical process that

produces the binarism "individual: society" on

predicated.
^^

which
the

early

modern
in

subjectivity

as problems, on ideological grounds, which Cartagena dramatizes the rupture of sign and signified. If one denies the referentiality of language, one obscures the author's own role in the construction of "truth" as a category based on what Gerli calls "private perception lacking external guarantors." To see this, we need to look at what

Further research might also construct

manner

elements of the external world the author exploits to develop his linguistic and epistemological themes. The case is obvious in two poems ("No juzgueis por

"un loco llamado Baltanas"), in which through the misperceptions of women and a madman. Put another way, "truth" is protected from the tainted gaze of the Other by being located in the "self," which is hypostasized as courtly, aristocratic, and masculine.
la

color," and the one dedicated to

illustrates his ideas

Cartagena

and Culture of anthologies and studies produced over the past thirty years, Julio Rodriguez Puertolas has encouraged us to confront fifteenth-century verse as both an overt and covert intervention in the changing sociopolitical structures of late feudalism. The present contribution, on Jews and converses in
Politics, Society,
a series

Through

the cancioneros, continues that tradition. Recognizing the value of individual

studies already

done on these

social

groups in fifteenth-century Iberia,

Rod-

riguez Puertolas contends that

available accounts

we

still

lack an adequate broad-based treatment

of cancionero poetry either by or about Jews and converses. Taken together, the fail both to explore the full thematic range of the subject and to situate it within "the larger historical coordinates of its production." His own essay does not set out to fill this gap but to survey the field and to

some issues for some poems by the

clarify
this

fiiture research.

As a necessary prelude to

his analysis

of

converse

poet-courtier Diego

de Valera, Rodriguez

Puertolas outlines the increasing anti-Semitism of late medieval Spain.

Without
of these

background in view, he argues, the

full political

significance

'^

For an imporunt essay on subjectivity and fifteenth-century Castilian court

literature

(with ample references to cancionero verse), see Pereira Zazo (1994, 245-77).

JULIAN WEISS
apparently innocuous j'ewx d' esprit
are related to the
fall

13

would be invisible. The three poems chosen of Alvaro de Luna, and together they demonstrate the importance of exploring the ideological underpinnings of cancionero verse by situating it within its concrete historical moment. Rodriguez Puertolas has certainly identified an area where more work urgently needs to be done, and he rightly concludes his study by calling for interdisciplinary collaboration among literary critics, historians, and sociologists. It seems to me that this collaboration would need to take place not just by sharing "findings" (though that is important) but by discussing methodologies of historical understanding. The present essay is structured upon the binarism "textrcontext," and this approach works well for the poems chosen. But in other cases it might be a drawback, since the literary text is usually posited as a secondary reflection of a pregiven reality, and in the process the potential of writing as a socially constitutive force is lost. In other words, other forms of historicism need exploring, which do not simplify the issue either by selecting obviously "propagandistic" works or by explaining everything as the by-product of an allegedly coherent world-view. Some possibilities are suggested below, in Mark Johnston's paper on cultural studies; but I would be particularly intrigued to see how cancionero scholars would respond to Regula Rohland de Langbehn's innovative attempt (1989) to use the concept of mediation developed by the Frankfiirt school to link the sentimental romance to the historical situation of the conuersos.

Though best known, perhaps, for her work on the sentimental romances, Rohland de Langbehn is also a distinguished critic of fifteenth-century verse. Her present paper extends the boundaries of cancionero studies by exploring the political themes of power and justice. Although work has been done on polisince Rodriguez Puertolas gathered the basic materials for the study of poes{a de protesta in the 1960s, the sharp political edge of this period's moral and didactic verse has remained largely unexamined. This explains the format of Rohland de Langbehn's study, which, like the contributions of Deyermond, Rodriguez Puertolas, and Burrus, serves the indispensable function of identifying the raw material and formulating some basic questions for future research and debate.
tical satire

of primary sources, including the neGuzman, Rohland de Langbehn brings together the most significant beliefs about power and justice and situates the resulting paradigm in the context of emerging monarchical absolutism. Her survey leads her to conclude that initially poets set their discussions of the subject within a shared (or "univocal") ethical framework, but that particularly from the reign of Enrique IV, they adopt a more critical posture. The critical tone, however, is largely a product of factional antagonism, which means that the basic rights and duties of the monarch were unchallenged (and in this sense the conceptuaUzation of power and justice was rather static in this period). In the course of her essay, Rohland de Langbehn confronts a number of crucial and delicate ideological problems (she argues, for example, against Helen
array

Drawing upon an impressive

glected doctrinal verse of Fernan Perez de

14

INTRODUCTION
thesis that the letrado

and noble classes held clearly distinguishable polime, however, the most stimulating ideological problem raised in this essay is the very concept of "ideology" itself, which is, as Jorge Larrain notes, "perhaps one of the most equivocal and elusive concepts one can find
Nader's
tical

views). For

in the social sciences" (1979, 13).

one defines ideology as a system of beliefi characteristic of term will not help us uncover any latent subtleties in the apparently homogenous poetic treatments of power and justice during this period. But ideology has many (often contradictory) meanings, which could be fruitfully exploited at different levels of historical and cultural analysis. ^^ The notion, for example, does not simply cover the ideas used by certain factions to promote their own interests; it also "aims to disclose something of the relation between an utterance and its material conditions of possibility" (Eagleton 1991, 223). In this respect, we might ask why the categories power and justice were linked in the first place and why this pairing is such an obsessive theme in the transition from feudalism to absolutism. The beginnings of an answer may be found in Anderson's observation that "it is necessary always to remember that mediaeval 'justice' factually included a much wider range of
It is

true that if

a specific class, the

activities

than

modern
153).

justice,

because

it

structurally
It

pivotal position within the total political system.

occupied a far more was the ordinary name of

power" (1974,

Rohland de Langbehn's essay is a healthy skepticism theme of power and justice as transparent expressions of self-interest and bad faith. (She suggests at one point that my reading [Weiss 1991b] of Perez de Guzman's rhetorical strategies of self-legitimization may well be anachronistic.) Her skepticism is important, because it
Implicit throughout
all

towards reading

instances of the

wish to pursue ideological criticism to confront the concept and to support our theoretical positions with convincing practical analyses of the ethical and political verse that this author encourages us to explore with fresh eyes.
will force those
real complexities that underlie the

of us

who

different perspective

on

political

and

social

Weissberger,

who

has

been

at the forefront

power is offered by Barbara of feminist readings of medieval

Spanish literature in

this

country. In "Male Sexual Anxieties in Carajicomedia:

A Response to Female Sovereignty," Weissberger reopens the discussion of the

literary representation

of Isabel la Catolica begun over thirty years ago by R. O. Jones (1962). The conceptual framework of her study is twofold. On the one hand, she deploys a materialist feminism that explores how relationships of

sex and gender are basic forms of political and social organization.
other, she draws

On

the

on the concepts of high and low

culture and the Bakhtinian

notion of the carnivalesque

(as modified by the cultural historians Stallybrass and White), to elucidate the ideological meaning of the Carajicomedia s gro-

'*

In addition to Larrain (1979), see Eagleton's survey (1991) and Williams (1977,

55-

71). See also the final paper in this

volume, by Mark Johnston, which contains some valuable

suggestions about

how

canciotiero

verse might be read as an ideological practice.

JULIAN WEISS

15

tesque parody of Mena's Laberinto}^ These conceptual models, backed up

with close textual analysis and historical documentation, enable her to demonstrate how the parody of male sexuality is predicated upon the demonization of the female potency embodied by Queen Isabel. In other words the carnivalesque mode of Carajicomedia does not subvert dominant patriarchal ideology;
it is

way of negotiating
impotente.

the anomaly of a powerful

woman who

reasserted

patriarchal values threatened

by her allegedly feminized predecessor, Enrique

IV,

el

Even the most cursory reading reveals the potential of Weissberger's paper as a model for further analyses of cancionero verse as a range of politically gendered discourses. Whether one follows her lead will, of course, depend on individual choice (rather than on arguments from within a common methodology): but the connections between her work and the issues of language and love explored by Burrus, Macpherson, Gerli, and Hermida Ruiz are there to be made. To pick up the thread of some of my earlier remarks, if one were to read Gerli's study alongside that of Weissberger, two mutually illuminating
possibilities

emerge: one,

as

have mentioned,

is

that Gerli's paper could

be

extended to explore the asymmetrical and gendered power relations structuring Cartagena's reflections on language and the reading subject. The other is that the male anxieties identified by Weissberger are implicated in a much wider

web of political and

social change: male sexual anxieties mediate the anxieties of a "self emerging against an impersonal "society" the former reified as an alienated (yet "private" and controlling) masculine self, the latter as an all-

engulfing or castrating feminine Other.

Mark

Johnston's "Cultural Studies on the

Gaya Ciencia" provides an

appropriately open-ended conclusion to this collection.

He

investigates

some

of the ways in which the interdisciplinary methods of cultural studies can help us understand cancionero verse as a discourse of social, political, and economic power. In spite of its eclecticism, cultural studies "share a commitment to

examining cultural practices from the point of view of their intrication with, and within, relations of power" (Bennett 1992, 23). Cancionero verse has, of course, been studied in connection with the political, economic, and social life of fifteenth-century Spain (Boase's The Troubadour Revival [1978] is still the boldest and best example). But cultural studies enables this connection to be discussed with greater conceptual refinement, avoiding simplistic formulations of "text and context" (where the literary text is secondary, a reflection of pregiven "reality") and reductive accounts of literature as a spontaneous reflex of a socioeconomic base.'"'

'^

The

Carajicomedia

first

appeared in the Cancionero de obras de

burlas (1519),

turn was originally the final section of the Cancionero general (1511).

which in its As Garcia and Beltran

vital

emphasized, the evolving structure and history of each cancionero offer

cultural analysis: in this case, they

evidence for

mark

the separation of high and

this essay.

low

cultures, the very

binarism that Weissberger deconstructs in

'

At various points

in his essay,

Johnston

refers to the

crude reductionism of cultural

16

INTRODUCTION

Johnston outlines some of the ways in which power relations are inscribed from the Candonero de ^race, class, gender, ideBaena. His essay covers a formidable range of issues and both his arguments and supporting bibliography sugology, subjectivity gest many new ways of looking at the Castilian material and relating it to work being done in French and English.''' In short, Johnston urges us to ask what cultural studies can do for cancionero studies. To avoid what is occasionally called "cookie-cutter criticism" and to establish a dialectical relationship between conceptual and practical inquiry, however, we also need to ask what the cancioneros can do for cultural studies. (A relevant question, given the emphasis of cultural studies on contemporary culture.) For example, as Johnston demonstrates, cultural studies reveals what we can learn when we deconstruct such modern categories as "literature" and "author," with their baggage of idealism. And yet, as I have mentioned in my comments on earlier papers, many features o cancionero verse indicate precisely how these categories began to emerge in the vernacular during the fifteenth century. I recognize that this is something that future research needs to explore more fully. However, at another level of inquiry I would reintroduce these categories as the grounds for a more sustained dialectical engagement between present methologies and the surviving record of past experience. The engagement between present and past provides the concluding theme for Johnston's essay, and it is an apt one for this book too. For the conjunction of cancionero and cultural studies requires us to examine our own relationship to the past (a similar point is raised by Gerli). As Johnston observes, cultural studies requires that we interrogate the "definitions of culture and literature in our academic institutions."'^ It would be wrong of me to co-opt the individual support of all the contributors for the particular endeavor described by Johnston. But collectively, the essays in this volume call attention to the potential of cancionero verse for understanding not just the past but our own modes of reading it.
in cancionero verse, and he draws practical illustrations

Uniuersity of Oregon

materialism.

It

would be

interesting to see this criticism substantiated; especially since the

man who developed

has attempted to

the notion of cultural materialism,

Raymond
is

Williams, was also one of

the originators of the cultural studies

movement. To

my

knowledge, no medieval hispanist

construed
as a cultural materialist

work with

Williams's ideas, whether he

or cultural studies guru.

" The
his

collection of essays
late to

on

early

modem

subjectivity edited

by Pereira Zazo (1994)

appeared too

be consulted by Johnston. However, the former's

own

contribution to

volume complements Johnston's extended remarks on the processes of subjectification. '^ Deyermond's contribution intersects precisely at this point, since the linguistic variety of cancionero verse helps us to question Castilian hegemony in the "Spanish" national and
cultural identity.

I.

Cancioneros:

Compilation and Cultural Meaning

The Typology and Genesis of the Cancioneros:

Compiling the Materials

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

After

the Civil War, Spanish research into the cancioneros changed dileft

rection and
century. That
is

the path
it

it

had followed since the mid-nineteenth

to say,

departed from the course that

Romance

studies in

and study of the medieval lyric. The initial impulse in the nineteenth century had come with the publication of the Cancionero de Baena by Pedro Jose Pidal (1851; reprinted 1949).^ But after the Civil War, information, studies, and extracts from cancioneros diminished in comparison with the earlier phase, in spite of the research of such scholars as Seris (1951, 318-20) and Azaceta (1954-55). From the 1940s through the early 1970s it was thought that each cancionero represented a particular school, period, or compiler, and research was redirected into editing them as an organic whole.^ The value of these publications is very
to follow in the edition

the rest of Europe

would continue

'

Francisque Michel (1860) revised the transcription but reproduced his preliminary study
a

and notes. For

review of these early editions see Azaceta 1966,

first

LII. Strictly speaking,

it

was

Usoz y Rio who

obras de burlas in

started to reedit the cancioneros,

his intentions

with

his edition

of the Caruionero de

London, 1841. But

to lay bare

and vindicate the other

to subvert

Spanish tradition, which had long laid buried and repressed

the dominant intellectual tendencies at the real starting point for scholarship
^

were
I

from abroad

home. For

this reason,

consider Pidal's edition to be

on

fifteenth-century poetry.

This period saw the editions of

cancioneiro musical e poetico

da Biblioteca Piiblica
(partial ed.

Hortinsia (ed.

Joaquim 1940);

II

'Cancionero' marciano (Str App.

XXV)

Cavaliere

1943); Cancionero de Uppsala (ed. Mitjana and Bal y

with

new

study by Querol Rosso 1980); Cancionero

Gay 1944; Mitjana's text reproduced de Ramdn de Uavia (ed. Benitez Claros
Querol Gavalda 1949-50);

1945); El cancionero de Palacio (ed. Vendrell de Millas 1945); Cancionero musical de Palacio (ed.

Angles 1947-51); Cancionero musical de

la casa

de Medinaceli (ed.

Cancionero de Pedro del Pozo (ed. Rodriguez Moiiino 1949-50); Cancionero d'Herberay des
Essarts (ed.

Aubrun

1951); Espejo de enamorados; Guimalda esmaltada de galanes y eloquentes

20
uneven;

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

it

depends, obviously, on their philological rigor, but

factors that

it is

also affected

by other

have not always received due attention: the material structure of the codex, the analysis of hands, the process of compilation, the scribes' sources, and what they reveal about centers of literary production. Lastly, the significance of an edition was also judged almost exclusively by the
quantity of previously unpublished works
it

contained, and these gradually

diminished in number.

These editions played a crucial role, and they continue to provide the basis of our own knowledge. In addition to making the texts available, they shed considerable light upon authors and often correctly evaluated the representative nature of the cancionero and its date. Nonetheless, Spanish philology made the mistake of limiting itself almost exclusively to this kind of research.
In the
poets,
first

place,

it

underestimated the value of

critical editions

of individual

which conditioned both the perspective and methods of analysis, which were more general than particular. Consequently, there was little literary study
of individual cancionero authors.-^ Issues of textual criticism arrived school, starting with Varvaro (1964). did have a rich tradition from the
decades of studying the
late,
It is

and from abroad, firom the

of
this

Italian

true that editions of particular poets

century."*

start

But

after

many

cancioneros, in the 1970s, for the first

time there was an

dezires de diuersos autores (ed.

Rodriguez Monino 1951); Cancionero dejuan Femdndez de hear

'

(ed.

Azaceta 1956); "El 'Pequeno cancionero"

(ed.

Azaceta 1957); Cancionero de Luz6n

(1508) (ed. Rodriguez

Monino

1959a); Cancionero de Gallardo (ed. Azaceta 1962); Cancionero

de Euora (Askins 1965); Cancionero dejuan Alfonso de Baena (ed. Azaceta 1966); Cancioneiro de

Carte e de Magnates (ed. Askins 1968); Cancionero musical de

la

Colombina (Querol Gavalda

1971). Although
the

it is

much more

recent, a project
J.

is

now

well under
this

way

to catalogue

all

Golden Age
*

cancioneros.

Directed by J.

Labrador Herraiz,

project will undoubtedly

bring to light

new

data for the Renaissance reception of fifteenth-century lyrics.

are

This does not mean, however, that they are not important. The most significant studies by Lida de Malkiel on Juan de Mena (1950) and Juan Rodriguez del Padron (1952b, 1954, and 1960); Lapesa on Santillana (1957); Marquez Villanueva on Alvarez Gato (1960;
ed. 1974);

2nd
fiil

perspective, there are various

and Alvarez PeUitero on Montesino (1976). From a basically biographical works by AvaUe-Arce (1945, 1967, 1972, 1974a-c). For a use-

bibliography of studies on Jewish and conuerso poets and themes, see Rodriguez Puertolas's

essay in the present collection.

''

The

initiative

pubUshed the works of

was taken by Jose Amador de los Rios Santillana. This was followed by the

as early as

1852,

when he

cancioneros

of Pedro Manuel

Ximenez de Urrea

(ed. Villar y Garcia 1878; see also Asensio 1950); Gomez Manrique (ed. Paz y Melia 1885-86; facsmile reprint 1991); Juan Rodriguez del Padron (ed. Rennert 1893); Anton de Montoro (ed. Cotarelo y Mori 1900); Macias (ed. Rennert 1900; partial ed.

in Martinez-Barbeito 1951);
(ed. Artiles

Fernando de

la

Torre

(ed.

Paz y Melia 1907); Juan Alvarez Gato

also editions

Rodriguez 1928); Pere Torroellas

as

(ed.

Bach y Rita 1930). See

it

of

such major works

Manrique's Coplas (Foulche-Delbosc 1902, revised 1905; 1907, 1912),

and Mena's

Laberinto (Foulche-Delbosc 1904a,

though

lacks critical apparatus).

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

interest in editing the

21

work of

individual authors.^ Fortunately, the

last

few

years have brought forth meticulous studies of textual transmission, although

even in this field the balance is still poor/' Numerous editions have appeared, on the whole carefully prepared. Nor has there been a lack of literary studies, and alongside the edition of cancioneros there has been a continuous flow of information, extracts, and analysis of each of them. Brian Dutton's Catdlogoindice (1982) and his Cancionero del sigh XF (1990 91) crowned an extraordinary bibliographical and documentary project.^ Both works constitute our major reference tools for a considerable part of the poetic corpus. Perhaps the least active front in recent decades has been facsimile editions.^ After the

Scoles (1967), de Nigris (1988, 1994), and

studies

with similar objectives, methods, and

also includes editions

texts.

Vozzo Mendia But these

as

(1989), constitute a series of

are not the only ones; the

panorama

of satirical works, such

those by Ciceri (1975, 1977) and

the edition of Montoro (Ciceri and

Italian school, see

Rodriguez Puertolas 1990). For another example of the one would have
to include

Caravaggi et

al.

(1986). For obvious reasons,

in this tradition Perinan's edition

''

of Suero de Ribera (1968).

On

the cancioneros of Baena, general, and British

Museum

(LBl), see, respectively, Alberto

Blecua (1974-79), Dutton (1990), and C. Alvar (1991); on Mena, see Kerkhof (1983b and
1984), Perez Priego (1986), de Nigris (1986),

Kerkhof and

le

Pair (1989);

on

Santillana, see

de Nigris and Sorvillo (1978), and Kerkhof (1990); on Jorge Manrique, see Beltran (1987,
1991, and 1992).
^

For progress reports published by Dutton and the members of his research team, see
I

Dutton (1977-78, 1979-80) and Krogstadt (1979-80). Henceforth,

bibliographical project

shaU use Dutton's siglae

originally set forth in his Catdlogo-indice (1982) to identify the cancioneros.

The

history

of this

works of Mussafia (1902); Aubrun (1953); Simon Diaz (1963-65); Varvaro (1964); Norton (1977); Gonzalez Cuenca (1978); Steunou and Knapp (1978); Faulhaber et al. (1984); and various specialized bibliographies whose value
traced in the

may be

has not always been fully appreciated, such as those by Foulche-Delbosc (1907) and Carrion

Gutierrez (1979). Alongside these bibhographies, one has to mention

in studies

lists

of sources included

on

specific manuscripts,

such

as

those found in Azaceta's editions of the cancioneros

of Juan Fernandez de Ixar (1956), Gallardo (1962), and Baena (1966). In addition to Simon Diaz's ongoing bibliography, there are of course the essential catalogues and bibliographical
studies

by Rodriguez Monino (1959b, 1965-66, 1970, 1973-77), which remain our most
a

valuable source for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

period

when

cancioneros

continue to anthologize fifteenth-century verse. Another related area that cannot be ignored
is

that

of the frequently bilingual Catalan

cancioneros,

although Castilian bibhographies often

include only the sections devoted to Castilian. While

we

await a complete bibUography,

which

am

currently preparing in collaboration with

Gemma Avenoza, we

have to

fall

back

on
I

the

shall

one by Masso Torrens (1923-24), which includes an index of catuioneros, whose siglae adopt where necessary, and a systematic analysis of the poets. Even more useftil in this
is

respect
" I

the doctoral thesis by Ganges Garriga (defended 1992, currently in press). the following: Cancionero de
la

know of only
1990).

Catedral de Segovia (1977), Cancionero de

Uppsala (1983), and Cancionero del Marques de Santillana [B.U.S., Mss 2655] (ed. Catedra and

Coca Senande

fail

to understand

why no one

has yet published a facsimile of the

magnificent Cancionero de

Estufiiga.

22

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

of interest in studies of this kind in the 1960s and early 1970s, the

relative lack

panorama has become considerably richer. Even so, recent research still bears the marks of a poor and occasionally ill-conceived tradition.'^ In general, it is clear that the most significant gap affects our knowledge of
textual transmission:

we

scarcely

know

anything about the specific problems of

the Italian (or rather the Aragonese or Catalan- Aragonese) family of cancioneros

and the more particular case of the Marques de Santillana. So long as we lack careful editions of the majority of authors, or at least the most significant ones, with corresponding hterary study and appropriate analysis of transmission, it will be difficult to make headway towards a rigorous and thorough understanding of this poetic school. The weakest area in our knowledge continues to be the compilation of the cancioneros, the relationship between them, and their modes of circulation. In this context, I believe it useful to focus my study on their genetic typology: the provenance of the materials they gathered, their organizational techniques, and the light they shed upon the diflfusion of poetry
in the fifteenth century.

We can start by returning to the well-known Cancionero de Herheray LB2 (Aubrun 1951). In his prelimary study, Aubrun remarked upon the existence of four sections of anonymous poems. These he attributed to the compiler himself, whom he identified as the Navarrese nobleman Hugo de Urries because of a reference to him in poem no. 43.^" I think it would be usefiil for our purposes to reconsider the structure of this cancionero, which typifies a model whose characteristics I shall now try to define. The first group of anonymous poems begins with no. 4.'^ According to Aubrun, it is headed by
'^

would

like to

have undertaken
this

a detailed

account of the goals and scope of studies

limits

published in the second half of

century.

But the

of the present study prevent

me

from doing

this.

For
la

review of the very positive developments in recent years, see the Bole-

tin Bibliogrdfico

de

AsociaciSn Hispdnica de Literatura Medieval.

The

published proceedings of

this association are the

most important forum

for recent trends in fifteenth-century studies in

studies

general and the lyric in particular.

Most of these

and publications continue

to focus

on

from the inevitable Manriques, SantiUana, and Mena, we again encounter Anton de Montoro, Juan Rodriguez del Padron, or Fernando de la Torre, while authors as innovative or culturally
attracted scholariy attention a

the same authors

who

hundred years ago:

apart

representative as Cartagena

still

he dormant in the

cancioneros.

Other

lyric

poets have attracted

some
'*'

attention because they cultivated other literary genres:

Diego de San Pedro and Juan

a

del Encina are typical.

"Les poemes anonymes sont a

la suite

et groupes: lo.

de 26r
soit

72v, a I'exception d'un

ditie,

55r (XLIII), signe

comme

malgre

lui

par

Ugo

de Urries,

44 pieces; 2o. de 85v

92v, soit 23 pieces; 3o. de 179r a 186v a I'exception de quelques chansons de poetes aragonais; 4o. de 194v a 205r, a I'exception de

deux chansons de Juan de Valladohd" (Aubrun

1951,

xii).
It

"

contains the following compositions (according to

Aubrun

[1951] and Dutton

[1990-91]), with groups of

(26r)

poems

separated by blank spaces:

3D Anonymous

canciSn in praise

of the

infanta.

Unique.

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

a eulogy dedicated to the infanta

23

Leonor de Navarra, the wife of the conde de Foix and governess of the kingdom in the name of Juan de Aragon, her father
(no. 5). Suffice
it

to say that

of nos. 13, Diego de

Sevilla, all

Dutton attributes this composition to the author of them dedicated to the same character.'^

And
5:

indeed, the rubrics of these

6:

poems
7,

are either imprecise (no. 4: "otra," no.

"desfecha," no.

"cancion," no.

and

8:

"otra") or missing (no. 3D); in

the cancioneros, this arrangement can sometimes indicate that they belong to the

same author. Nonetheless, it would be dangerous to attribute the first long series of anonymous poems in LB2 (up to and including no. 48) to the same author, whether it be Diego de Sevilla or Hugo de Urries, as Aubrun proposes. As I have said, the editor based his identification on the self-reference in no. 43; however, no. 6 also appears in PN13, where it is attributed to Sancho de Villegas, in the midst of a group in which compositions by this author are combined with those by Diego de Valera. This evidence leads us to doubt that we are faced with a compact group of poems attributable to a single
poet.

Nor do I believe it possible to attribute to the compiler the second group of compositions.^^ Here, poem no. 66 repeats the earlier cancion no. 12; acci-

4 Ditto. Unique.
5

Anonymous. Unique.
in PN13 (poem 30). In PN13, the text poems by Diego de Valera, of which the MS. is

6 Anonymous but ascribed to Sancho de Villegas

appears in the middle of a group of five

almost always the sole textual witness.

7-16 Anonymous and unique.

17 Otra por
la excelente

senora infanta.

Anonymous and
(eulogy).

unique.

18-24 Anonymous and unique.

25 De madama iMcrecia la napoletana 26-42D Anonymous and unique.

Anonymous and

unique.

43 [Hugo de Urries]. Unique. Unattributed. The author

the

refers to

himself in the text of

poem.
44-48 Anonymous and unique.
cancionero

(76v)
'^

The

opens with the following compositions:

concerning Leonor,
infanta

Diego de

Sevilla, pregunta

of Navarre. Unique.

2 Respuesta de Vayona. Unique. 3 Diego de Sevilla: Loor de

la infanta.

Unique.
cancioneros in

Henceforth,

shall take into

account the

which each composition

appears,

since this can help us trace their origin.

'^ It

contains the following compositions:

(85v) 6365 Anonymous. Unique. 66 = 12 Anonymous and unique. 67-68 Anonymous and unique.

24

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

by com-

dents of this kind are frequent in cancioneros and they can be explained both

the heterogeneity of the collected materials and by the incapacity of the

piler to

remember all the preceding texts. But how could he have forgotten he had already copied out one of his own poems? Moreover, if compiler and author were one and the same, he probably resorted to this very same cancionero to gather his own compositions, which would have made repetition
that

impossible.

The third group is very problematic.''* In it, both attributed and anonymous poems intermingle, although this situation can often be interpreted as a sign that poems belong to the last-named author. On the other hand, the
coincidence between
this section

Modena (MEl)

suggests that both

and the cancionero of the Biblioteca Estense de go back to a common source. In any case,

69 Anonymous. MP4a (poem 24) 7075 Anonymous and unique. 76 Anonymous.

78 Anonymous.

MP4a (poem MP4a (poem

20).

77 Anonymous and unique.

19).

79 Anonymous and unique.

80 Anonymous but attributed to Francisco Bocanegra
this section,

in

MHl

(poem

179).

Throughout

MHl

differs

from

all

other surviving witnesses.

(92v)
''*

81-86 Anonymous and unique.

contains the following works:

It

(179r) 165

Anonymous

(as in

MEl).

166 Anonymous but by Luis Bocanegra in

167 Mafuela 168 Diego de Sandoval. 169 Anonymous
(as

MEl

(poem

92).

in

MEl).

170-175 Anonymous (as in MEl, poem 75). 176-177 Carlos de Arellano (as in MEl). 178-179 Anonymous (as in MEl).
180 Pero Vaca
181
(as

in
(as

MEl).
in

Anonymous
it

MEl)

but by Francisco Bocanegra in

SA7 (poem

11). In this

cancionero

appears in the midst of a group of canciones that are

documented only

here,

attributed to various authors.

182

Anonymous

(as in

MEl)

but by Rodrigo de Torres in

SA7 (poem

appears in the midst of an unstructured group of canciones that are

19), where it documented only here,

by various authors (Garcia de Pedraza, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Garcia de Medina). 183 Anonymous (as in MEl).
184 Santa Fe
185
(as

in

MEl), anonymous
SA7, and
also

in

SA7 (poem

348),

where

it

appeals between

two

that survive only in

Infante

included in an unsystematic group of poems.

don Enrique (as in MEl). don Enrique (as in MEl and MHl). 187 Anonymous (as in MEl). 188 Pere Torrella (as in MEl). (186v) 189-190 Anonymous (as in ME17).
186
Infante

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

25

cannot have taken this section from LB2, so that the must have done nothing more than reproduce a separate booklet. As for the fourth group identified by Aubrun, it simply does not exist.'^ It is made up of an anonymous poem, followed by two by
as

we

shall see,

MEl

compiler of the

latter candonero

Juan de ValladoUd (all three in praise of Maria, daughter of the infanta Leonor) and by another two anonymous ones. In other words, it faithfiiUy continues the previous part of the candonero, a diverse group of works that do not con'^ stitute a cohesive whole. In sum, although I disagree with Aubrun's hypothesis, we should not discard the possibility that at least some of the anonymous poems (especially from the first two groups, which are particularly compact and contain works linked to the Navarrese court) can be ascribed to authors who were so well known in their communities that it was considered unnecessary to cite their names.
Their dual
a la fin
status as
this hypothesis,

alongside the fact that,

anonymous and unique poems within the corpus invites as Aubrun says, "les poetes qui rompent
... a

by Hugo de Urries or not, everything indicates that the Candonero de Herberay was the most elaborate representative of a characteristic type: anthologies that combine wellknown works with others that survive in single copies. I believe we are dealing with compositions from the compiler's own literary circle, probably by different authors, whose identities are not made explicit precisely because they would have been obvious. In this regard, the relation between LB2 and other candoneros becomes especially significant, in particular the connection with MEl. Between no. 88
are

ou au milieu I'anonymat de ces series, appartiennent immediat des princes" [of Navarre]. Whether these poems

I'entourage

'*

This

is

the final section of the candonero, and

Aubrun

attributes

its

poems

to the fourth

group of anonymous works:

(194v-195r) 197 Loores a
(196r-211v) 200-201
la

infanta [Maria], condesa de Foix.

Anonymous and

unique.

(195r-v) 198-199 Ibid., by Juan de Valladolid. Unique.

Anonymous and

unique.

Blank

folio.

Final folio (recto

'^

and verso) with the opening

stanzas

of the

Trescientas.

Index

as follows:

MEl (poem 116), MHl (poem 144). BMl (20), MEl (10), MHl (189), COl (22), MN54 (162), MN6b (41), PN4 (38), PN8 (39), RCl (126), VMl (68), ZAl (5), NH2 (40), IICG (94r), 14CG (72r), BAl (5 and 6), MN24 (36 and 37). 193 Juan de Ma^uela MEl (117). 194 Garcia de PadiUa MEl (118). 195 Pere TorreUa BMl (11). MEl (11), MP2 (27), NH2 (28), 14CG (71r). 196 Juan de Dueiias, Nao de amor GBl (21), MHl (201), MN54 (23), NH2 (80), PMl (13), PN4 (27). PN5 (26), PN8 (29), PN12 (24), PN13 (7), RCl (23), VMl (15).
191 Garcia de PadiUa

192 Pere TorreUa

26

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

and no. 196 most of the compositions appear in both collections. Aubrun offers a convincing explanation for this: in 1466, the marques de Monferrato married Maria de Navarra, the same woman eulogized by Juan de Valladolid in the cancionero's final section (no. 197199); and we know that MEl was already in the possession of the Monferrato household about 1500.'^ We can discount the hypothesis that LB2 might have been the archetype for the texts in MEl for two reasons. Firstly, if this were the case, we would not be able to explain the eulogy of the infanta Maria; secondly, poem 143, by Macias, is acephalous in LB2 but complete in MEl. As for the opposite hypothesis, the influence of MEl upon LB2, I consider it highly improbable, since LB2 is arranged by author. It would make no sense for the works of Torrellas and Juan de Mena (which MEl places in this sequence at the head of the collection) to appear in LB2 at the very end and in no special order. '^ As has been pointed out, three poems dedicated to Maria, daughter of Leonor and Gaston de Foix, and two anonymous ones are copied at the end of the volume. The main body of the cancionero ends on folio 21 Iv, a large part of which is blank. Also left blank is folio 212rv, but on the next (and last) leaf a later hand, which is much neater and with marked humanistic features, copied the start of Mena's Trescientas. Perhaps the scribe was interested in the dedicatory stanzas and invocation as a rhetorical model, since it was common for w^ell-known texts and school classics, either whole or excerpts, to be added to the final leaves of cancioneros so as not to waste blank folios.''^ In the light of these facts, how do we picture the genesis of the Cancionero de Herberay? My analysis is close to Aubrun's (1951, xvi-xxi) but with one

'^

Aubrun

(1951, xix).

The only

surprising thing

is

that the eulogies in

of Princess Maria,

who

caused the relationship between the two

MSS, do not appear

MEl.

'"

Similar conclusions have been reached by those

the texts contained in these

76-89) and by the editors

who have studied the transmission of two cancioneros (Michaehs de Vasconcellos 1900; Varvaro 1964, of Lope de Stuniga (Vozzo Mendia 1989, 47) and Juan de Mena

(de Nigris 1988, 79-81). Their conclusions coincide with

my own survey of the

critical

extant verse
apparatus for

of SantUlana. The
the "Querella de
in
1.

common
ed.),

errors in

both witnesses and Perez Priego's

amor" (1983)

reveal that whereas

MEl

reads "crueldad e gran tormento"

49 (=

1.

68 of the

LB2

preserves the

lectio dijftcilior

"crueldat e troquamiento" found

in the other textual witnesses. Therefore,

In the text of the "Infiemo de los

one can reject the dependence of LB2 on MEl. enamorados," the same situation frequendy occurs (11. 107,
is

232, 240, 278, 285, 299,

etc.),

although the opposite situation

is

found in

1.

347: the correct

has "targon,"

reading (according to Perez Priego's ed.)

"e del taragon cubriendo";

MEl

more with the variant "dargon"; in this case, the reading closest to the archetype belongs to MEl, which cannot derive from LB2. '^ At the end of the Catalan section of SA5 (an independent MS with the work of Ausias March) were copied some Hnes from the Vita Christi by Fray Inigo de Mendoza (fol. 158v), and at the end of the Castilian section, Mena's "La flaca barquilla" (fol. 206v). Stanzas from the Vita Christi also appear in the final folios of BC3 (97v-98v), and in those of LB2
but
corrupts this even
the dedicatory stanzas of the Laberinto de Fortuna were copied out in a different hand.

LB2

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

difference in interpretation.

27

Whereas he thought he could detect the intervenI

tion of a single author/compiler,

maintain that
is

we

should envisage the colla-

boration of a literary

circle.

This

to say,

we

cannot exclude the hypothesis

that various individuals or

even

literary courts gradually left their

various parts of the cancionero. Consider

how some up the second group of anonymous poems is common to the oldest section of the Cancionero musical de Palacio and that the third part influenced the Cancionero de la Biblioteca Estense de Modena and to a lesser extent SA7 (see the
of the material that
description of each of these sections in the relevant note).
circulated, as this

mark in makes

The material being example demonstrates, were groups of poems and not a large

cancionero nor individual compositions. The compiler first gathered the poetic production of the Navarrese court, inspired probably by the desire to preserve the panegyrics of the princess Leonor. That was the source of the texts that Aubrun classified as the two groups of anonymous poems. In this phase, he

must have already drawn on a booklet produced elsewhere and from which he took poems 49 to 62. He must have had at his disposal contributions of the highest quality, because in this section he also included a group of poems unknown to other textual witnesses, among which were preserved, for example, single copies of poems by Juan de Mena. Later, he would have laid his hands on a cancionero that provided at least some of the poems up to no. 196, perhaps the same archetype that provided the poems it shares with MEl. It was probably an excellent cancionero, though not very long, linked to the Aragonese family, which gave him the necessary material to convert that embryonic collection into something grander, something capable of combining the initial nucleus with a significant sampUng of fifteenth-century verse. Maria de Foix's connections with the House of Monferrato made it possible for this cancionero to reach northern Italy as well. Even later, a few compositions were added at the end; also unique, they are eulogies of this same princess from the court of Navarre. Finally, after a blank leaf, which was probably left free for further additions, a scribe copied the opening of the Laberinto de Fortuna. Moreover, this copy is of high quality and copied uniformly, which indicates that it was not the work of an amateur, but a more cultured product, attributable to the court of Navarre
itself.

In this type of cancionero, the compilers superimposed strata from different

origins.

On

the one hand, there were

poems

that reached

them through the

to be studied in

usual channels of cancionero lyric (which are admittedly

detail):

still

generally classics (Mena, Santillana,

Gomez Manrique,

the Vita Christi,

Fernan Perez de Guzman, Torrellas, and sometimes Villasandino or Macias) or booklets produced in the prestigious creative centers of the Castilian and

Aragonese courts.
in their

On the

other hand, they took advantage of works composed

own

circle,

gathered by the author himself or his protege. These

poems
their

circulated either individally or already organized into cycles, groups, or

booklets, and their authors did not always have to be

named

in writing since
his

works were destined

for the private

consumption of the compiler and

28

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

This procedure did not create problems until these booklets began beyond their orginal locale without any adjustment to their

circle.^"

to circulate
rubrics.

We
poems

should not imagine that

this

was

a frequent situation.

On

the whole,

that survive in single copies are

common

only in certain major can-

cioneros, which frequently share a high number of works that, judging by their sequence and readings, go back to a common source (as in the cases of PN8 and PN12). Nevertheless, cancioneros are often structured around an initial core made up of texts preserved by a single or almost single witness and strongly

The Cancionero del Marques de Monasterio de Montserrat (MS. 992 = BMl, with the wrong sigla in Dutton since it is not in Barcelona), opens with a "Pregunta de don diego de Castre al principe don karles [de Viana] quando el S. R. su padre lo truxo presonero de la ciudat de Lerida en la qual fue tomado en Lanyo Lx."^' No other copy of this composition is known, and surely it is closely linked to the origins of the cancionero, which is no doubt
influenced by the collector's taste and interests.
Barberd,

now located

in the Biblioteca del

Catalan.^^ Better

known
a letter

is

the

Cancionero de Martinez de Burgos

(MN33),

from Juan Martinez de Burgos to his son, Femand Martinez, continues with seven compositions by the former, and then develops into a broad selection of verse compiled in two phases, until it acquires the dimensions of a substantial anthology. ^^

which begins with

A
and
calls

similar case occurs in the Cancionero de Egerton (British Library, Eg.

939

= LB3), which opens with two

destinatee. In the

prose consolatory
to console

first (fols.
is

of unknown author 3r-5v), the author addresses a character he

epistles,

Count and

uncle; his goal

him

for the violent yet honorable

(fols.

death of his son, which occurred away from home. In the second

5v

^"

The argument
to

is

not new. Aubrun uses

it

it

to justify his attribution

of the anonymous
(1979), for

poems

Hugo
la

de Urries, but

has been applied in other contexts.

Whinnom

example, believed that the brief sentimental romance that he published under the tide La
coronaciSn de

senora Gracisla could be ascribed to the primitive compiler

of Biblioteca

Nacional, Madrid,
as

MS. 22020 on

the grounds that

it

appears anonymously in the same

is

MS
25
in

other prose works by San Pedro and Juan de Flores, whose authorship
^'

exphcit.

The poem

is

easily dated: Carlos

de Viana was arrested on 2 December 1460.

II

On

February 25 1461 the treaty of Vilafranca forced Juan

that year the prince died (Vicens Vives 1953, 222).
^^

to recognize

all

his rights,

addition to conceding a large part of his claim to rule in Cataluna, and

on 23 September of
a brief

The remainder of the poems

in the

first

part

of

this cancionero
is

form

anthology

of Mena's verse which, to judge by de

cancioneros
'^

Nigris's edition (1988),

closely related to other

of the Aragonese group: Herheray (LB2) and MSdena (MEl).

partial

See the study and edition by Severin (1976), especially her description of the
extracts contained therein.

copy by Rafael Floranes and the

VICENC BELTRAN PEPIO

29

lOv), he laments that after the loss of his son Gaston, he also witnessed the

who was related to the dynastic houses of Castile, Aragon, and France. After these comes a cancionero that, like Herberay, blends Naples, w^idely known works with others that survive in single copies. It is, in short,
death of his wife,
a substantial cancionero: doctrinal verse predominates, but
it

also includes the

at sys-

central texts of the fifteenth-century poetic school, with

no attempt

tematic arrangement but with

two general common

traits:

the connection of

works and authors to the poUtical and literary circle of the Aragonese party, and its didactic character (discussed below), except for the final section devoted to Anton de Montoro. Although beginning a cancionero with a group of unique poems was not the most common procedure, it was the most personal one. On other occasions, the initial inspiration was a preexisting poetic anthology. The perfect example of this is the Pequeno cancionero del Marques de la Romana (MN15), which opens with a selection firom the Cancionero de Baena.^^ Similarly, the first part of the Cancionero de San Martino delle Scale (PMl) is an anthology of Aragonese origin. Another typical example of this model though an extraordinarily ambitious one can be seen in COl, the bulk of which is made up of a generous selection of poets from the first half of the fifteenth century: Santillana, Mena, Lope de Stuiiiga, etc. Although the current state of research does not always allow us to reconstruct the immediate model (the Pequeno cancionero is an exception), there is no doubt that this is the most frequent mode of compilation we

encounter.

Other

cancioneros follow a simpler

scheme.

Many

are the manuscripts that

contain exclusively one or two long poems (and they are usually the same
ones), such as Las siete edades del mundo, whose textual history has been traced by Sconza (1991). This poem appears alone (OCl) or was frequently followed either by Lafundacion de Espana (EM12, MN9 and MN42) or by other poems of a similar character: Fernan Perez de Guzman's elegy on the death of Alonso de Cartagena (EM3) or the same author's "Doctrina que dieron a Sara" (SA12). In another cancionero (MREl) it is preceded by Santillana's Prouerbios. This latter poem also appears singly (ML4), as do Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna (NHS, PN3), Fernan Perez de Guzman's Vicios y virtudes e himnos rimados (NH4), Pedro de Portugal's Sdtira de felice e infelice vida (for an account of

the

MSS,

see da Fonseca 1975, x-xviii), as well as his Coplas del menosprecio e

contempto del

mundo (EMIO, MNll). In

short, cancioneros structured

around a

numerous. In MN39, the Siete edades del mundo is associated with the Tratado by Pedro de Veragiie {BOOST ID 4376), followed by the Infante Pitheus and a Tratado en metro (ID 4623) with its Desfecha (ID 4624). A later hand copied out a poem by Boscan. Thus, we can see how a small cancionero comes to be compiled
single poetic unit are remarkably

^* It

was edited and studied by Azaceta (1957). For

its

relations

with the Cancionero de

Baena, see Alberto Blecua (1974-79).

30

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

around the usual nucleus. In the same way, Santillana's Bias contra Fortuna is associated with another common basic text, Fernan Perez de Guzman's Vicios y virtudes, to begin MNIO, and other poems by this author were later added to make up an anthology of quite healthy proportions. ML2 leads off with Mena's Coronacion, continues with a miscellaneous prose section, and closes with the Trescientas. A copy of the Vita Christi laid the basis for an extensive anthology of pious verse occupying up to one hundred and forty-three folios (MLl); to the Fundacion de Espaha was added a selection of Mena's verse, including the Laberinto and sections devoted to Gomez Manrique, Fernan Perez de Guzman, and other odd poems (MMl); a manuscript as open-ended and as complex as the Cancionero de Gallardo (MN17; Azaceta 1962) starts with a copy of one of
those

poems

that often circulated individually: the Coplas de

all

la

Panadera,

whose

transmission has been studied by Elia (1982). In

these instances, cancioneros

of quite
initial

distinct

conception and scope seem to have been fabricated around an

nucleus formed by a long

collected

work

that circulated independently.

works of individual poets could also provide the core of a new cancionero. It is true that the works of Santillana or Gomez Manrique did not give rise to larger collections, perhaps because in the period 1460-1480
collective cancioneros are scarce. Nevertheless,

The

among

those that gather the

to begin with

poetic production of the reign of Juan

II it

was not

uncommon
as in

transcriptions of the verse of Fernan Perez de

Guzman,

the cases of PN5,

SA9b, and ZZl.^^ Similarly, LBl, a subby author, starts off with the verse of the then highly regarded Garci Sanchez de Badajoz. This system is also the norm in the anthologies of the Provencal troubadours and even the French trouveres (see Crespo 1991). I am not concerned here only with those cancioneros that bear the stamp of a particular identity. And of these, there is a group that characteristically starts w^ith an initial nucleus of texts to which new works are gradually added and which in large measure correspond to the two models described above: some
stantial cancionero

PN6, MN6, MNIO,

MMl, MM3,

from the

Isabeline period arranged

augment an earlier anthology, such as the Cancionero de Herberay, or derive from a preexisting collection, sometimes through a selection as strict as the
Cancionero de San Martino
role.
delle Scale;

an individual cancionero can also

fulfill this

of a longer work that is used as a foundation. These, in conclusion, are the most common procedures for starting to compile a new cancionero. Their subsequent growth could follow various paths. Finally, I should like to emphasize that what nowadays seems to be the
Others are elaborated on the
basis
initial

nucleus of a cancionero can in fact be the product of later textual, or even

codicological, additions.
folio Ir-v a Catalan

The

poem

Cancionero del Marques de Barberd (BMl) has on concerning the imprisonment of Carlos, principe de

^^

The

fact

Onate-Castaiieda.

was noted by Garcia (1990, xvii) in his introduction to the Cancionero de Merce Lopez Casas is about to present a doctoral thesis on Perez de

Guzman

that will shed further light

on

this

kind of problem.

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

Viana;

on folios 2r-3r, a work by Diego de Castre dedicated to the same whose reply is also transcribed (the texts are in Castilian or Aragonese). Although the manuscript appears to be fairly uniform, and possibly the work of a single copyist, a more detailed study reveals certain changes, sometimes
person,
quite distinct ones, both in the tone of the ink and in the style of the hand,

which might be explained as the result of sporadic work over a long period by the same person or possibly even be due to the intervention of two copyists. What is important to stress here is that the first folio is written in the same style of hand as folios 136v-150r and 164r-193r, while foUos 2r-3r, written out in a much neater and more humanistic hand, seem somewhat out of place. Since there are no flyleaves, I suspect that folio 1 was originally left blank and that it was later used to copy a poem concerning events relating to Carlos de Viana that linked the contents of the following two folios. Even more striking is the case of Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale MS. Esp. 225, a fine Catalan cancionero. At the firont of this, were added two booklets
foliated A-L and M-T. The Aragon awarding forty florins
first

begins with a privilege of Fernando

la

de

to the Consistorio de

Gaya Ciencia;

after

two

blank
Viana.

folios,

there

is

group of three works on the imprisonment of Carlos de

The second booklet contains the manuscript's table of contents and a new composition. The cancionero properly speaking begins with the following
which
is

booklet,

foliated in continuous

roman numerals throughout

the

whole collection. There is no doubt that this is a case of an expanded cancionero, but it was surely not extemporaneous: the same watermarks recur throughout various parts of the cancionero}^' A similar case is the same library's MS. Esp. 228 (PN6), which begins with a booklet containing a table of contents, also independently foliated with the letters a-h, even though it leaves two folios blank. ^^ A third Parisian cancionero, MS. Esp. 229 (PN7), also has a new initial booklet, though it is made of different paper from the remainder of the codex. In each of these cases, the addition of a booklet to be used either partially or in whole as a table of contents left room for the insertion of all
kinds of texts.

^ The
to identify,

pliers, identical to

those in Briquet (1907, no. 14089) and datable 1440-1460,

reappear in the eleventh quire and elsewhere.

is

type of sword,

which

have not been able

well as other

found

in folio

S of the second quire and in quires

6, 8, 10, as

odd
this

folios.
^'

As

in the previous case, the

same watermark

is

found in the
star. It is

first

twelve quires,

as

is

preliminary one: a

human head with

three rizos and a

very similar to Briquet

straighter profile,

15685 (Bourg 1470 and Provence 1476), although the &ce has a
with
ever,
a

much

more prominent nose, and the eyelids are more horizontal. The measurements, howare identical. The MS, therefore, is constructed as a single unit, and the only reason for
left this

having

section blank was simply to allow space for the index.

32

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

The
initial

nucleus could be augmented in various ways that are not always

out.

There are manuscripts that indicate that they grew by simple means: by the addition of preexisting collections without any apparent selection of material in the strict sense. The Cancionero de Juan Fernandez de
easy to
Hijar
ceta 1956, xv-xviii).
a

make

(MN6) combines two entire cancioneros, as its editor demonstrated (AzaThe compiler possibly tried to revise the material in such way as to avoid duplicating texts, but as often happens, he inadvertently

repeated some
that

we

poems in the two sections. Both units are so long and complex can scarcely imagine the compiler setting himself any other task than
is

to suppress repeated poems, even

joining together of the two parts

structure

though he was unable to carry this out. The perfectly visible both in the codicological

and in the type of paper.^^

as in the case of LB2, the compilers seem to have opted for a more random selection. PN6, for instance, after a section devoted to Fernan Perez de Guzman, incorporates an anthology that combines works of this author with those of Mena and Santillana but continues with a strange

On

other occasions,

hodgepotch in which Santillana rubs shoulders with Villasandino, the marquis of Astorga, and Juan Alvarez Gato. The Cancionero de Onate-Castafieda (HHl) juxtaposes Fernan Perez de Guzman with Santillana and is rounded off with a rich sample of Castilian verse from the age of Juan de Mena and Gomez Manrique to the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. PN5 also starts off with the work of Fernan Perez de Guzman but then combines verse by Gomez Manrique, Juan de Mena, and other poets from the Aragonese court, some of which goes back to the archetype of the Italian family (Varvaro 1964, 73-76). The second section of BMl is made up of a selection of verse by Mena, Gomez Manrique, and Juan Rodriguez del Padron, which also (as far as the current state of textual criticism allows us to deduce) can be linked to this same family of cancioneros. A strikingly different case is LB3, which was extended by adding works that seem to have quite varied origins and textual traditions; next to these are works surviving in single copies. ^^ This also seems to be the case of the

^^

deal with this cancionero in greater detail in a study to be published in Cultura

Neolatina.
-^ Its

contents are

as follows:

Manrique's Coplas in a version very close to the archetype

(see Beltran 1991, 18-32), his uncle

Gomez

Manrique's Regimiento de
four religious
all

principes,

then another

prose section, the Tratado

del infante Epitus, plus

Then
(fols.

follows another section of religious verse,

in

poems by Juan Alvarez Gato. single surviving anonymous copies

33r-41v), and another uniquely

29r-32v, nos. 8-15), a section of pious episdes

(fols.

documented poem (42r-43v). The remainder is an anthology of didactic verse which concludes with some poems by Montoro (fols. 43v-122v). The combination of unique texts, in prose and verse, and well-known and widely disseminated works recalls the Cancionero de Herberay. However, it possible that there existed a cancionero made up of Manrique's Coplas,

Gomez

Manrique's Regimiento de

principes,

and Fray Inigo de Mendoza's Coplas

de Vita Christi

(Beltran 1991, 30-31).

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

33

second part of the Cancionero de San Martino delle Scale, which is formed out of two juxtaposed sections of separate origin. The first is an anthology of the Aragonese family (fols. l-69v) which, to judge by the paper and the texts themselves, was compiled between 1467 and 1470 and was closely connected to the Chancery of Palermo (Bartolini 1956, 147-87; and Varvaro 1964, 65part contains a bundle of poems that were not widely circuand are attributed to Roman, Juan Alvarez Gato, Fadrique Manrique, and Guevara.-"^ From what we know of these authors and the contents of the poems, this section may also be linked to the Aragonese court, perhaps in the period of the Castilian War of Succession.-^' MMl, which begins with La
79).

The second

lated

14 [Roman].

IICG (poem

112r),

(12), U. A. Gato] LBl (363), 15 Fadrique Manrique a Johan poeta.

14b

MH2

14CG (poem 87r). IICG (11 Iv). 14CG (86v). MN6d (92), IICG (222v), 12*CP

(2),

14CG

(202r),

190B

(4).

16 Guiuara 17 Ropero

MN19

(205).

al serenissimo

Rey Anrique

de Castilla

MR2

(7).

18 [A prophetic fragment in prose]. Unique.

^'

The poem by Montoro

it is

is

a critique

of Enrique IV, gentle

in tone, as befits z juglar

addressing a monarch, but

a critique nonetheless.

See the editions and notes of Ciceri

and Rodriguez Puertolas (1990, no. 71) and Costa (1990, 405). With respect to Guevara,
unfortunately

we

still

lack a detailed study, in spite of his

undoubted
his

interest for the

development of
datable to the

late fifteenth-century verse.

The

rubric of
traveled
el

one of

poems seems

to

be

end of 1466, when Prince Alfonso

a
trip

from Arevalo to Ocaria (Suarez

Fernandez 1964, 276): "Otras suyas

since at that time

vna partida que

rey

don Alfonso hizo de Areualo"

de Carvajal
(ed.

(Foulche-Delbosc 1912-15, no. 904). This

took place around the middle of December,

being in that town from between

King Enrique was

in Madrid, according to Galindez

is

Torres Fontes 1946, 283), and the

15

latter

documented
refers to

as

December 1466 and 17 May 1467

(Torres Fontes 1946, 198).

The

tide

of King given to

Alfonso excludes the possibihty that the rubric

another stay in Arevalo the previous

year (Torres Fontes 1946, 230). Guevara had probably been in the service of Enrique

IV

even earher,

if

the

poem "O

desastrada ventura" refers to the

meeting held in Guadalupe in

1464 between Enrique, Princess Isabel, and Alfonso V of Portugal. This meeting prompted poems by Guevara, Pinar, Florencia Pinar, and the Portuguese king (see Catedra 1989, 149;
Boase 1978, 103-4).
It is

also

probable that his Sepultura de amor was even earlier than

Finally,
first

this
fifth

(Rennert 1895, no. 150; see Catedra 1989, 146).

1696, X, ch.

Fadrique Manrique was the

son of Rodrigo Manrique, Maestre de Santiago and

I).

Apart from knowing that in the Castihan

civil

count of Paredes (Salazar y Castro wars this family always fought

the side of the Infantes de Aragon, we know that Pedro Manrique, the eldest son of the count of Paredes and Fadrique's elder brother, took part in the negotiations that led to the pardon of Juan de Cardona's rebellion by Juan II of Aragon, in Valencia, 1467 (Salazar y

on

Castro 1696, X, ch.

Ill;

and Zurita 1988, hb. XVIII, ch.

xiii).

As regards Juan de ValladoUd,

Menendez
principle,
Ixxii).
I

Pidal dates this composition 1470 (1991, 413-16; see also Levi 1925, 419-39). In

accept

this attribution

(although not everyone does; see

Aubrun 1951,

Ixvii-

We

need

to respect archival
it

documents, which are the only nonliterary evidence

in service at the

we

possess.

Moreover,

was usual for those

Neapolitan or Sicilian courts to be

34

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

fundacion de Espana, continues with an anthology of Mena's verse, including the

Laberinto de Fortuna,

and concludes with sections devoted to

Gomez Manrique

and Fernan Perez de Guzman. Cancioneros also grow through the addition of material
probably the products of the compiler's
la

that, as in the cases

of LB2 and LB3, could be unique, sometimes anonymous,

texts that

were
of

own

circle.

The Pequeno

cancionero

from the Cancionero de Baena and then the Marques de includes six poems by Beltran de la Cueva; this is his only known work, leaving aside the single inuencion found in LBl (no. 291). The Cancionero del marques de Barberd follows an anthology of Mena's verse and the Siete gozos de amor by Juan Rodriguez de Padron with three anonymous and unique poems
selects verse

Romana

on

folio

22rV, which are then followed by more of Mena's verse and one

composition by
three

Gomez

Manrique. PMl,

after extracting

poems from

the

Aragonese archetype (usually

kind, though in a later hand

known
(fols.
(fol.

as

the Italian family), continues with

anonymous unique poems

68r 69v), plus another two of the same

it

69v), and

concludes with compositions

by Roman, Fadrique Manrique, and Guevara. More complex is the case of MN17, the Cancionero de Gallardo from the Biblioteca Nacional. After the Coplas de la Panadera and Petrarch's Triunfos translated by Alvar Gomez de Guadalajara, there is a group of anonymous poems that could be attributed to this same writer; then, folios 26r 29r contain three works attributed to the bachiller De la Torre and a friend of his, followed by some stanzas by Sem Tob, one poem attributed to Soria (though not the one who figures in the Cancionero general), and a few more that might also be by him, among which may be found an anonymous poem under the rubric "Qelos de una dama a un cavallero" (no. 36, fol. 45v), and the anthology then contains a selection of writers from the reign of Charles V.
In aU these cases, the amplification of the cancionero entails the inclusion of

unique, often anonymous, poems

among

texts that

were widely disseminated.

The compiler would

came

gradually have strung together the pliegos (folios) as they

into his possession. Sometimes, they contained

well-known works, choat

sen firom a large anthology, or even whole sections of one;

other times,

we

are probably dealing with booklets that derived firom the authors themselves or
their dedicatees; in certain cases the compiler

would have included works

whose author

is

not specified, although he perhaps

as in

knew him. When we

are

dealing with texts that did not circulate widely,

the case of the Cancionero

paid from the customs;

this
as

was the case of even such

Antonio Beccadelli
el

high-ranking figure in the service of

Alfonso

el

Magnanimo

Panormita,

who ako
is

started out

with

position in customs (Ruiz y Calonja 1990, 30742, especially 318). In

in the

fact,

the only obstacle

way of this

attribution

is

the chronology: 1420 to 1470

a considerable period

but

not inconceivable for a

man who

earned a living fi'om

letters.

VICENC BELTRAN PEPIO

35

de Herberay, we may suspect that they derive from the compiler's own circle, and so the study of them can provide us with valuable information. At the moment, I am not especially interested in whether or not the interpolations were made at the same time as the manuscript was copied, or if they were later additions on blank leaves, since in the final analysis both procedures enrich the collection with the owner's original contributions. This modus operandi can be reconstructed in the successive development of the anthologies printed in Zaragoza by Paulo Hums and Hans Planck, who started off from an edition of the Vita Christi by Fray Ifiigo de Mendoza. The first edition of this work (82IM) came out in Zamora, from Centenera's press, on 25 January 1482, accompanied by Diego de San Pedro's Sermon trobado (see Perez Gomez 1959, 30-41; Whinnom 1962). Apparently, some copies were bound with z pliego suelto containing Gomez Manrique's Regimiento de principes, published by Centenera himself that same year (82*GM). Pace Perez Gomez and Whinnom, I maintain that it was probably followed by Centenera's second edition (83*IM), perhaps from 1483.-^^ This added various works by Iriigo de Mendoza, Jorge Manrique's Coplas a la muerte de su padre, LamentaciSn de nuestra Senora en la quinta angustia, Mena's Coplas contra los pecados mortales with Gomez Manrique's continuation, Sancho de Rojas's Pregunta a un aragonh coupled with its reply, and Jorge Manrique's Coplas sobre que es amor. I argue that it is here that we have to situate the first edition of the Zaragoza printers, which is perhaps contemporary with the previous one (82*IM; facsimile ed. Perez Gomez 1975). Perez Gomez showed that it was an exact copy of Centenera's first edition (82IM) but with errors, the most serious of which was the loss of one page. Perhaps the Zaragoza printers had also seen the pliego of the Regimiento de principes, which they decided to add to that simple selection of Mendoza's work. When the copy was already at press, and at the moment of binding it, they altered the order of the booklets and interposed a terrible edition of Manrique's Coplas between the SermSn trobado and the Regimiento de principes. I believe this last-minute decision was inspired by Centenera's second edition (83*IM), which among other works also included the Coplas, although not Gomez Manrique's Regimiento?^ What for Centenera was an edition of Inigo de Mendoza, whose character he preserved with only shght modification in the second edition (83* IM), for the Zaragoza

^^

See Beltran (1991, 24-25). The gradual expansion of the anthology

is

the only

argument adduced by Perez

the edition as Paulo

Gomez

(and subsequendy

Whinnom)
c.

to identify the printers

of

Hurus and Hans Planck, Zaragoza,

that this edition

1483 (based on the Escorial and

Palermo
^^

copies).

We now

know

had other imitations. For example,

c.

it

was reprinted

with many

errors,

perhaps by Friedrich Biel, Burgos,

1490,

not specify the printer, nor place and date of publication, Rivera and Trienens (1979-80, 22-28). I have studied its text of Manrique's Coplas and
relation to earlier editions (Beltran 1991, 18).

whose only extant copy does though it has been identified by

its

36

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

was transformed into a small doctrinal cancionero, with four compoby three different authors, and the quality of the published versions was

printers
sition

substantially inferior.

This was the basis of the first printed collective cancionero worthy of the name: the Cancionero de Ramon de Llavia, published by Juan Hums in Zaragoza between 1484 and 1488 (86*RL). So as to underscore its strikingly original character, he suppressed the Vita Christi, even though he preserved various compositions collected by Centenera: the Dechado and the Coplas a las mujeres by Fray liiigo, Mena's Coplas contra los pecados mortales with Gomez Manrique's continuation, Jorge Manrique's Que cosa es amor and his Coplas (although this time his text does not come from Centenera, who had published an excellent edition, but firom the same archetype of the earlier edition published by Paulo Hums and Hans Planck). This nucleus was expanded by another work by Gomez Manrique, half a dozen poems by Fernan Perez de Guzman divided into two sections, two by Juan Alvarez Gato, Mena's Lajlaca barquilla, a poem each by Ervias and Fernan Ruiz de Sevilla, two by Gonzalo Martinez de Medina, and one by Fernan Sanchez Calavera. This wide selection of pious and doctrinal verse concludes with a unique poem ascribed to Fray Gauberte, who can be identified as the Aragonese chronicler Fray Gauberte Fabricio de Vagad, the future collaborator of these editors (Romero Tobar 1989). Paulo Hurus published a new poetic anthology that drew on the editorial experience of earlier ones but which was enriched by numerous fine woodcuts and whose text was far more carefully produced, to judge by the attention given to Manrique's Coplas, of which he knew two editions, 1492 (92VC) and 1495 (95 VC).-^'* In the first place, he took up the tradition of starting a cancionero with a long work, liiigo de Mendoza's Vita Christi, and he preserved another four compositions previously published by Centenera: La cena de Nuestro Senor, the Coplas a la Veronica, the Siete gozos de Nuestra Senora, and the
Justas de
mortales
la

razon contra

la
its

sensualidad, as well as the Coplas contra los pecados

by Mena, with
basis

continuation by

Cancionero de Llavia he took over Manrique's Coplas, in a

Gomez Manrique. From the earlier new edition revised

of the same Zaragoza archetype as the preceding ones, and the and he completed the volume with San Pedro's Pasion trouada and Siete angustias de Nuestra Senora and one new poem by Fray Juan de Ciudad Rodrigo, which would be frequently republished in the years to follow (ID 2899). Although the volume concluded with another popular work by Fernan Perez de Guzman (ID 197), he inserted four poems that were probably unique: the Resurreccidn de Nuestro Salvador by Pedro Jimenez (fols. 60v70v), the Ave maris Stella by Juan Guillardon (fols. 77v-78v), the Historia de la Virgen del Pilar de Zaragoza by Medina (fols. 78v 81v), and the anonymous Dezir

on the

poem by

Ervias,

gracioso de la muerte.

^*

copy of the 1492 edition

to scholars

is

to be

found in the

library

of D. Pedro Vindel and

is all

but

unknown

of

this

period. For flirther details, see

my

1991 edition.

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

In their three editions, the collaborators of

37

Hurus and Planck have

left

us

tangible evidence with which to strengthen some of my earlier hypotheses. A group of poems was gathered from preexisting cancioneros, most of which can be identified, and this initial nucleus would then be amphfied from a variety of sources. ^^ In some cases, we need to know more: for example, the text of "Seiiora muy linda, sabed que vos amo" by Ferran Sanchez Calavera is far superior to the one found in the Cancionero de Baena, but we lack any other textual witnesses that might belong, like this one, to an independent tradition.-'^

And

the dezir

"Dime quien

eres tu,

grande Anibal," ascribed to

Gonzalo Martinez de Medina, is documented nowhere else. Quite possibly, this editorial team had at its disposal one or two fairly substantial cancioneros that provided them with the major part of the additions in Ramon de Llavia and the 1492 incunable. But the editors wove them together with unique
witnesses that, according to the hypotheses developed for the manuscripts
discussed earlier, probably
I

and never found their way into the more widely diffused large cancioneros. The author of the final poem in the Cancionero de RamSn de Llavia, Gauberte Fabricio de Vagad, and the theme of the Historia de la Virgen del Pilar de Zaragoza, by Medina, included in 92VC and 95VC, confirm their dependence on the local culture

came from

their

immediate

circle

of Zaragoza.

of the copyists themselves, the evolution of as linear and simple as the earlier examples might suggest. The interpolations could derive from successive stages in the elaboration of the cancionero, which cannot always be reconstructed. The simplest example is when short texts are inserted onto the blank leaves of preexisting manuscripts, as in the case of SA4. It begins with a unique text but

Returning

to the contributions

the manuscript cancioneros was far from being

continues with well-known works:

Gomez Manrique's

Querella de

la

gobernaciSn

hand is the same, but two different hands then share the partial transcription of the Vita Christi (fols. 5v 30r), after which three folios are left blank. Then a fourth hand copied an anonymous composition found only in this manuscript (fols. 34r37v, ID 4685), and a later hand then added another unique text whose explicit attriand
Santillana's Doctrinal de privados.

Up

to this point the

^^

The

textual transmission

of Diego de San Pedro's PassiSn Trobada does not help

us,

since according to Severin (1973, 17-38), the Cancionero de Onate-Castaneda records an earlier

version than

all

the others, and these are bter than the one in question here.
its

^
An

Aside from

dual readings and a final stanza not recorded in

PNl,

it

contains
1.

obvious errors in Unes 16 and 39;

94RL
textual

also has errors that are

not in

PNl

(e.g., in

14).

exhaustive study of the transmission of

Feman

Perez de Guzman's verse would help us

solve these problems, as

would a Mendoza, and Gomez Manrique

comparison of the poems by Mena, Fray Inigo de

that occur in

both

cancioneros.

38

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

it to Pero Gomez de Ferrol (ID 4686).^^ Another two anonymous and unique poems follow, and the manuscript rounds off with the longest known version of the Vita Christi (420 stanzas), an extensive collection of poetry by Fray liiigo de Mendoza (fols. 119r 166r), and the Coplas que hizo el comendador Roman reprendiendo al mundo (ID 4276). This is far from being the only case. In the Cancionero de la Biblioteca Estense de Modena (MEl), on folio 22v, a later Italian hand made use of the blank leaf following a poem by Pedro Torrellas to insert a cancion by Manrique ("Quien no estuviere en presencia," although he does not identify its authorship). In PN9, a hand different from the one that actually transcribed the manuscript took advantage of a blank space to insert two poems by Pero Gonzalez de Mendoza, el gran cardenal (ID 151 and 152).-'^ The problem becomes considerably more complex when we do not have the original cancionero but a copy in which the different hands, periods, and styles, are obscured by the uniformity of the surviving copy. We should recall how the Cancionero de Baena was originally dated after the death of Queen Maria in February 1445 in spite of her being mentioned in the dedication as alive by the inclusion of two poems by Juan de Mena, no. 471 (after the battle of Olmedo, 19 May 1445) and no. 472, related to the events of 1449 (Azaceta 1966, xxvixxxiii) But subsequent research demonstrates that the extant exemplar is a copy (Tittmann 1968; Alberto Blecua 197479) and that Juan Alfonso de Baena died before 27 September 1435 (Nieto Cumplido 1979;

butes

1982).

The conclusion
body of the

is

obvious: these are later interpolations, assimilated into

by the only copy we now possess. -^^ When the surviving manuscript is homogeneous in style and construction, it becomes highly problematic to assess the relation between the unique compositions it contains and the collection as a w^hole. Even so, we should never lose sight of its connections with a center of production, even though it may be that of an
the main
cancionero

intermediate phase, prior to the surviving manuscript copy.

We
the

can

see, therefore,

how

certain texts, often linked to the cancionero's

at the start or, more frequently, within main body of the collection and become mixed up with the material that the compiler had gathered from contemporary written sources. We also know

center of production, could be inserted

that these interpolations can also

be the

result

of intermediate phases in the

^'

Six lines from this very

poem had been

transcribed

on

folio 33v,

immediately

after the

Vita Christi.
*'

Pero Gonzalez de Mendoza, son of the marques de

Santillana,

and successively bishop

of Calahorra and archbishop of Toledo, should not be confused

v^ith his grandfather

fiirther details, see

of the

same name, whose verse

(1979).
^^

is

recorded in the Cancionero de Baena. For

Nader

He was

the subject of a personal chronicle

by

P. Salazar

de

Mendoza

(1625).
(c.

The

cycle does not

end

here: as

said before,

one or two hands copied

it is

1500) the

text

of Manrique's Coplas on the

final folios,

although

obviously a later addition, incor-

porated after the construction of the original

MS.

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

39

manuscript transmission. Nevertheless, the favored place for these additions are
left blank between the end of the composition about to be copied and the total number of booklets that had been used to make up the codex. A characteristic example is BC3, the Cancionero de don

the leaves that were frequently

Pedro de Aragon.^^
(fols.

Its

original nucleus

is

made up of

the Laberinto de Fortuna

2r 52r), the Comedieta de Ponza

(fols.

53r 73r), "La Fortuna que no cesa"

leyendo" (84r-84v) by Mena, Santillana's and Mena's Razonamiento con la muerte (95v 98r).'*' The same hand that copied the rubric also put together an index on the back of the second flyleaf (fol. Iv) corresponding to this part of the
(73r-84r), and
tu rey

"O

que

estas

Doctrinal de priuados (87r 98r)

manuscript.

Up to this point, it is a very neat copy, in large format (268 x 210 mm.), with the text written out within a large ruled space (172 x 96 mm.), in a single column of three stanzas per page. Whatever their length, the rubrics are copied in red ink within the spaces between the stanzas and do not disrupt this general pattern. The poem's initial letter (fol. 2r) is guilded, with vegetable ornamentation drawn in white over a blue and green background. The initial
letter

blue

(fols.

of the Laberinto and of the incipits of other poems have been drawn in 13r, 37v, 53r, 73r, and 87r), and those of each stanza in red. There

are learned glosses in the margins, written

by the scribe himself, though in a

smaller and inferior script, and abundant reader's notes,

commenting upon or

emending

the text

(fol.

22v).

The

quires are remarkably regular: seven quires

of six sheets, plus one of five, and a quaternion, from which the second part of the third bifolium has been torn out. There can be no doubt that this is a
luxury manuscript, meticulously put together in every respect.

But
listed

this

did not prevent a series of clumsy interventions. After the texts

left

above, four folios (current numeration 99-102) were

all

blank, plus

of them ruled. A second, very irregular cursive hand, with humanist features, copied the start of the Vita Christi by Fray liiigo de Mendoza in two columns on folios 98v-99v. The scribe arranged the first column in the
folio 98v,

wide margin to the left of the ruled space, and the second one within the space itself. But because the Trescientas are written in eight-line strophes and the Vita Christi in ten, he was forced to employ the blank spaces between the
stanzas in the manuscript's original design.

'"'

For

its

move

to the Biblioteca de Cataluna, see Bohigas (1966, 485); for a textual

study, see

Kerkhof

(1979).

The

latter's

account of the textual transmission of the poems

for this

it

contains enabled

him

to propose a

stemma

codex and

its

closest relations,
all this,

and he
codico-

printed the unpublished texts by the comendador Estela. In addition to

logical study

my

uncovers

details that

enable us to understand

how
I

a cancionero develops (in this

case in a decidedly inorganic fashion).

'"

My fohation does not coincide with

Kerkhof s because
verification

follow only the

modem
is

one,

written in pencil, which erroneously begins on the second

flyleaf.

Kerkhof s
data.

the correct

one, but mine allows for a

more immediate

of the textual

40

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

third very Gothic hand, but also cursive and quite careless, devoted the of the volume to a transcription of various Castilian poems by the comendador Estela."*^ He tried to follow the design of the Trescientas and write in a single column. In the first section, the original scribe had left the first line blank, but the later one, forced to squeeze ten-line strophes into a space ruled
rest

for eight, started to write

on the

first

line

and
(fols.

fitted the last line

within the blank space between the stanzas

of verse lOOv lOlv). Paradoxically,

(fols.

when he came
scribal labor.

across texts actually written in octavas

lines,

102r 102v), he

completely abandoned the ruled

perhaps exhausted by his unaccustomed

We
luxury

can see

how

cancionero, altering

an amateur compiler had no scruples in expanding a its didactic character with poems of a different order

and destroying its perfect formal composition. This is a common phenomenon: at the end of the second part of SA5, a luxury edition of the Trescientas, Mena's "La flaca barquilla" is added in a different hand; even in PNl, the extant copy of the Cancionero de Baena, one or two different hands copied around 1500 an excellent version of Manrique's Coplas on the final (probably blank) folios. Nonetheless, the cancioneros that interest us most are those that incorporate unique texts that come perhaps firom the very same environment where they were gathered, written possibly by the manuscript's owner or even the compiler himself.

The
is

Cancionero de Salva

(FN 13), now

in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris,

two columns per page, uniform layout. Up to folio 192r it contains a generous anthology of verse from the first half of the fifteenth century, whose textual filiation is still to be determined.'*'* In the second column of folio 192r begins a series of eleven poems, all unique copies, attributed to Gomez de Rojas, whose work is not found in any other cancionero. Since the manuscript is mutilated at the end, we cannot be sure whether or not it included more authors. On the other hand, cancionero MMl does seem complete (see above), and it concludes with the unique copy of a poem by Juan de Herrera on the canonization of San Vicente Ferrer (1455). Perhaps the most interesting example is the Pequeno cancionero, whose compilation has several intriguing features. Beginning with compositions by Pero Gonzalez de Mendoza and Beltran de la Cueva, all in the same hand (fols. Ir2r), which are followed by a blank page (fol. 2v), it continues with selections firom Macias, a poem by Suero de Ribera and another by Juana, Queen
a luxury manuscript, exceptionally well copied in
a strikingly

and with

*^

In addition to Kerkhof s article

on

this cancionero, cited

above, see Martinez

Romero

(1990).
''

On

which, see Kerkhof (1983, 39-46),

who

argues that

it is

closely related to

MNIO,

although

this

MS

contains only works by Santillana and

Feman Perez de Guzman. Vozzo

it

Mendia

(1989, 5455 and

commentary on

the relevant poems) believes

to be related to

the Cancionero de Vindel

(NH2).

VICENC BELTRAN PEPIO

of
Castile, plus

41

one by Juan Rodriguez del Padron, which is thematically and then leaves another blank page (fol. 8v). Then it transcribes the Coplas de la Panadera and Mingo Revulgo, leaves another section blank (the second column on folio 13r and all of folio 13v), and reproduces a version of Rodrigo de Cota's Epitalamio burlesco that survives in no other manuscript.'*'* After leaving yet another folio almost blank (part of 16r and all of 16v), it ends up with the only extant copy of a poem ascribed to Arteaga de Salazar"*^ and an elegy on the death of Isabel la Catolica (26 November 1504). I should also point out that this cancionerillo, which was put together for strictly private use, has a strikingly learned character. It includes annotations and variants from the Candonero de Baena (fols. 6rv and 8r), which Blecua has used to reconstruct readings from the lost original of this collection; observations drawn from Santillana's Carta Prohemio (fol. 4r); and a description of a candonero belonging to Pero Lasso de la Vega, which contained works by Fernan Perez de Guzman and a selection of poets from the reign of Enrique III (fol. 6r). Although small, it contains tw^o clearly defined sections, the first being devoted to courtly and the second to historical verse. In spite of this, it does not depart from the usual methods of compilation: an initial anthology, some new works inserted in the middle, and some unique texts at the end, with blank folios for further addirelated,

tions appropriate for each section.

When
Herberay,

the candonero
is

distinctly
at

is copied out in a single hand or, like the Candonero de uniform in character, the unique texts were probably

added
it is

at

the end,

the very

moment

the manuscript was originally compiled;

is

also possible that their presence

the result of several successive interexists.

ventions and that they were included in a subarchetype that no longer

However, when they

it is

are the

product of a

later

hand,

as in

BC3,

especially if

the work of an amateur copyist, one can deduce that they were added by an owner and that the compilation was carried out in several phases. This situation
I

is

frequent.

have already discussed

final section includes

ness

hand.

(BM3 no. 11), An especially

from the Bibhoteca Nacional, Madrid. Its poem documented by only one other witand it ends with a poem by Boscan copied out in a later interesting case is SAS.''^' This contains an edition of Auan anonymous

MN39

'*''

The

editor,

Cantera Burgos, believes

it

to be an early version

of the

poem

(1970,

74-

81 and 112-29).
*^
^''

Dutton (1982)

identifies

it

in

MN65,
It is

an eighteenth-century copy of MN15.

This candonero was formed from two others.

The

first

goes up to folio

clvii(r)

and

contains the

work of Ausias March.

initials

written in a semigothic hand, with

traces

little

difference

between the broad and thin

fourteenth century; large
early foliation in

strokes,

and

of the Catalan cursive book hand of the and there

are very
folio

mark each

stanza,

few abbreviations, with

roman numerals. The second

part begins
It

on

159 (modern numbering;

each

the early fohation does not continue from this point).

Castilian semigothic usually

contains Mena's Trescientas in the

found in the neatest

cancioneros; the large initials for

new

stanza are far

more decorated than those

in part one,

and there

is

a greater use

of abbre-

42

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

a

text begins on foho clv(v) and ends approximately halfway down folio clvii(r) (Pages 1934, 5153; and Vidal Alcover 1987, 28-31). The second half of this folio has been left blank. On folio clvii(v) there is the sole surviving copy of an esparsa by Mosen Llois Pardo (Masso Torrens 1932), written in a more cursive and careless script than the previous one but that nevertheless still has Gothic features; the remainder of the folio is taken up by an "Oracio en strams feta ala santa creu / per don jordi centelles." On folio 158r (now numbered differently from the first part of the cancionero) there follows an esparsa, the first Castilian text in the collection, by "Don Jordi centelles / per dona blancha de rocaberti." Both works are written in the same legible, cursive hand. The rest of the folio is blank. There is yet another interpolation, occupying the top of folio 158v, which contains part of the opening stanza of the Vita Christi, though by now the cursive script is clearly humanistic. And finally, a scribal colophon in the same hand concludes this Catalan cancionero: "Quis escripsit escribat semper cum domino viuat dominicus vocatiue quis escripsit benedicatur." The case before us, therefore, is clear: at the very least, an owner added the two poems by Jordi Centelles, who was well known as a fractious man of letters (from 1456 until his death in Valencia in 1496); and he did so after this latter individual or another earlier owner had copied the composition by Llois Pardo. Jordi Centelles was the bastard son of the first count of Oliva, Francesc Gilabert de Centelles, and brother of the second count, Serafi Centelles, a patron of poets and the dedicatee of Hernando del Castillo's Cancionero general ^^ The cancionero, either the first part alone or with both parts now assembled, passed through Valencia (the orthography of the atonic vowels in the poem by Lluis Pardo betrays a Valencian hand) where these additions would be made perhaps even in the court of the counts of Oliva or possibly in the broad literary circle of the capital of Turia.**"
its

March and concludes with comenfa de morir," with both

sias

poem by
tornadas,

Pere March, "Al punt c-om naix

whose

viations. It continues

with "La

flaca barquilla" in a different

hand, probably added by one of

the readers

og

the

bound together
El cancionero
(1912, 31-34).

MS. Everything suggests that these were two separate cancioneros that were in an indeterminate moment in their history. For descriptions, see Dutton,

castellano del sigh

Its

XV (1990-91);

Masso Torrens (1923-24, 151-54), and Pages

provenance can be traced back to the sixteenth century,

it

when

it

was

in

Salamanca, Colegio de San Bartolome, though

studied
"^

was

in the Biblioteca

Real when Pages

it.

An

occasional poet, he was judge in a Valencian poetic competition in 1456, and he

also participated in those held there in

1474 and 1486.

Two

other

poems by him
regis

survive, as
libri

well

as

the Catalan translation of Panormita's

De

dictis et factis

Alphonsi

Aragonum

quattuor, see

who

Masso Torrens (1923-24, 150 and 154) and Ferrando Frances (1983, 115-22), publishes the two texts from SA5. The best study is Duran's introduction to A. BeccaPanormita, Delsfets
e dits del

delli el

gran rey Alfonso, especially pp. 15-29.

also

The

bibliography

of bihngual poets by Ganges Garriga (1992) should

^^

be consulted.
I

This point could be

clarified

by codicological study.

have not personally inspected

VICENg BELTRAN PEPIO

could go on citing various
cancioneros

43

with the same

characteristics,

some-

times copied by a single hand or with evidence of having been compiled in

several phases but always with the addition of unique texts in the final section.

PN6

closes a lengthy anthology

with

couple of them, the

first

anonymous

(ID 117), and the second (ID 118) attributed to the bachiller de la Torre. In a different hand was added yet another anonymous poem, found in two other

and cited by Diego de Mendoza in Garci Sanchez de Badajoz's end of PN7 another luxury manuscript of the Trescientas (although compiled differently from BC3) a reader added two little-known Castilian compositions by the comendador Estela, another of his Catalan poems, and his prose gloss "Vive leda si podras," although in a far better hand than the reader who filled the final folios of BC3. On the other hand, PN7 offers a supreme instance of what this kind of amplification could entail. The text of the Trescientas ends on folio 76v, in the second part of quire nine, and the works of Estela occupy folios 77r-81v, the end of the ninth quire and the two first folios of the tenth. But then follow thirteen unnumbered folios in this quire (plus the last folio that must have been torn out) and then the fourteen folios of the eleventh quire. If a reader had carried on writing in the original quire, a copy of the Laberinto would have become the nucleus of a collective cancionero of quite respectable size. The study of the concluding sections of cancioneros already has a certain tradition behind it. R. O. Jones (1961), when he examined the poems that conclude the Cancionero del British Museum (partial ed. Rennert 1895), considered the possibility that he was dealing with a collection compiled by Juan del Encina himself His arguments are plausible: no. 346 has the rubric "Villancico del actor deste libro," and it appears in Encina's Cancionero of 1496 with the no. 352; and another (British 352) is also attributed to Encina in the Cancionero musical de Palacio (ed. Asenjo Barbieri 1890; facsimile reprint 1987, no. 240). Consequently, this poet could have gathered the contemporary verse that he either had available or liked, and he closed the volume with some of his own compositions, from 347 to 352. More recently, Michel Garcia has
cancioneros
Infierno de amores.'^'^ Finally, at the

suggested a similar explanation for the Cancionero de Onate-Castaneda, which would be the work of Pedro de Escavias whose compositions appear at the end

of the codex (Garcia 1978-80, especially first volume; and 1990, 24-26). In both cases there are significant arguments in favor of this attribution, as regards
the structure of both the volumes and
its

contents, as well as the circumstances

and

tastes

of their supposed compilers.

the

MS, and
first

so

have been unable to determine

if these

additions are

all

in the final folios

initial

of the

part (which seems

most probable) or
last folio

if

they also extend into the

texts)
is

fohos of

the second. Since folio 158 (the

with interpolated

not numbered, one

should proceed with caution.

"'^

Gallagher (1968), stanza 19. Dutton (1982) attributes two

more poems

to

him (ID

5979 and ID 6223).

44

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

I

would even argue

well

that a third cancionero shares these characteristics:

SAlOa.

It is

known

that this

of two

distinct parts

volume (Salamanca University MS. 2763) is made up (Wittstein 1907 and Moreno Hernandez 1989, 18-20).
us here,
is

The

first,

which concerns

usually dated

c.

1520, and

it

contains an
a

anthology of poets from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, with
incidence of those
faction:

high

who

fought for the Catholic Monarchs and the Aragonese

Diego de Valera and Pero Guillen are the best represented, although poems by others, such as Lope de Stuniga, Gomez Manrique, and even Villasandino. Written in a single hand, between folios 89r and 91r it includes seventeen poems by Hernando Colon, in the same hand as the rest of the cancionero. So that no space is wasted, these are followed by a series of four anonymous compositions, which begin in the second column of folio 91r and are copied in a different hand. All poems are attested only here.^ We still
there are also

nothing of the transmission of the texts in the collection except for the of Lope de Stufiiga's work, and although the nature of its variants do not allow firm conclusions, there is a possible link with Cancioneros Vindel, Herberay, and Modena.^' Given Hernando Colon's personality and his obsession with books, it is perfectly feasible to imagine that he was the patron of this manuscript and that at its conclusion the scribe included the w^ork of his patron. Then, a subsequent reader or owner might have added on their own account the anonymous poems, whose authorship I have not been able to ascertain. Nevertheless, the fact that poems deriving from this manuscript are in a single hand is not enough to prove it was compiled in a single phase. The poems by Hernando Colon appear at the end of an anthology whose contents seem to date it around 1460 or possibly a little later. The surviving copy could be a new collection ordered by Colon, at the end of which he added his own work, but it could equally be just a reproduction of an older cancionero copied
case
at his behest.

know

In view^ of this information, the final sections constitute a varied and

com-

^"

Harrisse (1871, appendix F) published

the Biblioteca Real,

which may be

identified as the

Hernando Colon's poems from a cancionero in one under discussion here. Moreover,

Harisse also reveals that in Colon's library was a

et

Cantilene

manu

et hispanico sertnone scripti,

book entided Ferdinandi Colon varii Rithtni which in his opinion was probably dedicated

entirely to to Colon's
tifies this

own

work, though

this

MS could also be SAlOb.

that in Registrum

In

fact,

Varela iden-

MS,

cited in Abecedarium B, as the

one

has the tide Cancionero

de copies de
that
it

mano

echas pot diversos autores (1983,

185-201), although he does not point out

could well be SAlOb, the very

MS

that provides the source for his

clviii),

own
I

edition.

Har-

risse's

information reappears in Serrano y Sanz (1932,

and the poems have been reshould also like

pubhshed by Dutton
to

in the Cancionero castellano del sigh

XV. Nonetheless,

add that MS. Add. 13984 of the British Library (seventeeth century) has poems by Colon
fols.

on

44-45 (Gayangos 1875-91,

2:316), but Varela (1983, 192) affirms that

it is

simply a

copy of SAlOb.
*'

the index in

Vozzo Mendia (1989, 55-56). This connection was Ramirez de Arellano y Lynch (1976, 34).

limited to ten poems, to judge

by

VICENC BELTRAN PEPIO

plex
set

45

middle of the canwere inserted only at the very moment of compilation could exist alongside others that were added during the manuscript's circulation. And the latter probably originated in the same place as the cancionero, or even belonged to the compiler or an author very close to him. In any case, the final part of the manuscripts usually left free folios that would be the ideal place to add texts a posteriori, separated from their place of origin. ^^ Studying them, therefore, becomes a vitally important means of discovering the manuscript's evolution and history, but it requires utmost care if one is to
of problems. Perhaps to
the final sections
a greater extent than in the
cioneros, in

poems

that

avoid rash conclusions.

We

have seen, therefore,

how

the comparative analysis of manuscripts lays

bare a series of characteristic features that shed light on the habits of the
scribes, their

methods of work, the function of their

collections,

and even the

vanity of their owners.

initial nuclei,
all

Among them

stand out such notable features as the

the internal interpolations, and the concluding section.^^

And
fully

these features can coexist in a single manuscript, as in the cases of the Can-

cionero de Herberay

or the Pequeno cancionero. All help us understand

its

more

and owners. Sometimes we are confronted by collections that reflect the internal life of a Hterary court; if this were not the case, what could explain the organizational chaos of such highquality anthologies as the Cancionero de Estiiniga and its related texts, where there is no noticeable attempt to be systematic? Like the Cancionero de Herberay, they probably derive from open-ended miscellanies, in which, starting from an earlier compilation, the scribe noted down works as they were composed or were passed on to him but without any apparent organizational criteria. These are the very cases that might repay further study. Whatever the logic behind their inclusion, however, and whenever they were actually transcribed, we should pay close attention to as many poems as we can find in the cancioneros that exist in single or just a few copies. As I have already explained, almost all these compilations start in one way or another from preexisting volumes, be they personal cancioneros or more ambitious single works and anthologies. But most of them also display a significant innovative streak, which can take various forms: combining two or more cancioneros, judiciously selecting the material that comes down to them, and, especially, adding texts that were not widely circulated, which allows us to form the hypothesis that the centers of cancionero production disseminated originals alongside copies
the textual witness and reconstruct
history

^^

The

text

of Manrique's Coplas, for example, was copied in the

final folios

of the

Cancionero de Baena, at the very

(Beltran 1991. 28-30).

end of the

fifteenth or the start

of the sixteenth century

as well as the flyleaves, was a characteristic practice Middle Ages, before the increasing availabiUty of books during the Early Modern period changed reading habits. See Bourgain's remarks concerning Latin MSS.
fact,

^^

In

exploiting the blank leaves,

of

MS

readers in the

of the High Middle Ages (1991, 71-72).

46

TYPOLOGY AND GENESIS OF CANCIONEROS

of Other anthologies. Sometimes we can detect major centers of such activity: Hke the (as yet unidentified) place of origin of the Cancionero de Palacio (SA7) or the Trastamaran court that produced the archetype of what we commonly
call

the Italian family of cancioneros (though Aragonese

is

the

more

accurate

term),

of major works destined to be widely circulated. other occasions, the compilations have a more obviously local character:
collect a set

which

On
like

the central nucleus that formed the basis of the Cancionero de Vindel (of possible

Catalan origin; see Ramirez de Arellano y Lynch 1976) or that of the Cancionero de Pero Guillen de Segovia.^^ In

any

case, their study

can often shed light

chronology, and

on the
locale.

literary circle

from which they

originated,

its tastes,

In conclusion, studies

on the fifteenth-century
research,

cancioneros currently betray

certain weaknesses that, unless resolved, will prevent us firom advancing further
in this field. In

my own

mation about one

essential

I have been hampered by the lack of inforproblem: what originals did the compiler have on

hand, where did they come from, and how did he get them? In his magisterial book, Giuseppe Billanovich (1981) reconstructed the procedures adopted by Petrarch to edit Livy's Decades: what manuscripts he acquired, when, firom which library, what each contained, and how he handled them. It is true that many of Petrarch's autographs have survived, and among them his edition of Livy, with both his own marginal annotations and those of Lorenzo Valla. But it is also true that the identification, evaluation, and dating of these manuscripts are the result of a long series of studies and cancionero scholars have scarcely begun to embark upon such a task. There is a group of works of considerable scope that recur in numerous cancioneros, like Mena's Laberinto, Fray Inigo de Mendoza's Vita Christi, Gomez Manrique's Regimiento de principes, and many more, whose analysis would enable us to make progress on this score. In only a few concrete cases, such as the works of Santillana that have been so thoroughly researched by Maxim Kerkhof, are we in a position to retrace the paths they have followed. Consequently, I would like to suggest a new direction for our research: from the contents of the cancionero to its container, firom the poems to the scribes. Precisely because so few have followed it, it is this ^'' path that holds the greatest surprises in store.
Universitat de Barcelona

^*

The most
(1908),

relevant study of the origins of the

MS

is

Cummins

(1973); but see also

Lang
"'^

Marino (1978-79), and Beltran (1991, 39-42).

a

This study forms part of

broader research project on fifteenth-century cancioneros

funded by the Direcci6n General de Investigaci6n, Ciencia y Tecnologia.

In Praise of the Cancionero:

Considerations on the Social
Castilian

Meaning of the

Cancioneros

MICHEL GARCIA

Nothing could be
and

more timely than

this collection

of studies,
is

now
to

that

Brian Dutton's compilation of cancioneros (199091)

now

that

thanks
is

to

him

we have an exceptional opportunity

late
it is

finally

completed,

make

an in-depth study of the entire corpus of fifteenth-century court poetry.

intention here

My

not merely to pay personal tribute to our

rare that a scholar has

colleague but

to recognize an exceptional fact:

an opportunity to

review the whole of a literary corpus and to be able to develop theories with the confidence that they are based on utterly reliable material. Our debt to Brian Dutton for his monumental accomplishment is obvious, not only because of its great literary importance but because of the influence
his catalogue will

have on the way

in

which

this

and

fiiture

generations of

scholars focus their studies of fifteenth-centry Castilian literature.

By

setting

before us the complete panorama of surviving anthologies, Brian Dutton has

opened up

fields

of study that

we

cannot afford to ignore.'

should like to

point out the

fore.

two most obvious:

first,

editions of the complete

Even

in the case
fulfill

lologists

not to

works of a of forgotten (and forgettable?) poets, it is hard for phithe obligation they owe to every author from the past
to unearth.^

we are in a position to establish critical much wider range of poets than ever be-

whose works they happen

The second

is

to establish critical edi-

'

Some of the

issues

discuss in this study

have

also

been

raised in a

colloquium held in

whose proceedings have been edited by Tyssens (1991); see especially the opening paper by Roncaglia, to which I return below. ^ I am currently preparing an edition of the complete works of Costana and a new
Liege, in 1989,

edition of the verse of Pedro de Escavias.

48

SOCIAL MEANING OF THE CANCIONEROS

of the major poems. So far this has been done in only a few of the most significant cases, such as Mena's Laherinto de Fortuna, Santillana's Comedieta de Portfa and Bias contra Fortuna, Inigo de Mendoza's Vita Christi, Diego de San Pedro's Fusion Trobada, and Jorge Manrique's Coplas. These editions are the fruit of enormous labor, which previously could be justified only for the truly exceptional works; henceforth they will be possible even for poems of sections

ondary importance. The value of such projects cannot by any means be underestimated, and I consider them not just inevitable but essential, so long as they do not cause us to lose sight of our main objectives.-' In fact, I consider it more urgent to ask how we can exploit Dutton's new research tool to undertake a global study of cancionero production in particular and also to reassess our perceptions of fifteenth-century literary life in general. To this end, I think it vital that we confine ourselves to the reality of the cancioneros or poetic anthologies, whatever one chooses to call them.'^ It is not my intention here to explore the ways in which we might classify the cancioneros (Viceng Beltran has broached this topic in his essay in the present volume) but rather to use this opportunity to open debate on their definition and raison d'etre within the literary and sociological context of fifteenth-century Castile. Before I begin, I should point out that in my opinion the cancioneros should be the primary object of our research and that we must avoid from the outset the danger of regarding them as mere collections of texts or a fortuitous gathering of preexisting works. This is a very real danger. It is obvious that nowadays the existence of a poem in one of these cancioneros is not considered crucial information for the modern scholar or editor and that it has little or no influence on the definition of the text or its interpretation. Current editions usually relegate the codicological origin of the work to footnotes, where they also indicate the principal variants of the extant versions. But what interests them most is the text itself, whether published in isolation or included in a different context, namely, the complete works of the poet who composed it. The presence of a poem in one of these collections has at best been used as evidence for assessing the work's initial popularity. According to this line of reait includes unknown poems or Thus we have the paradox that a cancionero is considered interesting only if it calls attention to itself by departing from the norm in bringing to light previously unknown works or unusual

soning, a cancionero

is

interesting only insofar as

the original version of a particular work.

attributions.

Although

can

make

this

point only in passing, our experience with these

Roncaglia

is

of the same opinion: "Les problemes qui derivent de cette situation sont
faudra-t-il viser a I'edition

nombreux. Pour commencer:

plutot a
la

documentaire des chansonniers, ou

reconstruction critique des textes individuels? Voila

les

un. Pour des raisons difFerentes,

*

un dilemme qui n'en est pas deux taches sont egalement necessaires" (1991, 23).

On

the problems of the term cancionero, see Severin (1994).

MICHEL GARCIA
collections

49

shows us
at

that

we

have

a natural
its

tendency to attach

less

importance
simply

to the cancionero as such than to

contents.

At

best, candoneros are

overlooked;

worst, they are considered obstacles to the interpretation of the

poems and

the establishment of the texts.

By

contrast,

would argue

that
I

it is

necessary to examine the candoneros

as literary

objects in their

own right.

shall

advance several reasons for

this

view.

The
itself
first
is

first is

that fifteenth-century candoneros extend a long tradition

of poetic

anthologies compiled both within and beyond the frontiers of Castile. This in
significant.^

While

Castilian collections

half of the fifteenth century, the practice of gathering

began to appear only in the poems of different

form and thematic content was a common practice elsewhere in the Peninsula. According to the invaluable evidence of his Prohemio e carta al Condestable de Portugal, Santillana recalls having seen a large anthology of Galician-Portuguese verse, owned by his grandmother, dona Mencia de Cisneros (the relevant passage is quoted below). As Santillana's testimony suggests, it is most probable
that the Castilians inherited the practice firom the Galician-Portuguese school

and not the Provencal.

However,
century.

it is

appropriate here to refer to another

Castilian, represented

The

Libro

model that is genuinely by the works of the mester de clerecia of the fourteenth de buen amor by Juan Ruiz and the Rimado de palado by

Pedro Lopez de Ayala bear an undeniable similarity to the later anthologies, although in my opinion critics have pushed the analogy to unacceptable extremes.^

To

illustrate this,

would point

to the frequent changes in register in

the Libro de buen amor, the absence of certain

himself,

poems announced by

the poet

and the

final

gathering together of those pieces that apparently could

a place in the main body of the book. For the work of Ayala, there ample proof of this organization: the autonomy of the Ditado sobre el Cisma and of the religious cancionero at the end of Part One of the Rimado (underscored by the inclusion of dates or transitional stanzas); Ayala's adaptation of the Book of Job, where several versions of the same passage are combined alongside a series of unconnected sections, giving the Rimado its

not find
also

is

See Huot (1987). This book sheds considerable

light

on many

issues that are crucial to

e.g.,

our understanding of literary developments in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries:

the transition the gradual

from

oral to written Hterature, the increasing prestige

of vernacular

verse,

and

emergence of the concept "book." But the corpus

that concerns

me

here belongs

to a bter period,
sets limits to the
''

when
use
I

vernacular literature enjoyed a different,

can

The

rubrics to the

more elevated status, which make of Huot's arguments and conclusions. poems in the Cancionero de Baena fulfill a role similar to the vidas
collections.

and

razos

of the Provencal

However,

as

Weiss has pointed out (1990, 42), there

cast doubt on the conclusions drawn by Deyermond (1982) as to the influence on Baena of the Provencal models of compilation. ' For example, I do not believe that the fragments of cuadema via included by Ayala in his Rimado de palado were composed continuously between the reign of Pedro I and the final

are significant differences in content

and length, which

years

of the poet's

life.

For

details, see

Garcia (1982, 287-302).

50

SOCIAL MEANING OF THE CANCIONEROS

heterogeneous character. Despite this evident lack of unity, with good reason consider these works to be coherent. In part, no doubt, because the work is by the same poet. But this explanation is not very convincing, because there are limits to the coherence of themes and forms in an author's work, par-

we

ticularly

when

the

book

apparently includes his complete output in that genre.

two works in question the artifice of the poetic whole, w^hich consists in the attempt to balance comprehensive scope with a sometimes forced quest for formal unity suggest a poetic conception similar to that which inspired the candoneros, though with a much stronger sense of formal structure.
In
fact,

the principal characteristics of the

These
a

traits also

define fifteenth-century candoneros,

which

strive to gather

of works and order them in such a way as to make the collection as a whole appear coherent.^ We must not lose sight of these fourteenth-century antecedents when we consider both the appearance and the o candoneros in the following century. Ruiz and Ayala illustrate, with far greater clarity than Galician-Portuguese anthologies, one of the major preoccupations of late medieval literati: the preservation of the texts, or, put more dramatically, the determination to prevent their disappearance. Their other characteristics do not diminish that sense of urgency. It is manifest in fifteenth-century candoneros right from the very start: the Cancionero de Baena takes its initial impulse and shape as a compilation of the works of Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino. The same is true of several others, such as the Cancionero de Onate, w^hich, as I explain below, opens with the works of Fernan Perez de Guzman. In each instance, it is difficult to imagine that the operation does not entail the implicit desire to fix forever a body of poetry that is in danger of disappearing or, at least, of not acquiring the fame it deserves. The motives may evolve over time. In particular, the advent of the printing press could have influenced compilers to make the leap toward gathering together the complete works of given authors. But before the dissemination of printing, I see a desire to preserve a patrimony as the principal motivation, because the poets who merited such treatment had either died or stopped composing at the time their works
characteristics

maximum number

In a way, the works by Juan

were being compiled. The posthumous nature of the operation

about
its

tells

us

much

objectives.'

The

criterion

of length could be used to distinguish the

candoneros.

However, brevity
of the compiler,
is

was probably due more

to an unexpected interruption than to the wishes

and therefore, hypothetically speaking, the difference between the

qualitative, only quantitative.
^

collections

not

This

is

a topic that

would repay
(like

further study.

By

its

very nature, the process of

compilation can conceal

a great variety

of goals on the part of the compilers. Consider, for

Castillo) envisaged a

example, that not

all

compilers

Baena or

wide audience
had exerted

for their

collections. Perhaps the majority

wanted

to preserve

documents

that

a personal

influence

upon them. The range of attitudes

(those

of anonymous compilers,

publicists like

MICHEL GARCIA

51

We know that the cancioneros did not compile works of certain authors merely to preserve them; yet the diversity of their materials, authorship, inspiration, and even language makes it difficult to give a simple account of the reasons for their formation. As Beltran argues in his contribution to this volume, we need a taxonomy of the criteria used for including the individual works or combination of works in a given context. In the meantime, however, I feel it safe to say that these criteria do not contradict but complement each other. How else could one explain, for example, the apparently random gathering of isolated pieces or short series of works alongside compilations that presume to be the complete work of a particular author? I would suggest that these smaller collections are not altogether in conflict with the more extensive ones. The principle is the same, except that their coherence does not stem
from
single authorship but
is

thematic, or chronological, or geographic, or fol-

some of them possibly being very personal.'^ Moreover, the presence of isolated pieces often illustrates the difficulties of obtaining certain texts, which can be included only if the compiler chances to have access to them. The criteria are complementary in that the preoccupation to preserve texts is (up to a certain point) quite in harmony with the desire to publish the entire production of the genre. To preserve and publish are, after all, the two facets of the very definition of the object "book," whether in the age of manuscript production or in the early days of the printing press and possibly even beyond. It is not by chance that these remarks on cancioneros lead toward their identification with the concept "book." The idea I wish to set forth is that the cancionero is a book, with all that this concept implies: the demands of being both the vehicle and the object of literature. In other words, Hterature (and in our specific case, poetry) exists for and because of the book. This assertion is obvious, even when one grants due recognition to oral literature. A literature exists for posterity in the form of preserved texts, which not only testify to the existence of that literature but make it a reality and constitute its only possible field of study. Note the words of the Marques de Santillana when he speaks of the volume of Galician-Portuguese poems kept in the home of his grandlows other possible
criteria,

mother:

Acuerdome,

asaz pequeiio

muy magnifico, syendo yo en hedad no provecta, mas mofo, en poder de mi avuela doiia Men^ia de Cisneros, entre otros libros, aver visto un grand volumen de cantigas, serranas e dezires Portugueses e gallegos; de los quales toda la mayor parte era del
seiior

Baena, or "theorists"

like

Encina)

may have

in

common

the nostalgic desire to preserve

more than
tives

century of poetic activity that signaled Castile's cultural splendor.

Castillo, see the brief

On

the

mo-

of Encina and
(1970).
'"

but pertinent remarks of Weiss (1990, 237) and

Andrews
I

develop these points in

al.

my

introduction to the Cancionero de Onate-Castaheda

(Severin et

1990, especially xix-xxii).

52

SOCIAL MEANING OF THE CANCIONEROS

Rey don Donis

obras, aquellos

de Portugal

creo, seiior, sea vuestro visahuelo

cuyas

que las leyan, loavan de inven^iones sotiles e de gra^iosas e dulses palabras. Avia otras de Johan Suares de Pavia, el qual se dize aver muerto en Galizia por amores de una infanta de Portogal e de otro, Fernand Gonzales de Senabria. (Gomez Moreno and Kerkhof 1988, 449)

The

marques recalled the names of the principal poets included in the volume,
all

though not

are as well

known

as

the Portuguese

King

Dinis,

whom he

feels

obliged to emphasize given the identity of his interlocutor, the young don

Pedro, condestable de Portugal.

The

details

he provides about Suares de Pavia

his verse in that

seem taken from the

cancionero.

rubric that
is

would have introduced

What

is

striking

that after

many

years he

was

still

able to describe

even its material form as "un grand volumen." While it was defined by the works it contained, the codex retained its personality as a book, which distinguished it from the other volumes in dona Mencia's library. That identification presupposes recognition of at least a minimum of elaboration, which is one of the defining qualities of the concept "book." Inadvertedly, it passes from being a mere physical support for literary texts to being a real literary work in its own right. Is there anything in the cancioneros that would allow us to deny them these qualities inherent in a book? I think not. Moreover, in my opinion, they are the natural channel of fifteenth-centhe contents of a
that retained

book

tury poetry.

This verse survives only through the collections in which

cluded. If there
versity,
it is
is

it

has

been in-

anything the cancioneros have in

this rather

common,

despite their di-

would have one can detect something else: a systematic desire to preserve it. To demonstrate this, one has only to take tw^o examples from opposite ends of the chronological chain. Without the Cancionero de Baena (c. 1425), the work of Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino would be practically nonexistent. Without Hernando del Castillo's Cancionero general (first edition, 1511), over half the works ofJorge Manrique would have been lost: of the forty-nine poems attributed to him, thirty-two survive only in that collection. This documentary function was never lost firom view, despite the temporal distance between the two anthologies. But if the cancioneros had aspired only to preserve works that interested their compilers, they would have accomplished only half the purpose of the book. In reality, the existence of those collections contributes to the conceptual evolution of poetry itself How does one define the poetic production preserved in the cancioneros? Above all, as an art of composing poems that is related above all to a social context. For the aristocracy, it was as much a sign of nobility as the luxury of daily Ufe or the passion for the hunt.'' It displayed the poet's
to have kept alive an entire production, that otherwise

ceased to

exist.

Beyond

obvious

fact,

" In

this respect, it

is

very significant that

among

the

numerous pastimes of the "grandes

MICHEL GARCIA

53

adhesion to the cultural values that shaped the ideology of the governing class, with scarcely any concern for the specific values of literature. When Juan II or Alvaro de Luna composed their verses, they did not expect to be considered men of letters but only to share in and promote a social ritual of court life. For this reason, I feel it more appropriate to speak of production and not creation as such.^^ What is expressed through that medium is the social body itself, with

imposing from the top down social values and official norms. delight in emphasizing the recurrence of themes and forms in cancionero poetry are only recognizing the efficiency of this means of promoting an ideology; yet they do not realize that it is above all a sociocultural phenomenon, and they thereby fail to understand why this poetry survived well into the sixteenth century, clear proof that the phenomenon survives the circumstances that brought it into being. This durability comes, I believe, from the literary quality of the texts, and I consider this to be the essential contribution of the cancionero compilers. There is no hiding that such an assertion clashes with some of the characteristics of the cancioneros that are apparently incompatible with what we now regard as a "literary work." How can we reconcile their heterogeneous content, their frequent anonymity, and the occasional amateurishness of their authors with our expectations of "literature"? The apparent lack of unity in anthologies is a question that has been debated for a long time among scholars of Provencal poetry. But there is now a consensus that a unifying principle actually exists, and it has a name, "sylloge" in French ("silogio" in Italian). It is thus recognized that while the content of the collections may include a variety of pieces of different origin and authorship, they can still qualify as something more than mere anthologies. The unifying cement consists of two factors. The first concerns the sociocultural reality that surrounds the production of such works. As Roncaglia
a

view

to

Critics

who

explains:

Ce

sont des conditions

ou

le

sentiment d'une solidarite collective,

personnalite individuelle des auteurs

enracinee dans un milieu socio-culturel polycentrique, mais typologique-

ment homogene, I'emporte

sur

la

[qui pourtant] ne sont point interchangeables. (1991, 22)

This

and it cannot easily be denied the Castilian been condemned for monotony and repetitiveness in as well as in form and vocabulary. The second cohesive factor is the aim pursued by the compilers. Again I quote Roncaglia:
is

in short a tonal unity,

cancioneros,

which theme

so often have

senores" mentioned in Baena's prologue, he also refers to the art of poetry (ed. Azaceta

1966, 1:12-13).
'^

Production warrants an approach that

is

more

sociological than literary, while creation

presupposes a personal perspective on the work.

54

SOCIAL MEANING OF THE CANCIONEROS

J'ai dit

que

les

chansonniers

se definissent a la

rencontre d'un projet

qui

peut-etre

un

projet de choix, mais peut-etre aussi I'intention de produire

tout ce que

Ton connait

et d'autre part des conditions exterieures qui

pouvaient limiter
teriel,

la disponibilite des modeles. Done il y a un aspect mamais aussi un certain aspect de choix. (1991, 22)

Those two circumstances weigh heavily on any cancionero and help to The more the compiler seeks to order his materials systematically, the more evident the principles that unite them become. In this case, perceptible discontinuities only illustrate the difficulties encountered in collecting the material and, by contrast, throw into relief the compiler's project. But I am not unaware that these two criteria define the cancioneros only in a negative manner. We must therefore find more positive arguments in support of my proposal. The most convincing one would be to demonstrate that a collection could itself attain the status of a literary work. In this respect, we might find examples in the fourteenth-century works of mester de clerecta to which I referred above. Despite their obvious artifice, no one would deny that the Libro de buen amor and the Rimado de palacio should be considered accomplished works from
strengthen the kinship that unites them.
a literary standpoint. In medieval Castilian literature they stand out in three
respects: history, esthetics,

these qualities be found in a cancionero?

exist in

and the author's personality. To what extent can It would be easy to prove that they
the Cancionero de Baena, for

some

cases,

such

as in

which we

possess an

unusually large

amount of information:

the identity of the compiler, the cir-

cumstances of compilation, esthetic

to take a lesser-known

criteria outlined in the

it

prologue, and an
interesting
its

obviously systematic ordering of the material. But

would be more

work

in

which the circumstances surrounding

com-

pilation are not clearly defined, such as the Cancionero de Onate-Castaneda (ed.

Severin et

al.

1990).

What

strikes

one most about

this collection (c.

1485)

is

the keen awareness

shown by

the compiler for poetic developments that took place during the
is

by the way in which he gives most representative of their generation. They are carefully selected and ordered in chronological sequence: Fernan Perez de Guzman, Juan de Mena, el marques de Santillana, Gomez Manrique, Fray Ifiigo de Mendoza, Diego de San Pedro, Fray Ambrosio Montesino, Anton de Montoro, and Jorge Manrique. Merely enumerating these poets gives a clear idea of his priorities. The Cancionero de Onate uses history as a structuring device, which means transforming the collection into something more than an anthology: a real historical manual of fifteenth-century poetry. The impression is heightened by the choice of forms and themes that turn out to be the most representative in each generation. The Cancionero opens with a section devoted to twenty-three works by Fernan Perez de Guzman, a substantial part of which possesses a distinct structure: the second poem is a matins prayer (Loores a maitines), and the twentieth, an ultdogo. This constitutes
course of the whole century. This
illustrated

prominence

to the poets considered

MICHEL GARCIA
the whole of his reUgious poetry

55

rounded off with four

the end: in short, this
"el senor

large-scale
is

a
is

and it is presented as such and it is poems, one at the beginning, the others at most complete reproduction of the serious verse of
the only poet

de Batres."

He

who

merits such treatment.

It is as if

the Cancionero had been placed under his authority,

much

as

Villasandino was

the authority for Baena's collection. Despite their high quality, in every

way

comparable to Perez de Guzman, and despite the compiler's obvious admiration, the inclusion of the other poets' works depends on other criteria. Mena and Santillana are seen as complementary to each other. Their works alternate in a sort of fictitious dialogue that ends with an exchange of preguntas y respuestas. This physical arrangement illustrates tw^o of the principal characteristics of poetry during the reign of Juan II: that it was a collective activity and that it developed in the royal court. The reign of Enrique IV is represented by an austere poem by Gomez Manrique and by the typically critical tone of Franciscan verse. Lastly, the beginning of the Catholic Monarchs' reign is centered on one region, Andalusia, no doubt because of the compiler's own personal experiences. But even within these limits, the selection of works and poets shows an acute sense for the originality of that region's poetic production. The poet Montoro is an essential figure, and it is revealing that he is presented as a favor-seeking courtier, without resorting to the triviality of his minor verse. At the same time, the compiler brings to light the widespread patronage of Castilian nobles and the consequent composition of panegyric verse. Finally, the inclusion of Jorge Manrique indicates his ability to perceive new currents of quality. Seen in this light, the Cancionero does not have the limitations usually
attributed to anthologies. Despite the difficulties inherent in the task, especially

considering limitations imposed by contemporary modes of literary dissemination, the

his

own

age, but

compiler was not content merely to collect samples of the work of he has provided clues that permit one to read and interpret

not only the texts he himself gathers but also the entire corpus of fifteenthcentury verse. It constitutes a literary work in the strict sense of the term.

The second

criterion of literariness
It is

mentioned

earlier,

esthetics,
it

is

also

present in this cancionero.

manifested in several ways, and

I

gives a

good

account of the compiler's

tastes.

have already mentioned

his ability to capture

the dominant poetic trends of each era,

which

displays his

and

a capacity to evaluate the merits

this
is

of the works.

He

also

keen critical sense shows great care in

ordering the poems. But

not simply
(if

a didactic question.

The volume
went
into
its

comes

across as a well-balanced construction, with subtle patterns that suggest

that esthetic concerns as

much

not more)
is

as

didactic ones

compilation.

devoted to the works of Pedro de Escavias. This section reproduces in condensed form the chronology of fifteenth-century poetic creation, within the limits of one
the
last

good example of this

part of the Cancionero,

lifetime.'-^

This relationship between collective production and the poetic

'*

The compiler

tries

not only to trace the various stages of Escavias's poetic career

^not

56

SOCIAL MEANING OF THE CANCIONEROS

single author evokes a classic mise en abyme,

microcosm of a
Finally,

which

has evident

esthetic intentions.

even though the authorship of the Cancionero

left its

is

not made explicit,

the author's personality has certainly

I

mark.

It

can be deduced from what

have just said about the anthology's organization. But clearly, whoever the Pedro de Escavias, as I still believe he obviously felt under no compunction to include this or that work for reasons other than his own. His control seems ever present, and any changes in his criteria for selecting works, whether due to objectively changing trends in contemporary verse or to his
compiler was

own

literary evolution, are entirely deliberate

and used to good advantage in

lend themselves to the sort of
I

the compilation of his cancionero.

One might
valid point.

argue that not

cancionero has

all

cancioneros

do not believe this to be a and therefore deserves to be analyzed in that light. In any case, any taxonomic study worthy of the name presupposes detailed analysis of both the structure and the process of compilation of each surviving cancionero. I must emphasize once again the priority of this study over any other. Fifteenth-century poetry exists only because it was collected in the cancioneros, including that of Hernando del Castillo. A true understanding of that poetic production implies a prior understanding study of its original, almost exclusive
analysis appropriate to the Cancionero de Ohate.

Each

its

own

history

on the concept of the poetic work work with its author, we risk committing an anachronism by applying a modern concept that was foreign to the medieval period. At the very least, we should explain what we mean by this concept before applying it to such a remote epoch. Although I would not go so far as
position leads us to reflect
identify the
itself

medium. This

When we

to

deny

that fifteenth-century poetry

had

a personal

dimension (some of the

its

cancioneros clearly suggest this),

we

should not overlook

collective aspect,

same era as composed. The reception of that poetry took place through the cancioneros, and it is through them that the public became conscious of poetic production and its underlying currents. I think this argument is more than enough to make us take careful note of those collections as a means of evaluating fifteenth-century Castilian poetry in its proper context.
finds
its

which

best expression in the collections compiled in the

first

when

the verse was

University Sorhonne Nouvelle (Paris III)

hesitating to reject

works

that

seem of little value

but

also to illustrate the gradual evolution

of Castilian verse during the same period.

II.

Traditions:

Rupture and Renewal

Francisco Imperial

and

the Issue of Poetic

Genealogy

MARINA

S.

BROWNLEE
known"

Paradoxically, the Dezir a

and
debate
"least

las siete virtudes

(Dezir) remains the "best

understood" of the 588 poems in Baena's Candonero (Clarke

issue

1992, 77).

The

of

its

poetic genealogy continues to

its

elicit

considerable

primarily the extent of the Dantean subtext and

significance.

How

do we account for the apparent contradiction that the Dezir seems to rely extensively on the Dantean subtext while markedly diverging firom it in order
to expose the degenerate condition of an
Seville)?

unnamed Spanish

city (probably

Moreover: "Why,"

as

Dorothy

Clotelle Clarke remarks, "did our

all

poet have Dante, except for introductory and concluding remarks, do

speaking, often even quoting himself from the Divine
Critics continue to debate

the

ComedyV

(1992, 81).

meaning or

are

merely

enterprise with a

whether the echoes of Dante provide a coherent of fragments intended to endow Imperial's generalized aura of learnedness, a quality that was highly
a collection
will,
I

prized during this time (Post 1915, 181-82; Morreale 1967).

These questions and others

also the generic

believe,

become

clarified

once

we

under-

stand not only the programmatic treatment accorded by Imperial to Dante but

developments of the

late

medieval French

the discursive

model
as

for Imperial's dezir. Textual evidence

Imperial was
1907).!

tive treatment

conversant with the French tradition, of the Roman de la Rose, as he was with the

which provides makes it clear that evidenced by his selecdit,

Italian

(Luquiens

While

scholars agree that the Dezir offers an elaborate mosaic

of Dantean

'

The

present study will not treat this most influential of French texts for Imperial's
a future essay will

poem, although
and Jean de

show

the Dezir
its

careful

reworking of Guillaume de Lorris

Meun

to

be

as

sophisticated as

treatment of Dante. All quotations from

Imperial's verse are taken

from Nepaulsingh's edition (1977).

60

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

done on
I

references, -work remains to be

its

function. Giuseppe Sansone has

used the term "programmatic" but,

beheve, in a different sense than mine.

He

writes:

Imperial utilizza Dante programmaticamente, come documentano i suoi due poemi lunghi, in funzione di una scelta da compiere, in quella vasta construzione che e la Divina Commedia, di strutture allegoriche e di
verita del sapere, garantite dalla grandezza del trecentista e awertite

come

congeniali in un'area di professione poetica e carattere tipicamente

intellettualistico.

(Sansone 1974, 102)

Sansone, and others, assume that by inserting Dantean reminiscences into his
poetic status.

borrowing Dante's authority to enhance his own 1 hope to demonstrate that Imperial has strategically chosen seminal moments from the Commedia, remotivating them programmatically not simply to display his profound knowledge of the
text. Imperial
is

essentially

By

contrast with this view,

the first self-proclaimed vernacular poeta, although that in itself demonstrated by the poem. Beyond Imperial's impressive understanding of Dante's text, however, he exploits the text in such a way as to figure himself as a unique kind of poeta the poeta dezidor. I realize that this claim
Italian
is

master

clearly

seems paradoxical, given the Marques de Santillana's well-known appraisal of him: "Yo no [lo] Uamaria dezidor o trobador, mas poeta" (ed. Gomez Moreno

and Kerkhof 1988, 452). How can we speak of Imperial as both poeta (philosopher) and dezidor (rhetorician)? We are authorized to do so because Imperial, unlike Santillana, was aware of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century developments of the French dit. This claim is based on the conformity of the Dezir to all the features of the late medieval French dit as identified by Jacqueline Cerquiglini in her dazzling study of this poetic form (1980). Before turning to consider her remarks about the evolution of this important literary form, let us first consider the ways in which the dezir has been defined. Corominas, in his etymological dictionary, offers no entry at all for the term or its semantic field. By contrast, Pierre Le Gentil writes as follows about the dezir, especially in the case of Imperial:
Les
decires

d'Imperial se distinguent des

la

dits

fran^ais

en ce

qu'ils

conser-

ne comportent pas normalement d'intermedes lyriques, si Ton met apart le poeme moral intitule Decir a las siete virtudes. Ces compositions ont un caractere didactique tres peu accentue; elles ne prennent jamais caractere d'allure et les proportions d'un traite, comme c'est le cas des dits de Machaut. Nous sommes d'ailleurs, a cet egard, plus loin encore de la Divine ComMie. Faut-il tellement
vent toujours

forme strophique

et

s'etonner? Imperial

commence

a ecrire a

un moment ou
les

la

poesie castil-

lane est en pleine transformation. C'est alors que

dite et

notions de poesie

de poesie chantee tendent a s'opposer; mais cette evolution

la

qui

rappelle exactement celle de

poesie fran^aise au cours du

XlVe

MARINA
siecle

S.

BROWNLEE

61

n'est pas entierement

fixe sont deja

forme

titres, tres

achevee au Sud des Pyrenees. Si les genres nettement definis, le decir est encore, a bien des proche de la chanson, d'ou il est sorti. (1949, 1:240-41)
aspects

of Le Gentil's definition of the dezir, as yet somewhat unexplored identity in fifteenth-century Castile in general. What can be said with certainty, however, is that Imperial reveals in the Dezir a degree of literary selfconsciousness that is analogous to the form as it existed in France during the time in which he wrote. If we turn briefly to a consideration of the late medieval French dit, we that "le dit est un genre qui se definit par son find as Cerquiglini observes jeu au second degre; en d'autres termes, le dit est un genre qui travaille sur le discontinu" (1980, 158). In other words, it is not a particular subject that constitutes a dit but rather its configuration: "Ce n'est pas la nature des 'ingredients' qui fait le dit ... mais bien leur mode de mise en presence, leur montage" (1980, 158). It is its nature as "second-degree" literature (literature that comments on a preexisting text) that defines the dit. Hence it is a literature of selfit is

While one may challenge various

nonetheless accurate in reflecting the form's

conscious distantiation:
Si la loi constitutive du dit est bien un jeu de distanciation, on comprend pourquoi sont appeles dits tons les textes dont le principe de composition est un principe exterieure, venant d'un allieurs. (1980, 159)

For

this

reason one finds so

many

dits

bearing numerological
trois signes.

titles,

for

exam-

ple, the

Dit des douze mois, or the Dit des

(By virtue of its reference

to the

number
dits

seven. Imperial's Dezir obviously conforms to this feature of dit

composition

as well.)

According to

this

numerous
159).

that contain intercalations

same law of distantiation, we find of preexisting poetry or letters (1980,

lies at

Cerquiglini further associates the distancing or discontinuity that

the

heart of this literary form in the late Middle Ages with the shift that occurs

between oral (continuous) and written (discontinuous) literature. Citing Paul Zumthor's observation that "oralite et ecriture s'opposent comme le continu au discontinu" (Zumthor 1972, 41), she distinguishes the thirteenth-century dit from the form's fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manifestations in a very interesting manner, namely, in terms of the new attitude towards literature evident in the late Middle Ages in France:
Le

texte medieval, age

marque done, pour nous, I'apparition d'un nouvel age pour le ou celui-ci passe progressivement du statut d'objet auditif qu'il etait aux epoques anterieures a un statut d'objet visuel. On comprend alors la raison de la difference existant entre le dit du XIII
dit

siecle,

court

le

plus souvent, proche encore d'une 'parole' possible: 'Ore

escutez une dit creables' dit

un

tente

du Xllle

siecle, et les dits

du XlVe

du forme
et

XVe

decouvert toutes les possibilites de leur et en particulier son pouvoir integrateur ^pouvoir de dire, grace
siecles qui, ayant

62

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

a

recriture,

le

decrochement, renchassement

^peuvent

s'allonger

rinfini. (1980, 159)

In addition, Cerquiglini points out that the appearance of the

thirteenth century
is

word

ditie

in the

significant,
dictate,

comes from the Latin

rediger, enseigner).

stemming firom the verb ditier, which in turn which means in Old French "to write" (ecrire,

As such, the term dit does not refer to a genre but, it seems, to a particular form of enunciation; it is a meta-discursive mode. This metadiscursivity is facilitated by means of the third defining feature identified by Cerquiglini, namely, that "le dit est un discours qui met en scene un 'je', le dit
est

un

discours dans lequel

dit

un

'je'

est

toujours represente" (1980, 160). As

such, "le texte

devient

le

mime

d'une parole" (160). Even in the case of a

text w^here the enunciating subject, the author, introduces the narrative proper,

thereafter apparently forfeiting his primary role of author, he actually remains

visible, figuring in

an equally important

way

as

the principal

commentator on
it

the text. (This observation also has bearing

on

Imperial's enterprise, for

may

answer Clarke's question as to why Imperial has Dante "except for introductory and concluding remarks, do all the speaking, often even quoting himself from the Divine Comedy" [1992, 81]. What at first seems perhaps to be a surprising reticence on Imperial's part should be considered instead in terms of
the authorial metadiscursivity that the
dit entails.)

on allegory, charts the expansion of the term dit, explaining that the word "etait a I'origine strictement limite dans son emploi: par opposition a la litterature profane nourrie de fictions, il servait a designer le nouveau modus dicendi allegorique" (1964, 120). It was thus intimately related with "truth" ethical (rather than poetic) truth. This association had changed by the middle of the
a classic study
field

Hans Robert Jauss, in undergone in the semantic

as Cerquiglini illustrates by referring to the example of Guillaume de Machaut's celebrated Voir Dit. First, the title reflects that the dit was no longer construed as necessarily bearing religious or ethical truth. Second, the title communicates truth without the mediation of allegory,

fourteenth century, however,

unlike the earlier thirteenth-century

instead

dit.

The

text's truth-status

by the poet's own experience, and

this constitutes a

of vernacular poetic identity. ne pent plus etre garantie par son recours a une allegorie mais par appel a I'experience vecue" (1980, 167). (In the Dezir Imperial will, like Machaut, assert the primacy of the enunciating subject and of poetic truth at the expense of religious truth. While recalling, of course, a variety of religious considerations by means, primarily, of the seven virtues. Imperial puts in the foreground the importance of his primarily poetic rather than religious pilgrimage. This is why readers looking for clear theological interpretations continue to be stymied. This is also why the seven serpents continue to be subject to so much debate and why the Celestial Rose is not revealed to Imperial at the end
in the evolution
verite

is guaranteed major development As Cerquiglini points out, "La

of his poem [v. 456].) Bearing in mind the three principles of the

dit (discontinuity, its resultant

MARINA

S.

BROWNLEE

63

metadiscursivity, and the primacy of the first-person subject), let us

sider Imperial's dezir.

now

con-

that he fell asleep, the narrator (in w. 17 and 25) begins of the Dantean journey in a way that signals to the reader his markedly different enterprise. More precisely, these two verses of the Spanish text reiterate the first and last invocations of the Paradiso. Their citation in

Having indicated

his rewriting

stanzas three

and four of the Spanish narrative

third canto of his

serves,

among

other things, to

collapse the daring Unguistic journey (firom Apollo to

by Dante throughout the

God) sequentially staged poem. Dante writes:

buono AppoUo, a I'ultimo lavoro fammi del tuo valor si fatto vaso, come dimandi a dar I'amato alloro. Infino a qui I'un giogo di Pamaso assai mi fii; ma or con amendue m'e uopo intrar ne I'aringo rimaso.
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
si

come quando
la

Marsi'a traesti
le

de

vagina de

membra

sue. {Par.

I,

1321)^

[O good Apollo, for this last labor make me such a vessel of your worth as you require for granting your beloved laurel. Thus far the one peak of Parnassus has sufiiced me, but now I have need of both, as I enter the arena that remains. Enter into my breast and breathe there as when you drew Marsyas firom the sheath of
his limbs.]

as

This opening invocation involves a daring conflation of St. Paul and Ovid, Robert Hollander has observed (1969, 205). The word "vaso" (v. 14)
St.

echoes the "vas d'elezione" which described

subtext for both passages
the blinded Saul
is

Paul in Infemo

II,

28.

The

Acts 9:15,

where God speaks

to Ananias regarding

and spiritual) will soon be restored: mihi iste, ut portet nomen meum coram gentibus, et regibus, et filiis Israel" [Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel].^ Dante requests the kind of vision granted by God to Paul. At the same time, Dante addresses himself to an Ovidian Apollo in terms of his poetic enterprise: the "amato alloro" of v. 15 refers to the transformation of Daphne (Met. I, 548sight (both physical
est

whose

"Vade, quoniam vas electionis

67) into the Apollonian tree from

whose
is

leaves the corona poetae

is

fashioned.

In explaining this extraordinary conflation, Kevin Brownlee writes,

tian request for Pauline inspiration

"A

Chris-

thus being

made

in Ovidian, poetic

^
^

Dante (1970-76). All

references, unless otherwise indicated, are to this edition.

Biblia Sacra (1959). Latin citations refer to this edition. English citations are

taken from

Oxford Annotated Bible (1962).

64

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

is

terms: the apostolic calling

presented

as

leading to the laurel

crown of the

poeta" (Brownlee 1991, 225).

Imperial's rewritten invocation,
tirely;

by

contrast, omits the Pauline allusion enspiritual vision:

he will not

attain

an unmediated

Sumo

Apolo,
tu
este

ayudame
que en
del ver

a ti me encomiendo, con suma sapien^ia, sueno atiendo,

non

sea

al

dezir defyren9ia;

entra en mis pechos, espira tu ^iencia,

commo
quando
de
la

en los pechos de Febo espiraste, Mar^ia sus mienbros sacaste su vayna por su ex^elen^ia. (XVII, 17-24)
a

The absence of the

him and

Pauline vision has far-reaching implications for Imperial,

as well, in that
it

qua protagonist of the Dezir and qua author

his enterprise

boldly separates

St. Paul was so For Dante-protagonist, the Paradiso involves experiences that are clearly beyond the bounds of human perception and articulation. Imperial would appear, thus, to be construing Dante's celestial voyage as a dream, not

from

his Italian predecessor, for

whom

essential.

as

the

literal fact

stature

Dante claims it to be.'* In so doing. Imperial reduces the of the Commedia to that of one more dream vision albeit the most

exalted one.

Not

only

is

the Pauline register absent, but Imperial recalls Apollo's

own

of himself in the contest with Marsyas in another highly significant recasting of the Commedia. We recall that Marsyas's punishment by Apollo {Met. VI, 385-91) was the result of his prideful presumption
(self-sufEcient) inspiration

in challenging the divinity to a musical contest.

referring to Apollo both in the second person
inspiration)
(as

What

Imperial achieves by

the universal source of poetic

and in the third person

is

(as

the punisher of Marsyas for a particular

transgression)

a highly original split

and Apollo-protagonist. It is al's text as subtext and guide.

between Apollo-generalized poet figure no accident that Dante figures as both in Imperi-

Imperial not only has collapsed the essential linguistic progression whereby

he

relies initially

upon Apollo, upon

God, he

explicitly signals the

classical allusion to attain direct speech to hermeneutic distance separating him firom his
as follows:
ti

poetic predecessor. Dante writes

O
^

somma

luce che tanto

levi

Whereas Dante makes

his

it

clear that his vision

was not

dream but an experience he

underwent while

entirely awake, Imperial purposely

he found himself for

makes the physical condition in which analogous journey an ambiguous one. In w. 13-16 he writes:
sueiio,

"vynome
en
lo

a essa ora/
el

un grave

que

alma dul^e assabora," and

maguer non dormia,/ mas contemplando la mi fantasia/ in v. 72, "non sse sy dormia o velava." Likewise (v.

462), he concludes by saying, "acorde

commo

a fuerza despierto."

MARINA
da'concetti mortali, a
ripresta

S.

BROWNLEE
mia mente

65

la

un poco
favilla sol
la

di

quel che parevi,

tua gloria

e fa la lingua

mia tanto possente,

de
la

ch'una

possa lasciare a
e per sonare

futura gente;

che, per tornare alquanto a

mia memoria

un poco

in questi versi,
vittoria. {Par.

piu

si

concepera di tua

XXXIII, 6775)

[O Light Supreme
ing, relend to

that art so far uplifted

a little

my mind

of what

Thou

above mortal conceivdidst appear, and

my tongue such power that it may leave only a single spark of Thy glory for the folk to come; for by returning somewhat to my memory and by sounding a little in these lines, more of Thy
give
victory shall be conceived.]

Imperial recalls this ninth and final invocation from Dante's third canto but
alterations. First, rather than concluding his journey through Paradise with this invocation, he recasts the Dantean text in verses 2532, in the octave immediately following his recasting of Dante's first invocation in Paradise. The effect of this conflation is to cast Dante's spiritual and poetic voyage into the category of discontinuity of "second-degree literature," to use Cerquiglini's terminology, into that of a remotivated subtext. Beyond this significant repositioning of the ninth Dantean invocation, the

with some notable

particular verbal recasting

is

equally important:
te al^aste

suma

luz

que tanto
lo

del concepto mortal, a

mi memoria
que

representa
e faz

un poco

me

mostraste,

mi lengua

tanto meritoria,

que una ^entella sol de la tu gloria, pueda mostrar al pueblo presente,

e qui^a despues algunt grant
la

prudente

en^endera en mas

alta estoria. (vv.

25-32)

The

of the Spanish text reproduce nearly verbatim the Italian three verses of the octave, however, change the subtext dramatically. Imperial, unlike Dante, is not thinking of hypothetical future readers of his poem, "la futura gente" (v. 72), but of his readers in the present time in which he writes. Concurrently, Imperial alludes to the venerable procedure of emendacion by some future "grand prudente" who may improve his estoria} Dante, for his part, envisioned no such possibility of improvement.
first

five verses

original.

The remaining

Imperial's substitution

of the Dantean rhyme word

its

"vittoria"

with "estoria"

is

particu-

larly interesting here,

given

semantic range

at the time. Estoria

was used to designate

66

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

than just another instance of the well-worn topos of the
captatio benevolen-

More
tiae.

Imperial differentiates himself from his predecessor to underscore his belief

in the dynamics of intertextuality

and (somewhat

playfully perhaps) in the

recasting in his

poem of the one

way

text that presents itself as

immune

to subtex-

tual refashioning. In this

Imperial clearly distinguishes his poetic enterprise

laconically presenting the Commedia as his own reworked model, thus underscoring the inevitability of intertextuality. That Imperial's remotivation of Dante was very carefully wrought is also borne out by his inclusion of the two key mythological figures of Marsyas and Glaucus. Marsyas figures the problem of language for Dante-poet and Glaucus, the problem of vision for Dante-protagonist. We recall that Dante rewrites the flaying of Marsyas in bono since it is represented as a liberation from the body by means of divine inspiration {Par. I, 1321). Dante in the first person is asking to be metamorphosed like Marsyas. Brownlee incisively remarks that:

from Dante's while

Dante-poet
inspiration.

is

asking for a "martyrdom" that

is

nothing other than poetic

On the

other hand, the extraordinary pridefulness of Dante's

is

experiential claim and poetic request

it

explicitly

acknowledged and,

as

were, sublimated. This extraordinary act of

self-justification involves

once again the strategic conflation (and transformation) of Pauline and Ovidian models. (1991, 227)

Dante transforms Marsyas's literal emancipation from his body through divine intervention. Yet this act ends not in death, as Ovid claims, but in Dante's life.'' This extraordinarily privileged linguistic accomplishment for the poet Dante finds its parallel in the privileged transformation of the protagonist Dante, a transformation effected by means of the Ovidian metamorphosis of Glaucus from a man to a sea god {Met. XIII, 904-59). This second transformation is triggered by Dante's gazing directly at Beatrice: "Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,/ qual si fe Glauco nel gustar de I'erba/ che '1 fe consorto in mar de li altri dei" [Gazing upon her I became within me such as Glaucus became on tasting of the grass that made him a seafellow of the other Gods.] {Par. I, 6769). What is most important in the Dezir's recollection of this Dantean moment is the notable absence of Dante's
guide, Beatrice. Imperial
is

signaling the difference of his text (although he has

no guide

at this

point, he does not

need one), indicating

in this

way

that

he

does not need the stimulus of an explicit guide to undergo the Ovidian transformation. This claim, of course, constitutes a remarkable transgression of the

"allegory," "history," and "story,"

i.e.,

a fiction

which
as

is

clearly

not what Dante had in

mind.
''

Imperial seems to be rewriting

Ovid

as

well

Dante in the reference to Marsyas. For

lost.

while Marsyas challenged the master (Apollo) to a contest and

Imperial wins his contest

with Dante.

He

is

certainly not the loser.

MARINA

S.

BROWNLEE

67

Dantean teleology, whereby first Virgil, then Beatrice and ultimately Saint Bernard painstakingly guide Dante-pilgrim on his unprecedented journey. Imperial's transformation is motivated instead by his unmediated gazing into the
stars

themselves:

En
e

sueiios

veya en

el

Oriente

quatro f ercos que

tres cruzes fa^ian,

non puedo
los

dezir conplidamente
las tres

commo

quatro e

luzian;

enpero atanto que a mi movian, commo movio Glauco gustar la yerva por que fue fecho de una conserva con los dioses que las mares rregian. (vv. 41-48)

way his difference firom Dante as both from this passage as firom several others, the discontinuity, metadiscursivity, and vivid portrayal of the first-person subject that define the dit operative in the deepest levels of the Dezir s conception and
Thus he underscores
in yet another

poet and protagonist.

We

see

articulation.

Evidence of the strategic choice of fi-agments made by Imperial is oflfered in same octave (vv. 41-48) as we notice that the De^rir conflates Paradiso I, 39 with Purgatorio I, 22-24. Imperial claims to see in a dream the four astronomical signs that Dante saw in his vision (the four circles and three crosses). It is highly significant that Imperial does not claim to have experienced the celestial phenomena during a fully conscious state, as does Dante in his claim to extrathis
terrestrial transport.

More

precisely, Imperial at times claims to be dreaming,

as is

the case in v. 41 for example, but at other times he seems unsure as to

this
is

whether
tion.

in fact the case (e.g., v. 72,

"non

sse sy

dormia o velava"). His

text,

vacillation again distances

him markedly

as

pilgrim fi-om Dante's self-presenta-

We

observe

still

further alterations of the

as

model

however. For

Imperial compUcates his self-presentation

Purgatorio,
I

protagonist in the recasting of

that the circles

when he

claims,

unhke Dante,

and crosses that

make up
upon

the Southern Cross (representing as they did for Dante the four cardinal and three theological virtues) are shining down not upon Cato's face but
his

own.^

This figuring of himself as Cato constitutes yet another seminal transformation of the

model

text,

one which

is

intimately linked with Imperial's specifiat

cally Iberian

concern: his desire to counter corruption

home by

recalling for

'

"Vidi presso di

me un

veglio solo,/
la

degno

di tanta reverenza in vista,/

che piu non dee

a'

padre alcun figliuolo./ Lunga

barba e di pel bianco mista/ portava,

suoi capelli

simigliante,/ de' quai cadeva al petto doppia lista./ Li raggi de le quattro luci sante/ fregiavan
si la

sua faccia di lume,/ ch'i'

'1

vedea come

'1

sol fosse

davante" {Purg.

I,

31-39).

68

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

readers the

his

Roman
civil

exemplar of
corruption,
it

civil

integrity.^

In keeping with his

interest in

exposing

to associate himself with this

makes sense that Imperial would choose symbol of civil integrity. He does not wish to
heavens.
Imperial-protagonist exploits the

retrace
literal

Dante-protagonist's footsteps, particularly his transhumanation, his

spiritual

raptus

into

the

Commedia instead
dise
I I

for his

In an unanticipated

own consummately literary terrestrial journey. inversion, we note that Imperial relies heavily on

Para-

to describe himself while outside the garden, whereas he refers to Inferno

it. Indeed, once Imperial has met Dante, he cites the very Commedia in Spanish: "En medio del camino" (v. 103), describing the volume as being "escripto todo con oro muy fino" (v. 102). Thus

after

he has

entered

first

verse of the

the book itself is concretized, presented as a material object, again in keeping with the concept of "second-degree literature" that is so important to the extreme literary self-consciousness of the dit. Imperial is, moreover, casting Dante into the role of guide, just as Dante before him had cast Virgil. Here too, however, Imperial distinguishes his literary project from that of his predecessor. For while Virgil was a pagan guide unable to accompany Dante on his celestial voyage, Dante remains by Imperial's side until the moment of his awakening with the Commedia open in his hands at the "Salve Regina" of the last canto of Paradiso (XXXIII, 1). Imperial is not only valorizing Dante as the consummate guide, he is endowing him with a truly novel attribute, namely, a passionate interest in Iberia. That is, it is he who will explain to Imperial why the seven virtues depicted as stars never appear in Iberia (vv. 280ff.).

Dante's

first

appearance to Imperial

is

presented in reverential terms, leading

the unsuspecting reader (unfamiliar with the

marked

differences that separate

Dante's literary project from Imperial's) to think that

we

are witnessing a case

of straightforward emulation. The Spanish poet registers his respect for the poeta in no uncertain terms, first by his action and subsequently by his speech: "faciendole devyda rreverencia,/ e dixele con toda obedien^ia:/ 'Afectuossamente a vos me ofresco/ e maguer tanto de vos non meresco,/ ssea mi guya vuestra alta cyen^ia" (w. 107-12). Dante takes his poetic disciple by the hand (v. 121) as the latter literally follows in his footsteps (v. 122). These indications of filial indebtedness are double edged. Imperial views Dante as being in a category by himself as far as western poetry is concerned, a point that few if any other readers would dispute. Imperial not only indicates this profound

In the Conuivio and in

De

Monardiia Dante praises Cato unreservedly in the following

terms:

"O

most sacred breast of Cato,

who

shall

presume
.
. .

to speak

of thee? Assuredly there

the world
it

can be no greater speech about thee than to be

silent.

We

read of Cato that he thought

all
. . .

of himself
to

as

bom, not

for himself, but for his country

in the

and for

that

he

might kindle the love of hberty

world he showed of what worth

it

was, for he chose

Sinclair's

go

forth

from Ufe

free rather than

remain in

without hberty." (Quoted from

transbtion of Dante [1975], Purgatory commentary, 28-29.)

MARINA

S.

BROWNLEE

69

admiration for Dante explicitly, he implicitly yet very visibly controls the
details

of the Commedia
it

in a

way

that

few other writers have. (Indeed, one

is

hard put to think of other texts that afford such an extensive and programmatic

treatment of

in

any language.) Nonetheless, the wealth of recontextualibelie his self-presentation as

zations effected
scribe

by Imperial

humble and

faithful

of the Florentine

maestro.

In addition to the re writings already discussed, further corroboration of

Imperial's flagrant tampering with his literary
after his self-presentation as literally

model

is

offered immediately

following in Dante's footsteps, with

bowed

baxos por no perder tino," 123). Just as Imperial had encapsulated the experience of Paradiso by including the first and last invocations at

head

("los ojos

the beginning of the Dezir, he similarly minimizes the importance of the

experience of Purgatorio. Whereas Dante-protagonist had had to undergo an

educative process at the end of which the "P's" ('*peccati"/sins) visible on his

forehead would be erased, signaling the successful completion of his course. Imperial has little interest in the experiential process of the master. So as to
crystallize for the discerning reader his rewriting

Imperial will, moreover, invert the order of

two important

of the matter of Purgatory figures from the

Commedia: Leah and Metellus,

Purgatorio (cantos

who

correspond to the entrance to the Dantean

representation of the entrance into the Earthly Paradise and the exit from

XXVII and IX

respectively).
its

In the third purgatorial dream, the prelude to the Earthly Paradise and

threshold, Leah appears

Imperial recalls this

making a garland of flowers. By means of paranomasia, moment: "^non oyes Lia con canto grafiosso/ que destas
(w. 143-44).

flores ssu guirlanda lya?"

He

is

recalling this final purgatorial

scene

at

the beginning of his

his alteration
is

own

journey, thus altering the Dantean place-

even more far-reaching, aimed, once more, at not dreamed his celestial voyage. Dante, immediately before his sighting of Leah, indicated that he fell asleep. In Imperial's text Dante assumes that Imperial too falls asleep: "Creo que duermes o estas ofiosso" (v. 141). Imperial, however, differentiates himself from his
Dante's claim to having experienced

ment. Yet

poetic predecessor by answering his guide, saying

this

"non duermo"

(v.

145).

At

response Dante reproaches his charge: " 'ssy non duermes eres omme rudo./ <;Non ves que tu eres ya Uegado/ en medio del rrosal en verde prado?/

Mira adelante las ssyete estrellas'" (vv. 147-49). Imperial here conflates the figure of Leah with the beholding of the celestial bodies that occurs in Paradise. The creative misreading of the Commedia extends even further as we note
the reference

made

to the noble Metellus in verse 374. Exhorting the citizens

of the

city

he

castigates to act nobly. Imperial writes:

'Ora te alegra, que fazes derecho, pues que triunphas con justi^ia e paz, e multiplica de trecho en trecho
tanto el bien, que

por

el

el uno al otro comun; cada uno mas faz

faz

70

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

que
fizo

en

Roma

Metilo tribune;
colore su
faz.

mira e vee sy en ty ay uno

que cate

al fielo e

(w. 369-76)

Historically, Metellus achieved legendary status as a result

of

his

courageous

(although vain) attempt to defend the

Roman

treasury against Julius Caesar in

ry,

49 B.C. In describing the opening of the door of the sacred portal of PurgatoDante draws upon a passage from Lucan {Pharsalia III, 15357, 16768),

stating that: e

quando fuor
li

ne' cardini distorti

spigoli di quella regge sacra,

forti,

che di metallo son sonanti e

non rugghio si ne mostro si acra Tarpea, come tolto le fu il buono

Metello, per che poi rimase macra. (IX, 133-38)

[when the pivots of that sacred portal, which are of metal resounding and strong, were turned within their hinges, Tarpea roared not so loud nor showed itself so stubborn, when the good Metellus was taken from it, leaving it lean thereafter.]
association with Leah in opposed to Dante-pilgrim. The Dezir grafts the description of voices singing in praise of God that follows immediately after the mention of Metellus onto Leah {Dezir 129-36). Canto
is

Canto IX

further recalled

by the Dezir by

its

terms of the music heard by Imperial-pilgrim

as

IX

reads:

lo

mi

rivolsi attento al

primo tuono,
al

e Te

Deum

laudamus mi parea
dolce suono.

udire in voce mista

Tale imagine a punto mi rendea

cio ch'io udiva, qual prender
si

suole

quando
ch'or
[I

a cantar

con organi

si

stea;

si

or no s'intendon
first

le parole, (vv.

13946)

turned attentive to the

note, and "te

Deum

laudamus"

seemed

to hear in a voice mingled with sweet music.

heard gave

me

the same impression

What I we sometimes get when

people are singing with an organ, and

now

the words are clear

and

now

are not.]

Similarly, Imperial writes:

.

oy bozes

muy

asonssegadas,

mussycado canto; mas eran lexos de mi aun tanto que las non entendi a las vegadas.
angelicales e

MARINA
'Manet in
et
caritate,

S.

BROWNLEE
in eo,

71

Deus manet
alii

credo in Deum,'
las

sse rrespondia,

e a

vezes, 'Espera in Deo,'

alii

aquesto entendi en cuanto

oya.

(w. 12532)

The inversion effected by Imperial in the beginning and ending of Purgatorio with Leah and Metellus, like the encapsulation of the first and ninth invocations of Paradiso, reminds us that Imperial is not interested in reproducing the empirical journey of Dante-pilgrim or Dante-poet. Instead he is interested in
model text to treat it as a discontinuous and metacritical manner, manner of the late medieval dit. If we consider the eponymous seven virtues themselves, we see that here too Imperial has effected a notable transformation of his model text. In Purrecalling the

in the

gatorio

XXIX,

that
is

is,

the virtues serve as Beatrice's handmaidens, while in the

as

Dezir Beatrice

conspicuously absent

mediator between the earthly and

divine spheres of existence.

It is

not simply a question of eliminating Dante's personal muse that Imperi-

Wisdom

by the erasure of Beatrice in his poem. For Beatrice (represented as personified) is borne in a triumphal cart drawn by a griffin (first mentioned in XXIX, 108) who is Christ himself, described as "la fiera/ ch'e sola una persona in due nature" [the animal that is one person in two natures] (Purg. XXXI, 80-81) to Beatrice and the pilgrim Dante. Dante dwells on this
al effects

unprecedented
follows:

moment

in literature (his viewing

of Christ the

Griffin) as

Mille

disiri

piu che fiamma caldi

li

strinsermi

occhi a
'1

li

occhi rilucenti,
saldi.

che pur sopra

grifone stavan
il

Come
la

in lo specchio
fiera

sol,

non

altrimenti

doppia

dentro vi raggiava,
altri

or con

altri,

or con

reggimenti.

Pensa

letter, s'io

mi
la
si

maravigliava,

quando vedea

cosa in se star queta,

trasmutava. (vv. 118-26)

e ne I'idolo suo

[A thousand desires hotter than flame held

ing eyes that remained ever fixed on the

my

eyes

griffin.

on the shinAs the sun in a

mirror, so was the twofold animal gleaming there within, now with the one, now with the other bearing. Think, reader, if I marveled when I saw the thing stand still in itself, and in its image changing.]

This type of vision

the Dezir.

indeed any

christological vision

is

notably absent in
is

We

see here, as in prior details of the

poem,

that Imperial

not

interested in replicating the religious journey of Dante-pilgrim or the poetic

journey of Dante-poet. In recasting this most crucial media, Imperial diverges once again from his model.

moment

in the Corn-

72

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

Not only is

the privileged sighting of the Griffin and of Wisdom personified

in the figure of Beatrice absent, the seven virtues are presented in an entirely
different way. In the Commedia we are told by the Virtues that they are the handmaidens of Beatrice: "Pria che Beatrice discendesse al mondo,/ fiimmono ordinate a lei per sue ancelle" [Before Beatrice descended to the world we were ordained to her for her handmaids] (XXXI, 107-108).

Imperial further distinguishes his Virtues firom the Dantean ones by his

mode of description.

In the Commedia they are introduced in a most undetailed manner. They are mentioned in connection with Dante's baptism in XXXI:
Asperges

me

si

dolcemente

udissi,

che nol so rimembrar, non ch'io lo

scriva.

La

donna ne le braccia aprissi; abbracciommi la testa e mi sommersi ove convenne ch'io I'acqua inghiottissi.
bella

Indi

mi

tolse, e
la

bagnato m'offerse
le

dentro a

danza de

quattro belle;
coperse.

e ciascuna del braccio

mi

'Noi siam qui ninfe e nel ciel siamo stelle; pria che Beatrice discendesse al mondo,

fummo
Merrenti a

ordinate a
li

lei

per sue ancelle.

occhi suoi;

ma

nel giocondo
i

lume ch'e dentro aguzzeranno

le tre di la,

tuoi
(vv.

che miran piu profondo.'

98111)

[I
it,

heard "Asperges
far less

write

it.

me" sung so sweetly that I cannot remember The fair lady opened her arms, clasped my
under, where
it

head and dipped

the water.

me
she

behooved me

to swallow of

Then

drew me
are

forth and led

me

bathed into the

dance of the four

her arm. "Here

fair

ones, and each of

them covered me with

heaven

we

nymphs and

in

we

are stars:

before Beatrice descended to the world

we were

ordained to her

for her handmaids. We will bring you to her eyes; but in the joyous light that is within them the three on the other side, who look deeper, shall quicken yours."]

Shortly thereafter

(v.

131), the four cardinal Virtues refer to the three

theological ones with equal brevity, as "I'altre tre" [the other three].

What

is

important in the Dantean text

identity as the

is

redefines these venerable fixtures

He of Christian allegory with their radically new

not their description but their speech.

handmaidens of Beatrice.

By contrast, the Dezir offers elaborate descriptions of each of the Virtues. One hundred and nineteen verses of a total four hundred sixty-five, that is,
over one-fourth of the entire poem,
is

devoted to the detailed descriptions of

these extraordinary ladies. And, not only does Imperial rewrite the Dantean

presentation by offering a plethora of precise details, he offers in addition an

MARINA

S.

BROWNLEE
his

73

entourage of handmaidens for each Virtue. Again,

contrastively. If we turn to the presentation

aim

is

to recall

Dante

of one of the Virtues for compari-

we find, first of all, that Imperial recasts the Dantean Virtues's claim that heaven they are stars, while in the Earthly Paradise they are nymphs (XXXI, 106107). Imperial tells us that "fforma de duena en cada estrella/ se demostrava, e otrossy fazian/ en cada rrayo forma de doncella" (w. 15355). He goes on to describe their geometric shapes and their respective colors, as well as the characteristic activity in which they are each engaged. There follows a list of each Virtue's handmaidens (ranging in number firom six to ten). These obvious differences are intended to remind the reader of the distance separating Imperial's enterprise from that of his predecessor. The Virtues
son,
in

themselves, not their subservience to

Clearly, the

someone

else, are

important for Imperial.

most commented departure from Dante is that of the seven personified serpents who occupy a total of fifty verses, or approximately oneninth of the entire text. Since they are seven in number, critics have often been tempted to view the serpents (identified variously as serpientes, sierpes, or bestias) as the seven deadly sins designated by Christian belief Yet the textual details of the Dezir do not support such a reading. The theory advanced by
Clarke,
tian

which views
is,

the serpents as historical heresies according to the Chris-

church

in

my

view,

far

more convincing. She

writes:

The

is that the accumulation of and especially the contemporary attempts to splinter the Roman CathoUc Church, bringing or having brought about a (presumed) reversion to debauchery and heathenism via contempt for all morality, is ending (or will soon end) in the complete destruction of Christianity and all its beauties. (1992, 80)

explanation of the serpientes probably

attacks

on

Christianity,

Roman
(the

According to her interpretation, the emperor, Nero, who set Rome

as a
first

first

serpent (vv. 316-17) refers to the

afire,

blamed the Christians

for

it,

and
the

persecuted them
Father.

consequence. The second (w. 318-20)

refers to

Arius

Christian heretic),

who

denied the equahty of Christ with

is

God

The

third (vv. 321-26)

identified as Judas Escariot,

who

betrayed

Christ and,

more

broadly, Judaism itself

The

fourth serpent

is

Alenxada (w.
as
is

33336), that is, Lexada, a reference to Pedro de Luna, otherwise known Benedict XIII, who reigned as antipope during the Great Schism. Next
serpent five, the Sierpe Calixta (w. 337-40),

Huss, a priest

who

lived

John during the time of Benedict XIII and who was

Clarke identifies
as

whom

burned

at

the stake for advancing the belief that the

as

communion

calix

should

be given to laymen

well

as priests.

Asyssyna

(vv.

341-44), the sixth serpent,

of Assassins, founded in 1090, whose members were and murder. The final serpent, Sardanapalas (vv. 345-48), supposed king of Assyria is, as Clarke affirms, "virtually a synonym for complete moral and spiritual dissolution" (79). This historically based interpretation of the serpents is a compelling one, since the entire thrust of the Dezir is historical, given the timely poUtical, civil.
refers to the Islamic sect

known

for engaging in drugs

74

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

and personal castigation leveled by Imperial against the Seville of his day.^ It moreover, Dante's extended castigation of Florence. Yet, here too the reference to the seven heresies and to the serpent as well finds a model in the Commedias longest canto (Purg. XXXII, 109-60). The fox that invades Beatrice's cart (and that she herself drives away) in this section represents the Christian heresies. In speaking of false teachers, Ezechiel writes: "Quasi vulpes in desertis prophetae tui" (13, 4) [Thy prophets are like the
recalls,

foxes in the desert].

The

serpent (identified

represents the devil, "the old serpent" of the

is

first as a dragon, XXXII, Book of Revelation (XII,

131)
9). It
is

important to note, moreover, that

when

the dragon's invasion of the cart

is

referred to a second time (in

XXXIII,

34), "serpente"

the term chosen

by

Dante.

Beginning in verse 109, Dante represents,

as

Singleton explains:

seven principal calamities that have successively befallen the Church and are an offense to God's justice as represented by the tree. Such calamities,
affecting the tree

and the Church which

is

reunited to

it,

are

termed

"blasphemies of act" in Purg. XXXIII, 58-59. (1970-76, 797)

Dante depicts as the first heresy Nero's persecution of the Christians, and it is no accident that Imperial followed him in this regard. In the Commedia an
eagle (the Imperial Eagle) attacks the tree, rending
leaves, thereafter attacking the car as well
as a
its

trunk, dispersing

its

with

all its

force,

which

is

depicted

foundering

ship:
'1

feri

carro di tutta sua forza;

el

ond'

piego

come nave

in fortuna,

vinta da I'onda, or da poggia, or da orza.

(XXXII, 115-17)
[And
it

struck the chariot with

all its

force, so that

it

reeled like

a ship in a tempest, driven

by the waves,

now

to starboard,

now

to larboard.]

The second
the

heresy depicted by Dante, using the invasion of the cart by the

is

of Gnosticism. The third great threat to of materialism, that is, the acquisition of temporal riches resulting from the "Donation of Constantine." Dante depicts this situation by having the Imperial Eagle swoop down over the cart, leaving it covered with its feathers ("di se pennuta," v. 126). The fourth calamity is the heresy of Mohammedanism (vv. 130-35), depicted by the dragon that thrusts its envenomed tail through the cart's floor, dragging away part of the
fox (vv. 118-23),

most

likely that
is

Church

(vv.

124-29)

that

''

The

fact that the

seven-headed hydra

is

the

emblem of Seville

lends further authority

to the historically specific interpretation

of the

beasts.

MARINA
floor as
it

S.

BROWNLEE

75

Dante addresses the fifth disaster (w. 136-41), recaUing once again the danger of material wealth in a historical context. He wheels and effects this by presenting the cart as entirely choked by feathers
departs. Thereafter

pole included.

Of this

scene of transformation Singleton remarks:

This no doubt refers to the Donations of Pepin (A.D. 755) and Charles the Great (A.D. 775), and other similar and rapidly growing accessions

of wealth and endowments to the Church. Dante graphically says the change was effected before his eyes in less time than a mouth remains open in uttering a sigh (v. 141). These possessions had now become so vast as to alter the whole aspect of the Church, and to bring about a complete transformation of its original character (v. 142). (1970-76, 803)

The
47):

sixth threat alluded to

by Dante

is

that

of the seven deadly

sins (vv.

142-

Trasformato cosi
mise fuor
tre

'1

dificio santo
le parti sue,

teste
'1

per
e

sovra

temo

una ciascun canto.

Le prime eran cornute come bue, ma le quattro un sol corno avean per fronte: simile mostro visto ancor non fue. (vv. 14247)
[Thus transformed, the holy structure put forth heads upon its on the pole and one on each corner: the three were like horned oxen, but the four had a single horn on the forehead. Such a monster was never seen before.]
parts, three

These hideously deformed beasts also serve as analogues for Imperial's bestias. The seventh and final danger depicted by Dante brings us back to history once more, indeed, to a historical moment contemporary with Dante's lifetime. It refes to the Avignon captivity of 1305, the removal of the papal seat from Rome to Avignon under Clement V, represented in terms borrowed from the Apocalypse: the cart is no longer occupied by Beatrice or by the ideal papacy but by a harlot (vv. 148-60). Of this amazing passage, this seventh and final vicissitude, E. Moore observes: "This brings the panorama of the Church's history comparatively near to Dante's own time. Henceforth we have depicted contemporary troubles, and notably the Avignon captivity from 1305 onwards. These form the seventh and last tribulations here figured" (1968,
208-209).

Dante writes

as follows:

Sicura, quasi rocca in alto

monte,
intorno pronte;

seder sovresso una puttana sciolta

m'apparve con
e

le ciglia
li

come perche non

fosse tolta,

vidi di costa a lei dritto

un

gigante;

76

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

e basciavansi insieme alcuna volta.

Ma perche
a

I'occhio cupido e vagante

me

rivolse, quel feroce

drudo

la flagello dal

poi, di

capo sospetto pieno

il

infin le piante;
e d'ira crudo,
trassel

disciolse

mostro, e
lei

per

la selva,

tanto che sol di

a la puttana e a la

mi

fece scudo

nova

belva.

(w. 148-60)

[Secure, like a fortress

an ungirt harlot

sitting

on a high mountain, there appeared to me upon it [the monster], with eyes quick to
order that she should not be taken

rove around; and,

as if in

saw standing at her side a giant, and they kissed each other again and again. But because she turned her lustful and wandering eye on me, that fierce paramour beat her from head to foot. Then, full of jealousy and fierce with rage, he loosed the monster and drew it through the wood so far that only of that he made a shield from me for the harlot and for the strange beast.]
I

from him,

According to Moore, Philip the Fair is the principal monarch represented giant, who is also meant to recall other notorious members of the French royal family (cf. Purg. XX). Their occasional intrigues with various popes (e.g., Urban IV, Clement IV, Martin IV, Nicholas IV), which are depicted by Dante as the caresses exchanged by the giant and harlot (v. 153), were replaced by the enmity of Philip and Boniface VIII. The attacks on Boniface carried out by the myrmidons of Philip Nogaret and Sciarra at Anagni (see Purg. XX, 85ff.) are suggested by the giant's scourging of the harlot, her former lover (vv. 155-56). In a wrathful rage, the giant unties the chariot from the tree, carrying it, along with the harlot, out of sight. This action signals the transfer of the papal seat from Rome to Avignon during the papacy of Clement V, in 1305 (Moore 1968, 209). In sum, the Dantean depiction of seven heresies by means of monstrous beasts offers another indisputable model for the Dezir, another textual nexus for Imperial to endow with his own metaliterary purpose. The final Dantean nexus I would like to address in terms of Imperial's poem is that of the Celestial Rose. This phenomenon, as Dante explains in Paradiso IV, 28-63, is not a literal but a metaphorical space an accommodative metaphor, an analogy by which the truth of God is made accessible to man. Of such metaphor in Paradiso Robert Hollander writes:

by the

As Beatrice explains in Canto IV: Paradise, that is, the actual place where God is, is the Empyrean. Thus the rest of Paradiso, that is, the poem, is not Paradise, but an accommodative metaphor {Par. IV, 28-63), actually a series of nine metaphors, in which the truth of Heaven is gradually made clear by the kind of analogy that Grace alone affords, as spirits who actually dwell in the Empyrean with God descend from their seats in the

MARINA
celestial

S.

BROWNLEE
meaning of

77

stadium-rose to

make

the hierarchical structure and

God's truth

known

to

man. (1969, 192)

function, and in keeping with the remotivation of
for his

Aware of this metaphorical

Dante effected by Imperial
into

own

metaliterary purposes, Imperial offers

6465 Dante describes the flowers "Di tal fiumana uscian faville vive,/ e d'ogne parte si mettien ne'fiori" [From out of this river issued living sparks and dropped on every side into the blossoms]. There follows in verses 9199 the moment in which Dante has an unmediated vision of God, one that is effected by the angels in the flowers:
us literal roses instead. In Paradiso

XXX,

which

living sparks (angels) descend:

Poi,

come gente
altro

stata sotto larve,

che prima, se si sveste sembianza non siia in che disparve, cosi mi si cambiaro in maggior feste
la
li

che pare

fiori e le faville,
le corti

si

ch'io vidi

ambo

del ciel manifeste.

isplendor di Dio, per cu'io vidi

I'alto triunfo del

regno verace,

dammi
[Then,
as folk

virtu a dir

com'

io

il

vidi!

who have been under masks seem other than do off the semblances not their own wherein they were hid, so into greater festival the flowers and the sparks did change before me that I saw both the courts of Heaven made manifest. O splendor of God whereby I saw the high triumph of the true kingdom, give to me power to tell how I beheld it!]
before, if they

This moment, where Dante begins to see God face to face (culminating in XXXIII, 139-45), is clearly the culmination of Dante-pilgrim's and Dante-poet's experience. One cannot imagine a greater spiritual or poetic atPar.

tainment. Precisely for this reason, and in keeping with his programmatic desacralizing in the Dezir, Imperial denies his pilgrim the

same Dantean experi-

ence.

He

writes:

'E pues amansaste

la

con

el

bever

mi

grant sed,

dame, poeta,

non se dezir quanto, que yo non sse ver

canten este canto.'
espanto,

commo

estas rossas
'Fijo,

Dixome:

non tomes

ca en estas rrosas estan Serafynes,

Domina^iones, Tronos, Cherubines, mas non lo vedes, que te ocupa el manto.'

(vv.

449-56)

We
as

vision. This

is unable to experience the unmediated of course, in keeping with Imperial's recasting of the Cotnmedia "second-degree literature." For, what he does is to turn Dante's metaphori-

see that the pilgrim of the Dezir

is,

78

FRANCISCO IMPERIAL AND POETIC GENEALOGY

which point which he
to
is

cal roses,

unmediated
unable to

Hteral angels into Uteral roses

and medi-

ated angels,

see.

Thus he
allegoresis,

consistently turns the

Commedia into

a
is

more

limited form of
to the tenets

representation and language. Although he

faith,

committed

of the Christian
book."^
It is

he writes not a

religious allegory but an "allegory

of the

interesting to note, in addition, that the reception of the

Com-

media in France had an analogous fortune during the same time period in
Christine de Pizan's Chemin de longue estude (1403) (in this context, see
lee 1993).

Brown-

Imperial crystallizes this mise-en-abyme of Dante's celestial journey by having

two verses of the Dezir end with a curious reference to the first line oi Paradise XXXIII: "Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio." Instead of referring to a canto or verso, however. Imperial speaks of "el capitulo que la Virgen
the final
salva" (v. 464). This prose marker, the chapter,
is

used to differentiate the

second text from the

first,

to alert the reader in yet a different

two

vastly different literary projects constituted

manner of the by the Commedia and the

Commedia s function as second-degree literature is and concretized by the fact that these last two lines present Imperial the protagonist as waking up with a copy of the Commedia the

Dezir. Further proof of the

totally explicit

made

the discontinuity, metadiscursivity, and primacy of the first-person subject at issue in the late medieval French dit. It is by means of a narratological analysis of the Commedia and the Dezir thsx Imperial's profound knowledge of Dante as well as his daring remotivation of this vernacular fZMctor becomes visible. In this way may Imperial justifiably, without being contradictory, be termed a poeta dezidor.

book itself as object, not the The Dezir boldly exploits

vision or experience

it

depicts

in his hands.

University of Pennsylvania

'"

Once

again,

it is

the

estoria

created

by Imperial,

his fictional

journey based on

his

"history of the intertext," that predominates.

Silent Subtexts

and Cancionero Codes:

On

Garcilaso de la Vega's Revolutionary Love

AURORA HERMIDA RUIZ

The most

specialized criticism of the sixteenth-century Spanish lyric has

frequently regarded the literary transcendence of the Renaissance with

a partial and subjective radicalism. Renaissance poetry has been taken to be an unprecedented cultural triumph, represented in rhetorical terms as the victory of progress over tradition, modernity over primitivism, or, simply, culture and civilization over poetic barbarism. For the history of Spanish poetry, the arrival of Petrarchism stands less for an alternative source of poetic imitation, or liter-

ary fashion, than for a simple and definitive rupture with a

past.

most forgettable

Vega, reputed to be the first representative of Petrarchism in Spain, independently of all earlier Castilian poets, rises up to become "el fundador de nuestra lengua hrica, la cual, hoy mismo, esta en la
la

Thus Garcilaso de

would have have defended fifteenth-century Castilian poetics for their coarse "reproches nacionalistas" and their "valoracion mezquina, insuficiente y, por fortuna, superada desde hace aiios entre los mejores garcilasistas" (1986, 110-11).
es el."

misma cadena cuyo primer eslabon

us believe, but only after

Or

so Lazaro Carreter

denouncing those

critics

who

In the same way, Francisco Rico not only exposes the aggressive rhetoric of

humanism but
the
fact: in

ocultar

become one of its champions. Nor does he hide los barbaros, Rico writes, "No puedo que aun manteniendo algunas trazas de objetividad yo mismo he
revives
it

to

the prologue to Nebrija contra

tomado partido en
tas,

la

pelea de que cuento unos pocos lances. Por los humanis-

desde luego, contra los barbaros" (1978b, 9;

my

emphasis).

With
to

contemptuous
338])
as

rhetoric,

Rico denigrates what he considers

the same be Castilian

precursors to Garcilaso's Petrarchism

so

(his "prehistoria 'a la castellana'"

[1978a,

many

"malditas coplas" (325) of one "pecador" or another (328).^

This humanist rhetoric can be traced even in the

earliest revisionary

judgments oi can-

80

GARCILASO DE LA VEGA'S REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

There have been studies, nevertheless, that have tried to tone down this combative rhetoric while attempting to account for the actual permanence of cancionero poetry in the Golden Age; the studies by Jose Manuel Blecua (1952), Rafael Lapesa (1967), and Antonio Prieto (1984) are the most notable.^ Approaching the question as an urgent problem of literary historiography, Blecua proclaimed the need to include and consider fifteenth-century poetry in the literary histories of the Golden Age as fundamental for any understanding of "la profunda originalidad de la poesia barroca" (24).-^ In doing so, Blecua not only undermined the concept of struggle between ancients and moderns as a failed model of historical periodization but also discredited it as a simplistic overview of the poetic panorama of the Golden Age. After Blecua, Castilian poetry could not be seen anymore as the waning tradition of some reactionary traditionalists (Castillejo is the exemplary case) but as a "parallel" undercurrent
to the Italianate fashion,
still

palpable in later generations of poets."*

the
re-

Even acknowledging the vitality of the cancionero tradition throughout Golden Age, the concept of struggle between Castilian and Italian poetics

mains a historiographical problem in Lapesa and Antonio Prieto, hidden under the guise of a debate over aesthetic value. Following a general tendency in Garcilaso studies (Rico 1978a), both critics tend to evaluate cancionero poetry for its lack of poetic ideals akin to Petrarchism and not on its own aesthetic terms. ^ The implied impartiality of the chapter heading, "El ayuntamiento de dos practicas poeticas" (Prieto 1984, 37-58), for example, does not prevent Prieto firom subsequently succumbing to the temptation to malign cancionero poetry as obsolete and unrefined, to which the Renaissance will ultimately "otorgar cultura," "salvar," and "ennoblecer" (43). Working back chronologically from Prieto to the conclusions of Lapesa in his "Poesia de cancionero y poesia italianizante" (1967), one sees how little attitudes have changed after many years of debate and how central the establishment of this rigid hierarchical opposition has been for Garcilaso studies: "En general, la orientacion italoclasica Uevaba un concepto de la poesia mucho mas elevado que el de mere

cionero poetry.

Already in the "Justa poetica" in honor of San

Isidro,

Lope de Vega made the

first

gesture of recognizing the wit of "aquellos ingenios maravillosos" but not without

par-

doning them for the "grosera" and "barbara lengua de que usaban"
46).

(ed.

Carreno 1984, 145in his

^Julian Weiss

is

currendy studying
Its

this

problem of ruptures and continuities

are

book

in progress, Medieval Verse and

^

Renaissance.
is

Although the
For
a

original study

from 1952, the references here

critical

from the reprinted

version of 1970.
^

more

specific

example of this

approach, see also Otis H. Green's study

on

courdy love in Quevedo (1952). ^ It was Keith Whinnom who

the esthetics of cancionero poetry:
tica a la

first

proposed the need for an immanent approach towards

el cual se

"uno en

pospone

el ejercicio

de apreciacion este-

determinacion

estadistica del ideal estetico

contemporaneo" (1968-69, 369).

AURORA HERMIDA RUIZ

entretenimiento o habilidad celebrada en
la

corte" (222;

my

emphasis).''

The radical view of the Renaissance has led not only to a disdain for cancionero poetry but also to an almost mythical regard for the place of Garciwhat Rico, for example, boldly laso in post-1526 Spanish literary history

proclaims to be a "nuevo universo poetico" (1978b, 336), "revolucion poetica," and "mutation brusque" (1976, 50). But this emphasis on the primacy and
originality

of Garcilaso

may be

misleading.

On

the one hand, the persistance

of love as supposed revolutionary status of Garcilaso. To solve the problem, idealist criticism offers what has become the classic answer: that Garcilaso brings to Spanish poetics not only a "true" understanding of Petrarch's poetic language (as Rico would have it) and a "higher" concept of poetry (as we have seen with Lapesa) but an entirely new idea of love: the concept of love proposed by
neoplatonic philosophy and perceived in Petrarch's Canzoniere
as its best

the subject matter of poetry "par excellence" could attenuate the

ex-

pression. Alexander Parker views the change as a "gradual modification" in

which the cancionero's obsessive conflict with carnal desire (always unfulfilled, by his definition) is finally overcome, thus achieving the highest possible degree of idealization and glorification of human love (1985, 4243).^ In the end, Garcilaso's assimilation of neoplatonic mysticism and Petrarchan style and concepts made poetry a much more worthy enterprise since, after all, it relates
to a
is

much

higher

human

endeavor: the search for individual transcendence.

It

this

metaphysical status of Garcilaso's poetry that has finally exacerbated the

tendency to trivialize the cancionero tradition as nothing more than an entertaining "pastime" for amateurs with no vital commitment whatsoever to love,

and posterity (see again Lapesa 1985). struggle and distance between Italian and Castilian muses seems to be less radical, however, if we think of Petrarchism from a less idealistic point of view. Leonard Forster recommends that specialists of European Petrarchism should lower their expectations for profundity and originality from a movement that was so highly codified and fashionable. After all, Petrarchism became "le dernier cri" of poetic fashion around Europe for reasons that, according to Forster, were much more trivial than many critics are willing to accept: it seems unreasonable to reproach Petrarchist poets with imitating precisely those
art,

The

'*

Although

this

study

initially

appeared in 1962,

refer to the version

reproduced in the

revised edition of Z^ trayectoria poetica de Garcilaso de

is

la

Vega (1985, 213-54). Lapesa's opinion

traditional poetry

a direct

though moderate inheritance of Menendez Pelayo's views on the

".
.

of Boscan:

coplas de cancionero, versos sin ningun genero de pasion, devaneos insulsos

sutiles

que parecen imaginarios, conceptos

pronto dichas

como

olvidadas, burlas y motejos

y alambicados, agudezas de sarao palaciego tan que no sacan sangre: algo, en suma, que

recrea agradablemente el oido sin dejar ninguna impresion

'

en

el

alma" (1908).

For Parker, the fifteenth-century poets were

also in search

of "some

sort

of aspiration

or ideal" (1985, 17) which gave transcendental value to

to
all

human

love, while only

managing

do so "in

a confiised

way"

(43).

By emphasizing

this trascendental

value of poetic activity,

poetry before Garcilaso appears to be, once again, a failed project.

82

GARCILASO DE LA VEGA'S REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

aspects of Petrarch's poetry that were imitable and with neglecting those that were not. Moreover, they had their reasons for wishing to imitate. These were first of all social; these poets were living in a society in which love was one of the most important subjects of conversation and consequently of poetry and song. Everybody was expected to participate, and poetry was mostly not so

much
talk,

the baring of the soul as a heightened kind of social small

a

talk.

Small

however heightened, can only operate within

a conventional idiom, otherwise
it

conventional framework

and with
62-63).

ceases to be small (Forster 1969,

Thinking more of the material connections between Garcilaso and

quited love but
court,
as

cancionero

poets, Garcilaso appears not only as another poet writing mainly about unre-

another

member of
of /

the nobility writing love poetry at

a courtier traditionally proves
I

one of the many

exercises in
I

which

himself (see specially

Book

cortesano; Castiglione 1980). In this essay,

propose to challenge traditional poetry of both Garcilaso and the

ventions but
as social

literary historiography

by reexamining the
as

cancionero tradition,

not only

poetic con-

of radical change and modernity that has traditionally marked the distance between Garcilaso and cancionero poets somehow becomes blurred if we explore and connect the idiomatic character of Garcilaso 's poetic diction with an equally conventional attitude towards love. This, of course, means sacrificing the romantic, idealized notion of Garcilaso as the first Spanish poet to contemplate the feeling of love in the intimate and solitary realm of his soul. It does not mean, however (as it seems to mean for Forster), that the love poetry of Garcilaso will begin to appear just as trivial or forgettable as cancionero ever was or was reputed to be. It is not my purpose here to elevate cancionero poetry to the poetic status of Garcilaso; after Whinnom (1968-69, 1981) it is hardly necessary to justify its aesthetic qualities. Nor do I wish to downgrade Garcilaso. What interests me at this point is to see whether the change of poetic language, that is, the change of literary conventions, entails a parallel and measurable change in the social relations at court, and this issue is far from "small" and trivial. To begin answering these questions, I shall focus on one of the principal topoi o cancionero poetry the "secreto amoroso" as it appears in the work of one of the most representative and famous poets of the Cancionero general: Jorge Manrique.*^ Such noted critics as Otis H. Green (1970, 5357), Keith Whinnom (1968-69, 36), and Nicasio Salvador Miguel (1977, 286-87) have viewed the topos of secrecy as central to the idea of courtly love for the conspicuous position it occupies in the hierarchy of courtly values. It is the first requirement of any noble lover, not only as an essential component of amorous serones
as well. It

seems to

me

that the notion

"

Hernando

del Castillo includes

up

to

46 compositions attributed

to Jorge

Manrique

in

the 1511 edition and, in spite of the disappearance of some after the second edition, the total

number grows

thanks to the inclusion of other, newer poems.

AURORA HERMIDA RUIZ

vice but as the most faithful proof that such service exists in the
first

83

place.

The

entire edifice

of love
el

is

based, as

Diego de San Pedro

tells

us in his

secret: "Pues luego conviene que lo que cora^on cativo, sea sobre cimiento del secreto si quiere su labor sostener y acabar sin peligro de vergiienza."^ On the formation and meaning of the topos of amorous secrecy, Lapesa writes:

Sermon,

on the foundation of the

en

edificare el desseo

Cualidad imprescindible del amador cortes era la reserva: recomendada por todos los manuales de preceptiva amorosa, Uego a constituir un topico literario. Se presenta, de una parte, como consecuencia de la timidez: el enamorado no se atreve a afrontar la posible repulsa y permanece callado, sin descubrir sus sentimientos ante la dama. Por otra parte, el buen nombre de esta exige que no se divulguen las pretensiones y menos
aun,
si

los hay, los favores. (1985, 29)

According to this opinion, the fifteenth-century cancionero poet, composing on the themes of the lover's secrecy and silence, does nothing but repeat a kind of song learned in courtly life, thus confirming a fundamental law of wooing. In contrast to the cancionero poet, the Petrarchist poet draws back completely the veil that covers the woman and dedicates his poetry to her glorification since, according to Lapesa, "es en el mas poderosa la creencia de estar llamado a publicar las excelencias de su amada" (1985, 30; my emphasis).^" We should not forget, however, that cancionero poetry is read, glossed, discussed and debated at court and is itself denounced as a form of publicity by Diego de San Pedro in his Sermdn:

amador deve antes perder la vida, que fama de la que sirviere. E lo que mas deve proveer, es que ... no yerre con priessa lo que puede acertar con espacio; que le hara passar muchas vezes por donde no cunple, a buscar mensajeros que no le convienen, y embiar cartas que le dafien, y bordar invenciones que lo
.

Donde

paresce que todo

escurescer

la

publiquen. (ed.

Whinnom
is

1971, 1:174;

my

emphasis)

This pubhc character

into an ideal courtly

inherent in cancionero poetry, turning poetic activity

for embellishing

medium

and divulging the image of

lover that any

young noble should know how

ser

to "affect," as Juan Alfonso de

Baena puts it in the prologue to his own e que siempre se precie e se finja de

Cancionero:

"E otrosy que sea amador, enamorado" (ed. Azaceta 1966,

Quoted from Obras completas, ed. Whinnom (1971, 1:173-83, at 174). Though Lapesa insists on the discovery of female beauty as one of the main achievements of Petrarchism, it is worth noting that, from a feminist perspective, Nancy J. Vickers
'
'**

points to the opposite direction: that Petrarch never allows a complete picture of Laura to

emerge

in the Canzoniere
full

and

that the resulting

fragmented image

is

an emblematic way of

suppressing her

presence and speech (265-79).


84

GARCILASO DE LA VEGA'S REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

of secrecy seems to be absolutely incompatible

1:15).^^ In principle, the topos

this sense, it becomes necessary meaning of these topoi, to understand both the reasons behind the fifteenth-century insistence upon using them, and the limits of the renovation brought on by Garcilaso's Petrarchism. Manrique's lyric verse provides an ideal model to analyze the application of the topos as a means of courtly propaganda. In two compositions, the poet explicitly declares himself keeper of the law of amorous secrecy. "De la profession que hizo en la orden del amor" (17-19) sees the poet imagining himself inducted into the rank of lover, a position for which he must make a series of

with

this social aspect

of cancionero poetry. In

to reconstruct the social

of the military as Serrano de Haro and Beltran respectively have shown.'-' But the parody also functions inversely to distinguish the suitor as a caballero about to receive a title of nobility. The terms of the parody suggest a contractual agreement in which are implied not only the lover's duties but also his rewards; in other words, the lady's duty to compensate for his service. Manrique promises to be secretive and "guardar toda verdad / que ha de guardar el amante" (11. 34-35) but only after promising his constancy in not complying with the famous vow of chastity, a promise presented as a personal act of will and not as a request for
fiction
is

vows.'^

The

parody of the

rituals

characteristic

orders of

caballeria,

or the religious sacraments of holy orders,

favors.

hardly be
claims

With respect to the service this lover intends to provide, one could more indiscreetly plain: in this new "profession," what the poet prois his sexual ordination. The reference to secrecy only serves to confirm

the existence of a the

now

poetically revealed "truth."

(11.

In the coplas, "Acordaos, por Dios, seiiora"

48-51), the poet addresses

services that

woman

directly so as to

remind her of all the vows and

make

him

deserving of the prize.

The

allusion to the secret ensures that her feminine

reward will not be made public ("Acordaos que soy secreto / acordaos de mi firmeza / y aficion"), while simultaneously reveaUng that such a reward has already been bestowed. Moreover, if the woman were not to grant what "en justicia" belongs to him, then there would no longer be any secret to keep. The woman comes under a severe threat of blame and defamation. In one

" The idea of courtly love

as a

kind of "game" or "social fiction" has been studied by

John Stevens

in the case

of the early Tudor court:

Courtly love provided the aristocracy not only with a philosophy and a psychology of
love but also with a code of social behaviour.
ness,"
It

was

school of manners, of "pohtea lover,

of "chere of court."

Even

if

you were not

you must

at least in

mixed company

act the lover.

(1961, 151)

ume,

For the case of Spanish poetry, see Roger Boase (1977, 103-107) and, in the present volthe articles by Victoria A. Burrus and Ian Macpherson. For a concise reading of the

ideological impHcations of the

''3

game of courtly

love, see

Weiss (1991a).

All references to Manrique's poetry are firom Vicente Beltran's

1988b

edition.

See Beltran (1988b, 17) and Serrano de Haro (1966, 72).

AURORA HERMIDA RUIZ

sense,

85

she lacks any possibility of obtaining forgiveness, either divine or

human:
Acordaos que Uevareis

un
si

tal

cargo sobre vos

matais
lo pagareis

me

que nunca
ante el

mundo

ni ante Dios,

aunque

querais.
is

In another sense, there

no escape from

this suitor's pursuit,

is

and not only

because he boasts of persisting to the death: there

also a "tribunal" or

"police" that protects him, where he promises to seek revenge for any femi-

nine injustice. Thus a collective masculine cause begins to take shape, a cause
that has

even

God on

its

side

and for which the

woman

has

no

defense:

Y
la

aunque yo sufra paciente muerte y de voluntad mucho lo he hecho,

no

faltara

algun pariente

que de quexa a la Ennandad de tan mal hecho. (my emphasis)

It is

disquieting to find a reference to "la Santa

Hermandad,"

powerful

fif-

teenth-century police force, in a

poem

supposedly about love.

real institutions

Once

again

Manrique
sion

disguises as poetic

orders, police corporations

metaphors

institutions that

of the times: military were marked by a sense of cohetheir subordinates.

as

among

their

members and of obedience among

persona
as a

Manrique
special

identifies his poetic

very special lover,

well as a very

by doing so, he inscribes love as an act of power and dominance over women, and as a violent act, if necessary.''* The secret leaves no doubt as to whether the woman offers her favor; on the contrary, the existence of the woman's favor is emphasized precisely by establishing it as something that in fact must remain hidden. Of particular interest is the poet's manipulation of the terms of the topos: it is no longer the evidence of feminine favors that condemns her to infamy and eternal fire but rather the lack of those favors.'^ While we still might think that the woman
organizations, and

member of those

'^

Victoria Burrus has pointed out to

me

another metaphoric use of "la Ermandad" in

poem by

Quiros, where

it is

aimed

at threatening those

women who

forget their presupla vista

posed loyalty in favor of newcomers:

plaziente, / serviros de

"Y en

verdad, / aunque toda novedad / es a

mucha gente

/ sera caso

d'Ermandad" (Dutton 1990-91, ID6733,

acts as

llCG-951, 21 Ir).
'^

Alfonso Martinez de Toledo, in one of the numerous occasions in which he

an

advocate for

women,

also alludes to the threat

of baseless defamation

as a

common

masculine

recourse for forcing the

woman

to yield her honesty:

86

GARCILASO DE LA VEGA'S REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

last

has a right to be even a Httle "unjust" or that the

Manrique
the cancion

leaves her absolutely

is

no capacity

for decision-making.

word belongs to her, The end of

revealing enough: "Consentid que vuestro sea / pues que vuestro

is

quiero ser / y lo sere" (my emphasis). There the masculine one. Woman's only function
this will

only one will here that counts:

to "consent" to the

is

power

that

wants to

represent.'*'

Clearly then, the poetic treatment of the secret transforms a formula, long

considered by
spect for
It is

Green, Whinnom, and Lapesa to be one of renorms, into one that underscores masculine values. a dialectical game in which the achievements of the suitor are "revealed"
critics

such

as

woman

and

social

through the idea of concealment and mystery, underlining masculine virility and silencing only what is of no interest: any decisive role whatsoever for the

woman

in the relationship.'^

Within this same pattern, it is fitting to consider those compositions in which Manrique sets about contriving conceptual games concerning the identity of the beloved. Once again, Diego de San Pedro offers a valuable testimony for interpreting the function of these poetic games:
Guardaos, senores, de una erronia que en
galanes,
la

ley

comen^ando en

la

primera

letra

de

los

enamorada tienen los nombres de la que sirven

es
dellas.

sus invenciones

o cimeras o bordaduras, porque semejante "gentileza"

la

un

pregon con que se hace justicia de

infamia

(1973, 176;

my

emphasis)

There can be no doubt of the

social

dimension of these poetic inventions

Eso mismo digo de

mugeres e

cavalleros burgeses e otras personas de estado

.
. .

o manera qualesquier
vezes por fuer^a
las

que aman locamente.

las fijas

vienen ya en

tal

especie que a

las

de

los

buenos fazen
las

ser malas.

Que, cuando non quieren

a altas horas a sus puertas

las tales

consentir a su voluntad, luego son

disfamaciones, los libellos difamatores puestos

por puertas,

las

palabras injuriosas dichas de

noche

fasta

que, o por fuer^a o por mal grado, se ha de fazer lo que a ellos pluguiere por sobervia

pura e fuer^a, sin temor de Dios nin de

Gerli 1979, 127-28)

la justicia

e sin vergiien^a de

las

gentes. (ed.

'*

third part

Diego de San Pedro employs the same technique of divine of his SemtSn, aimed exclusively at women:
el

threat

and dissuasion in the

Pues para comen^ar

los

proposito, solo por salud de vuestras animas devriades remediar

que

penais,

que

incurris

por

el

tormento que

les dais

en cuatro peccados mortales.

.

E
el

si

esta

razon no bastare sea por no cobrar mala estimacion.

a cada su officio,

Pues dexad, senoras,

la

por Dios, usar

redemir y
el

que para vosotras

es el

amor y

buena condicion y

consolar. (ed.

Whinnom

1971, 1:179-80)

'^

See also Weiss (1991a) for a treatment of this dialectic of display and dissimulation in
love
as a

the

game of courtly

medium

for the aristocracy to construct powerful identities

of

masculinity.

AURORA HERMIDA RUIZ

when San Pedro
warning
is still

87

be an infamous "pregon." But San Pedro's condemnation: the game seems to be fair enough when the favor of a woman can be read between lines, but when her name can be read, the game seems to have gone too far. Basically, what this means is that courtly poetry is a language of both competence and competition. In other words, the courtier "acting the lover" needs to know how to negotiate the fine line between concealment and display to win the match and the prize. And since the favor of the woman is so implicitly presupposed in the code of secrecy, it seems to me that the real prize of this game is to show competence and control over it and over the other members of that masculine circle (whether they be "parientes" or member of "la Ermandad") who constitute the poem's primary public. Obviously, those who could not handle the subtleties of the game had a lot to lose by their exclusion firom this masculine
declares

them

to

very ambivalent in

its

courtly contest.

But Manrique

will use the feminine identity

game

to validate another set

of

interesting values that, while masculine, nevertheless avoid feminine defama-

"jGuay de aquel que nunca atiende!" (20-22), Manrique employs the device or "invention" of the acrostic to reveal the name of one woman in particular: his wife. In "Segun el mal me siguio" (3537), not only her name but those of the four lineages that contribute to it (Castaneda, Ayala, Silva, and Meneses) appear "hidden" inside the poem through the rhetorical device oiannominatio. Both compositions are guessing games that challenge the reader to reconstruct the name of the woman, who is herself now "reduced" to being a mere anecdote of her lineage. Once again the poet, now showing off his wife as if she were a recently acquired title of nobility, is the immediate beneficiary of this revelation in full presence of the assembled participants in the guessing game: "claro sera quien me tiene / contento por su cativo."'" If before Manrique revealed the secret as a means of accentuating his own manliness, now he does so to highUght his own heightened nobility. In this way, poetry functions as a means for creating or shaping his status at court.
tion. In the cancion

In "Castillo de

Amor"

(27-31), Manrique makes use of an allegory

construction of a castle-fortress
his love.

symboUze the unyielding steadfastness of The standard atop the castle is, once again, a riddle concerning the
to

the

name of the

lady to

whom

he

offers his service as vassal:

En
un
el

la torre

de omenaje,

esta

puesto toda ora

estandarte

que muestra, por

su seiiora

vasallaje,

nombre de

a cada parte.

'"

Guiomar de Castaneda
sister,

did, in fact,

belong to

powerful Castilian family, and

father,

Don

Jorge was not the only one to join

this family

by marriage. His
earlier.

Don

Rodrigo, had

married Guiomar's

Doiia Elvira, one year

Thus we have

the quite complicated

picture of the stepmother / sister-in-law and the wife / aunt.

88

GARCILASO DE LA VEGA'S REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

que comienza como mas
el

nombre y como

valer

el apellido;

a la cual nunca jamas yo podre desconocer aunque e perdido. (my emphasis)

Both Beltran and Serrano de Haro have detected in this poem the woman's real name, which unfortunately is impossible for us to reconstruct today.'' Even had she really existed, it does not seem that Manrique's guessing game could be solved in this way alone. The lady to whom he pays homage is also part of the allegory; what the poet hopes to achieve with his vasallage is "valer mas": to acquire more of a name, more nobility, more virility, in a word, more symbolic power. This unnamed "senora" of the castle of love symbolically reveals how we are to understand the proper names of other women: like his wife, Guiomar de Castaiieda, Ayala, Silva y Meneses, they serve as a means to "mas valer." The topos of secrecy belongs to an amorous ideology that stresses an array of
fundamentally masculine courtly values. In
the
this context,

love and poetry are

means through which Manrique emphasizes

setting.

his merit, position,

and

status

within the courtly

According to Lapesa, when Garcilaso and Boscan poeticize the themes of

secrecy and self-restraint, they are merely harking back to a tradition already
in
its

death throes, a tradition that after 1526 will begin to belong to the past.
particularly, Lapesa says that "despues
artistica

Of Boscan,
concepcion
1985, 44;

de haber descubierto una

mas ambiciosa y

exigente,
firuto

primeras creaciones considerandolas

pudo negar importancia a estas de un juego sin trascendenda" (Lapesa

as a

my

emphasis). Cancionero poetry has repeatedly been defined

game, one of wit and skill, to be sure, but one that we can no longer continue thinking of as insignificant. As Julian Weiss puts it: "The love lyric can hardly be called 'minor' on an ideological level" (1991a, 244). Contrary to what we might suppose, even Garcilaso will never entirely distance his poetry from the ludic concept of verse, and his poetic games are also decidedly masculine. Even Lapesa himself seems to acknowledge that there is in Garcilaso a constant affirmation of virility that somehow might recall the Castilian tradition. In the main, however, he sees it as Garcilaso's individual embodiment of the archetypal virility of the Spanish character:
Pero en todo una

momento
es la

se

mantienen dos notas de honda raigambre

ser exigencia

espanola:

contencion recatada, que de

de

la

''^

Beltran contends that for Manrique's contemporaries,

to a "transparent" revelation

this

particular case

would
is

amount
112).

of the

lady's

name (1988b,

15).

Serrano de Haro

in-

clined to think that the composition was also dedicated to his wife,

Dona Guiomar

(1966,

AURORA HERMIDA RUIZ

cortesania, se convierte

89

en norma

artistica gracias a la cual

quedan repuviril

diadas

las

lamentaciones sin nervio; otra

la

es la altiva

independencia con

que

el

poeta defiende
el

autonomia de su
el

espiritu

y transforma en

resolucion

abrazo con
is

destino adverso. (1985, 65)

but for the wrong reasons. In no way can I accept Lapesa's "sympathetic" praise for Garcilaso's virility as an archetype of the Spanish national character (being a woman myself, I would never qualify

The

choice of words

right,

properly

as a

Spaniard). If Lapesa

is

correct in calling attention to Garcilaso's

"virile" concerns, his tendency to naturalize or "nationalize" Garcilaso's masculinity is obviously problematic. Lapesa seems to suggest that Garcilaso is just one more literary example of the Stoicism that since Amador de los Rios and

Menendez Pelayo (among

linity in Garcilaso
is

others) has

been considered

a distinctive feature

of

"Spanishness" already present in Seneca.^*^ This stoic affirmation of mascu-

apparent not for the reasons signalled by Lapesa but rather

class that

due to

issues

of gender and

cannot be so
is

easily dissociated firom the

historical period in

which

this

poetry

written.

An

examination of "Cancion

V" helps to determine how Garcilaso plays with poetry as a means to assert his own image of nobility and masculinity. The "Ode ad Florem Gnidi" or "Cancion V" (as Herrera more prosaically
been considered since Menendez Pelayo to be a kind of poetic which Garcilaso addresses the lady Violante Sanseverino to intervene on behalf of his friend, Mario Galeota.^' In the third book of El Cortecalled
it)

has

plaything, in

sano,

Castiglione suggests the possibility of relieving the suitor's suffering

his

through sharing
es

love secret to a male friend: "Y, demas destos provechos,

las tome como propias; y asi hacen mayores comunicandose" (1980, 153). In "Cancion V," Garcilaso takes advantage of that possibility, not so much as a means

muy

gran alivio decir vuestras congojas a quien

mismo

los placeres se

^"

Manrique's "aunque yo sufra paciente

la

muerte"

is

an example of the Stoicism alluded

to

by Lapesa.
^'

In this sense,

it is

interesting to recall Lapesa's

comments regarding Menendez

la

Pelayo:

"Menendez y
accepts

Pelayo, en el magistral analisis que hizo de

la

oda,

la califico

de 'precioso

juguete': en efecto, posee

gracia y

la

finura del

puro juego" (1985, 146).

Dunn

(1981)

Menendez

Pelayo's definition but attempts to explain

how
is

this

"juguete" actually

works. Lazaro Carreter also proposes to demonstrate that the ode

tation.

grand example of imi-

Notwithstanding,
its

it

seems curious

that after

having achieved

this,

and upon beginning

objectives

to perceive

"socarroneria latente," he takes a step back firom his

initial

and ends

by chiming the work a "joya menor" (1986, 126). The reason seems to be that "Cancion V" does not share the supposed "uniform gravity" that critics have imposed on Garcilaso.
Prieto, for example, insists

on

the "gravita" of Garcilaso's verse and that his poetry never

participated in the evidendy jocular vein of other Renaissance poets, such as

Hurtado de
of
cancionero

Mendoza
poetry.

(1984, 90). This critical disquaUfication of pure poetic play with respect to Garci-

laso reproduces the

same

attitude that traditionally has affected the appraisal

On

this last point, see

Whinnom

(1981, chap.

1).

90

GARCILASO DE LA VEGA'S REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

of consoling his friend but so as to establish a powerful male bond. By the end of the poem, what began as a personal secret shared between friends has become a gender-based alliance in opposition to one woman. Garcilaso organizes a male poetic syndicate to threaten the "desdefiosa" Violante (1. 68), a kind of
poetic "mafia" similar to the "Ermandad" that protected Manrique against
cruel female indifference.

laso

Manrique initiated his threat by denying woman divine forgiveness. Garcinow makes use of a classical metamorphosis to reproduce the same refusal
albeit in a

of pardon,

pagan

setting:

Hagate temerosa
el

caso de Anaxarate, y cobarde

ser desdefiosa se arrepintio

que de
y
asi,

muy
(213;

tarde;

su alma con su

marmol

arde.

my

emphasis)^^

The
hinges

sexual blackmail continues in both poets with the threat of defamation;

how^ever, Garcilaso's Petrarchism will produce a

new

type of threat: one that

upon

the immortalizing value of poetry, and in

which more than

"la

glorificacion de la

amada" of which Lapesa

writes,

we

are left instead

with her

woman wishes to be a "musa inmortal," like Petmust submit to the will of the poet who pursues her. If not, then the very same poets (note how the plural proclaims a united masculine
eternal damnation. If the
rarch's Laura, she

cause)

who

could immortalize her beauty will instead charge themselves with

the task of defaming her:

No

quieras tu, sefiora,

las saetas

de Nemesis airada

probar, por Dios, agora;

^^

The myth of Anaxarate and

Ifis

has served poets since

Ovid

as a

recourse for softening

an overly hard woman. The motive behind Anaxarate's belated repentance seems, however,
to

be an original embellishment by Garcilaso (Lazaro Carreter 1986, 124), with

this tardy

less interest

in enlisting Violante's compassion than in threatening her

and pressing her to take the only

(and therefore useless) re-

out offered her. Castiglione's El Cortesano also deals with

pentance: one of the interlocutors seeks to

show how women's disdain comes not from their honesty but rather from some kind of sadistic nature that would have them take pleasure in the misfortunes of men, the more extreme the better: "Querrian si fuese posible, despues de quemados y hechos ceniza resucitallos por volver a quemallos otra vez y otras ciento." When women finally relent and concede what is asked of them, they do so at such an inop.
.

portune

"quedan ellas deshonradas, y el enamorado se halla haber perdido el y haberse acortado la vida, trabajando sin frutos y sin placer ninguno, pues alcanzo lo que deseaba no cuando gustara tanto de ello que hubiera sido bienaventuthat

moment

tiempo y
rado;

los trabajos,

mas cuando ya no

lo preciaba

de tener

el

corazon tan caido que, no tenia ya senti154-56). Garcilaso's por-

miento de placer ni de contentamiento que

trait

se le ofireciese" (1980,

of Mario Galeota conjures up the same image of extreme

decline.

AURORA HERMIDA RUIZ

baste

91

que

tus perfetas

obras y hermosura a los poetas

sin

den inmortal materia, que tambien en verso lamentable

celebren
la

miseria

de algun caso notable

que por

ti

pase

triste

y miserable. (215;

my

emphasis)

The "Ode"
translates into

uses the idea of a Laura immortalized

spin to the usual

by Petrarch to give a new form of sexual blackmail. The poet's power over his poetry
the poetic muse, that
is,

power over
title,

over the

woman.

Garcilaso

threatens Violante with a metamorphosis that the

poem has

already carried out;

from

its

very

the

woman

has already

Cnidus.

The

"verso miserable" that could

become a statue: the Venus of condemn her is the very poem we

of mythology, the case of

are reading.

Trapped forever

in the eternal frame

Violante Sanseverino serves to immortalize Garcilaso's poetry and also to

immortalize the misogynistic discourse that traps her.

relies

Now,

this discourse

more on
is

the idea of poetry as an eternal force and

as a

personal identity
has changed
aging.
. .

means

to assert

more openly on power. To quote Arthur Brittan: "What

but
its

not male power

as such,

form,

its

presentation,

its

pack-

alization

However, what does not easily change is the justification and naturof male power; that is, what remains relatively constant is the mascu.

masculinism or heterosexualism" (1989, 23). ode plays extensively with the idea that gender roles are naturally justified. The hardness of Garcilaso's Venus is presented as a "contra natura" inversion of her proper role. While the "dureza" and "fuerza" with which she is "armada" turn her into the "fiero Marte" whose praises Garcilaso does not wish to sing, Galeota is shown disposessed of all his masculine attributes: he does not ride a horse, carry a sword, or fight. Furthermore, he does not even talk to his friends. On the contrary, he appears as an effeminate "viola," a flower, and, as a being without a will of his own, "a la concha de Venus amarrado" ("enconchado" Lazaro Carreter puts it, a little more suggestively; 1986, 121). As Ignacio Navarrete has pointed out, this lack of courtly activity is an erotic code for
line ideology,

Garcilaso's

Galeota's sexual inactivity (1994, 106109). Inversely, Galeota's sexual solitude

is

represented
is

as a

complete withdrawal fi:om the public scene. of sexual

afiairs, his

What
is

has to be

read here
a lack

that Galeota's lack

emasculation,

equivalent to

private matter

of public image and agency. In other words, love and gender are not a between a man and a woman, but a public one. Obviously, woman continues to be a major means through which masculinism can exist; accordingly, only the woman who "loves" ratifies masculine ideology and deserves to be fittingly immortalized. Poetry, far from being an innocent game, in the hands of the poet becomes a weapon with which feminine will can be threatened, controlled, and undermined. ^"^

Here

it is

appropriate to recall

Lope de Vega's

free imitation

of the "Ode," which he

92
In

GARCILASO DE LA VEGA'S REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

no way does
this analysis

stylistic change that occurs of the assimilation of Petrarchism; it has, on the other hand, sought to call into question a series of claims regarding the consideration of love in the poetry of Garcilaso and the nature of his poetic revolution. For in this new love and this new poetry, woman continues to function as a medium for the reaffirmation of masculinism, and her new status as poetic "muse" is inadequate grounds for postulating a feminist stance on the part of the poet. The inherited misogyny of Garcilaso's discourse of courtly love, which neither Petrarchism nor neoplatonism do anything to abate, will continue to have poetic currency after him, especially in Quevedo. The male will continue to assert his central place in the scheme of things, and the glorification of the beloved is, like the breaching of secrecy before it, merely another means for the creation of a privileged group with an impeccable image of masculinity.^'*

pretend to deny the

in sixteenth-century Spanish poetry as a result

Unwersity of Richmond

presents under the suggestive

"Encarece su amor para obligar a su dama a que lo preone of the burlesque sonnets written by Lope in the guise of Tome de Burguillos. In a spoof of the Petrarchism that was already evident in his model, Lope also "steals" Garcilaso's famous line, "en la concha de Venus amarrado" (ed. Carreno
title,

mie."

The poem

in question

is

1984, 461).
^* I

am especially

grateful to Professors Julian

this essay has

Weiss and Michael

Gerli,

from whose

close

reading and

comments

gready benefited.

Ill:

Courtly Games

The Game of Courtly Love:

Letra, Divisa, and

Invencion

at the

Court of the Catholic Monarchs

IAN

MACPHERSON

"Everybody has heard of Courtly Love, and everyone knows that

suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc."

it

appears quite

These
world

are the

words of C.

S.

Lewis (1936,
felt

2),

writing in 1936. In The

Allegory of Love Lewis, with recourse principally to the writings

of

Chretien de Troyes and Andreas Capellanus,

a definition

confident enough to offer the

in the process

of the nature of Courtly Love, establishing

four convenient boxes into which scholarly observations about the

phenome-

non could be

tidily placed. Its

defining and distinguishing characteristics were

identifiable as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery,

Lewis, Courtly Love,

standing of

as it

surfaced in Languedoc, depended

describable.

and the Rehgion of Love. For on a misunder-

Ovid and was

of
critical

ink has flowed under proverbial bridges since the and there can be no doubt that the term Courtly Love is now firmly established amid the terminological baggage of modem scholarship. Although a thoughtful article by Joan Ferrante (1980) brought out the fact that the usage of the term was by no means as uncommon in Medieval Europe as had been earlier assumed by scholars such as D. W. Robertson (1968), John Benton (1968), and E. Talbot Donaldson (1970), their skeptical legacy is still with us. Whether or not we agree that the notion of amour courtois is Uttle more than a myth, a fictional invention, or reinvention of Gaston Paris and the late nineteenth century, it would be perverse to deny that in the course of the last half century scholarship has moved inexorably, if not always profitably, towards a
great deal
thirties,

present situation in

which

its

practitioners find themselves unable to agree

on

96
a definition or
circle to the

THE GAME OF COURTLY LOVE

even an adequate description of the term.* We have come full view that "love" in the modern sense of the word (that is, as used in phrases such as "falling in love" or "being in love") was in no sense, as Ernst Curtius (1953, 586) had it in a lecture delivered in Colorado in 1949,
"an emotional discovery of the French troubadours and their successors," but,
in the w^ords of Peter

Dronke

sixteen years later, an experience "universally

possible in any time or place and

least as old as

on any level of society," an experience "at Egypt of the second millennium B.C., and might indeed occur

any time or place" (196566, Irxvii). My present concern is not to reopen the great debate over nomenclature, nor to undertake another journey through the multitudinous theories of origin so far expounded. It is rather to attempt the more modest task of focussing on one single aspect of the phenomenon as it resurfaced in fifteenth-century Spain and was adopted with enthusiasm by the court poets of the fifteenth century, in particular by those of the court of the Catholic Monarchs.^ In this area one feature that must be of primary concern to the literary critic is context. It seems improbable that the phenomenon remained static: its characteristics did not remain unchanged over a period of three hundred years, nor did it survive intact either its journey over the Pyrenees or its translation, literally, into another language and another culture at another time. Yet this fairly routine consideration has often escaped the attention of those who have
at

written

on courtly poetry

in Spain.

The temptation among

critics

literary historians

not to read widely

scholars for France,

among

English

reading of the texts, to latch on to a

set

nor to dedicate themselves to close of generalizations designed by earlier

and to text-hunt in Spain for specific illustrations to support an accepted and acceptable theory, simply ignoring or dismissing as eccentric aberration what does not fit, has proved irresistible in many cases.^ This is the background to the observations I now wish to make about the state of play in this field at the court of the Catholic Monarchs. The social context for the period is the court itself, a closed community, presided over by

'

This

is

brought out well by Kelly (1987). His conclusion

amour
courtois] to

is

that

"no attempt
it

to restrict

it

[the phrase

any particular author or work, or to make

so vague as to
it

be valid for
ceived.
start
^
*

a large

number of works, can

succeed, because of the promiscuous use

inertia;

has re-

We
a

cannot hope to undo past errors and present

we must

cut our losses and

over" (324).

For

comprehensive account of origin

fall

theories, see

Boase (1977).
24142).

Scholars tend to

naturally into

one or other of the categories defined by the

historian Jack

Hexter

as

"lumpers" or

"splitters" (1979a,

The lumpers

are those
rules;

who examine

their data for likenesses

and connections, in search of systems and general

the splitters cannot abide the systems and the generalizations and delight in highlighting divergences, drawing distinctions, pinpointing differences.

The lumpers who

write of courtiy
to
all its

love have done so in terms of the features that can be alleged to be

common

manifestations north and south of the Pyrenees and until recendy have tended to dominate

courtly love criticism.

My

natural sympathies tend to be with the splitters.

IAN

MACPHERSON

97

Isabel and peopled predominantly if not exclusively by an upwardly mobile lower nobility identified and brilliantly described by Jose Antonio Maravall in his study of Celestina (1979, 32-58). The literary context is the expression in the contemporary creative writing of a set of attitudes towards love. These attitudes made their presence felt in Languedoc at the end of the eleventh century and in the same or modified form had been enjoying a considerable vogue in Spain since the middle of the fifteenth century. The critical context is the terminology: "Courtly Love" is a lumper's box not unknown in the Middle Ages but principally inspired by nineteenth-century French scholars and since used by many as a catch-all to net the totality of its manifestations in Western Europe over a period of some five hundred years, or at least as many of those as have seemed at the time convenient or relevant to the lumper in question. Generalizations about the nature of the courtly experience designed to cover all individual performances in all geographical locations over five centuries are unlikely to be either accurate or helpful. Like all genres, this one developed and evolved, reaching what could well be regarded as its most imaginative manifestation in Spain towards the end of the fifteenth century and decUning rapidly thereafter. The play element love is a game, poetry is a game was there as a component from the outset, and became one of its most prominent features during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. As early as the

thirteenth century Alfonso el Sabio asserts that

God

intended mankind to

by playing games. And for the later Middle Ages Pierre le Gentil reminds us that Courtly Love "n'est plus qu'un jeu, et, de fait, alors, c'est bien la forme d'un jeu que prend le service d'amour. On le joue, du reste, comme
enjoy
itself
**

celui de la chevalerie dans les tournois, avec le plus grand serieux" (1949,
1:92). It is my contention that this is the background against which we should be reading the Cancionero general of 1511, in which Hernando del Castillo offers his selection of the poetry of that time.'' Whatever one says about the nature of Courtly Love, the element of play was an important ingredient from the earUest times. There is a striking mis-

match between what the

of the
real-life

historians

and

sociologists tell us

about the behavior

human

beings in the south of France and the set of assumptions

on which their literary behavior is based. One way to account for the mismatch is the sublimation theory, as expressed eloquently by Alexander Parker (1985), which holds that all these writers longed for something more spiritual than the disgraceful social and sexual behaviour which they saw going on

"Por que toda manera de

las

alegria quiso

Dios que ouiessen

los

omnes en

si

naturalmente,
los

por que pudiessen sof&ir

esta

cueytas e los trabaios

quando

les uiniessen,

por end

omnes

buscaron muchas maneras por que

esta alegria pudiessen auer

complidamientre.

Onde por

razon fallaron e fizieron muchas maneras de iuegos e de trebeios con que se alegrassen,"
^

Lihros de acedrex, dados e tablas (1941, 4).

The

Cancionero general can

now

be most conveniendy consulted in Brian Dutton

(1990-91, 5:117-538).


98

THE GAME OF COURTLY LOVE

around them, and they expressed their views in the ideahzed Uterary Avorld of what has come to be known as "Courtly Love" (see also Aguirre 1981; Gallagher 1968, 283-88).

The problem, however,

for the critic

who

is

seeking to

distinguish the philosophy that underpins the

is

whole corpus of courtly writing

more than a uniformly constrained to express such sublimation, that all did so consistently in various languages over four centuries, and that anyone who did not do so should be set aside as an aberration. If, on the other hand,
thousand poets
felt

the need to assume, in order to justify the generalization, that

at the literary exercise as a manifestation of the approach does account for and put into perspective a significant proportion of the observable data. Some of the outstanding formal characteristics of play have been identified by Johan Huizinga (1970), and four of them are particularly relevant to the present argument:
is

the critic

prepared to look
this

play

phenomenon,

1.

Play stands outside "ordinary"

illusion: the player pretends

life as

a kind

of interlude, but
is
is

it

nevertheless

tends to absorb the player intensely and totally. There

the element of
players take
possible to

he

is

not playing. Play

by definition "not

serious," but the observation has to be

their

made

that the best

game

games very

seriously indeed,

and play to win; although

it is

adopt a more light-hearted approach, it is not easy for a player to excel at any game unless he takes the game totally seriously while it is in progress.
2. Essential for

the playing of a
it.

game

are the field

of play, and an agreed time

span in which to play

space and time.

The
is

players

need

a field, a board, a pitch, a court,

its

within which the game proceeds within

predetermined boundaries of

The game

finite: it

has a beginning and an end, but of

as

course

it

can be repeated
a return to real

as

many

times

the players please.

Then

there

must be
3.

life.

The game has rules. The rules are part of the mystique, joy, and pleasure of the game and have to be adhered to by all who take part for its duration, or the game is "spoiled." The individual players display their virtuosity by working within self-imposed restrictions. Any individual may cheat or bend the rules, and indeed many contestants derive much pleasure from the
cheating or the rule-bending, but

recognize that there are

players into the
4. It

game

rules,

if one contestant consistently refuses to he cannot be accommodated by the other

is

that player

a spoilsport.

follows that only those

who

are prepared to learn the rules can

be wel-

comed into the game. The rules may be learned from the book or more commonly by word of mouth or example from other, experienced, players. The closed community the golf club, the tennis club, the bridge club

forms

itself
It

and by

outsiders.

very nature tends to build a defensive wall against very quickly develops a specialized language and vocabulary not
its

readily intelligible to the uninitiated

"three double bogeys and an eagle,"

"a double-handed knicker-tucker," "stopped in

3N when

the grand was

IAN

MACPHERSON

99

cold"

and

the players take pleasure in their recondite and secret language,

to provide a

which tends

warm and

reassuring feeling of belonging.

The relevance of these observations to the game of Courtly Love should be immediately evident, and I resist the temptation of laboring the point by drawing the one-to-one parallels. The historical scenario, however, needs closer
attention.

The
as is to

play element in Courtly Love

it is

is

evident from the beginning in Languefor

doc, but

taken very seriously indeed by a high proportion of the players,

rules

be expected. The

not

life,

but for the game

is

have

their

compiled by Andreas Capellanus (1892), whose twelfth-century De arte hones ti amandi nevertheless contains more than a touch of irony not always identified by later scholars.^ The court of play is the closed confine of the royal and noble courts of the time, the players are predominantly the upwardly mobile younger members of the nobility, the specialized language is developed, the outsiders are excluded. There is considerable evidence, as Joan Ferrante observed, that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries poets "seemed to be working with conventions that were common to all of them and familiar to their audiences, to such an extent that they could parody them and count on the audience to get the joke" (1980, 686). The revival of the genre in Castile during the reign of Juan II consisted very much in the first instance of a mastering of the base rules, and the early manuscript cancionero collections of the period amply demonstrate this: for example, the poets of the Cancionero de Baena (compiled by c. 1430) express a lively interest in moral and religious issues and not a great deal of concern for the business of Courtly Love. The comparatively small number of love poems included in Baena shows poets such as Macias and Villasandino amply demonstrating their skills as players in all seriousness but in a game whose rules have not materially altered since their first drafting north of the Pyrenees. Critical rules elaborated for Languedoc are reasonably appropriate for this period in
roots in the social context of the time.
selection of these

Spain.

This type of poetry was introduced, nevertheless, into

a social

context that

from the context of its observes in the prologue to his Cancionero:

differed considerably
los rreyes e prin^ipes e

origins.

As Juan Alfonso de Baena

grandes seiiores vsaron e vsan ver e oyr e tomar por otra manera otros muchos conportes e plaseres e gasajados, asi como

ver justar e tornear e correr puntas e jugar

caiias e lidiar toros e

correr e

luchar e saltar saltos peligrosos. (ed. Azaceta 1966, 1:12)

This observation shows every indication of being based on the behavior of

Juan

II,

king who, according to Fernan Perez de Guzman, had

little taste

for

the business of ruling,

who

delegated state

affairs

to his favorite Alvaro de

Andreas's use of puns,

humor and

irony

is

elegantly brought out

by Bowden (1979).

100

THE GAME OF COURTLY LOVE

Luna, and whose reputation depended almost exclusively on his love of the "conportes e plaseres e gasajados" to which Juan Alfonso de Baena refers/

Juan

II

cared passionately for tournaments, jousting, the ring and the quintain,

pasos de armas, juegos de cams

bulrushes), and was himself an expert jouster who took part in tournaments from the age of eighteen; jousts accompanied his coronation in Zaragoza; his engagement to Maria of Aragon in 1428 was celebrated with tournaments, jousting, and bullfights; it was during his reign that the Passaje Peligroso de la Fuerte Ventura took place in Valladolid and then perhaps the most famous of all the Spanish pasos de armas, the Passo Honroso, organized by Suero de Quiiiones on the bridge at Orbigo in 1434, which lasted thirty days and where one hundred and eighty lances were broken (the plan was to break three hundred lances, but disappointingly for the organizers the supply of willing adventurers dried up)." Juan II was a king who, according to Fernan Perez de Guzman:

(mock tournaments fought with

all

celebrations and festivities of

kinds; he

sabia fablar e entender latin, leia

torias, oia

muy bien,

plazianle

muchos Ubros y
aun
el

es-

muy

de grado

los dizires

rimados e conogia

los vigios dellos,

avia grant plazer en oir palabras alegres e bien apuntadas, e

las

mesmo

sabia bien dizir. (ed. Tate 1965, 39)

at least

In fact

seven compositions attributed directly to him by early manu-

have survived (Dutton 199091, 7:38). itself, in the presence of its ladies, with these tournaments, jousts, and pasos de armas, but the entertainment that forms the
script cancioneros

The

nobility entertained

background

for

many of

the

poems preserved

in the early cancioneros

would

accustomed to the violent melees of eleventh-century Provence. Lances were tipped with coronals to reduce the numbers of casualties; for major festivities the elaborately decorated ames real was generally preferred to the more functional ames de guerra and became much more like spehave outraged
a nobility

'

"Nunca una

ora sola quiso entender nin trabajar en el regimiento [de su reino] aunque
Castilla tantas rebueltas e

en su tienpo fueron en
1965, 39).

danos e males e peligros quantos no ovo en

tienpo de reyes pasados por espacio de dozientos aiios," Fernan Perez de

Guzman

(ed.

Tate

The

priuado, nevertheless,

was

still

able to find

ample time

to indulge his sporting

a sus amores.
ellas

and
Fizo

artistic tastes:

"Fue

muy enamorado
. . .

en todo tienpo: guardo gran secreto

muy

vivas e discretas can^iones de los sus amores, e

muchas bezes declaraba en

misterios de otros grandes fechos.

e sacar entremeses

Fue

muy

[inventivo e

mucho dado

a fallar

invenciones,

en

fiestas,

o en

justas,

damente

significaba lo

que

queria.

o en guena; en las quales invenciones muy aguFue muy] nonbrado cabalgador en ambas sillas, e grand
1940, 207).

bra^ero, e dio grand cuidado de tener buenos cauallos e ligeros" {Crdnica de don Alvaro de

Luna, condestable de
*

Castilla, maestre de Santiago

Pedro Carrillo de Huete (1946, 20-22) and Lope Barrientos (1946, 59-62). For commentary, see especially MacKay (1985) and Ruiz (1988). The passo honroso is described by Pero Rodriguez de Lena
detailed descriptions of these festivities can be found in

The most

(1977).

IAN

MACPHERSON

101

cialized sports

ards (often dressed as jesters) dealt with the

equipment; violence was kept in check by official judges. Stewproblems of crowd control; the
to

injuries was reduced with the introduction of a cenkeep the jousters and the horses apart.*^ The decorative and theatrical aspects of these festivities came to predominate. Extravagant blazons and emblems adorned the pavilions, the standards, banners, clothing and armor of the knights, the tabards of the heralds and the trappings of the horses. Displays of riding at the ring and the quintain, pas d'armes,juegos de cartas, juegos de tablas (the hurling of spears at fixed wooden targets); jesters, dancers, singers, and mummers provided entertainment during the natural breaks. Scaffolding (cadalsos) was brought in at great expense to construct mock castles and towers richly decorated with drapes and cloth of gold; they provided a secure vantage point from which the ladies of the court could better see and be seen. What had in its earliest manifestations been a training ground for warriors
tral barrier,

number of collisions and

the
tela,

became

a festive occasion for courtiers. Banquets, dances, poetry readings, in-

venciones,

and

entremeses filled the evenings.

The

letras

came

to be an indis-

pensable part of the proceedings: they were composed to decorate the helms
laid

out before the tournaments to entertain, delight, and increasingly towards

the end of the century to scandalize the ladies, and later collected in the six-

teenth-century cancioneros (for example, Hernando del Castillo assembled in the

more than a hundred letras and invencicomposed by jousters). The participants on these festive occasions were predominantly young and inventive, and life was full. There were love affairs,
Cancionero general of 1511 a section of
ones
real

or imagined, to be conducted; literary activity, along with song and dance,

Isabel,

was encouraged by
ly sense.

but the participants were not erudite in any scholarthe ideal vehicle for the literary

The game of Courtly Love became

after-dinner soirees and the post-tournament festivities: occasional poems, riddles, motes, letras, invenciones, preguntas, and respuestas became the staple diet of such reunions, because they particularly lent themselves to group activity,

required no great depth of erudition or scholarship, and depended rather on

native intelligence and quickness of wit in
all its

senses.

examples of how the invencion grew out of and formed an integral part of the tournament are provided by Pedro Carrillo de Huete, the falconer of Juan II. The chronicler records that the Infante Henrique rode out to joust in Valladolid:
characteristic

Two

'*

The

tela

was almost

certainly invented in Spain

and used
la tela

in the Passaje de

la

Fuerte

Ventura in 1428:

"E

estava puesta vna tela de canas, e

comen^aba desde

la fortale^a,

vn arco de puerta" (Carrillo de Huete comments on the backwardness of the French in these matters: "Los franzeses justan por otra guisa que non fa^en en Espana; justan sin tela, a manera de guerra, por el topar. Conteze muchas vezes que topan vn cavallo con otro, e caen amos a dos, o cae el vno, o amos [a] dos. No ay alii mantenedor, ni justa uno con otro setialadamente, sino quien mas se atiene." The tela was rapidly to become a favourite source of erotic wordplay in cancionero poetry (see Macpherson and MacKay 1994).
al la tela

otro cavo de

estavan otros dos torres e

1946, 21). Gutierre Diez de

Games

(1982, 237)


102

THE GAME OF COURTLY LOVE

con vnos paramientos

muy

rricos,

eran [peras], e vnos rrotulos con vnas

vordados de oro. La qual vordadura letras en que dezia: Non es. (Carri-

Uo de Huete 1946, 24)

What
es

is

required of the lady to

whom

the message

is

directed

is

that she

make
non

the mental effort to juxtapose the messages received by

and

peras

word and image

in that order; her efforts will be

rewarded by the discovery that

is

she will not be kept waiting

when

the jousting

over:

non

es-peras.

Two
E

weeks

later

King John himself rode out

to the

lists

in the apparel

of God

the Father, with a retinue of twelve knights decked out as the twelve apostles.
todas sus cubiertas de los cavallos de grana, e daragas bordadas, e vnos

rretolos

que dezian: Lardon.

(Carrillo de

Huete 1946,

25)^"

Pedro Carrillo de Huete assumes that the solution is obvious: "Asi que bien entendida la ynuen^ion." It is, provided that this time we appreciate that the letra, the verbal message, makes no sense in itself and must be prefaced by the visual stimulus, the divisa. This time image (daraga) must precede word (lardon):
dara ga-lardon.

Francisco
this

Rico (1965) neatly encapsulates the literary device: the invenciSn in context aims at providing a harmonious combination of image and word
and
letra,

soul (cuerpo and alma), which marks the composer. '^ The wordplay in Spain, as I have argued elsewhere (1985), tended to be accompanied by innuendo, and a secret language, specific to practitioners of the genre, was developed. Who would be providing the reward? The king, to his courtiers, in financial terms? Or the lady, to the king, in kind? Pedro Carrillo de Huete, diplomatic as ever, does not record the social events of the evening in full.
{divisa

mote), or

body and

thoughts or feelings of

its

It is

clear that the "traditional"

and "serious" version of courtly composition

'"

As

reflexes

of Arabic

darqa, daraqa, the

as

forms daraga, daraga, adagara, adarga alternated

freely in

medieval Castilian. For example,

my

colleague Fred Hodcroft kindly indicated,

the so-called "Acto de Traso,"

which appears

in late editions ofCelestina, begins "Las adargas

y cora^as tengamos apercebidas" {Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea, ed. M. Criado de Val y G. D. Trotter [Madrid: CSIC, 1970]: 314), while the manuscript Celestina comentada (Act 19)
has the reading "daragas." Given the medieval love of symbol, the &ct that this
shield
is

Moorish

heart-shaped
first

is

by no means

irrelevant to the invenciSn.

" In the
esperas,"

example, Pedro Carrillo de Huete's text reads: "La qual vordadura eran
last

where
lie

the

word

appears to be an erratum. Rico, however, suggests that the

error

may
ello,

in the

letra

rather than the divisa:

"La

letra diria,

en efecto, 'non
. .

as'

[asi

en

Barrientos], pero lo

bordado

serian 'esperas,' es decir, 'esferas'.

la

habra que comprender,

se saco la

segun
al

'non

as esperas,'

'no esperas,' referido a

dama por quien

invencion o

corazon, a

pasion, del propio Infante."

IAN

MACPHERSON

103

imported from north of the Pyrenees was introduced to a context very different from that of its origins, the very much less serious, often frivolous, context of the court of Juan II. It should come as no surprise that the Cancionero de Baena, compiled by a scribe in the service of Juan II, should contain a generous selection of preguntas, respuestas, reqiiestas, debates, and adivinaciones the products of group activity rather than of the solitary inspiration of the individ-

ual poet.

The

Cancionero general of Hernando del Castillo contains a

much

higher pro-

portion of love poetry than Baena but continues to demonstrate a comparable

lively interest in the poetic

production of group activity

at court.

Among

the

many

"traditional" compositions (which nevertheless remain in the great

ma-

jority),

and where the love experience continues to be articulated by poets

who

should, according to Baena, "siempre se precien e se finjan de ser

is

enamorever-

rados" (ed. Azaceta 1966, 1:15), a group stands out which

ential,

much

less

and which is characterized by its lack of respect for the traditions of the genre and an attitude towards love very much less spiritual. Particularly in the last tw^o decades of the century, when Isabel la Catolica gathered around herself a lively and energetic band of young courtiers, circumstances favored collective literary activity. These courtiers and their associates formed the prototypical closed community. Their numbers included Pedro de Cartagena, Juan Tellez-Giron, Antonio de Velasco, Fadrique Enriquez (the fourth admiral of Castile), Juan Manuel II, and Juan de Mendoza. Many were interrelated, and some were sufficiently wealthy and sufficiently interested to employ professional writers like Diego de San Pedro or professional musicians such as Gabriel Mena. This was a group that met regularly in "fields of play," which are readily identifiable: the court of the Catholic Monarchs, the manor houses and castles of the Peiiafiel-Valladolid-Rioseco triangle and the numerous jousts, tournaments, and bullfights that were regularly held on festive occasions throughout the country.'^ There are clear indications in the poetry of the period that the more "traditional" attitudes towards Courtly Love, although competently demonstrated from time to time by the courtiers of Isabel's entourage, had begun to lose their novelty value and their appeal. In the eighties and nineties we begin to find more variation and experimentation, both in content and in form.
Increasingly, cancionero poetry

of

this

period becomes,

as

Keith

Whinnom

observes, "el arte de

la

miniatura," and the

way

in

between

and letra developed and flourished of these new attitudes towards poetic composition at court. By means of a series of close personal readings, Whinnom (1981; 1994) has shown how the conscious restriction of both metrical forms and lexical items by the poets of the Cancionero general has led to the semantic enrichment of their
divisa

which the interrelationship as an art form is a graphic

illustration

writings.

The

result

is

a series

of "difficult" poems that are suggestive, ambiva-

'2

For more

detail, see

Avalle-Arce (1974a) and Macpherson (1984; 1986; 1989).

104

THE GAME OF COURTLY LOVE

and prone to wordplay in which the vocabulary is value and sometimes in its figurative and erotic sense. The invencion of one, two, or three octosyllables, occasionally supplemented by a line oi pie quebrado (half-line), aspired at its best to be a harmonious combination of divisa and letra and grew naturally from the tournaments of the fifteenth century.^-' In Spain the participants would ride into the lists with an elaborate crest (cimera), painted upon or affixed to their helms, or a striking emblem {divisa) embroidered on their clothing, the scabbard of their sword, or the trappings of their horse. ^'* This image was designed to be interpreted in conjunction with the letra in verse composed to accompany it. The letras, inscribed on small wooden boards (rotulos), embroidered on the cloth draperies (paramentos) that decorated the hsts, laid out with the decorated helms for inspection in the pavilions, or passed around on scraps of paper to the participants and spectators during the tournament, were generally targeted specifically at the current real or imagined object of the poet/jouster's afiections.'^ The object, as can be deduced from the recorded examples that have survived (there appear to be no surviving manuals of composition), was to express an idea, or an emotion, as concisely and economically as possible, ideally by drawing attention to a hitherto unsuspected relationship between image and word. Innuendo was an optional extra. Not all surviving invenciones are of equal literary merit: the one hundred and thirteen recorded by Hernando del Castillo in the Cancionero general (fols. 140r-143v) fully justify Juan de Valdes's laconic observation that "en las invenciones hay que tomar y que dexar" (1987, 244). They range from the simple-minded to the highly imaginative but, perhaps most interestingly for the critic, illustrate a range of literary techniques that once understood, considerably facilitate our understanding of the poetry of the period.
lent, at times indecent,

sometimes to be taken

at its face

'*

The

semantic range of invencion was wide in the fifteenth century,

its

when

the term

is

occasionally used to refer to the divisa alone, or alternatively in

to any type

most general sense to

refer

of novelty or fashionable innovation, such

as

one of the dramatic improvisations

often staged during the course of a major tournament. In the course of the sixteenth century,
its specific sense of divisa + letra progressively gave way to the term empresa. "E todos aquellos caualleros man^ebos hijosdalgo de la cassa del Condestable, e muchos otros, iban muy ricamente guarnidos. Ca unos llevaban diversas debisas pintadas en

invenciSn in
'*

las

cubiertas de los caballos e otros avia

que llebaban

tarjas

pequeiias
la

muy

ricamente guamilas

das,

con

estranas figuras e ynben^iones.

las

E non

era

poca

diversidad que llevaban en

9imeras, sobre

feladas e los almetes; ca

unos llebaban

tinbles

de

bestias salvajes, e otros

asi

penachos de diversos colores, e otros avia que llebaban algunas plumas,

^eladas,

por ^imeras de sus

la

como

de

las testeras

de sus caballos

Asi que en esta manera yba toda

gente del

Condestable" {Cr6nica de don Alvaro de iMna 1940, 166).

'^

Some

crests

were so

striking that

they were incorporated into the family shields of the time (see Riquer 1936).

Leriano makes

this clear in Carcel de

Amor. "Por

las

mugeres

se

inventan los galanes

entretales, las discretas bordaduras, las

nuevas invenciones; de grandes bienes por cierto son

causa" (San Pedro 1971, 164).

IAN

MACPHERSON
on

105

When
on

the Vizconde de Altamira appears

the Hsts with "Juana" inscribed

his scabbard,

and composes the

letra:

Letras del nombre de vna que no tiene par ninguna (Dutton 199091, 5:348)

we
and

find ourselves at the elementary

rides

end of the spectrum.

y en

When

the same
.a.,"

nobleman

on displaying "vna

figura de san juan

la

palma vna

we

learn that

conesta letra demas

de
si

la

figura

en que vo
so (Dutton 1990-91, 5:344)

miras conosceras

el

nombre de cuyo

the effort required to identify the particular saint depicted and then

combine

"Juan" and "a" may reassure us about the Viscount's constancy in love but does little to stretch us intellectually or emotionally. A variation is produced

by Juan de Mendoza, whose

Vida
ser el
es esta

letra

reads:

medio de

su

nombre

principio de su respuesta. (Dutton 1990-91, 5:349)

The

rubric reveals that "su amiga se dezia Ana," and

we deduce

negative

response to Juan de Mendoza's advances on that particular occasion.^**

An
a

anonymous letra, which

galdn offers a slightly

reads:

more complex

variation of the

game with

Diziendo ques y de que de quien cuyo so dize lo que hago yo. (Dutton 1990-91, 5:349)
esta

The accompanying
bric reveals that the

divisa

is

"vna
is

.a.

de oro," and Hernando del Castillo's ruis

name of the

lady in question

Aldonza. Correct identifi-

cation of the lady, however,

invenciSn.

not in

this instance the

primary objective of the

look and tion of the "a de oro," and then look and say
is first

What one must do

"adoro"

see, to

make

a visual identifica-

to elucidate the last

of the letra: "lo que hace este galan es adorar a doiia Aldonza." This type of invenciSn could conveniently be grouped under the heading of "find the lady": divisa and letra, taken together, offer the courtly circle a guessing game with possibly, as in the cases of Juan de Mendoza and the anonymous galdn, the bonus of a reflection on the present behavior of the object of the poet's affections or on his present state of mind.
line

'^

External evidence suggests that the object of Juan's affections

is

Ana de Aragon,

daughter of the count of Lerin,

who was

subsequently to respond in the affirmative and

become Juan de Mendoza's second wife

(see

Macpherson 1989, 98-99).

106

THE GAME OF COURTLY LOVE

mentary, the
this

The "look and say" game may take a more ambitious form. At its most eleConde de Haro sports a helm on which is depicted a prison. The eyes of the spectators observe, and the word cdrcel is generated. The letra picks
up
in the
first line,

with routine sentiments:

Enesta carcel que veys

que no

se halla sallida

beuire mas ved que vida. (Dutton 199091, 5:344)

Fadrique Enriquez, the fourth admiral of Castile, displaying his acquaintance with the colors of rhetoric, offers an example of traductio whereby the sound sequence generated by the divisa, in this case a deljtn or doljin, is repeated in the letra in a syntactical form, which now spans three parts of speech,
do+el+fin:

La mejor vida es aquella dolfm es comien^o della. (Dutton 1990-91, 5:345)

The

principle
first

is

echoed
is

in a three-line

letra

devised by

Don

Alvaro de Luna,
as his divisa.

w^here the

line

generated by

Don Alvaro's

choice of a/wenfe

and circumstantial evidence is that this letra is not the work of Juan II's priuado, the constable of Castile, but of his grandson, also called Alvaro de Luna, who was the first alcaide of Loja but also, and more immediately relevant to the the inuencion, the lord of Fuentidueiia. The invencion emerges as
internal
little

The

more than

a signature, a self-conscious reference to

Don

Alvaro's princi-

pal

title:

antes

Fuentendido mi querer que yo lo dixesse

siruiesse.

en mandarme cos

(Dutton 199091, 5:344)

last two invenciones, it must be observed, are syntactically enterprising but remain intellectually superficial. Each marks a phonetic overlap between otherw^ise unconnected sound sequences, but neither seeks to develop the connection in any meaningful way. A more elaborate version of traductio that appears frequently in this group of invenciones is that which brings together words of the same form but with different meanings. The Valencian Henrique de Monteagudo complements the heraldic device of the diamond-shaped lisonja (now more commonly losange)

The

with the hyperbolic

letra:

No
no ay

lisonja para vos.

tocando en lo de dios (Dutton 1990-91, 5:349)

Altamira adopts a feather
as his divisa; the spectator's

The Vizconde de
must

eye

and generate not the obvious pluma but the neologism letra develops the wordplay on pena with a second layer of traductio, pena. The as the same form takes on a new syntactical function and then a different sense
see, consider,

in the

first

octosyllable:

IAN

MACPHERSON

107

Quien pena sepa mi pena

y aura
la

suya por buena. (Dutton 1990-91, 5:348)*^

We

are

now

clearly in the area

of the agudeza, which so captivated Baltasar

Gracian about cancionero poetry. "La primorosa equivocacion es como una palabra de dos cortes y un significar a dos luces. Consiste su artificio en usar de
alguna palabra que tenga dos significaciones, de
rather than two-way, wordplay.

modo que

deje en

duda

lo

que

quiso decir" (1969, 2:53). For good measure, Altamira here offers three-way,

The

conceptismo

embodied

in the invencion

was to reach

its

most recondite
letra

and sophisticated form with

attributed to Esteban de

a type that

can be illustrated in the following

Guzman:
la

En
y en

la

vida

busque
la halle.

la

muerte

(Dutton 1990-91, 5:345)

The

alma literaria embodied in these two lines is totally obscure without its accompanying cuerpo visual, the divisa. The divisa is referred to twice but by the weak pronoun "la" on each occasion, so that the harmonious whole aimed at

when the eyes of the recipient appreciate that the device embroidered on the clothing of the toumeyer represents the sesame plant. When the possible solution sesamo is set aside, alegria is selected and then
can only be achieved
applied, in
its

very different metaphorical sense, to the

invencion:

letra.

The

sentiments
is

expressed then turn out to be of an unexceptional courtly nature, but this

not the point of the

image and word, the

surprise

what matters is the imaginative juxtaposition of and pleasure of replacing, with a single leap of
all

the imagination, confusion with clarity.

Further examples of the same type, with

divisa

specific verbal reference to the

formally excluded, illustrate that the technique was well understood by

the closed circle of jouster-poets

who

practiced the genre:

Saquelas del cora^on

por que

las

dar lugar a

las

que salen puedan que quedan.

Castilla,

(Condestable de

Dutton 1990-91, 5:346)

A
que

todos da claridad

sino a

mi que

la

desseo
la

sin veros

no

veo.

(Juan de Lezcano, Dutton 1990-91, 5:345)

Esta que veys que padesce por que dio all uno lo que paresce
es

'^

Francisco

Rico (1966) was the

de penas."

first

to

draw attention

to the

wordplay on pena in

his

influential

"Un penacho

108

THE GAME OF COURTLY LOVE

all

otro lo quescondio.

C'Un

galan,"

Dutton 1990-91, 5:345)

lo

Lo que haze causa veros que dize conosceros. (Don Juan Manuel, Dutton 1990-91, 5:348)

of these the weak pronoun "las" of the letra picks up the penachos divisa and develops the traductio over three lines. The w^it, as Francisco Rico has observed, depends upon the interpretation ofpena as pluma in the divisa and its necessary reinterpretation as sufrimiento, pesar, cuidado in the letra (Rico 1966/rpt. 1990, 194). The second is Juan de Lezcano's only known
In the
first

or penas of the

contribution to Spanish letters. For the key, since the letra is completely impenetrable without some indication of the unexpressed subject of the verb
dar in the first octosyllable, the divisa reveals all: "Saco juan de lezcano vna luna seyendo seruidor de doiia maria de luna."'^ Possibly surprisingly, if his

dismiss Juan as a

contemporaries Garcia de Astorga and Antonio de Velasco were right to drunken old sodomite, an economical little poetic conceit

emerges: the moon lights the whole world but not, in the absence of Maria de Luna, the world of Juan de Lezcano. The third letra is anonymous and refers to the divisa only by its first word, the demonstrative pronoun esta. In this case

Hernando del Castillo records an elaborate device depicting "vn dragon con media dama tragada y el gesto y la meytad se mostraua de fuera" and the invencion now becomes instant innuendo: the mysterious esta, the galan publicly suggests, refers to the lady being consumed by the dragon as a punishment for reserving her top half for one lover and her lower half for another. I suggested earlier (1985, 58) that the last invencion of this group, by Juan Manuel II, might well be one of the most imaginative and suggestive of the period. Considered now in this wider context, the claim still seems valid.^' The unexpressed subject of the main verbs in the letra has to be supplied, as always, from the divisa, in this case embroidered on the clothing of the jouster

Dutton (1990-91, 7:379) notes: "Segunda mitad del siglo XV. Garcia de Astorga en ID0837 se burla de Lezcano, el del rey, diciendo: 'hasta agora viejo an^iano / de pro a popa borracho / y aun dizen que se hallo / en la fibdad de sodoma / desde mochacho'. Antonio de Velasco en ID0793 recuerda a Lezcano diciendo: 'Que cal^as de rraso verde/
'"
. . .

dieron

la

muerte

a Lezcano'." Velasco's

composition forms part of

sequence in which a

group of Castilian poets

''^

ridicule the
at

new

camlet breeches modeled by the Portuguese

nobleman Manuel de Noronha

court in Zaragoza.
essentially

The

lines that

immediately follow represent

what

said then.

For

a slightly

different emphasis, see

Whinnom
is

(1981, 104-105, n. 95).

Whinnom

accepts

my

interpretaa

tion of the invenciSn but

less

impressed by the conceit, which he sees

as litde

more than

sequence of courtly commonplaces.

We

coincide in our view of the

artistic

techniques
los versos, a base

employed: "De todas maneras,

es evidente, sin

que importe como interpretamos

y
'suelta' (verbo), se

que

el

juego de palabras homofonas,

'suelta' (sustantivo)

hace

de

una palabra expresada solo en un dibujito bordado"

(105).

IAN

MACPHERSON

109

and depicting the hobble worn by the horses as they enter the hsts to prevent bolting. The key to the paradox is the stimulus "suelta." In the first Une "veros" has to be read as the subject of the main verb "causa": "Veros causa lo que haze (la suelta)." Since what the hobble does is to restrain, the sight of the lady causes the poet to become a prisoner of love, now the victim of his eyes, in metaphorical fetters and deprived of his former liberty. In the second line the context changes and we can impose sense on the line only by interpreting suelta as the imperative or present indicative of the verb "soltar" and by considering not "lo que haze," or what the fetter does (restrain), but and that is "loosen," "re"lo que dize," what its homophone says or means or "set free." Thus "knowing you" (and this can be taken in its everylease," day, or in its biblical sense) "leads to release." This represents a remarkably condensed piece of wit. The key word suelta simultaneously involves both restriction and release, and the parallels with the effects of love (the tensions involved in holding back or coming forward) are now patently clear: the enigma is resolved, and the paradox is sharp and effective. Traductio and paradox are all bound up in the six letters oi suelta, but suelta does not itself appear in the letra: the only clue is the visual stimulus of the embroidery on the knight's tunic. This invendon differs from the majority of those considered above in that the sense is as compelling as the technique. While the notion of love as a simultaneously restraining and impelling force is by no means a novel poetic concept in the late fifteenth century, the focus that Juan Manuel brings to it, deriving its inspiration from the tournament and depending on recently

them from

established poetic techniques, represents a considerable innovation.

This

is

way of writing
combine
to

that takes us

some
is

distance

from the fin' amor of the

Play,

standard histories of literature. Plasticity

alma, ideally
play,

the keynote: eye and ear, cuerpo and

produce

harmonious end product.

and
ladies

and word-

come

to the fore. In this public entertainment the poet-jouster plays his

part before an audience of the gentlemen

of the court, expressing

at

sentiments that on the whole have been well tried and tested over the years

but characteristically with recourse to

imagination,
tionships
at

vocabulary that aims

stimulating the

focussing the attention of the intended audience

on the

rela-

between

objects and ideas that might hitherto have passed unnoticed.

among its practitioners may not exceed three and a half lines of verse, there is self-evidently little margin in which to develop any great depth of thought, but this is not in principle what one should be looking for in the invenciones of the late fifteenth century. The keynotes are wordplay, verbal ingenuity and context-switching, and the best of these invenciones demonstrate above all a fascination with the multiple possibilities offered by words at work. These compositions graphically illustrate the early peninsular origins of the kind of conceptismo, which was to entertain Juan de Valdes, captivate Gracian, and later be honed and polished by Luis de Gongora and Francisco de Quevedo.^**
In a composition that by tacit agreement

full critical

edition of the inuenciottes of the Cancionero general, along with an intro-

no

THE GAME OF COURTLY LOVE

The rapid rise to popularity of letras and inuenciones from the period of Juan onwards by no means impUes that all cancionero poetry of the time depends on fiestas, tournaments, paradox, and wordplay, with the occasional spicing of innuendo. There is evidence, however, that the play element, always an important ingredient from the earliest stages, became an increasingly influential factor during the last two decades of the century. As with all games, some of
II

the players continued to take completely seriously the established principles

governing courtly behavior,

poets of the period

at least

while taking part in the game.

is illicit

One

finds

and therefore necessarily secretive, about the quest of the male for his own spiritual ennoblement, and about the pain and suffering of parting or the anguish of unrequited love in much the same terms and with much the same terminology as their predecessors did four hundred years earlier. It may never be satisfactorily determined whether this is to be accounted for by the sublimation theory, the simple desire to excel at a literary genre currently held in high esteem, or even the unfashionable possibility that they really were suffering. Alongside these traditionalists, a new generation of Isabelline courtiers, less respectful of the rulebook handed down by their predecessors, interested in developing and refining the principles governing the verse form and the content, fascinated by the multiple possibilites of language, exercised their skills above all through group activity in mixed gatherings at tournaments and at the royal court. Men and women have always tended to share a lively interest in words and in the relationships between the sexes, and that is what a significant proportion of Isabelline courtly poetry is about. The bawd's blandishments directed at the impressionable Parmeno in Act I of Celestina illustrate this
write about a kind of love that
precisely:

who

La natura huye lo amigos en las cosas y comunicarlas.

.
. .

triste

sensuales,

y apetece lo delectable. El deleyte es con los y especial en recontar las cosas de amores, jO que juegos! jO que besos! 'jVamos alia!' 'jBolmusical': 'pintemos los motes, [cantemos] canci-

vamos

aca!'

'jAnde

la

ones, [hagamos] invenciones, justemos.' (Fernando de Rojas 1991, 262)

is recommending is of course the specialized version between two lovers the justa de amores, with its accompanying games, caresses, dance, music, and words. These literary and sporting activities are part of the world of the imagination and are also related to real

The justa

that Celestina

that takes place

life: if

we

approach them

as interludes,

designed to stand outside "ordinary"

rules

life,

interdependent games with their

own

and vocabulary, played for a

fixed duration and within an agreed field of play, then

what

results

is

some-

thing that approximates very closely to Huizinga's description of the play

phenomenon.
Queen Mary and
duction to Castillo's collection and an updated bibliography, can
Westfield College

now

be consulted in Mac-

pherson 1998.

Role Playing

in the

Amatory Poetry

of the Cancioneros

VICTORIA

A.

BURRUS

The
which
it

role playing

shall discuss in

the amatory poetry of the cancioneros can

only be adequately understood in the context of the social world in

was

cultivated.

Written

for,

and often by, the members of the courts

of kings and magnates,

this

type of poetry served a valuable social function that

must be taken into consideration in its appraisal. The fifteenth century in Spain was a period in which the nobles were becoming increasingly dependent upon the figure of the king for their continued survival as a privileged upper class in the face of the growing power of a bourgeoisie, which was itself making inroads into the nobility by way of the royal concession of titles.' The need to maintain the prestige and privileges that distinguished their class drew evergrowing numbers of nobles to court, where they vied for the rewards that the attention of the powerful could bring. The close quarters of the court in turn created the need for restraint in their now much more complicated social dealings with each other, a restraint embodied in a courtly code of manners, of ceremony and etiquette, which gradually arose in court life.^ Life at court involved a high degree of role playing, of taking care to present the appropriate image at the proper time for the benefit of the proper people. One had to be ever sensitive to the sometimes subtle shifts in the dynamics of social power relationships and adjust one's public image accord-

'

The

gradual process by which,

a barter

as

Norbert

Elias puts

it,

"a landed warrior nobility

founded on

economy

is

supplanted by a court aristocracy founded on a

money
was

economy"
^

(1983, 158) was taking place throughout Europe, but Spain, along with

Italy,

in the forefront (1983, 241).

This

is

essentiaUy the thesis of Elias,

it as

who

sees the role

of the court

as a

dual one,

characterizing

"an institution for taming and preserving the nobility" (1978-82, 2:269).
is

As

a sociologist, Elias

concerned with the underlying

social

and economic conditions

that

foster social change.

For different perspectives, see Jaeger (1985) and Scaglione (1991).

112

ROLE PLAYING IN AMATORY POETRY

These role playing skills so vital to their survival at court were pracand refined during leisure activities, which were used primarily to proin medieval medical and philowhich were frequently used to justify the leisure These activities were in fact vital to life at court, and

ingly.^

ticed

mote

conviviality among its members.'* The importance of leisure was recognized

sophical doctrine, allusions to

pursuits

of the

nobility.^

we

find Alfonso

X of Castile establishing in his thirteenth-century Siete partidas

between
corte and palacio. The corte was the place in of the kingdom was handled ("Que cosa es corte,"

a revealing distinction

which the
II, ix,

official business

27; 1807, 2:82-83). In contrast:

el

Palacio es dicho aquel logar do

rey se ayunta paladinamente para fablar

con

los

homes,

et esto es

en

tres

maneras, o para librar los pleytos, o para

. . .

comer, o para fablar en gasajado. Et quando es para fablar como en manera de gasajado, asi como para departir o para retraer, o para jugar de palabra, ninguna destas non se debe de facer sinon como conviene: ca el departir debe seer de manera que non mengiie el seso al home por el, asi como ensafiandose: ca esta es cosa que le saca mucho aina de su siesto.
(II, ix,

29; 1807, 2:85)

As a place to "fablar en gasajado," the palacio could provide a needed hiatus from more serious concerns, a place where one could relax and be Ughthearted with one's fellows.
In Alfonso's insistence
life

on the

separate

and valued

role

of the

palacio in the

of the court,

we

can better understand the nature of the

life at

activities

one

finds

occurring in the social

the palacio in Trastamaran Spain. Literature had

as

always played an important role

courtly entertainment, but by the fifteenth

at

century, after generations of being entertained

the palacio

by romances of

chivalry and the troubadour poetry of the Provencal, French, and Galician-

Portuguese traditions, the notion of courtly love that ran through these works

become the basis for a rather elaborate social fiction, a sort of role game played among the courtiers during the plentiful free time at the palacio.^ The roles were adopted in sociable conversation at court and enhad
clearly

playing

hanced by the writing and performance of poetry

as a

means of portraying

Ellas

comments: "Court

aristocrats are often well

aware that they wear a mask in their

that playing
is

dealings with other people, even though they

may not be aware

with masks has

life

become second
all
"

nature to them" (1983, 241). Jaeger concurs: "It

a truism

of court

that

public acts and words are a mask" (1985, 62).

Jaeger speaks of "that important law of court

life:

maintain unbroken cheerfulness and

amicabiUty" (1985. 62).

^
''

For
Ian

a discussion, see Olson (1982). Macpherson examines the playful

qualities inherent in the

concept of courdy love

and the poetry

love
as

that
at

was based on
that

it

in his study in the present in

volume. The game of courtly

with the fantasy games such
as

played

court has a

number of elements
became popular

common

"Dungeons and Dragons"

in the late 1970s (on

which

see Fine 1983).

VICTORIA

A.

BURRUS
game
the boundaries

113

oneself and others in these rolesJ In this

ature and
life

between

liter-

were

purposely confused, and the exploitation of the ambiguities

created by this confusion was an essential part of the entertainment.

The

knightly lover in literature provided the role

on which the

courtiers

modeled
lady

their behavior toward the ladies at the palacio.

The

fantasy to

be

played out required the knight to be in the grip of an obsessive passion for a
all beauty and virtue, one whose perfection precluded his worthy of her love. He would nonetheless strive to prove his ever being worth to her in the hope that she might one day look favorably upon him. Love was a magnificent quest fraught with difficulty at every turn: the more

who embodied
truly

it was, the more seemingly impossible its successful completion, the more noteworthy it would be. The knight's love for his lady was of such monumental proportions that it deserved to become as legendary as the loves of the famous knights of the romances.*^ The true lover was willing to put his

arduous

very

life

in jeopardy for his lady's love. Elaborate tournaments, jousts,

and

passages at arms afforded knights of all ranks the opportunity to play the valiant

knight-errant engaged in a marvelous enterprise to prove his merit to his lady.

and worthy knight had unconditionally surrendered his heart. In the lists he would joust for her, while at the palacio he would do his best to demonstrate that his love, if unrequited, would surely be the cause of his death. An exceptional love such as this would needs be sung at court. Such works could be commissioned of the many court poets, but it was, of course, far preferable for one to participate actively oneself as poet, inspired by a noble passion.
unquestionable honor to

Noblewomen

readily accepted the role of the lady of unsurpassed beauty

whom

'

Spain

is

far firom

unique

in this
its

phenomenon

and, as often

happened
For
a

in Hterature,
this

foreign patterns
as

were adapted

to

own

particular circumstances.

view of

game

played in the early

F.

Tudor

court, see Stevens (1961, esp. chap. 9,

esp. chap. 4,

"The 'Game of Love,'"

154-202) and R.

Green (1980,

court of late medieval France, see Poirion (1965).

ing the usefulness of the term "courdy love" (see

'The Court of Cupid," 101-34). For the Aware of the critical controversy concernBoase 1977, 111-14), Larry Benson insists:

"Courtly love did

fifteenth,

exist,

perhaps not in the twelfth century, but certainly in the fourteenth,

and even sixteenth centuries" (1984, 239).

like courtly

He

concedes: "Certainly not everyone

fifteenth centuries,

was acting

loven in the bte fourteenth and

and even those

who were probably

**

did so

on

rare occasions.

Yet

these

few

set the fashion that

grew stronger

and more widespread in the generations that followed" (1984, 251).

The

courtiers often

compare themselves favorably with

/

literary lovers. In a

poem

firom
si

the Cancionero de palacio, Juan de Duenas, for example, claims to his lady "que por ^ierto

yo

ftiera /

en

el

tiempo d'Amadis,

segun vos

amo

y adoro /

muy

lealmente sin

arte, /

nuestra fuera

la mas parte / de la Inssola del Ploro" (ID2606, SA7-233, fol. 101 v; Dutton 1990-91, 4:140-41). Poems are identified by ID number and manuscript reference according

to

Dutton (1990-91). Texts

are cited firom facsimile editions

of the Cancionero

de

Baena

(PNl) and the Cancionero

general

(IICG) and
punctuation.

in other cases

from

their transcription in

Dutton (1990-91), using

my own

114

ROLE PLAYING IN AMATORY POETRY

certain

amount of intrigue was

required, as the lover

by convention had

to conceal the object of his passion, ostensibly in order to protect his lady's

honor. "Secret" communication with the lady became a key to playing out the
fantasy.

The knight could not

properly appear

at a

tournament or joust or

enter into battle without vaunting a secret love in

some symbolic

fashion,

often going so far as to wear his lady's colors or a token she had given him.

The

fanciful crest, or cimera,

adorning the knight's helmet could be adopted

as

were composed to elucidate their meaning.^ The knight often adopted a motto (mote) that alluded to his role as lover and for which poetic glosses could be composed, such as Jorge Manrique's gloss of his mote "Siempre amar y amor seguir" (ID6405 4229, llCG-598, fols. 143v-44r).' Elaborate devices (inuenciones) of all kinds were contrived to allude to aspects of one's love and verses inevitably composed to explain them. The lover truly wore his heart on his sleeve, as invettciones sometimes involving a rebus were embroidered on the clothing or on the caparison of a mount. A color system was used in invenciones and in the composition of one's costume to convey an emotional state.^* It was in sociable conversation w^ith the ladies at the palacio, how^ever, that the role of lover could be most elaborately developed.^^ There one need not yet be knighted to participate, and a ready wit was a more valued asset than skill at arms. The lover's ingenuity could be most impressively demonstrated by writing amorous poetry, which would be performed at court for the appreciation of all. In terms of the fantasy, the verse supposedly inspired by this great
part of his armorial bearings, while sometimes enigmatic verses

'^

The

Cancionero del British

Museum
fols.

^iertos justadores"

(LB 1232-308,

contains a section of "Letras y ^imeras que sacaron 77r-79v) including poetic commentary on some of

them by Pedro de Cartagena. Many of these are reproduced in the section of "Invenciones y letras de justadores" in the Cancionero general (llCG-481-593, fols. 140r-43v). See Ian Macpherson's study in the present volume.
'"

The

Cancionero general includes a section of "Glosas de motes"

(IICG, 594-634,

fols.

143v-46v).

" Matulka
266-82,
esp.

discusses erotic color

symbolism

in

medieval Spanish courdy culture (1931,

1:400-19).
in
in

276-82). See also

Kenyon
as it

(1915), and Battesti-Pelegrin (1982,

Goldberg has reviewed the system

greater detail that "although at
a straightforward system
first

appears in the sentimental

it

romance and shown

symbolism consisted

glance

might seem
.
.

that colour

of fixed equivalences,

meaning varied not only according

to hue,

but also according to shade and intensity" (1992, 232).

'^

Stevens discusses the importance of courtly conversation, or "commoning," particular-

ly "luf-talkyng," in the early

Tudor

court:

"The importance of talk

in the aristocratic ideal

world of courdy living can hardly be exaggerated" (1961,

159). " 'Luf-talkyng' could take

many

different forms.

good

talker could coin

maxims or aphorisms,
talk

devise riddles and

jokes, develop 'themes,' formulate 'questions' concerning love, start a debate or a 'contention,' take part in talking-games,

and so on. Such

is

nearly always dramatic" (1961, 161).

Poems

like Puertocarrero's

have recently been dubbed autos de amores and are discussed by

Sirera (1992).

VICTORIA

A.

BURRUS

115

love served as an important vehicle for "secret" communication and helped to

foster an air

of intrigue

that further fueled the fantasy. '-^

The anonymous

author of the Cronica de don Alvaro de Luna portrays Juan II's notorious Constable of Castile as the very model of the perfect courtly knight, one who therefore did not neglect to cultivate the role of lover in an admirable fashion:

Fue

muy medido
amo
e

conpasado en

las

costunbres, desde
las

la

su juventud;

sienpre

honrro

mucho

al

linage de

mugeres. Fue

rado en todo tienpo; guardo gran secreto a sus amores.

e discretas can^iones de los sus amores, e

muy enamoFizo muy vivas

ellas

muchas bezes declaraba en

misterios de otros grandes fechos. (1940, 207)

Although they provided

a vehicle for sociable conversation

and proved
is

highly versatile in lending a dramatic dimension to

many forms of courtly enas well. It

tertainment, these roles had a very important practical benefit

well

of great strife and social upheaval the nobility. If in the real world blood dictated social worth and established a hierarchy within the nobility itself, in the mixed company of the palacio all nobles were equal in the role of lover, be they nobles of ancient
that the fifteenth century

known among

was

a time

lineage or the most recent recipients of a concession of noble status.

The

lover

concern outside the love relationship: political rivalries, the obligations of rank, even duties to king and country were brought to nothing by the awesome power of love, for the duration of the game. Courtly love
official

had no

transformed

all

nobles into knightly lovers, each intent on proving himself the

Each would play the role as though, in the words of yo sere comien^o d'ella" (ID0858, IICG 232, fol. 108r), and in a way, the writing of courtly love verse ensured that his story would indeed be told. Moreover, all the ladies of the court were potentially the unnamed lady of the poetry, which attributed to them a power over men and their own fates, belied by historical fact and unsupported by serious philosophy. Other men could be rivals, but more often, it would seem, theirs was the role of co-sufferers who listened sympathetically to the lover's plaint. The role of lover thus offered the noble a means for interacting socially
greatest lover ever born.

Guevara,

"si

d'amor

s'escriue ystoria, /

in an unthreatening

way with both male and female members of the

court.

'^

In

many

cases the "secret"

is

clearly

an open one,

as is

evident in

many of

the

invenciones

used to designate the lady.

The

letras

de invendones

of the Vizconde de Altamira

and others cited by Ian Macpherson

in the present

volume

are typical.

Another only some-

what
spells
letter.

less

transparent device

is

the use of acrostics, such as in Jorge Manrique's

poem, which
si la

out the name

GUYOMAR by beginning each successive strophe with the appropriate

still

Despite the acrostic, Manrique can

si

declare:

"jO

si

aquestas mis passiones, / o

pena en qu'esto, / o
/ oyesse la

mis

fliertes

passiones / osasse descobrir yo! /

fol.

jO

si

quien a mi

las

dio
as

quexa

dellas!"

(ID6147, llCG-194,

98v).

There

is

fiirther

irony in that,

the audience well knew,

wife.

Guiomar was

Aurora Hermida discusses

name not of Manrique's secret love but of his other acrostic poems by Jorge Manrique in her study in the
the

present volume.

116

ROLE PLAYING IN AMATORY POETRY

social fiction

of courtly love contributed to patterns of thought and basis for what has generally come to be regarded as civilized behavior. The formal show of deference toward women that became an essential part of polite social behavior, a sign of good breeding, may be seen as a cultural legacy from the days when "gentleman" (^entilhombre) was synonymous with "nobleman" and the game of courtly love was played in the courts of Europe. In Spain it is clear that by the time of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs these play concepts had already begun to crystallize into required formal gestures, as all forms of affection and reverence toward women came to be expressed in the mode of courtly love. Poetic praise of the queen and of the ladies present at court was also habitually rendered in amorous terms. ^"^ Pedro de Cartagena, for example, employs a cancionero technique that Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel designates the "hiperbole sagrada" to praise not his own lady-love but rather Isabel herself
behavior that would form the

The

Que

loaros, a

mi

ver,

en vuestra y agena patria, silencio deueys poner, que daros a conoscer haze la gente ydolatria.
(ID6120, llCG-153,
fol.

87v)^5

Fernando and
of the poetic
plains:

Isabel themselves led the

way

in playing the courtly lover to

each other. Each adopted

a personal device

senhal, signified the other, as

which, in the Provencal tradition Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo ex-

Muy

acostumbrada cosa
la
la

es

en nuestra Espaiia, entre caualleros e

sefiores,

procurar que

nombre de
dando
la

invention comien^e su nombre en la primera letra del senora por quien se inven^ iona, demas del atributo o sinifi-

cagion de lo que quieren magnifestar o publicar con esas devisas.

esta

guar-

orden,
letra es

el

Catolico

Rey don Fernando

la

trahia

vn yugo, porque

primera

Y, por Ysabel; y
primera
letra es F,

las firechas,

que

la

Reyna Catolica trahia por diuisa por Fernando. (1983, 1:480)

finds

Even

in their personal correspondence,

one

Fernando playing the role of

'''

'^

Jones adduces evidence for "toda una tradicion amorosa a Isabel" (1962, 63). For extensive examples of the convention of the lover calling his lady his God, see
n.)

Lida de Malkiel (1946, 306-309

this sort: "II

and Gerli (1981). Le Gentil points out

a la lettre

that in
.
. .

poems of

ne faut

pas,

bien entendu, prendre

un

tel

langage

il

faut penser

que

la

terminologie courtoise tend alors a se transformer en un simple formulaire de

la

pohtesse, aussi bien, I'amour etant

plus haute
il

forme de I'admiration

et

du

respect, dans la

pensee des

hommes du moyen
1:101).

age,

ne faut pas s'etonner du ton que prennent certaines

II

cantigas de loores adressees a des souveraines.

s'agit la

d'hyperboles poetiques, dont personne

n'etait

choque" (1949,

VICTORIA
the unrequited lover
sans mercy.

A.

BURRUS

117

who claims his death will be on the head of his belle dame Absent from court and having received no news from his queen, Fernando wrote her the following letter, written in Tordesillas, 16 May 1475:
Mi
seiiora.

lo

menos agora bien

se

pareze quien se adolesce mas

escribe

dell otro quanto segiin vuestra senoria

[sic]

me

y aze saberme

como

no puedo dormir, tantos son los mensajeros que alia esta da tenemos que sin cartas se vienen no por mengua de papel ni de no saber escrebir, salvo de mengua de amor y de altiva, pues estais en Toledo y nosotros por aldeas. Pues algun dia tornaremos en el amor primero. Si por no lo yziese vuestra seiioria, por no ser omecida me debe escrebir y
alegre,

azerme saber como

79)16

se halla vuestra senoria. (ed. Prieto

Cantero 1970,

Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo,

court of Fernando and Isabel, has
use of the role of lover as a

who
left

began

his

long career of service

at the

perhaps the most overt statement of the

model

for

proper courtly behavior:

Costumbre es en Espaiia entre los seiiores de estado, que venidos a la aunque no esten enamorados o que pasen de la mitad de la hedad, fmjir que aman, por servir y favorecer a alguna dama y gastar como
corte,

quien son en

fiestas
les

amores, sin que

y otras cosas que se ofrecen de de pena Cupido. (1983, 1:249)'^

act

tales

pasatiempos y

The
sala

nobles,

who must

"como quien

son," adopted the role of lover

as

an

essential part

of social pastimes

at court, for, as

of Isabel la Catolica, puts it in his amores son el sello / que sellan la gentileza" (ID 1895, MP2-33, fol. 95r; Dutton 1990-91, 2:405). Poetry was a major vehicle for the dramatic expression of the play sentiment of courtly love as well as for the elaboration of the nature of the concept. In the prologue to his cancionero, Juan Alfonso de Baena enumerates the qualities that the practitioner of "el arte de la poetrya & gaya fien^ia" (PNl 3r) must possess: discretion, good judgment, erudition, worldly experience, and
finalmente, que sea noble fydalgo

Hernando de Ludueiia, maestrerhymed Doctrinal de j^entileza: "Los

&

cortes

gra^ioso

& polido &

finja

donoso. E que tenga miel

donayre en su rrazonar.
premie

otrosy que sea

& mesurado & gentil & & a^ ucar & sal & ayre & amador & que siempre se
a saber,

& se

de ser enamorado, porque es opynion de muchos sabyos

sea

que todo omne que

enamorado, conuiene

que ame

quien

"

am

indebted to Peggy K.

Liss for facilitating the citation

of Femando's

letter to

Isabel.

For

a discussion, see Liss (1992,

first

110-12).

" Roger Boase

drew

attention to this passage (1977, v).

118

ROLE PLAYING IN AMATORY POETRY

tal

deue & como deue & donde deue, afirman e dizen qu'el buenas dotrinas es doctado. (1926, fol. 3v)

de todas

courtly poet should be both a "noble fydalgo" and an "amador." This second attribute is important because when he loves in the proper fashion ("a quien deue & como deue & donde deue"), he, by implication, possesses a set of concomitant virtues. It therefore behooved the courtier to feign love ("se finja de ser enamorado") if necessary, in order to be able to play the role by which he could increase his prestige among his peers. Amatory poetry was enthusiastically cultivated by the nobility, who circulated it among themselves and had it performed before the court for the entertainment of all. The meticulous care with which this poetry was preserved in voluminous cancioneros bears witness to the high esteem in which it was held. The poems were considered displays of courtly skill, just as the feats of arms at joust and tournament were demonstrations of knightly prowess. The compilers of the cancioneros duly recorded for posterity the names of the noble poets along with their verses with the same diligence shown by the chroniclers in registering the names of participants in knightly action, be it battle or tournament. While as a format for social etiquette all were expected to participate to some extent, as a real game, courtly love was one to which only the young could fully commit themselves. It was considered quite unseemly for a mature man to attempt to participate with the unbridled enthusiasm of youth. Hernando de Ludueiia asserts: "El galan a de tener / lo primero tal hedad / que de treinta e seis no pase" (ID1895, MP2-33, fol. 82v; Dutton 1990-91, 2:395). Later in the same work he elaborates:

The

amores de gentileza,

no neguemos la verdad, huyen de la senetud,

porque toda su firmeza,
condifion e calidad
son
flores

de juuentud.
a los finquenta,

el

que Uega

finquenta e ^inco, o sesenta,

con mafias de enamorado, quanto deue ser culpado no tiene quento ni quenta.

(fol.

89r;

Dutton 1990-91, 2:400)

The poet then

estirado

ridicules at some length the sight of "vn biejo bordado, / en la gran sala" (Dutton 1990-91, 2:401). Such behavior on the part of a mature man shows a complete lack of a sense of decorum in a society in which, as Luduena informs us, it is vital to "pensar en elegir / lo que se deue vestir, / segun cuerpo, tienpo, edad, / pues la no conformidad / es cosa para reyr" (fol. 83r; Dutton 1990-91, 2:395). There was certainly no want of willing participants in these activities. For

VICTORIA

A.

BURRUS

119

young man, the fantasy of being a knightly lover like those of the romances of chivalry was attractive indeed. In his autobiography, Saint Ignatius of Loyola recalls his own fantasies as a young knight who was "dado a las vanidades del mundo, y principalmente se deleitaba en ejercicio de armas, con un grande deseo de ganar honra" (1966, 27). In 1521 at the age of twenty-six he sustained serious leg wounds defending a fortress against the French at Pamplona. An operation to reset the bones, which had healed badly, left him bedridden for a period and, being "muy dado a leer libros mundanos y falsos que suelen Uamarse de caballerias" (1966, 30), he would often find his mind straying to
a
idle thoughts:

de muchas cosas vanas que

se le ofirecian,

una tenia tanto poseido su

ella

corazon, que se estaba luego embebido en pensar en

dos y

tres

cuatro horas sin sentirlo, imaginando lo que habia de hacer en servicio

medios que tomaria para poder ir a la tierra donde ella que le diria, los hechos de armas que haria en su servicio. Y estaba con esto tan envanecido, que no miraba cuan imposible era poderlo alcanzar; porque la seiiora no era de vulgar nobleza: no condesa, ni duquesa, mas era su estado mas alto que ninguno de
de una
seiiora, los

estaba, los motes, las palabras

estas.

(1966, 31)

Their heads filled with such fantasies, eager and lusty young knights and must have arrived at court fully expecting to fall in love with a lady at first sight. The anonymous author of a short epistolary treatise found in the prose material at the beginning of the Cancionero de Herberay des Essarts (LB2) describes the phenomenon in explaining the Ley^^ '^^ amor to one young
donceles

"mossen Ugo":

Vos

mas que ninguna otra cosa las una bella e graciada qu'en estremo e presto se comprehende es vista por un man^ebo qui con la voluntat suelta con feruiente sangre e con gentil animo va buscando amor, fallado el pedrenal dispuesto e la yesca fina, ninguna marauilla es que presto, con el golpe de solos oios, I'enamorado fuego s'en^ienda. (ed. Aubrun 1951, 24)
sabeys plazen a todos naturalmente e
las

donas, d'entre

quales

si

Although this was certainly preferable, if none of the ladies happened to inspire any real attraction, all was not lost. The knight had merely to single out a lady who seemed worthy of the honor of receiving his attentions on occasions that called for a display of gallant servitude. She, in turn, would respond as she saw fit: purely honorific service would be graciously accepted, while those with pretensions of more would have to play the role with all the more zeal to prove that their love was indeed on a par with that of the knights who populated the romances. As there were always far more men than women at court, a comely lady would typically have several would-be suitors vying for her affection, with varying degrees of seriousness their part. Each would be expected to prove by word and deed that his love for her was true, while that of his rivals was base and false. Typically he would seek to accomplish this

120

ROLE PLAYING

IN

AMATORY POETRY

through the affirmation of the orthodoxy of his own love or the witty derision of his rivals and their goals. To be fully convincing in the role of courtly lover, one had to learn how to "fazer gestos / como los enamorados" (Pedro Gonzalez de Uzeda; IDOlll, PNl-343, fol. 126v). For this, a knowledge of the classic signs of lovesickness (the signa amoris of the medical manuals) was indispensable. Since these symptoms served as testimony to the sincerity and strength of his love, the lover displayed them as a badge of honor for all to witness. It is for this reason that in his Coplas sobre la gala Suero de Ribera jocularly makes them a requirement of the galdn: "El galan flaco, amarillo, / deue ser y muy cortes" (ID0141, 1 ICG 88, fol. 51r). It is apparent from the medical literature of the day that passionate love (amor hereos, or simply el mal de amores) was recognized as a genuine disease that was capable of leading to madness and, in extreme circumstances, to death.'** The symptoms were commonly known. We find Alfonso Martinez de Toledo echoing them in a chapter of his Corbacho (1438) entitled: "De como muchos enloquecen por amores":
^Quantos,
di,

amigo, viste o oiste dezir que en este

mundo amaron que

su vida fue dolor e enojo, pensamientos, sospiros e congojas,

mucho
tal

velar,

non comer, mucho

pensar? E, lo peor,

mal e otros son privados de su anima donde penas crueles le son aparejadas por siempre jamas,
1979, 79)

non dormir, mueren muchos de buen entendemiento; e si muere va su

(ed. Gerli

Pedro Mejia, in his Siha de varia leccion (1540), describes how Greek and Arab physicians counted "el aficion y pasion de los amores" among the other "enfermedades humanas" (1933-34, 2:74) and lists some of the signs:

ponen para conocer cuando uno anda enamorado, duermen y comen poco, que el pulso les anda apriesa, y hablando con ellos no responden a proposito algunas veces; y asi otras muchas que no quiero decir, porque ya los hombres se precian tanto de ello, que ellos tienen cuidado de publicallo
seiiales otras

Muchas

como que

tienen los ojos hundidos, y

y aun

a las veces falsa

y fingidamente. (1933-34, 2:75-76)

Those who go
role

to such extremes are obviously

more involved

in playing the
as part

of lover than the courtier

who

takes

on

aspects

of the role merely

'"

In a 1495 translation into Spanish of his Liliutn medicmae (1305), Bernardo Gordonio

says that "devedes

es

de saber que
la

el

amor que hereos

el

se dize es propria passion del celebro e

por corrupcion de

imaginativa" (Bernardo Gordonio 1990, 109).

He

summarizes the

seiiales

of amor

hereos:

"Son que pierden

sueno

e el

comer

e el bever e se enmagresce todo

su cuerpo, salvo los ojos, e tienen pensamientos escondidos e fondos

con
si

sospiros llorosos"

(1990, 108).

He

states

unequivocally: "La pronosticacion es

tal

que

los

hereos

non son

curados, caen en mania o se

Wack

mueren" (1990, 108). For recent research (1990) and Jacquart and Thomasett (1988).

into the subject, see

VICTORIA
of courtly etiquette. Here
the ones without

A.

BURRUS

121

we

whom

the notion of courtly love

affectation

have a glimpse of the true players of the game, would have become no

more than a stale stylistic ment reveals that he still

believes that lovesickness

of literature. Furthermore, Mejia's statewas a real phenomenon,

although he recognizes that the exaggerated display of symptoms has become

a status symbol. That "a veces" one finds men displaying these signs "falsa y fingidamente" seems to refer to the motive of the display rather than to the display itself. It is not the player of a harmless game who plays "falsa y fingida-

mente," but rather one who uses it for the base purpose of seduction.'^ In the context of the court, the role of lover was highly ambiguous, and in its ambiguity lay its attraction: although its conventions could be used as an adjunct to secular chivalry, for mere social amenity, or for flattery of the powerful, it is equally true that no less noble form could appropriately be employed to express a real attraction or to honor an existing relationship, and as no more effective form could be used for moralists were quick to point out seduction. ^^ The knowledge that clandestine (and overt) affairs could really take place certainly added spice to the social banter. This flexibility and ambiguity in turn provided endless material for courtly entertainment, much of which was achieved through poetry. Because this love would always be presented as unrequited, it allowed virtuous ladies to participate in social acti-

^''

Pedro de Cartagena,

in a

poem warning

the ladies of "los enganos de los onbres,"

describes these lover/poets

who

are neither lovers

nor poets, although they would "por

estilo

galan / contar cuentos de passion, / qu'estos sin ningiin afan / por dondequiera que van /

dizen

la

misma razon" (ID6118, llCG-151,

a short treatise

fol. 87r).

Appended

to his

1554

translation

of

the Amphitrion of Plautus, Francisco

V, includes

Lopez de Villalobos (1473P-1539), physician to Carlos on love in which he similarly speaks of false lovers: "Lo sobre. . .

dicho se entiende de
ya

los

verdaderos amores.

Mas de
los

los fingidos otra cosa sentimos;

que

hemos

visto algunos grandes seiiores

dissimular

con

ellos los

amores por su pasatiempo, y para grandes negocios que andan urdiendo, sabenlo tan bien hacer, que
a sus amigas

que toman

quien
-"

los viere jurara

que estan dentro; mas yo aviso

que

se

guarden

dellos,

porque vienen

a ellas

The

moralists,
la

en vestiduras de cordero, y ellos son lobos robadores" (1855, 489). of course, took a dim view of the whole game. The anonymous author had taken in following
la

of the

Libro de

consola(i6n de Espafia sees the path that the court

these customs as a perilous

one indeed: "Ca lla[ma]mos

a la
vil

Luxuria de

came

al

adulterio

'amores' e 'bienqueren^ias': e en cosa tan sucia e tan

de^iamos tan altisymo nonbre e

quitamosle
ello e

el

suyo, e tenemos por mejor

le fasen,

al

mas honrra

ca es tenjdo por

que mas vsa destos amores, e mas loado es por mas desenbuelto e por mas omne, e avn el se da

mas fauor por

ello,

e quiere

mas

valer

por nes^edat, e

mucho

syn seso

es

reputado oy

el

que

non anda en tales amores, por cuyo trabto yo creo verdaderamente segund lo que veo trabtar que Dios non tyene parte, njn avn pequena parte en los manfebos nin avn en los de mas
hedat que man^ebos, njn en
las

mujeres, ca tanto abran

como

complaseran e
a la parte

se agradaran

vnos

otros en sus adulterios, asy ellos

como

ellas,

que ^iegan

de Dios e

ofende[n]lo por myll maneras, solo por este trabto tan malo que trabtan" (ed. Rodriguez
Puertolas 1972, 204-205).

122

ROLE PLAYING IN AMATORY POETRY

without compromising their reputations, while elevating mundane sexual by depicting them poetically as essentially chaste and noble. Speculation as to the identity of the poet's unnamed lady and the real nature of the relationship was a major source of amusement at the palacio. And of course, one need not have any particular lady in mind to write a poem of courtly love, in which the lady traditionally remains nameless. A poet could thus write poetry to a fictitious lady merely to display his poetic skills or to pique the interest of the court. One suspects as much when Pedro de Cartagena writes a poem, as the rubrics claim, "respondiendo a ciertas damas que le preguntaron quien era su amiga, si era dueha o donzella" (ID0914, IICG 142, fol. 85v). In his Doctrinal de gentileza Hernando de Ludueiia emphasizes the essential harmlessness of the fiction as played at court:
vities

liaisons

De

palafio los amores

tal

son de

constela^ion,

que dessechan la victoria, porque los mas son fauores do pro^ede presunp^ion, qu'es el cabo de su gloria.
(ID1895, MP2-33,
fol.

89r;

Dutton 1990-91, 2:400)

minority:

He

insists that

those

who do

not respect

this are in the

si algunos son agenos de lo bueno e no tan bueno que no guardan el conpas,

no
por

se
la

condenen
(fol.

los

mas

culpa de los menos.

89r;

Dutton 1990-91, 2:400)

He

reminds us that court

life

obliged the doncella to take part in the game:

No
la

es

razon de

se escusar

donzella de

salir

en palacio y ser mirada. Tanpoco puede dexar

y reir, conforme donde
el festejar
(fol.

es criada.

93r; Dutton, 1990-91, 2:404)

He

defends the maligned doncella firom detractors

therefore judge her actions as suspect:

who do

not understand the

game and

Porque ay cien

mill mugeres,

festejadas, palan^ianas,

en esta nuestra Castilla que sauen de mil plazeres sanas como las manzanas,

VICTORIA
sin

A.

BURRUS

123

a las tales

punzada y sin manzilla. condenar

loar,

o dexallas de

son malifias ynfernales,

porque son tantas y tales, que no se podran contar. (fol. 93v; Dutton 1990-91, 2:404)
of this courtly game at assimilate her role and eventually be able to begin to play herself She had to be made aware, however, that it was really just a game. Overexuberance on her part would therefore be subtly chastised, as in a poem by Tapia to a young lady who evidently took to extremes her role as the belle dame sans mercy: "a vna dama, porque era altiua con quien la seruia. Dale consejo porque era muy mo^a" (ID6613, 1 ICG850, fol. 178r). In it he tells her that in her youthful ignorance she has erred in thinking that the "surtes esquiuos" with which she treats her admirers will bring her fame, "pues no se llama bondad / los respectos muy altiuos / a la
doncella

The young

had to learn the unwritten

if she

rules

the palacio

itself.

There,

paid attention, she

would

dama"

(fol.

178r).

"dama muy honesta

a "dul^e respuesta" to those

who

/ y de linaje" (fol. 178r) must give contemplate her with desire and adoration.

The poetry that depicts the social banter between the aspiring lover and his would-be lady-love could be highly amusing.^' Witty poetic responses to a lady's challenge abound in the later cancioneros. Alonso de Cardona writes an esparsa, as the rubric explains, "porque estando delante vna senora, sospiro, y ella le dixo que no deuia sospirar pues que dezia que se tenia por dichoso de su passion" (ID6677, llCG-905, fol. 194r). The rubric to a poem by Geronimo de Artes claims that he wrote it "porque le dixo vna sefiora que pensaua en que podelle enojar" (ID4360, llCG-941, fol. 206r). The courtly lady could be quite a coquette in this matter. Another poem in the Cancionero general was composed, according to the rubric, by "vn galan porque, estando con su amiga, ella le puso la mano sobre el cora^on, y hallo que estaua seguro y dixole que era de poco amor que le tenia" (ID6260, llCG-371, fol. 127v). Knowing that a racing pulse was a primary symptom of the mal de amores, the
lady playfully chides her lover for not sufficiently fulfilling the expectations of

the role.

mortally

The young ^a/^ answers in his poetic defense wounded by her unceasing disfavor. Keeping in mind the playful nature of the activity,

that his heart has

been

it

is

not surprising to

find courtiers actively seeking to pique the curiosity of the ladies. Pedro de

Cartagena, for example, writes a

que dezia

el

poem "porque le dixeron vnas damas que por y otros compaiieros suyos que estauan tristes, qu'en su vestir pub-

^'

What

Stevens says of the hterature of the early

as well: " 'Literature' in this

Tudor court apphes

to the late Trastalk, idealized

tamaran court
talk" (1961,

period presents us with stylized

160);

"one cannot but be impressed by the closeness of

literary to

spoken

forms" (1961, 161).

124

ROLE PLAYING
el

IN

AMATORY POETRY
fol.

licauan
88r).

contrario,

porque yuan vestidos de grana" (ID0668, llCG-159,

Well aware

that scarlet garb symbolizes alegria, Cartagena has a ready (and

las veces ell amor / haze muestras d'alegria / con qu'encubre su dolor" (SSr)?^ Similarly, a young galan dressed in black fairly invited inquiries about the person for whom he mourns. ^-^ Costana accounts

standard) response: "c'a

for his dress in the following

poem, contrasting

his lady's playfulness

with

his

own

professed sincerity:

Vuestra merced me mando con vn officio fengido que dixesse por quien yo andaua tal qual me vio

de xerga negra vestido.

Mostrando con gran desden encobrir que sabeys cierto que soys mi mal y mi bien,
ni

menos
las

saber por quien

hago

onrras de muerto.

(ID6109, llCG-135,
It is,

fol.

Sir)

of course, for himself that he mourns,

explain:

as

Guevara, in a similar poem,

would

Que maguer me
en
la

muestro biuo,

verdad y razon

ya muerto soy,

pues con yra y mal esquiuo aueys muerto el gualardon

tras

quien voy.
teniendo esperan^a
el

Que no
se

cuenta muerto

que biue

su [= sin?] dul^or,

pues a mi con

tal

andan^a
se

no mandeys que mi dolor.

me

oluide

(ID0869, llCG-219,

fol.

104v)

^
-^

For

a different perspective

on

this

poem,

see E.

Michael

Gerli's discussion in the

present volume.

This was

a favorite
fol.

theme of Alonso de Cardona (ID6669, llCG-896,

193v). See Boase (1977, 40). for a brief discussion
his

fol.

193r and

ID6675. llCG-903,

of the fashion of
II.

wearing black among Alvaro de Luna and

contemporaries

at

the court of Juan

Whinnom

reminds us that in heraldry black symbolizes

las

"la fidelidad

la

lealtad" (1981, 53).

In his Tratado de

annas Diego de Valera sutes that black stands for "la firmeza e honesud"

(1959. 138).

VICTORIA
Guevara

A.

BURRUS

125

is

not truly without hope, of course, and he even goes so

far as to

make

the following suggestion to his lady:

Mas
vernie

si

desto que buscastes

os dio pesar,

tal

perde crueza,

que vos la que me matastes me podeys ressucitar

de mi
tristeza. (fol.

104v)

Poems such
banter
place.

as

at court.

these may or may not be based on real exchanges of playful The rendering of the lover's response in poetic form clearly

whether or not some semblance of it really took Although these poems are formally addressed to the lady, the intended audience is the entire court, which judges the ingenuity of the poet's response in terms of playing the game. From a social point of view, one of the main goals of this type of poetry may have been to illustrate how the social game should ideally be played: the ladies are both ^radosas and cuerdas, and the lovers
fictionalizes the encounter,

are equally witty in their (presumably) vain attempts to seduce

them

into play-

ing the

game on

their terms.

The poet

Puertocarrero creates a lengthy poetic dialogue between himself

and a clever lady (ID0738, llCG-794, fols. 160v-63v). After some brief banter during a chance encounter in the street, she decides to invite him to come pay her a visit. She asks a companion (who is, according to the rubric, "tanbien tercera d'el") to send for him and tells her to hide and listen in on their conversation "si aueys gana de reyr" (fol. 161r):
as a hapless ^fl/^n

Ora

le

vereys venirse

passeando y requebrarse; velle eys sin pena quexarse

y con quexas despedirse.

Velle eys mil vezes partirse
sin

que
la

parta;

Velle eys que nunca se aparta

de

muerte

sin morirse;
(fol.

vereys que no es de sufrirse.

161r)

The unsuspecting galdn, however,

all

plays his role in an

orthodox fashion, using

the lady consistently

the rhetoric of courtly love at his

command, while

calls its tenets

and

his sincerity into question:

Nunca mas
tenga yo

passion ni pena

que la que mi vista os dio, que yo la teme por buena.

(fol.

161v)

The conversation becomes a battle of wits: she willfully trying to exasperate him with common sense and he just as determined to play the lover to the

126

ROLE PLAYING

IN

AMATORY POETRY
him
short.

end. Finally, having tired of the game, she cuts

To

his plea that she

not withhold

at least

some shred of hope,

niego,

she responds:

Ni
ni so

la pedis, ni la

ni OS la do, ni la tomays,

yo la que buscays, aunque os he tenido juego. Assi que a las penas tristes
y al engano, y a quien quexa vuestro daiio, y a quantas quexas me distes, ningun derecho touistes.

Que

si

confessays verdad,
ni dano,

no aura culpa

ni vos receleys engafio, ni vuestra liberalidad.

A
no

quitar ociosidad

OS entrastes.

Pues passatiempo buscastes,

finjays necessidad,

qu'es tocar en liuiandad.

^Vuestra
In this
social

Pero dexemos nos d'esto. muger esta buena? (fol. 163r)

poem

the interlocutors sustain a level of wit that real players of the

to achieve in actual courtly conversation.
is

game could never hope

It is

for that very reason that the piece

so entertaining.
as
it

the younger

game too
It is

of the poetry all the of the poet, including, and indeed especially, the "poetic I." Cancionero poetry dealing with courtly love tends to fall into two categories: (1) that which may properly be called "courtly love poetry," in which the poetic voice is that of the impassioned lover suffering the pangs of unrequited love, and (2) poetry in which the poetic voice is that of a courtier who is clearly a player in the social game of courtly love. In the first category, the poet creates his poetry to actively play the role of the ideal lover striving to gain his lady's favor. In the second category, he uses the poetry to comment on the social fiction. In this second category, the poet is at liberty to step out of the role of the ideal courtly lover to adopt other less well defined roles such as the disillusioned lover, the misogynist, or the jaded courtier. These deviant roles are not meant to reveal the "ugly truth" about courtly love but are, quite to the contrary, essentially festive in nature. Their existence served to spur the defense of the "orthodox" roles of the long-suffering noble lover and the perfect, unattainable lady, injecting new vigor into what would otherwise have become tired old formulas that ceased to amuse.
that in the context

members of the court, it would lose important to keep in mind

seriously or

served

as a

was also instructive to reminder not to take the

It

all its

gaiety.

personages are fictional

entities, creations

VICTORIA

A.

BURRUS

127

In poetic debates, preguntas and respuestas, and the like, the courtiers examined the nuances of the concept of courtly love and
its

practice at court for the

entertainment of all.

These two categories of poetry are not ironclad, for a favorite ploy is for poem of the first type not to have believed, or to have ceased to believe, in love before laying eyes on the one who has stolen his heart. Juan de Mena confesses to having merely played along with the game
the poet to admit in a
for

convenience in the

past:

De
Mi
que

beuir sin dessear

quantas vezes he memoria.

dolor es mayor gloria

la

vida sin amar.

sin pensar

Quando biuo
^que
faria

enfingendo d'amador,

de

la

con fauor que amo sin par?

(ID0335, llCG-59,
fol.

30v)

existence of the social fiction as essentially a game is implicitly recognized, and yet the poet afFirms his own experience to be real. In this way Mena can play the game (by implying, at least, a current love interest) and still comment on the game and the way it is played. In examining a particular poem, in addition to establishing the nature of the poetic voice, one must consider for whom the poem is intended. The audience of a poem dealing with courtly love must also be considered on various levels. In a classic courtly love poem, the poet addresses himself to an unnamed lady, but, as we have seen, the private nature of the communication is
a fiction, for indirectly the

The

poet also addresses the entire court

as his

audience.

from within the fiction in terms of their implicit roles as courtly lovers and their ladies or from without, as his fellow courtiers who are
This
either

may be

consciously playing these roles.

his lady in a

When

the lover confides his secret yearning to

poem, he speaks exclusively to her on one level and on another to the entire court, which listens in on this supposedly secret communication. Likewise, when the poet ostensibly addresses a confidant and tells him of his
passionate love for a lady

who

refuses to believe the purity

of his motives and

the depth of his suffering, he

may on
lady

another level be understood to be sendtheoretically

ing a message to his

anonymous
fun
is

(who
is

the courtiers listening to the

poem

as it

performed).

may be present among Or of course, she may

Love or

not exist

at

all.

The

in the conjecture.

The

poet's complaints to

Fortune, the internal dialogues he creates within his fragmented self and the
like are also quite

obviously meant to be "overheard" by the courtly audience.

is not that of the poet speaking for himself as a man but rather that of the persona he wishes to portray, so the poet manipulates the

Just as the poetic voice

image he presents of

his lady.

When

he pictures her

as

perfection

itself,

he

128

ROLE PLAYING IN AMATORY POETRY

his

When he emphahe often bewails her as indifferent or even cruel, the obvious strategy in terms of the game being to make the lady feel guilty for the suffering she has inflicted on him. The audience would understand the motives behind the lover's rhetoric not only in terms of the poetic description of his plight but as fellow players in the game, in terms of the persuasion of the lady to take pity on him and yield to his suit. Rather than call her cruel to her face, the poet may address his poem to the general audience,
augments
sizes his

own

prestige as a lover equal to such a lady.^'*

suffering,

monumental

which knows

full

well that his

unnamed

lady

is

likely to

be in their midst:

Yo como
y en
qu'es
la

alcango lo digo,

esta
la

razon

me

fundo,

por quien me fatigo mas hermosa del mundo. Es tal, que no tiene ygual

su saber y discrecion;
es tal,

que fuera razon

mortal.

no nascer muger

por quien digo yo, no tiene sino vna cosa, que quando Dios la crio, no la hizo piadosa.
esta

(ID6265, llCG-377,

fols.

127v-28r)

The

lover/poet may, on occasion, dare to inform the lady of this single defect,

as a sign

of his despair:

Hermosura tan hermosa que destruye todas las hermosas

y enbara^a
si

las discretas,

fuessedes amorosa,
las

terniades todas

cosas

mas

altas

y mas
la

perfetas.

Mas con
la

vuestro desamor,
belleza

quanto gana

crueza desconcierta.
lo se

Yo

por mi dolor.

^^

Maria Eugenia Lacarra explains the poets' use of the perfect lady

as

an "abstract

construct" from a feminist point of view: "Only in that

desires
tive

way could

their poetry project

male

of perfection on the female beloved, and

stiU

preserve intact their mascuHne preroga-

of superiority over women. Since masculine ideology defined

inferior to
literal

men,

it

was necessary
is

that the beloved, the LMdy,

be an exceptional

women as naturally woman in the

a

sense of the word, that

to say, an exception to the rule.

Only by being
19).

unique

specimen could a female be considered worthy of the love of a man" (1988,

VICTORIA
que de Uoros y
ya tengo
la

A.

BURRUS

129

tristeza

vida muerta.
(Tapia; ID6596,

llCG-827,

fol.

174v)

Occasionally, however, the poet

may choose

to subvert the

game by taking

a radically Juan Alvarez Gato, obviously eager for the opto use his glib tongue to defend his posture, makes bold to tell the portunity

unorthodox

stance.

ladies

of the court:
Las que os han

mucho

loado,

nobles damas, hast'agora,

dexa, dexa lo prestado,

que sabe que con pecado

se

hurto desta senora.

las

Tanbien
que
si

que yo

serui

n'os quexeys porque os desdeiio,

con

ficion menti,

virtud es grande de

mi

tornar lo suyo a su dueno.

Cabo.

Quexen
riiian

las

que quexaran,
baraja,

y tengan
vos soys

que

los ciegos lo
la

veran
ventaja.
[sic]

como

si

alguna se atreuire

en contra de lo hablado, sefiora, perded cuydado, mientra qu'el Gato biuiere. (ID3105, llCG-240,

fol.

llOv)
that they

He

first insults
is

the ladies of the court

by demanding

concede that

his

lady

the rightful

owner of all

the praise they have received in the past and

then blatantly admits that his own past praise of them was a lie that must now be rectified. Knowing that this would be sure to cause a scandal, he gallantly tells his lady that she need not fear that others may be displeased with this statement as long as "el Gato" is alive to defend her.^^

^^

In light of

this,

one wonders
las

if

Pedro Torrellas,

who

seems to enjoy being

at the

center of controversy with the antifeminist stance he takes in

"Coplas de maldezir de

mugeres" (ID0043) found

a osadas, / todas las

in

poems such as the infamous some fifteen different cancioneros,

with a

might not be deliberately trying to provoke

"Cessen ya de ser loadas,
/ sin pensar /
si

similar reactions

poem

that begins:
las

donas presentes. / Oluidense

se

passadas,

en

las

vinientes. /
/ a sus

vos,

mis nueuos amores, /

den

los

grandes renombres /
el

y quiten

los

amadores

amigas los nombres / de mejores, / que vos venida en

/

mundo,
creet

/ fazeys su

nombre segundo

en loores" (ID2232, llCG-173,

also

fol. 94r).

The

indis-

mention of

his lady as

"mis nueuos amores" would

seem

to indicate a

noncon-

130

ROLE PLAYING
is

IN

AMATORY POETRY
presents himself as the sincere player

Even more shocking

the poet

who

and the lady as the one who brings into the courtly love situation unwanted elements from the real world. By manipulating her role in this way, he may create the illusion of being her moral superior. Peralvarez de Ayllon writes a poem "a vna muger que se le encarescio y despues vinolo a otorgar por vn ducado, y el, antes de la tocar, embiole estas coplas":

Con mi crescido cuydado he sabido de vos cierto c'os vence mas vn ducado qu'el mas lindo requebrado que anda por seruiros muerto. Y pues no valen sospiros,
quiero, seiiora, deziros

que abrays publica la tienda, porque no yerre la senda el que viniere a seruiros.

Yo's pensaua d'agradar

y andaua al reues la rueda. Yo's seruia con sospirar, con miisicas y trobar. Vos queriedeslo en moneda. Y pues que distes sefial, perdona si hablo mal, que yo cierto he sospechado c'aunque demandays ducado

no desechays

el real.

siendo vos de

tal trato,

quanto
tanto es

me congoxo
la

y mato,

mayor menosprecio,
cosa anda en precio,

y pues

yo's espero a

mas

barato.
fol.

(ID4120, llCG-1004,

229r)

Although the poet presents himself as the sincere player of the game, his representation of the lady breaks all the rules.^'' The utter unorthodoxy of the

ventional approach that invites a response. Interestingly, the earlier Cancionero de Herberay has
the

more orthodox "mis

-^'

tristes

amores" (LB2-90,

fol.

98v).

It is

telling that in the rubric Castillo refers to the lady as

senora.

"vna muger," not dignifying

latter

her with the designation of dama or

ly,

Within the poem the

is

term

is

used ironical-

for

though she may be

noblewoman, she

certainly

no

lady.

VICTORIA
poet's strategy

A.

BURRUS

131

of course, appreciated as such by the audience, and the poet is unhkely to be reprimanded poetically for what is obviously a joke. The foregoing poem is not an aberration, for presentations of a degraded version of the game essentially serve as a commentary on it. Hernando del
is,

Castillo tends (as above) to segregate such

poems

in the Obras de burlas section

of
la

his Cancionero general (fols. 219r-34r), but

includes a "Cancion que hizo

vn

gentil

among the general works he ombre a una dama que le prometio si

y el, despues de auerla a su plazer, ge lo segun muestra la cancion" (ID6253, llCG-360, fol. 126v). He explains nego, that he would surely have complied had he not discovered that another had already merited the honor:
hallasse virgen de casarse con
ella,

Yo
por

soy vuestro prisionero

de grande amor, y otro es mas vuestro debdor que gozo de lo primero. El qual, pues, dama, Ueuo lo mas de lo que nos distes, haga lo que me pedistes,
la fe

c'asi lo hiziera

yo,

ganando

lo qu'el gano. (fol. 127r)

While

complete lack of discretion in referring to this matter already marks most uncourtly, the poet uses the typical language of courtly love to imply that although under the circumstances he is not bound to the agreement, he gallantly remains her devoted courtly lover ("vuestro prisionero").^^ The men might have snickered at the gullibility of the lady and admired the cavalier tone of the poet, but the poem may also have served as a cautionary tale for the inexperienced younger ladies of the court. It is immediately followed by a poem in which the lady in question ruefully repUes that as
his

him

as

^'

The

prospect of marriage
le

is

not part of the game of courtly love.

A poem written by
ella"
is

Juan Alvarez Gato "porque

dixo vna senora que siruie que se casase con

often

alluded to in this regard: "Deziz: 'casemos los dos, / porque d'este mal

no muera.'

/ Senora,

mi compaiiera. / Que pues amor muero / nunca la querre ni quiero / que por mi parte se tuer^a. / Amamos amos a dos / con vna fe muy entera, / queramos esto los dos, / mas no que le plega a Dios, / siendo mi senora vos, / c'os haga mi compaiiera" (ID3094, MH2-27, fol. 12v; Dutton 1990-91, 1:549). This poem is often deno plega
a

Dios, / syendo

mi senora

vos, / c'os haga

verdadero / no quiere premia ni fuer^a / avnque

me

vere que

scribed in terms such as "Expresiva testificacion del caracter antimatrimonial de

cortes" (ed. Aguirre 1971, 161
n.). It is

la

experiencia

my

contention that the game was not antimarriage

leading rubric suggests the possibility that the
a

but merely not concerned with marriage.

lady's proposition

The

and the response of the lover comprise an idealized representation of

witty verbal exchange at court, the lady challenging the sincerity of the lover's claim to be

dying of the mal de amores by offering him a solution not possible within the framework of
the game.

132

ROLE PLAYING
of his

IN

AMATORY POETRY

lleuar vos lo

lie, he is responsible for the "cien mil muertes que muero / por mejor" and that "beuiran mis dias tristes, / pues vuestro querer falto / a quanto me prometio" (ID6254, 1 ICG361, fol. 127r). The entire episode is doubtless a fiction. The lady's respuesta, typically echoing the rhyme scheme of the original, was in all probability written by a male poet in response to the scandalous stance taken by the first. Indeed, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that they were one in the same person. A more subtle poet is Guevara, who creates delicious comic irony in the

a result

following

esparsa:

jQue noche tan mal dormida, que sueiio tan desuelado, que dama vos tan polida, que ombre yo tan penado! jQue gesto el vuestro de Dios, que mal el mio con vicio, que ley que tengo con vos, que fe con vuestro seruicio!
(ID6168, llCG-220, This appears to be quite standard
"Esparsa a ssu amiga, estando con
fare until
fol.

105r)
that the rubric reads:

one notes

ella

en

la

cama." As the De amore of Andreas

Capellanus was known in Spain at this time, this may be an allusion to the extreme case of amor purus which "goes as far as kissing on the mouth, embracing with the arms, and chaste contact with the unclothed lover, but the final consolation is avoided, for this practice is not permitted for those who wish to
love chastely" (Andreas Capellanus 1982, 181).

Be

this the case

or not,

it is

certain that in the courtly circles of fifteenth-century Spain

under those conditions the "final more likely, since the dama of the poem is described in the rubric as the poet's amiga, that we are dealing with a playful contraposition of the courtly love of theory and its practice at court, as the rubric gives the lie to what the words themselves say about the suffering of the poet.^^ In assessing a given poem, the importance of audience expectations cannot be overestimated. The poet knows exactly what the audience expects of him if he is to play the game according to the rules, but he also knows that it doubt
that

no one would consolation" would indeed be at-

tained.

It is

^
this

Keith

Whinnom

interprets the

poem

differently. In light

of the su^estive rubric to

amores suggested in

seemingly ideahstic poem, he detects sexual overtones in the references to "vicio" and
tnal de

"vuestro seruicio." Recalling that the most certain remedio for the
the medical manuals was to have sex with the desired

noche desvelado

ya nos figuramos

como

woman, he

interprets:

"Ha pasado b
los

^y,

a pesar
. . .

de lo que dicen en
el 'vicio,'

tratados

medicos, ha quedado mas enamorado que nunca.

Aun con

sea, a pesar del

supremo

extasis del placer, su mal, su

enfermedad, o

sea, su

amor

sigue tan fiierte

que

resiste

hasta al consagrado

remedio de

los teoricos" (1981, 32).

VICTORIA
thrives

A.

BURRUS

133

wishes to affect his audience.

its

in

The type of poem he creates depends on how he The courtly audience rehshed this poetry because very rules and conventions invited innovative poets to dare to break them creative ways, to have fun with them. Thus, alongside serious poems that
on jokes and
intrigue.

of orthodox courtly love as reality, we find playful intimaboth the poet and his audience are conscious players of a social game, laughing at each other and at the game itself. In the preceding pages I hope to have shown that a just evaluation of the amatory poetry of the cancioneros cannot take place without considering the social context in which and for which it was produced. Because the social goals of the poet were often as important as (if not more important than)
reflect the fiction

tions that

strictly literary ones,

it

should not be surprising that

art

much of the amatory pointrinsic literary

etry

was preserved

in the cancioneros not because

of any

merit

and the practice of the art lent honor to a particular name. That a great deal of cancionero poetry seems derivative and uninspired is the result of those who composed vene merely to remain in the mainstream of court activities. These poets, however, form part of the game and cannot be dismissed from attention. As Keith Whinnom astutely observes, "Los versos malos nos pueden enseiiar tanto como los buenos" (1981, 1415). The complexity and ambiguity o( cancionero poetry, while frustrating to the modern reader unfamiliar with it, was the key to its longevity as a style. Amatory poetry not only allowed the poets to enhance the role they played in the social fiction at court, it also provided an ideal medium for playing with the concepts of the social fiction. The more daring poets made use of the same stock of commonplaces to achieve goals different from the ones sought by the merely social players. While the game could certainly be played "straight," skilled and playful poets were occasionally wont to subvert the role of the impassioned noble lover in sometimes subtly, sometimes outrageously, unorthodox fashions. This sort of mock threat is what kept the game fresh and interesting. The spirit and wit in many of these poems is readily discernible to anyone familiar enough with the social context of the palacio to understand that the poet could both play the social game and comment on it through the ^'^ conscious manipulation of roles as a poetic strategy.
Vanderbih University

but because a prestigious name lent honor to the

^''

This study

is

drawn from

forthcoming book

titled Cancionero Poets at Play:

Love

Poetry in Late Medieval Spain.

IV: Questions of Language

Bilingualism in the

Cancioneros

and

Its

Implications

ALAN DEYERMOND

1. Bilingual Poetic Courts Throughout the Middle Ages there are examples of poetic courts courts in which a monarch or a great noble is an active patron of poets (and often of musicians, prose writers, and artists) where the poetry is in two or more languages. There are several causes of such bilingualism. The monarch and the higher aristocracy may speak a different language from the rest of the popula-

that the language of court culture is not that of the was the case with the court of the French-speaking Hainault princes of Holland in the first half of the fourteenth century (Oostrom 1992,
tion; this

may mean

country,

as

10-12; 1994, 32; see also Prevenier 1994), but

higher cultural prestige than that of the
teenth-century Aragonese court
at

it

may
This

generate an authentically
the case with the

bilingual or multilingual culture, especially if the language of the country has

rulers.'
is

fif-

Naples, where the poets of Alfons V,

el

Magnanim, wrote not only in Catalan and Castilian but also in Italian and Latin (M. de Riquer 1960; Black 1983; M. Alvar 1984; Rovira 1990; Maguire 1991; Turro 1992a; cf Atlas 1985). Other causes of a bilingual poetic court may be a genuinely bilingual kingdom (in the fifteenth century the Crown of Aragon not merely had a bilingual court but was, as a whole, a bilingual
country), the marriage of the sovereign to a foreign consort (for instance, one
Castilian king
princess,

and

several

was married to an English princess and another to a Norwegian had French wives; one Castilian princess and one Arago-

'

It is

noteworthy that when Bavarian princes replaced the Hainault

soon developed,
a

rulers in 1358, a

bilingual poetic court

Germanic

koine ("in the late-fourteenth-century

Hague

court, the Dutch and Bavarian languages were fused into a practicable linguistic compromise," Oostrom 1992, 11) coexisting with the already well established and culturaUy

prestigious French.

138

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

nese married English kings), or the proximity of a country whose language had higher prestige (in central and western Europe the prestige of Latin was likely

some element of bilingualism for several centuries after the emergence of cultured vernacular poetry) The use of Hebrew as well as Arabic in the courts of Al-Andalus is well
to sustain

known; indeed,
in

those courts

became the home of the most

brilliant

culture of medieval Europe, though Jewish poets faced problems

Hebrew when writing

and for a Muslim (or a Christian) court, as Ross Brann shows (1991). In the second half of the twelfth century, the courts of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine can, in the light of recent research, be seen to have been
visited, for longer or shorter periods,

by many of the

greatest poets

of the

time: Peter of Blois and Walter of Chatillon in Latin; Bernart de Ventadorn in

Provencal; Marie de France, Benoit de Sainte-Maure, and Chretien de Troyes

in

French

(for

other names, see

also

Dronke
it

1976).^ Frederick

II,

Holy

Roman

Emperor 1215-1250, was

press) has

king of

Sicily,

and so

poetic court was to be expected, but

did not stop

German and Italian there: Peter Dronke (in

a

and Provencal were used just as often by the court poets and that there was also some use of French and Hebrew. At the court of Alfonso el Sabio, a generation later, the diversity was almost as great: the dominant poetic language was Galician-Portuguese, in which the king composed at least some of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, but he was host and patron to many Provencal troubadours (Bertolucci Pizzorusso 1966 and 1967, C. Alvar 1977) and to some Hebrew ones; Latin was used at least for the composition of hymns; and it may well be that Arabic and Castilian were also active poetic languages at the court (though there is no evidence that Castilian was used for lyrics). Such diversity raises problems, of course: when Todros Abulafia presented his Hebrew poems to Alfonso, was the manuscript merely admired for its visual beauty, or did the poet improvise translations of some of his work? (See Doron 1989, Brann 1991.) It would be hard to imagine anyone with the versatility needed to appreciate poetry across the full linguistic range, but there is evidence that poetry in one language may have influenced another and not just in the simple case of Provencal and Galician-Portuguese: Todros Abulafia may have been affected by the Provencal poets with whom he came
that Latin, Greek,

shown

into contact (Boreland 1976-77).

of bilingual poetic courts continued in the fourteenth and we have already seen. The English courts of the period were a home of French as well as English poetry (see Robbins 1976; Doyle 1983, 163; Wilkins 1983). In the fourteenth century, for example, the court of Edward III was of this kind, Jean Froissart being one of the French authors
tradition
fifteenth centuries, as

The

In the third quarter of the century, Eleanor and

Henry

traveled back

and forth across

Channel with some frequency (Labande 1952, H. G. Richardson 1959). Thus these bilingual monarchs presided over bilingual or multilingual courts that moved from one lanthe

guage area to another.

ALAN DEYERMOND

139

who

spent time there (Wimsatt 1991), and that of Richard

II

followed a
In the

similar pattern

(Mathew

1968).

The
I

ducal court of Brabant had a French and

III.

German

poetic culture (see Willaert 1990), especially under Henri

French queen Violant de Bar was the home of poetry not only in Catalan that consciously continued the Provencal tradition (Boase 1978) but also in French and occasionally Latin: the Chansonnier de Chantilly, long thought to have been compiled in Italy, now seems to have been made for Joan (Scully 1990). I doubt whether Castilian was used by his court poets: these were the early years represented in the Cancionero de Baena, when Castilian had not yet clearly asserted itself over Galician; perhaps, however, even the remote possibility that Joan I's poets used Castilian and/or Galician should be investigated. From the thirteenth century to the mid-fifteenth, the courts of both northern and southern Italy were frequently bilingual, and in the earlier part of that period Provencal, as well as Italian and French, was spoken there, in addition to some literary use of Latin. Thus Adam de la Halle wrote some of his poetry at the court of Naples, and many Italians wrote in French (Fallows 1989, 429). In the fifteenth century, French lyric was still familiar at the English court (Armstrong 1979, BofFey 1988), and French was still vigorous as a court language in northern Italy until about 1440
his

1380s and 1390s, the court of Joan

of Aragon and

(Fallows 1989). In the 1420s Queen Margarida de Prades maintained a court within a court in Barcelona, where Catalan and Castilian poets met (Jordi de

Sant Jordi and the Marques de Santillana are the most famous). In 1416, in Perpignan, Margarida met the Tirolean poet Oswald von Wolkenstein (see n.
32, below),

who

wrote

in her

honor an autobiographical poem

in

which he

boasted of his linguistic and musical knowledge:

Franzoisch, morisch, katlonisch
lampertisch, reuschisch

und kastilian, teutsch, latein, windisch, und roman, die zehen sprach hab ich gebraucht,

wenn mir
The

zerran.

(M. de Riquer and Badia 1984, 325)

list of examples could easily be prolonged. Although I am chiefly concerned in this paper with central and western Europe, biHngual poetic courts are by no means confined to this area; the factors already mentioned could operate anywhere. The Islamic conquest of

Persia displaced the ancient Iranian court literature for a couple of centuries, but poetry in Persian began to reassert itself at court around 900, though now with Arabic verse forms predominant, and coexisted for some time with poetry in Arabic (Danner 1975; Meisami 1987, chap. 1). Japanese court poetry flour-

ished fi-om the mid-sixth century A.D. but was to some extent under the shadow of the much older Chinese court lyric: "China gave court poets their
prestige

(Miner 1968, 144). From the seventh century onwards, the of Chinese affected all aspects of court life in Japan, and in the early ninth century, Japanese was largely replaced by Chinese as the language of culture, Chinese models being followed even by those writing in Japanese.^
classical heritage"
^

There

is

one important and long-lasting exception.

Women continued

to write

poems

140

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

of bilingual caneven in such a context, monolingual collections were likely to be the norm). It may be relevant that linguistic skill was one of the qualities expected at court, whether of the courtier in Germany in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Jaeger 1985) or of the poet in Castile in the early fifteenth century (as Juan Alfonso de Baena says, in the prologue to his Cancionero, it is important that the poet "aya visto e oydo e leydo muchos e diverssos libros e escripturas e sepa de todos lenguajes"; see Weiss 1990, 5153).'* It is to these cancioneros that we should now direct our attention.
Bilingual courts
a natural setting for the compilation
fact that, cioneros

were

(though

we

should not lose sight of the

2. Cancioneros:

A Working Definition
tastes.

Poetic anthologies, and not only in Western European languages, seem to be

ubiquitous in the Middle Ages where there are courts with cultural

The

Arabic courts of Al-Andalus are famous for their diwans

(see, for

example,

Bellamy and Steiner 1989).^ This is as true in Asia as in Europe: much medieval Sanskrit and Japanese poetry comes down to us in anthologies that had already attained classic status in their own times (Brough 1968, 1419, Miner 1968) and that may have continued to be copied and embellished for centuries (e.g., Pekarik 1991). Such anthologies are not a medieval invention: the Anthologia latina, which survives in the sixth to seventh-century Codex Salmasianus, was compiled in North Africa in the early sixth century and combines poems of late classical Rome with the Latin poetry of Vandal-occupied North Africa. It may have served as a model for such early collections of medieval Latin lyric as the eleventh-century Cambridge Songs, and it may in its turn be modeled on one or more of the many Greek anthologies that were compiled

in Japanese, and these often

drew on

a native

popular tradition (Pekarik 1991, 14-16).

Stephen Reckert observes that "the 'Golden Age' of any world

(1993, 100 n. 34). Earl

early Classical period in Japan (9th-llth c.)

was the only

literature in

which

women
. .

writers played the leading role"

.

Miner

says that "the Japanese

I

never took over Chinese

that they did not

as a

poetic language" (1968, 145), but he must,

think, have

meant

wholly or

permanendy adopt it to the exclusion of Japanese. ^ The same quality is singled out by Baena in the rubric to one of Francisco Imperial's poems (one that contains a Castilian/French dialogue between a man and a woman): "La
qual era

muy

fermossa muger; era

muy

ssabia e bien rrazonada e sabia

de todos lenguajes"

(Nepaulsingh 1977, 51). For other aspects of the language problem in the Middle Ages, see

Chaytor 1945, chap. 3; Schulze-Busacker 1987-88; and Paterson 1993. It is interesting to compare these medieval views of linguistic versatility with the reflections of Stephen Reckert
(1993, 1-15).
^

Kitab rayat al-mubarrizm wa-ghayat al-mumayyazin (Tfie Banners of the Champions),

translated

by Bellamy and
is

Steiner,

was compiled

in 1243, but the great century

of Hispano-

Arabic anthologies

the twelfth, with Ibn Bassam's Dhaklura ft mahasin ahl al-jazira {Treasure
to

of Beauties of the People of the Peninsula) and Ibn Khaqan's Martnah al-anfus {Goal
Aspire).

whidi Souls

ALAN DEYERMOND

141

from the fourth century B.C. onwards. (These are lost, but their contents are preserved in the vast Palatine Anthology of the tenth century, with its thousands of lyrics. There is though over a much longer period a curious parallel here

to the puzzling disappearance

of all the smaller

cancioneros that served

Hernando

and Garcia de Resende as sources.'') Even before the earliest Greek anthologies, there were small papyrus collections of ancient Egyptian love songs (De Rachewiltz 1957), and it may well be that the Song of Songs, one of the most powerful influences on medieval European lyric (see Dronke 1979, Hunt 1981, Astell 1990, and Matter 1990), had its origins in such an
del Castillo

anthology

(see

Landy 1983).

For the purposes of this paper, I take cancionero to have a more restricted meaning than "manuscript or early printed book containing lyric poetry." The boundary is hard to draw, and this consideration, as well as practical utility for users of his work, led Dutton (1982) to include a fair number of manuscripts
that
fall
I

outside the category

oi^ cancioneros.

He

later

(1990-91) cast

his net

still

wider.

do not wish

to criticize that decision; indeed, as a frequent user

of his

books

welcome

it.

However,

in sections 3

and 4 of this paper

confine

my-

self to formally

organized anthologies, whether manuscript or printed, contain-

ing the work of several poets, since statements that are true of them may not be true of a manuscript containing just one poem.^ Major collections containing the work of a single poet, especially if prepared by that poet, often have a great deal in common with multipoet anthologies in terms of organization and presentation, and interesting research is now in progress on the characteristics of such collections (e.g., Bertolucci Pizzorusso 1991, Beltran 1992). But such collections do not, at least in my limited experience of the subject, have great importance for a study of bilingualism unless, of course, the poet is bilingual.

Much
ticular

important work

is

now being done on

on

the characteristics oi cancioneros

I

in the strict sense

and

in particular

their compilation:

am

thinking in par-

of Tavani (1969c and 1979), Ferrari (1979), Livermore (1988), and Gon^alves (1991) on Galician-Portuguese; Bourgain (1991) on Latin; Roncaglia (1991) on Provencal; Maguire (1991) on Castilian (Severin and Maguire 1 992 describe work on strict cancioneros as well as on other kinds of miscellany); and Cerquiglini (1987) and Ferrari (1991) on a wider range of Romance; as well as the splendid book by Julia Boffey (1985, supplemented by Boffey

^'

Dr. David Fallows, in a letter of 29 January 1993, does not find

is

this puzzling.

The

same
that
'

true,

he

finds,

of the exemplars of almost every surviving poetry or music manuscript

he has studied.
Severin 1994 argues for a drastic reduction in the use of the term cancionero, and her

reasons are in line with the experience of specialists in other areas: Dr. Julia Boffey says that

"there are really very few

lyrics)" (letter
scripts that
cioneros,
lyrics,

anthologies of just lyrics

(as

opposed

to anthologies

with some

of 2 February 1993), and Professor Peter Dronke

lists

tells

me

that

of the manuas can-

he

(Dronke 1965-66), only some

thirty to forty

could be described

the remainder being compilations of prose and/or of nonlyric verse, with

call,

some

or perhaps only one (telephone

22 March 1993).

142

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

and Thompson 1989) on fifteenth-century Enghsh manuscripts, and the comon French by Sylvia Huot (1987), which offer a wealth of information on anthologies, though they are not confined to them. The prehistory of Provencal chansonniers is the subject of two studies that point in different directions (Van Vleck 1991 on compilation firom oral sources, and Meneghetti 1991 on the role ofjlorilegia), and there are of course many studies (A. Blecua 1974-79 is an excellent example) on the history of individual cancioneros. Studies of this kind are important for our understanding of the ways in which bilingual cancioneros were compiled.
parable one
3.

The Compilation or Copying o Cancioneros

Outside Their Linguistic Area In one sense, all medieval Latin poetic manuscripts were compiled and read
outside their linguistic area. In this section, however,
I

shall

be concerned with

vernacular cancioneros compiled in a region where another vernacular was the

of the major traditions of court lyric, the Provengal and the Galician-Portuguese, are for the most part preserved in anthologies copied, and in some cases compiled, in other lands. J. H. Marshall observes that "a good proportion of the [Provencal] chansonniers were copied in Italy. And, if w^e allow for a few collections made in French-speaking or in Catalan-speaking territory, we are left with a very small number of extant MSS copied within the linguistic area which had been that of the original poetry itself (1975, 5; see also Avalle D'Arco 1961 and Folena 1976). The compilation o( chansonniers in Italy is a witness to a culture in exile (many troubadours took refuge there after the Albigensian Crusade: Marshall 1975, 5-6), but the copying there, just before or just after 1500, of the Cancioneiro da Vaticana and the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti /da Biblioteca Nacional cannot, despite the strong presence of Castilian and Catalan lyric in Italy in the preceding few generations, indicate
a surviving Galician-Portuguese tradition there:

normal speech.

Two

we owe

these cancioneiros to

the antiquarian interest of Angelo Colocci (Ferrari 1979).

Chansonnier de Chantilly was, as we saw in section 1, above, compiled Joan I of Aragon: Scully (1990) has established that the date was between 1392 and 1396 and that the scribe was Catalan speaking. In this case, the reason for compilation outside the linguistic area of the contents (all but two of the songs are French) was neither a culture in exile nor an antiquarian interest; it was a trilingual poetic court. That five major French chansonniers were compiled in Italy (Scully 1990, 509-10) had seemed puzzling, but David Fallows has shown, on the evidence of musical sources, that French "remained a vital courtly language in many parts of northern Italy at least until 1450," nearly a century later than had been supposed (Fallows 1989, 441). He finds that "virtually all the surviving sources of French song from 1415 to 1440 were copied in northern Italy" (1989, 434).

The

for

4. Bilingual Cancioneros

Some cancioneros are bilingual only in appearance: two monolingual manuscripts

ALAN DEYERMOND

143

into the same volume, as in the case of PN11=BN Paris esp. 305 (Severin and Maguire 1992, 55), and there are some cases (e.g., PN4: see Black 1985) in which a second hand has added poems in another language to a previously monolingual anthology. Cases in which modern rebinding has created a bihngual volume should obviously be excluded from consideration, but the case is not so clear if a medieval librarian still more, a medieval pri-

may be bound

vate

owner gether. The

over a language into blank spaces of a manuscript that originally contained only poems in another language, since this may imply a bilingual readership, even
if

two or more poetic manuscripts bound tocase for exclusion is even less strong if one or more hands have, period of time, created a bilingual cancionero by copying poems in one
has chosen to have

only a small one.^ Another kind of doubt

is

raised

by the

cancioneros that

second language: for example, the two Latin songs among the 110 French ones of the Chansonnier de Chantilly, or the single Franco-Italian poem among the 84 Castilian ones of SAlOa (quite possibly a late addition, since it is no. 74 of the 75 poems in the cancionero)!^ The Cancionero de Vindel, on the other hand, is authentically bilingual, even
short
in a

include only one or

two

poems

87 poems include only four in Catalan.'" It was copied by a Cataand three of the four Catalan poems are by Mossen Avinyo, a bilingual Catalan poet who also has Castilian poems in this cancionero (see section 5,

though

its

lan scribe,

"

Professor Vicente Beltran asks, with

good

reason, "^y

si

lo

conservaramos en una copia

sola letra?"

posterior, quiza despues de

una seleccion de

su contenido,

de una

He

continues:

"Mi impresion personal es que no puede separarse de la tradicion bilingiie. Al fin y al cabo, en un momento determinado cayo en manos de algun usuario a quien no importaba que lo
fuera,

quiza, incluso, lo preferia" (letter of February 1993). Dr. Jane

Whetnall draws

a dif-

ferent conclusion:

"Most

[cancioneros] are copies, either

of selected sources or of exemplars

which have had to some discrete

tions
is

bits

added.

Which means you may

find that the 'alien'

components belong
of quotathey are integral?)"

stage in the composition or copying.

(And therefore

that evidence

a better

index of hnguistic competence in the audience,

as at least

(letter

of February 1993). For quotations

in Iberian cancioneros, see Dias (1978)

and Whetnall

(1986, chaps. 2-3).

many cases in which bilingualism is so tenuous that to include the cancioneros would be stretching the term absurdly: for example, a single line in a second language, in just one of a hundred poems, does not in my opinion make a cancionero bilingual. Dr. Jane Whetnall coinments, in a Castilian context, that "if you were to count quotations and other kinds of lyric insertions, glosses, etc., you would be hard put to name a
'^

There

are

in this category

cancionero that wasn't at least trilingual. Latin

is

everywhere, with odd signs of pretty well

(letter

everything including Arabic, Hebrew, French, Provencal, and English"

1993).
'"
lists

of February

Ramirez de Arellano's
an error

list

of contents has 84 poems (1976, 16-23), whereas Dutton

poems given by him in VII.662 is number given by Faulhaber (1983, 1:578-83). The difference is to be explained by this cancionero's idiosyncratic division between poems, which was interpreted in one way by Ramirez de Arellano and in another, more satisfactory, way
87 (1990-91, 3:1-49)
the total of 85 for Castihan
also the

clearly

and

is

87

by Dutton and Faulhaber.


144

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

below).
1,

The

multilingual culture of the Aragonese court at Naples (see section

above)
it,

left its

mark on the family of cancioneros compiled

there or deriving

from

not just in the doubtful case of PN4 (Castilian and Catalan), discussed
part-Italian

above, but in the clear case of the Cancionero de Estuhiga, which contains
Italian

and

poems by

Carvajal.
is less

The

bilingualism of these cancioneros

is

intense than one might expect,

combining Catalan, Casand Latin in roughly equal proportions, even though many at the court must have been able to read aU three languages. But such a disparity is far from uncommon: the notably multilingual poetic court of Alfonso el Sabio, for example, produced little by way of bilingual cancioneros and had few bilingual poets. A curious late reflection of the Neapolitan dimension of the Crown of Aragon is found in the second edition of the Cancionero general printed in 1514 in, like the first edition, Valencia. Not only does it contain poems in Catalan among its overwhelmingly Castilian contents, but it includes eighteen Italian sonnets by Bartolomeo Gentile, who, as one of a Genoese family settled in Seville, must have been bilingual in everyday life but who seems to have written poetry only in Italian (Chalon 1988). There are no bilingual Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros. Is this because of a
given the culture of the court: there
cancionero
tilian, Italian,

no

"tradizione povera, tradizione sterile" (Tavani 1969c, 89-96)?

Or

could

it

be

that a poetic koine (in this case, a literary language that seems to correspond

neither to the Galician nor to the Portuguese of the time)

chances of bilingualism?
linguistic

medium

may reduce the with Provencal, "a poetry whose was an Occitan pruned of most narrowly dialectal features

A fair comparison

is

a linguistic blend or koine so subtle that

modern

scholarship has never entirely

succeeded in locaHsing

it"

(Marshall 1975, 6; for

some

qualifications, see

Zufferey 1987, 312-13). Provencal and French poems are found with relative frequency in the same chansonniers, but other types of bilingualism are rare or
nonexistent in the Provencal lyric tradition. Classical literary Arabic
koine,
is

also a

and the compilers of its diwans normally exclude poems, like those of Ibn Quzman, that use Vulgar Arabic or foreign phrases. We should therefore
consider the possibility that the poetic courts of medieval Europe normally
surpassed the boundaries of a single language or dialect, either by bihngualism

or by a koine, but not usually by both (for an exception, see n.

course, such a koine

1,

above).

Of

may become one of the

area: the

languages in a multilingual poetic

at

court outside

its

primary

two chief poetic languages

the court of

Alfonso

X were

Galician-Portuguese and Provencal.

Authentically bilingual (or multilingual) cancioneros are numerous. Vindel has

well-known example is the Carmina Burana (Dienone of its 131 love songs is wholly written in the vernacular, 48 combine Latin with German (usually by ending with one or more German stanzas, though a few songs combine the languages in other ways; for an example, see section 6, below), one has a French refrain, and one combines Latin and French Unes in each stanza; thus 38 percent of the love

already been mentioned.

mer and Diemer

1987): though

ALAN DEYERMOND

145

songs are bilingual.^' Other examples are the Venetian songbook, c. 1463 (Bodleian Canonici misc. 213), that has, besides sacred music, 25 Italian and

239 French songs

century Iberian
de
la

in the

same hand (Fallows 1989, 435), and, among

Resende's Cancioneiro
a
geral,

fifteenth-

cancioneros,

the musical Cancionero

Catedral de Segovia,

and

group

ofcartfoners in

de orats

and
it

others).

The

vast Cancioneiro geral

Barcelona libraries (Jardinet of 1516 with nearly 1,200

poems,

thousand-poem model, Hernando del Castillo's Canciohas 157 Castilian poems, 71 of them freestanding and the nero general of 1511 rest in some relation (pregunta/respuesta, glosa, etc.) to another poem, sometimes Castilian, sometimes Portuguese. It is not only the number of Castilian poems in this Portuguese volume that makes it so clearly bilingual (though the number alone would suffice): their authors are usually Portuguese, and, as we have already seen, Castilian poems are linked with Portuguese ones on many occasions, and the Portuguese ones quote Castilian poets even more often than
surpasses

its

they quote in their

own

language.'^

is bilingual, as Lang (1902), Lapesa (1953-54), V. Richardson (1981, 31-35), and Polin (1994) have shown, but in a different sense, since the Galician poems that it contains are mostly from its early years. The long time span that it represents is one of change in the dominant language of court lyric, as we can see from the work of Villasandino and other poets (it has traces of other languages also: e.g., a stanza in French, see Deyermond in press; a line in Arabic, see Krotkoff 1974). In the eastern part of the Peninsula the situation is more complex. From the end of the fifteenth century, Castilian begins to replace Catalan as the language of court lyric in the Crown of Aragon, but the many bilingual canfoners (whose Castilian poems are edited by Catedra 1983) are not necessarily a reflection of that change. The first cancioneros to include both Castilian and Catalan lyrics are predominantly Castilian, and the chief reason for their bilingualism is the prominence of Catalan in the Aragonese court at Naples. The earliest manuscript to show this mixture is, I think, the Cancionero de palacio in the late

The

Cancionero de Baena

1430s,

which contains

eight Catalan lyrics,

all

anonymous (though

the authors

and early sixteenth centuries, there is a change: it is chiefly the predominantly Catalan canfoners that have this mixture. Max Cahner (1980) attributes this development to political pressure from the Trastamaran rulers in favor of Castilian. Pedro Catedra dissents (1983, v-x), arguing that the causes are the growing prestige of the innovatory late-medieval Castilian lyric and the rise of a new class of reader:
identifiable). In the late fifteenth

of a couple

may be

" See Wachinger 1985. By

element, and
'^ all

contrast, only a

few of the 40 drinking songs have

and for some other

German

55 moral and

satirical

poems

in the collection are exclusively in Latin.

cancioneros are

See Dias 1978.

My

figures for the Cancioneiro geral

derived firom Dutton's "Indice de lenguas" (1990-91, 7:590-97), one of the

many

indexes

make the final volume of Dutton's masterpiece an working on fifteenth-century Spanish poetry.
that

indispensable research tool for anyone

146

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

"Puede sugerirse que estos cancioneros nacen en el ambiente ciudadano de nuevos lectores, a los que no alcanza el codice de lujo" (1983, x). More recently, the bilingual nature of the Crown of Aragon itself has seemed a more satisfactory explanation, especially since most of the Castilian poems in these can^oners are anonymous, so that it would be rash to assume that they are the
. . .

los

work of Catalan poets and that the parallel with the Cancioneiro geral is therefore close. '^ From the end of the fifteenth century, it is indeed true that the use of Castilian by Catalan poets becomes more firequent, but Catalan poetry
continues to be written >vell into the sixteenth century, and
bilingual cancionero
is

as late as

1562 a

printed: the Cancionero llamado Flor de enamorados, sacado

de diversos autores agora nuevamente por

muy

linda orden copilado

(Rodriguez-

Mofiino and Devoto 1954; Romeu Figueras 1972). One of the cangoners studied by Catedra, the Cangoner del Ateneu Barcelones, has an Arabic estribillo and Castilian glosa:

Di
ay,

ley vi namxi,

mesqui,
calbi.

nafHa

Quando

vos veo, senyora,

por la mi puerta pessar, lo corafon se me alegra; d'amores quiero finar.

Quando

vos veo, senyora,

por la mi puerta venir, lo corafon se me alegra;

d'amores quiero
morir.''*

also, presumably as a result of the Aragonese dominatwo Italian popular songs, the first Neapolitan and the second Sicilian (Aramon i Serra 1947-48). Another canfoner (ZAl; Baselga 1896) has 187 Catalan poems and six Castilian, two of them with Latin words or lines; it includes 20 Catalan and three Castilian poems by Pere Torroella (Masso Torrents 1932, 20). One piece of special interest is a Catalan poem by

The

Canfoner

del

Ateneu

tion of Naples, contains

Torroella that quotes Catalan, French, Provencal, and CastiHan poets (eight of
the
last:

Dutton 1990-91, 4:376-77).

'*

Dr. Lluis Cabre writes: "La Corona d'Arago era

bilingiie,

mes encara

si

es

recorden

les

relacions

amb Navarra
solfa:

durant bona part del segle XV. Abans d'especular

i

amb

fatalismes caldria
bilingiies,
i

posar en

Uocs de composicio dels can^oners

la

dates,

procedencia dels
poesia navarresa

adscripcions a corts, etc. ...

llengua tapa

la realitat cultural: la
la

aragonesa
(i

pot estar
'^

escrita

en

castella
(letter

pero pertany a

societat

de

la

Corona d'Arago tambe

at first

te

tendencies propies)"

of February 1993).
It

Catedra (1983, 43, 88), and Sola-Sole (1972).

was not
as

apparent that the

estribillo

was in Arabic. Aramon

n. 2).

Serra referred to

it

merely

"tres dificils versos solts"

(1947-48, 159

Aramon

Serra (1961) edits and studies

cattfoners.

two

Castilian

and Latin poems,

and two Catalan and Latin ones firom Catalan

ALAN DEYERMOND

147

There are Castilian cancioneros that contain Portuguese poems, though not, with one exception, on the scale of the CastiUan representation in the Cancioneiro geral. The exception is the Cancionero musical de Elvas, compiled circa 1520, which has 17 Portuguese songs and 48 Castilian ones. Dutton's "Indice
de lenguas" shows five other cancioneros with between one and five Portuguese poems. It is noteworthy that of the 30 Portuguese poems in Castilian cancioneros, 26 are in musical ones: if a song is included primarily for its music, the
language
is

less

important, a factor that helps to explain the astonishing lin-

guistic diversity

of the Cancionero de
it

la

Catedral de Segovia. Previously thought

to be of the late fifteenth century, and compiled for use

Isabel la Catolica,

by the musicians of

now

seems, in the light of Victor de Lama's research, to

be somewhat later and destined for the musicians of Felipe el Hermoso (Lama de la Cruz 1994, 12230). It is made up of three parts, each apparently by a different copyist (the second part may have been begun by a fourth copyist: Lama de la Cruz 1994, 117); the first of these contains alternating sections of Latin religious pieces and vernacular secular songs, the second part is Castilian, and the small third part, Latin. '^ Gonzalez Cuenca (1980, 25-29) lists the French and Flemish songs but mentions the small Italian element only in
passing."' This cancionero thus has songs in five languages.

The number
first,

is

equalled by the Pixerecourt, Escorial, and Mellon chansonniers (for the

see

Pease 1960; for the

last,

Perkins and Garey 1979), but in practice Segovia

s

outdoes the others: o Mellon

English,

guage, French, while the rest are

57 songs, for instance, 47 are in a single lanmade up of four songs in Italian, three in

two

in Latin,

and one

in Castilian.'^

The

Cancionero musical de palacio

of several However, Dr. David Fallows is not convinced that several copyists were involved: "It will be hard to penuade me that this wasn't one musician's personal collection. And what seems most fascinating about it is that the scribe was plainly Spanish (as first
raises

'^

This

the possibility that the manuscript might be a combination

different repertoires.

established in [Baker 1978]) but

had

a flawless

knowledge of Flemish"

(letter

of 29 January

1993).

(1980, 38 n. 67). Scholars diflfer on the exact number of song? in and on the number in each language, because some have only an incipit, which may not be a safe linguistic guide, and some are repetitions. The Italian component
this cancionero
is

" Gonzalez Cuenca

an extreme case, since of the five

lines.

Italian

songs only one has a text, and that consists of

it's

only four

Dr. Fallows comments: "Since

the most widely distributed Itahan song

it" (letter

of the

late

15th century, there are few simple conclusions to be drawn from

of 29

January 1993).

" The
is
is

Escorial chansonnier,

produced

in Italy (probably Milan) in the

second half of the

fifteenth century (Southern 1981; see also

included by Dutton (1990-91, 1:65)

French, the second
is

as

Hanen 1983, who argues for a Neapohtan origin), EM2, with three songs edited, but the first of them
is

Italian

(another cancionero has a lingua franca version), and the third

that

song by Cornago, "Yerra con poco saber,"

as incipit the first three

was

left

without

a text, a later

hand pro-

viding

words of a poem

that occurs in several cancioneros

with attribu-

tions to

Juan de

Mena

or Pedro Torrella (Hanen 1983, 122-23; Dutton and Krogstad 1990-

148

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

(MP4), overwhelmingly Castilian in its original form, and still primarily Casof additions, has thirteen Italian poems (Romeu Figueras 12428). Two of these include Latin, while one Latin song has some 1965, Italian. There is also a Basque song with some Castilian words and another that has a Basque estribillo and a Castihan ^/o5fl. One song mixes French, Italian, and Castilian, and another mixes French and Catalan. There are thus songs in four languages (Castilian, Italian, Latin, and Basque), and the number of languages used rises to seven when we take account of lines or phrases in Catalan, French, and Portuguese. Segovia, nevertheless, is outstanding because of its substantial representation of four languages (Castilian, Flemish, French, and
tilian after a series

Latin).

'

In these cases the musical fashion seems to have produced linguistic diversity far

above what might have been expected, and the

special nature

of musical
it

cancioneros (see, for instance. Fallows 1992; also Gallo 1978)

makes

desirable

had at first intended to devote separate sections to the musical and the nonmusical cancioneros, since they raise different problems in a study of bilingualism (and in other contexts: e.g., the inclusion of nonlyric material), but not all of the summary listings of poetic anthologies that I consulted distinguish clearly between those that have musical notation and those that do not. I remain convinced that such a distinction is important in any extensive consideration of the subject, though I have temporarily had to abandon
to treat
separately.
I

them

it

for practical reasons.''^

The mention of the Carmina Burana and

chansonniers serves as a

the Mellon, Pixerecourt, and Escorial reminder that bilingual or multilingual poetic antholoit,

gies are as frequent outside the Iberian Peninsula as within

and bibliogra-

(my scrutiny of these is far from complete) show the extent of the phenomenon. Boffey (1985, 187-200) lists for the fifteenth century six manuscripts that combine Latin and English in varying proportions; four with Latin, French, and English; two with English and French; one Latin,
phies for different languages

Welsh, and English; and the multilingual Mellon and Escorial. Of her list of 126 manuscripts of the period 1400-1530 that contain English courtly love lyrics,
15
are, in

some

sense, at least bilingual: a percentage

of 11.9. Peter Dronke

91, 7:58). There

is

thus, as

with the single

line

of an English song, the

Italian,

minimum justification

required for us to add Castihan and English to the French,

manuscript. Pixerecourt (PN15), copied in Florence
c.

Flemish, and Latin of this

1484, has songs in Latin, Castilian, and

what may be Provencal (most of the texts are garbled), as well as French. "* Dr. Fallows, commenting on "a few [cancioneros] that include surprising
languages: a
little

strange

French

in the Schedelsches Liederbuch, Itahan songs in

is

f fr. 1597, the extenFlemish in

sively copied English in Mellon," says that "it

in that context that the flawless

Segovia seems remarkable (whereas the French

and

Italian text incipits are not)" (letter

of 29

January 1993).
''^

For different

aspects, see, as well as the studies already cited, the

fundamental biblio-

graphical tool Census (1979-88), and the books by Stevenson (1960) and Stevens (1961,
1986).

ALAN DEYERMOND
lists

149

some 140 manuscripts containing love poetry

in medieval Latin (1965-66,

II,

545-83).

Of

these, 16 (11.5 percent, a figure astonishingly close to that

derived from BofFey's list) are bilingual: the Carmina Buratia has Latin, German, and French; five have Latin and German; four have Latin and French; three have English, Latin, and French; two have Latin and Czech; and one has Latin and English. In almost half of these cases, including the Carmina Burana and the Harley Lyrics, the manuscript is known to have been produced in the country whose vernacular accompanies the Latin texts, and in most of the other cases, as one would have expected, it is in a library of a region speaking
that vernacular.

The

Chansonnier de Chantilly does not

is

fit

this pattern,

but

it

has only
listings

two

Latin texts, and so

not of great significance in

this context.

The

given by Gaston Raynaud (1884) and Robert White Linker (1979), though they do not provide all the information that is needed, offer a usefiil impression of the occurrence of French and Provencal in the same chansonniers (see also Meyer 1890). Raynaud's inventory of 32 French chansonniers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (1884, I) includes five with such a mixture, or 15.6 percent of the total, but only three of these (9.4 percent) are thoroughly bilingual. The percentage of French in Provencal chansonniers is higher: Linker (1979, 6869) lists 19 such manuscripts, and since there are some 95 Provencal chansonniers, those with French poems are 20 percent. To take an average from the information provided by Boffey, Dronke, Raynaud, and Linker is risky, since their methods of listing are different, and they cover different periods (all medieval poetic manuscripts for the language concerned in Dronke and Linker, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries only in Raynaud, fifteenth only in Boffey). Nevertheless, making all necessary reservations and recognizing the highly tentative nature of the calculation, it is interesting that the average of the four percentages is 13.2 percent and that if we take the 55 bilingual anthologies listed by these four scholars as a percentage of their total listings of 533, the figure is 10.3 percent. It seems at present, therefore, that we may expect something between one-eighth and one-tenth o{ cancioneros to be bilingual. Among musical cancioneros the percentage is likely to be much higher: for example, Fallows finds that French polyphonic song established itself in northern Italy about 1375 (1989, 431), with the result that "in the first years of the fifteenth century the surviving north Italian song manuscripts (most of them fragmentary) nearly all contain roughly equal quantities of French and Italian material" (433).
5.

Bilingual Poets
bilingualism of Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino reflects the change from
as

The

Galician-Portuguese to Castilian
54; V. Richardson 1981;

the dominant language of court lyric in the

center and western part of the Iberian Peninsula (see Lang 1902; Lapesa 1953-

Deyermond

1982, and Polin 1994). 2"

He

is

not the

have not yet been able to see Carlos Mota's Barcelona doctoral dissertation (reported

150

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

the most prolific one.

only bilingual poet of the Cancionero de Baena, but he

is

sharp chronological division between the use of poetic languages, without

transitional linguistic forms,

is represented by Villasandino's older contembegan in the 1370s with poems in the AngloNorman dialect of French that had been used in the English court since the Norman Conquest, but he was heading towards obsolescence: the religious allegory Mirour de I'Omme and perhaps the Cinkante balades. A few years later he wrote a long satirical poem in Latin, Vox clamantis, which deals with, among other subjects, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and that in turn was succeeded by the long poem that took up most of the rest of Gower's active life, the Confessio amantis, written in English despite its Latin title and Latin marginal glosses. The division is thus both chronological (if the Cinkante balades are indeed among the early poems) and generic.^' A purely generic division may be observed in Petrarch, who wrote love lyrics and allegories {Rime sparse and Trionji) in Italian but genres of Virgilian inspiration {Bucolicum carmen and the lost epic Africa) in Latin, and in the Comendador Estela, who wrote religious poetry in Catalan and love lyrics in Castilian (Martinez Romero 1990). Chronological divisions in authors' use of languages may have a biographical rather than a generic basis: two well-known examples in fifteenth-century prose are the use of Catalan by Enrique de Villena for the first version of the Doze trahajos de Hercules and of Portuguese by Dom Pedro de Portugal for the first version of the Sdtira de la infelice e felice vida, because of where they spent their youth; the circumstances of their later lives made it

any

porary John Gower,

who

natural for

them

to use Castilian.

These are interesting examples of bilingualism, but even more interesting are those w^riters who use two languages within the same poetic genre and at the same period of their lives. David Fallows has found that a high proportion of surviving French songs by named composers from the period 13401415 (42 out of 194, or out of 118 if Guillaume de Machaut is excluded) are by Italians (1989, 432). Charles d'Orleans is such a poet: captured at Agincourt when he was only twenty (though already a poet), he spent twenty five years as a prisoner in England, continuing to write a great deal in French but also

complete in 1992) or to obtain

context of
just cited.
^'

details

of

it.

For the present,

see,
as

on Villasandino
as the

in the

this

change, Levi (1928-29) and Caravaggi (1969),

well

general studies

For the problems of dating the Cinkante

balades, see Fisher (1965,

It is

72-74).

Gower may
Chaucer,

not be the only major English poet of his time to write in French.

likely that

who knew
his career,

French poetry well (Wimsatt 1968, 1991), wrote

it,

at least in the early part

of

and Wimsatt argues (1982)

in the
also

that

he may have composed some French poems

letters

headed "Ch"

manuscript (though, of course, the

could stand not for Chaucer

but for chanson). See

Robbins (1976).

ALAN DEYERMOND
writing a substantial
biographical

151

number of English poems. ^^ There is a different kind of explanation for the two Italian and two part-Italian poems among
at

the 47 Castilian ones by Carvajal (M. Alvar 1984): he spent years

the Ara-

gonese court in Naples.

Other Iberian

parallels to

Charles d'Orleans's bilingualism, though without

such a strong biographical reason for it, are Catalans such as Romeu LluU, Pere Torroella, and Mossen Avinyo. Montserrat Ganges Garriga's inventory (1992) lists 25 poets who wrote in both languages. Some show a marked preference
for Catalan: Francesc Alegre (Ganges Garriga 1992, 103-105) has ten
in Castilian,

poems

in

Catalan and only one and Jaume GassuU (Cantavella and Jafer 1989; Ganges Garriga 1992, 139-42) eleven and two. In some the preference runs the other way: Francesc FenoUet (Ganges Garriga, 136-39) has one poem in Catalan but eight in Castilian, while for Francesc Moner (Cocozzella 1970, 1986, 1987, 1991; Quesada 1973; Ganges Garriga 1992, 15262) the numbers are 16 and 66. In other cases, the two languages are evenly matched: Francesc de Castellvi has four Catalan and five Castilian poems, Miquel Estela six Catalan and four Castilian (Martinez Romero 1990, Ganges Garriga 1992, 12629), and for Torroella the numbers are 34 and 36. Romeu Llull (Turro 1989, 1992b; Ganges Garriga 1992, 14449),

Bernat FenoUar (12936) has 24 and two,

who

has several Castilian

poems

in the Catalan

misceWAny Jardinet de
as LluU's

orats

(Catedra 1983; Turro 1992c), wrote two replies, one in Catalan and the other
in Castilian, to a

poem by

the

Conde de

Oliva.

As well

nineteen

Catalan and six Castilian poems, there are six in Italian (Turro 1992a, 1992b),

and he wrote one quatrilingual poem. One other Catalan poet wrote also in Castilian and in Italian: Narcis Vinyoles, with eighteen poems in Catalan and two in each of the other languages (Ganges Garriga 1992, 190-94). A number of Catalan poets, from Jacme March in the 1370s to Torroella and Francesc Ferrer in the 1440s, incorporate into their poems lines and stanzas from Bernart de Ventadorn, Arnaut Daniel, and other Provencal troubadours (I. de Riquer 1993). Torroella and Avinyo are strongly represented in the Cancionero de Vindel (Ramirez de Arellano 1976), with over a fifth of this small but important cancionero' s texts. Torroella has been edited and studied (Bach i Rita 1930) but is due for further attention in the light of the last sixty years' scholarship (see Cocozzella 1987; Ganges Garriga 1992, 166-87); Avinyo has at last received the extended treatment that he merits (Arques i Corominas

22

Steele

and Day (1970); see

Am

(1983).

Some

scholars (e.g., Poirion 1958, 1978) have

is

queried his authorship of these poems, but the weight of recent evidence

against

them

(see

Deborah Hubbard Nelson 1990

and

for an analytical account

of scholarship;

also

BofFey 1988),

their doubts are surprising within a context

of frequent poetic bilingualism. However,

Italy for

we

should remember that Guillaume Dufay was resident in

litde Italian.

more than twenty

letter

years,

but seems to have learned

He composed

songs for the d'Este family in French,

though he
1993).

set

some

Italian

poems

to

music (Fallows 1989, 438-40, and

of 29 January

152

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

not only Catalan poets

1992; see also Ganges Garriga 1992, 108-11).

(those already

It is

named and

others listed

Catedra 1983)

who

write both in

by Ganges Garriga 1992 and edited by that language and in Castilian: the same is

was probably Navarrese.^-^ of Castilian, there are many Portuguese poets of the Cancioneiro geral who write in both languages. We have seen some cases in section 4, above, and there are plenty of others. A striking example is that ofJoao Manuel, who has 29 Portuguese poems and 12 Castilian ones in the Cancioneiro geral, and another 12 Castilian ones, under the name of Juan Manuel, in the 1511 Cancionero general and the Cancionero del British Museum. Although it is possible that Juan and Joao were two different poets (Macpherson 1979), cogent reasons have been given for believing that they were the same man (Botta 1981; Gornall 1991). For Joao Manuel and Carvajal, for Avinyo and Fernam
true of Juan de Valtierra,

who

At the western

frontier

da Silveira, writing in a bilingual culture,

it

seems that either language would

do

for their lyrics. This impression

is

reinforced by the quoting

Cancioneiro geral: the Portuguese poets quote

poems in the Mena, Jorge Manrique, Anton de

Montoro, and others

6.

just as readily as their Portuguese contemporaries.

Bilingual
all

Poems and Their Uses

that there are

We

know

poems

in

they demonstrate the poet's linguistic

ability,

more than one language that, though provide no evidence of a bilinI

gual or multilingual poetic culture, since their comic or bragging use of lan-

guage implies an exception to normally monolingual poetry.

am

thinking of

modern cases such as A. D. Godley's macaronic poem about the motor bus ("What is it that roareth thus? / Can it be a motor bus? / Yes, the smell and hideous hum / Indicat motorem bum! / ] Domine, defende nos / Contra
[
. . .

hos motores bos."), and medieval ones such as Raimbaut de Vaqueiras's descort, in which each of the five stanzas is in a different language and the tornada uses
all five:

Eras quan vey verdeyar

pratz e vergiers e boscatges,

vuelh un descort comensar d'amor, per qu'ieu vauc aratges;

-^

See Lang (1909).

It

is,

however, not certain

that the Valtierra

who

wrote three Cas-

tilian

poems and

the Vallterra
n.).

who

wrote one

in Catalan

were the same man: see Ganges

perhaps not be the Artes
n.).

Garriga (1992, 187-88

stance, the Jeroni Artes

There

are, inevitably, a

other problems of identification: for in-

who

wrote

poem
as

in Catalan

may

who

wrote seven
Santa Fe,
in

in Castihan (see

Ganges Garriga 1992, 105-106

The Aragonese Pedro de

who

certainly

wrote in Galician

well as Castilian (Tato 1994), also wrote a

86),

poem

Catabn, according to Lang (1909, 82-83,

(1994, 260). Tato's doctoral dissertation

more cautious (Univ. de La Coruna) on Santa Fe, in which she

though Cleofe Tato
well advanced.
is

deals also with his contacts with Italian poets,

is

now

ALAN DEYERMOND
5

153

q'una dona.tn

sol

amar,
coratges,

mas camjatz
los

I'es sos

per qu'ieu fauc dezacordar

motz

e.ls

sos e.ls lenguatges.

lo son quel que

ben non

aio

10

ni jamai

non

I'avero,

ni per april ni per maio,

si

per

ma donna non

I'o;

certo que en so lengaio

sa

gran beuta dir non

firesca

so,

15

fhu

qe

flor

de glaio,

per qe no m'en partiro.

Belle douce
a vos je

dame chiere, mi doin et m'otroi; n'avrai mes joi' entiere

estes

20

si

je n'ai vos e vos moi.

Mot
si

male guerriere
foi;

je

muer per bone

25

mes ja per nuUe maniere no.m partrai de vostre loi. Dauna, io mi rent a bos, coar sotz la mes bob e bera
q'anc
fos, e gaillard e pros,

ab que no.m hossetz tan hera.

Mout
30

abetz beras haisos

e color hresc' e noera.

Boste son, e

si.bs

agos

no.m destrengora hiera. Mas tan temo vostro preito,

todo.n son escarmentado.

35

40

Por vos ei pen' e maltreito e meo corpo lazerado: la noit, can jatz en meu leito, so mochas vetz resperado; e car nonca m'aprofeito falid' ei en mon cuidado.
Belhs Cavaliers, tant
es car

lo vostr' onratz senhoratges

45

que cada jorna m'esglio. Oi me lasso! que faro si sele que j'ai plus chiere me tue, ne sai por quoi? Ma dauna, he que dey bos ni peu cap santa Quitera,

mon

corasso m'avetz treito

154

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

50

mot gen

favlan furtado.
(ed. Linskill 1964, 192-93)2'*

This
are

is

though
all

an exercise in linguistic virtuosity (and perhaps has other aims too), it is without any element of conscious exoticism, since the languages
are contiguous,

Romance,

and would probably be accessible to an edu-

cated speaker of any one of them: successive stanzas are in Provencal, Italian,

French, Gascon, and Galician-Portuguese. Such poems are of limited interest

in the context
that
five

of our present discussion

(unless,

of course,

it

could be shown

Raimbaut de Vaqueiras composed languages were in use).

as in

his descort at a

poetic court

where
is

all

Raimbaut, here

the

man-woman

dialogue mentioned below,

an

innovator. 2^ Three similar

poems

are written a

few generations

later,

two of
Sabio

them by poets who have

(C. Alvar 1977, 18194),

strong Iberian connections.

at

The troubadour
amor

Bonifaci
el

Calvo, born in Genoa, spent some years

1989)
as

the court of Alfonso

cantigas de

where he composed two

and where,

(see Piccat
sir-

well

as

poems

in Provencal,

c.

1254, he addressed a

ventes to Alfonso, inviting

him

to

make war on

the kings of Navarre and

Aragon:

Un nou
car

sirventes ses tardar

voill al rei

de Castella

far,

no.m

senbla, ni pes, ni crei,

qu'el aia cor de guerreiar Navars ni I'aragones rei; mas pos dig n'aurai zo que
el faz'o

dei,

que quiser

fazer.

2"

See Crescini (1923-24); Brugnolo (1983, 67-100); Tavani (1986, 1989); Gaunt

(1988); Segre (1993); Brea (1994); Fernandez

Campo
is

(1994).

have not yet been able to see

lyric

Tavani (1969a). Brugnolo argues that Raimbaut

parodying the contemporary courtly

of the

five languages.

Gaunt

says that
as

in a

poem which

switches languages

this

one does, any

explicit reference to

language such

as that in

the Itahan stanza ["certo que en so lengaio / sa gran beuta dir

non
phor
I

so"] invites interpretation.

Here Raimbaut seems

to be aware
is

of
as

fundamental

barrier

between the sexes and

if the

poem's multilingualism

seen

another meta-

for sexual difference, the text surely

lines

becomes much

richer. (1988, 313)

is

am

not sure that the

quoted

will support such a conclusion, but Gaunt's suggestion

interesting,

and

it

deserves further attention.

The

use of quotations in this section contrasts

I

awkwardly with
a substantial

their almost total absence elsewhere in this paper, but unless

it is

anthology

only bilingual poems

not
I

am

to

append
that can

bilingual poets or cancioneros

be thus
^^

illustrated.
is

His innovation

recognized by Elwert: "La

424).

mode

a ete inauguree dans la poesie

courtoise par

Raimbaut de Vaqueiras" (1960,

am

not sure

why Gaunt

(1988,

307-

308) accuses Elwert of saying the opposite.

ALAN DEYERMOND

155

Mas eu oug'a muitos dizer que el non los quer cometer

10

non de menassas, e quen quer de guerr'onrrado seer, sei eu muy ben que Hi conven
si

de meter hi cuidad' e sen,

cuer e cors, aveir et amis. 15

Per quoi

ia

diz au roi, se pris

vuelt avoir de ce qu'a enpris,

qu'el guerries sens menacier,

20

que rien no mont', au mien avis; qe j'ai por voir oi comter que il puet tost au champ trover
les

doi

rois, se talent

en

a.

E
sa

se el aora

non

fa

vezer en

la terra

de

la

tenda e son confalon

25

a lo rei

de Navarr'e

so sozer lo rei d'Arragon,

a caniar averan
tal

razon
lui

que solon de

ben

dir.

E comenzon
30

a dire ia

que mais quer

lo reis

de Leon

cassar d'austor e de falcon

c'ausberc ni sobrenseing vestir.

(Fomiisano 1993, 140-41)

Vicente Beltran (1985) has shown that political facton governed the choice of languages: Galician-Portuguese was the chief poetic language of Alfonso's
court; French was that of the Navarrese court and the native language of
its

Champagne, who had recently died; and Provencal was the poetic language of the Catalans, whose king, Jaume I, was waiting in Tarazona to resist the Castilian attack on Navarre. The use of language differs from that of Raimbaut's descort, not merely in that there are three languagking, the trouvere Thibaut de
es,

not four but also in their distribution: Provencal

is

is

repeated, occupying the

fourth stanza and the tornada (Raimbaut's tomada

multilingual),
first

and although

the sentence breaks

come

at

the end of each stanza, the

two changes of

language do not coincide with them (Provencal is replaced by Galician-Portuguese in the last line of stanza 1, and Galician-Portuguese by French in the last

hne of stanza 2)}^' Nevertheless, the debt to Raimbaut is clear (despite the hesitation of some scholars), just as it is in the cobla by Bonifaci's contempo-

^'

As well

as Alvar, Beltran,

and Formisano, see Branciforti (1955), Brea (1985), and

Blasco (1987).

156

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

troubadour Cerveri de Girona:
querria eu achat

rary, the Catalan

Nunca

ric'home con mal cora^on,

mas volria seynor trobar que.m dones ses deman son jon;
e voldroye touz les jors de nia vie

dames trover o pris de tote jan; e si femna trobava ab enjan

pel

mio

cap'io, misser, la pigliaria.

Un
The
four

esparver daria a I'Enfan

s'aytal

de setembre,
rubric says that this

cobla.m
en

fazia.^^

is

a "cobla

.vi.

lengatges," and scholars

as

were

at first

inclined to accept this statement, identifying the languages

Provencal (with

lines), French (two lines), and Galician-Portuguese, Italian, and perhaps Gascon (one line each). Giuseppe Tavani, however, argues that there are only four languages: Provencal, French, Galician-Portuguese, and Italian. The last member of this group of texts is a 44-line trilingual poem attributed to Dante, which departs radically from the pattern of the others by changing the lan-

guage with every

line:
ris,

Ai faux
oculos

pour quoi

trai

aves

meo? Et quid

tibi feci,

che

fatta

m'hai cosi spietata fraude?

lam

audivissent verba

mea

Greci.

selonch autres dames vous saves

di laude.

che 'ngannator non e degno

(Brugnolo 1983, 107)

Here the tradition deriving from Raimbaut's descort seems more conscious display of linguistic virtuosity. ^^

to end, with an

even

A different kind of interest attaches to what looks like a nonsense refirain, to be found in a number of medieval and later poems, refrains that may turn out to be a garbled form of another language, as in a mid-thirteenth-century cantiga de amigo by Pedro Annes Solaz:
Eu velida non dormia, lelia doura, e meu amigo venia, edoy lelia doura.

Non

dormia

e cuydava,

lelia

doura.

^^

Tavani (1968,

76).

As well

as

Tavani's study, see

M. de Riquer

(1947, 45-46),

Monteverdi (1948), and Frank (1950). ^^ The poem is studied by Crescini (1934) and at greater length by Brugnolo (1983, 105-62). Brugnolo concludes, on stylistic and lexical grounds, that the attribution to Dante
is

"fortemente plausibile" (1983, 162).

The poem

is

not, hovk'ever, accepted into Dante's

lyric

canon by Foster and Boyde (1967).

ALAN DEYERMOND
e

157

O
e

meu amigo chegava, edoy lelia meu amigo venia, lelia doura,

doura.

O
e

d'amor tan ben dizia, edoy lelia doura. meu amigo chegava, lelia doura, d'amor tan ben cantava, edoy lelia doura.
lelia

Muito desejey amigo,

doura,

que vos tevesse comigo, edoy lelia doura. Muito desejey amado, lelia doura, que vos tevess a meu lado, edoy lelia doura.
Leli,
leli,

par Deus,

lely, lelia

doura,

ben sey eu que non diz leli, edoy lelia doura. Ben ssey eu que non diz lely, lelia doura, demo e quen non diz lelia, edoy lelia doura.
(Dutton 1964,
1)

Brian Dutton concluded that the refrain was probably Arabic, and he suggested

an interpretation ("The night [weighs] long [upon] me, /

night [weighs] long [upon] me"). His article concludes:
I

languish,

and the

am

inclined to see in this

a liaison

poem by Pedro Annes

a

Solaz an ironical
.
.

comment on The first four

between
[I

Muslim

minstrel and a soldadera.

stanzas are perhaps part

. . .

fond of singing.

Similarly

of a song which the soldadera was suspect that] the refrain in Arabic comes
.
. .

from the repertoire of her paramour. blend of two love lyrics that produce
. . .

We

must

see in the

poem

a fine

piece of ironic

satire.

(Dutton 1964, 8-9)

poems might

European beyond recognition (cf. Frank 1952), but the investigation petered out because of methodological problems and because the evidence was tenuous. The form in which
For
a time,

he explored the possibility that nonsense

refrains in other

similarly represent Arabic phrases garbled almost

such refrains have survived does not, in any case, suggest that they are the
products of bilingual poetic cultures, and for that reason
I shall not be further concerned with them in this paper. The vexed question of biUngualism in the kharjas (see, for instance, Whinnom 1982-83, Armistead and Monroe 1982-83) is also, though for other reasons, remote from our present topic, but the use of different languages (e.g., Hebrew/Spanish or Hebrew/Vulgar Arabic) for kharja and muwalidh, arising from the linguistic range of the Andalusian courts in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, is directly analogous to the bilingualism of many fifteenth-century court lyrics and their social context. I am, however, aware of very few cases in which a woman replies in everyday language, in the kharja, to a man's elevated speech in Classical Arabic or Hebrew, in the main body of the rnuwalldh.^'^

^'^

It is

thus not true that

"what some of the complete poems [muwa^^ahas]

now show

us

. .

158

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

I can find only one case, among the eighty-one poems in Sola-Sole (1973), in which the poet addresses his beloved (in the fifth and final Classical Arabic stanza of the muwa^^dh) and she replies to him in the khatja (in Vulgar Arabic that may contain a couple of Romance words). This is an anonymous poem of unknown date (no. 48, Sola-Sole 1973, 289-91). In addition, two of the ninety-three Hebrew muwaslahs with kharjas (both of them couplets) in "a more or less colloquial form of Arabic," studied by James T. Monroe and David Swiatlo (1977), end with a bilingual dialogue between a woman and her lover. One of the muwa^Sahs is by Abraham ibn 'Ezra (c. 1092-1167), and the other is by another famous Hispano-Hebraic poet, Todros ben Yehudah ha-

Levi

Abu l-'Afia (1247-c. 1306). The interplay of languages, registers, and

1993)
a

tones between courtly, man's-

voice muwaS^ah and colloquial, woman's-voice kharja in these three cases (see

Deyermond

is to some extent parallelled in Carmina Burana no. 185, woman's voice speaks throughout: the German lines present a romantic seduction, while the Latin lines that alternate with them show that

though here
it

was

a rape:

Ich was ein chint so wolgetan,

virgo

dum

florebam,
al,

do

mich div werlt omnibus placebam.

brist

Hoy

et oe!

maledicantur thylie
la

iuxta uiam posite! wolde ih an die w^isen gan,

flores adunare,

dowolde mich ein ungetan

ibi deflorare.
.
.

Er nam mich
sed
er

bi der

wizen hant,

non indecenter, wist mich div wise lanch

valde fraudulenter.
. .

Er

graif

mir an daz wize gewant

valde indecenter,
er furte

mih bi der hant multum violenter.

.
.

is

a conventional situation in

the language of culture,

people" (Forster
that

which a poet expresses his longing for a beautiful slave-girl in whereupon in the coda [kharja] the girl replies in the language of the 1970, 12). As is well known, the majority of Arabic and .Hebrew muwaSiahs
or Vulgar Arabic kharjas are panegyrics or homosexual love poems.

have

Romance

Among

the minority that are heterosexual love-poems, the

norm

is

for the

young woman
without

to address her

mother

in the kharja,

and/or for the poet to write about

his love

directly addressing the beloved.

ALAN DEYERMOND
Er sprach: "vrowe, gewir baz! nemus est remotum." dirre wech, der habe haz! planxi et hoc totum. "Iz Stat ein linde wolgetan
. .

159

non procul

a uia,
Ian,
. .

da hab ich mine herphe

timpanum cum

lyra."

Do

er zu der linden

chom,
sere
. .

Er

dixit:

"sedeamus,"

minne twanch "ludum faciamus!"

dive
graif

den man

mir an den wizen

timore,

lip,

non absque
er sprah: "ich
dulcis es

mache dich
ore."
. .

ein wip,

cum

Er warf mir uf daz hemdelin

corpore detecta,
er rante

mir

in daz purgelin
. .

cuspide erecta.

Er nam den chocher unde den bogen, bene uenabatur! der selbe hete mich betrogen,
ludus compleatur.
.^"
.
.

Both the German and the Latin lines are in the same woman's voice. Why, then, do they carry different meanings? Anne Howland Schotter says that "the girl's narration of her seduction proceeds much more rapidly in Latin than in German, so that she appears either not to know what is happening to her, or else to willfully soften it with the idealistic diction of Minnesang" (1981, 24). Schotter decides in favor of the second possibility: the young woman "continues to use German to romanticize what is in fact a rape" (25). I think she is probably right, but more study of this poem is needed.^' This is one of many songs in the Carmina Burana that combine Latin and German (as we have seen
in section 4, above), but
its

skillful
it

interweaving of the languages to establish

interesting than those that use a

an ironic counterpoint makes

much more

^"

Diemer and Diemer

(1987, 588-92). See Schotter (1981, 24-25); see also

Dronke

(1965-66, 1:304, and 1975, 128); Plummet 1981, 141-42. It is interesting to compare a dialogue between a knight and a young woman in the Cambridge Songs, in which both
parties use Latin
^'
I

and German.
of other (though not
bilingual)

place

it

in the context

poems about

sexual initiation

in

Deyermond

(1990).

160

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

stanza or stanzas to

German
such

end

a Latin

poem, without the

factors that

make

muwaSSah and its kharja?^ A closer parallel to the muwal^ah/ kharja linguistic pattern a much closer is found in a poem written at the parallel to the three man-woman dialogues
a pattern fruitful in a

Aragonese court

in

Naples by Carvajal: the

man

speaks Castilian and the

woman,

ItaUan:

"^Donde sois gentil galana?" Respondio manso e sin priessa "Mia matre e de Adversa
io,

micer, napolitana."
si

Preguntel

era casada

si

se

queria casar:

"Oime

disse

esventurata,

hora fosse a maritar!

Ma

la

bona voglia

e vana,

poi fortuna e adversa:

io,

che mia matre e de Adversa mecer, napolitana." (Scoles 1967, 186)

Although the usual description of this poem as a serranilla rests on shaky ground (Marino 1987, 119-20), the implication is that the woman is of lower social status than the man, and this sociolinguistic differentiation contrasts sharply with the insistence of the Italian humanists that their culture is superior
to the Castilian.

There are several very interesting analogues to Carvajal's poem, in addition muwaHdhs already mentioned, and 1 am inclined to think that they form a subgenre of bilingual man- woman dialogues, perhaps inspired by the difference in register often found in pastorelas, perhaps descended directly from a tenso (c. 1190) by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, in which the man speaks Provencal and the woman, the Genoese dialect of Italian. ^-^ The other texts that I have found are the section of the Libro de Buen Amor in which Trotaconventos courts a young Moorish woman on the narrator-protagonist's behalf, and the
to the

^-

The form of this poem,

(letter

alternating lines in each

bnguage within

a quatrain,

may be

related to the early stages

of the

rondeau; see Beltran 1984. Professor

Regula Rohland de

Langbehn
single

of 24 February 1993) draws

my

attention to a thirteenth-century

poem by
result:

Tannhauser, which combines two languages in a different way to produce an ironic

German poem: "Von amure seit ich ir, / daz vergalt si dulze mir. ..." She also points out that two poems by Oswald von Wolkenstein (1377-1445) contain passages in several languages with German versions of
words from the French courdy lexicon
are set within a

these passages (Klein et

seen,

al.

1962, nos. 69 and 119).

Von

Wolkenstein,

as

we

have already

met Queen Margarida de Prades and wrote a poem in her honour (section 1, above). ^^ The text is in Linskill (1964, 99-101). Simon Gaunt suggests that the Italian stanzas may be the authentic work of an anonymous Genoese woman poet (1988, 302, 313). The suggestion had been made by earlier scholars, but Gaunt develops it fruitfully.

ALAN DEYERMOND

161

replies in Arabic (not a lyric but an adaptation of a lyric pattern; Blecua 1992, 387-89, st. 1508-12); a Castilian-French dialogue by Francisco Imperial (Nepaulsingh 1977, 51-55; Dutton and Gonzalez Cuenca 1993, 303 304); a Welsh-English dialogue by Carvajal's contemporary Tudur Penllyn (D. Johnston 1991, 7477); and a French-Basque dialogue written at the end of the fifteenth century by the Flemish musician and poet Josquin Desprez

woman

(Stevenson 1977, 218-19; Paden 1987,

II,

522).

These dialogues need

much

accommodated in the present paper, and I have therefore dealt with them separately (Deyermond in press). There are many other kinds of bilingual poem, in various linguistic combinations. Some songs from the period 13401415 (much the same period as that covered by the Cancionero de Baena) mix Italian and French (Fallows 1989, 432). A random sampling of sixty fifteenth-century English religious lyrics (Brown 1939, nos. 120, 81100, and 14160) reveals eleven, or nearly onefifth of the total, that combine English and Latin in some way. The kind of

more

discussion than could be

combination

varies: alternating Latin

and English

texts in nos.

and 90; a
first

Latin refrain in 6, 85, 156, and 159; the fourth line of each stanza in Latin, 16;
alternating Latin

and English

lines,

17 and 86; the

first

half of each of the

It

four lines in Latin and the second half in EngHsh, 18, 157.

could be objected

that frequent use of the liturgical language is not surprising in religious lyrics, and indeed the equivalent sample of fourteenth to fifteenth-century secular lyrics (Robbins 1955) yields only five cases, but they are very interesting ones: a French refrain, no. 1; the second half of a few lines in French, 14; Latin last line(s), 89 and 90 (these should perhaps be eliminated from consideration, since they are colophons); and a short trilingual drinking song:

Verbum

caro factum est

et habitavit in nobis.

Fetys bel chere,

drynk to thy

fere,

verse le bavere,

and synge nouwell! (1955,

8,

no. 10)

comparable earher case

love

is

no. 19 of the early fourteenth-century Harley

Lyrics, a

poem whose

first

eighteen lines are a macaronic blend of Latin

lines in English:

and Anglo-Norman, ending with two

Dum ludis
le

floribus velud lacinia

dieu d'amour
je ne

moi

tient

en

tiel

angustia,

merour me
si

tient de duel et

de miseria

la

ay

quam amo

super omnia.

Eius

amor tantum me facit fervere qe je ne soi quid possum inde facere;

ly

pur
si

covent hoc seculum relinquere

li

je ne pus I'amour de
est
si

perquirere.

Ele

bele e gente

dame

egregia

162
10

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

cum

ele fust imperatoris

filia,

de beal semblant e pulcra continencia,

ele est la flur in

omnia

regis curia.
tali

Quant je

la

vey je su
lune

in

gloria

come
15

est la
la

celi inter sidera;

Dieu

moi doint

sua misericordia
alia.

beyser e fere que secuntur

Scripsi

hec carmina in tabulis; mon ostel est en mi la vile de Paris; may y sugge namore, so wel me is;

20

3ef hi de3e for love of hire, duel (Brook 1968, 55)

hit ys.

Earlier

still,

and dividing the languages more

sharply, are

two

thirteenth-

and Anglo-Norman versions are arranged in alternating stanzas (Brown 1932, 1013, no. 5), and a definition of love, whose three stanzas say the same thing in, successively, English, Latin, and French:
century poems, a prisoner's
parallel English

poem whose

Love

is

a selkud

wodenesse
ledeth by wildernesse,

J)at |5e idel J)at |)urstes

mon

of wilfulscipe and drinket sorwenesse and with lomful sorwes menget his blithenesse.
est

Amor

quedam mentis

insania

que vagum hominem ducit per deuia sitit delicias and bibit tristia crebris doloribus commiscens gaudia. Amur est une pensee enragee ke le udif humme meyne par veie deveye
ke a soyf de delices e ne beyt ke
tristesces

and od souvens dolurs medle sa tristesce [sic]. (Brown 1932, 14-15, no. 9)

The

linguistic state

of the secular

lyrics thus reflects a trilingual

and other

trilingual cultural contexts

poetic court

in late

medieval England.

We

should

most famous of Scottish lyrics from the end of the Middle Ages, William Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris, uses a Latin refrain to great effect:
recall that the
I

that in heill

wes and

gladnes.

Am trublit now with

And
feblit

gret seiknes.

with infermite;
mortis conturbat me.
. .

Timor

He

hes done petuously devour

The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour, The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre; Timor mortis conturbat me.
. .

Sen he has

all

my

brether tane,

ALAN DEYERMOND

163

He

will

nocht
I

lat

me

lif alane,

On

forse

man

his

nyxt pray be;

.
.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

(Mackenzie 1933, 20-23)

We should recall also that Juan Ruiz's contemporary Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote
a nine-stanza
is

meditation on a eucharistic sequence, in which each Latin phrase

a

glossed

by

Welsh

quatrain.

as in those of other countries, Latin and the vernacular found together in religious poems or in parodies of religiare most be ous texts. The misas de amor of Juan de Dueiias, Suero de Ribera, and Nicolas Nuiiez provide a good example (see Tillier 1985, chap. 2). In secular lyric the blend is much more likely to be of two vernaculars and to be found in two or more closely linked poems than within a single one. Thus in Resende's Cancioneiro geral a Portuguese poem by Jorge da Silveira (Dutton ID 5240) begins a series of 74 poems, so closely linked that in Dutton 1982 they were given a single ID number. The first two of this series (the anonymous 2280 and Nuno Gon^alvez's 5241) are in Castilian, and all the rest are in Portuguese. A Portuguese pregunta by Fernam Brandam is answered in Castilian by Anrique de Saa (514344), and Fernam da Silveira replies in Castilian to his own Portuguese pregunta (545960). Similarly, two Catalan canfoners include a demanda in hendecasyllables by Joan Rois de Corella to which the Principe de Viana repUes in Castilian, using the same rhyme scheme but in arte tnayor.^^ Only a few single poems by Castilian poets are bilingual or trilingual: Carlos Alvar's estimate is 12-15 (1991, 499). One by Carvajal, which uses language for gender and social differentiation, has already been quoted; in another, entirely man's-voice, he mixes Italian, Castilian, and Latin: a quotation from Scipio Afiricanus transposed to a love complaint (Scoles 1967, 192-93; see M. Alvar

In Iberian cancioneros,
likely to

1984). 35
Bilingual

poems may be

classified in a

distribution of languages within the

poem.

number of ways. One relates to the If two are used in a single line, we
of Harvey 1978 for Anglothat change languages with

have a macaronic poem Norman), and the same

(see the observations

is

true of

some poems

'^

For the

difficult

problem of defining the hendecasyllable according

to the scansion

conventions in different languages, see DufFell (1991).

different languages

An
as

exchange between poets of

was not always by

a

bilingual: the individual candonero

of

Gomez Manrique
which Manrique
this

(MN24)
guese
is

includes a pregunta

Portuguese identified only

texts in

Alvaro, to

replies in the

same language (3369-70;

Dutton 1990-91,
in this note.

2:217). Manrique's Portu-

slightly Castilianized,

and Alvaro's pregunta includes three hnes of Castilian;

I

does

not, however, invalidate the statement that

*'

make
a

Another poem by Carvajal begins with

hne
is

in Latin, the rest being in Castilian,

but

this

hardly counts as bilingual, since the Latin

(Scoles 1967, 192-93).

Celestina.

An

analogue

is

well-known quotation from the Psalms Rojas's use of a phrase from the Salve Regina to end
a

164

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

the descort attributed to Dante, though not "Ich was ein chint from the Carmina Burana, with its antiphonal effect). The function of macaronic poems is hkely to be different from that of poems that

every line

(e.g.,

so wolgetan,"

have a final stanza or stanzas in a second language or that use a second language for one speaker in a dialogue. Much, however, depends on the languages used. If, as is usually the case in macaronic texts, one is Latin and the other is vernacular, and the subject matter is religious, we should need strong evi-

dence before accepting

is

that the

purpose of this linguistic mixture

far

more

likely to reflect the bilingual nature

medieval western Church: Latin liturgy, vernaculars are mixed within a line, the most probable reason is that the poet wishes to exploit the comic possibilities of such a mixture. Vernacular-Latin bilingualism is in any case usually of a different nature from the mixture of two
or

is comic; it of popular worship in the vernacular sermon. If, however, two

more

vernaculars: Paul

Zumthor

observes that "le bilinguisme

roman

est

horizontal; le bilinguisme latin- vulgaire, vertical," and he dates the

emergence

end of the twelfth century (1960, 588; 1963, 110). The any pair of liturgical and everyday languages: for example, the Hebrew muwaslahs with Vulgar Arabic kharjas studied by Monroe and Swiatlo (1977). This does not, of course, imply that the two vernaculars are necessarily on an equal footing. Another basis for classification is the number of languages used: at one extreme, a wish to display linguistic virtuosity is likely to be the main, perhaps the sole, reason for using four or five languages in a single poem; at the other extreme, if only two languages are used, some other explanation should probably be sought. These, however, are probabilities, not immutable rules, and each case needs to be carefully considered: until Vicente Beltran (1985) showed the political significance of Bonifaci Calvo's trilingual sirventes, critics had assumed that it served the same purpose as its model, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras's descort.
of the former same contrast
to the
is

valid for

7.

Implications for Readers

I

In the preceding sections of this paper,

have

raised, directly or indirectly, a

number of important
used in
guages,
a

when two languages are man-woman dialogue, is there a hierarchical ranking of the lanand if so, how is it manifested? Is the hierarchy that of cultural prestige
general questions. For example,

or of political and economic power? In Josquin Desprez's poem, where the male narrator-protagonist speaks French and the woman, Basque, the criteria converge. In Raimbaut de Vaqueiras's tenso, the man's language, Provencal, is that of high culture, while the woman's, the Genoese form of Italian, is the language of power, as she brutally reminds the man at the end. Two and a half centuries later, when another such dialogue is written in Italy, by Carvajal, the roles have changed: the man's Castihan is one of the languages of the Aragonese conquerors of Naples, while the woman's Italian is one of the languages of culture (not ranked as high as the Latin of the humanists, but with the Divina commedia and Petrarch's lyrics at its back). In Carvajal's poem, however, these hierarchies are only implicit, as they are in its contemporary, Tudur

ALAN DEYERMOND
Penllyn's dialogue (written in a lower register),

165

where the language

roles are

comparable. In
is

all

the

man-woman

dialogues, the question of gender hierarchy

sometimes coinciding with the hierarchy of culture, sometimes with that of national power, sometimes with both, sometimes with neither (for the texts of these dialogues and discussion of the poems, see Deyermond in press). These often competing hierarchies remind us that Zumthor's image of vertical and horizontal bilingualisms is sometimes too
explicitly or implicitly present,
restrictive: there are diagonal

other context for language hierarchy

and even chiasmic hierarchical relationships. Anis found in the bilingual poem from the

Carmina Burana, quoted above, where a single speaker alternates the language of high culture with that of everyday life (albeit in a fairly high register). Here the two languages may reflect two levels of the speaker's awareness or two interpretations. There is no transferable set of hierarchical relationships, even
the same pair of languages is involved. Context is all important: the macaronic use of Latin and German in "Ich was ein chint so wolgetan" has little in common with that of a fifteenth-century Christmas carol:
In dulci iubilo

when

nun

singet

und

seid froh!

Unsers Herzens
leit in

Wonne
Sonne

praesepio

und

leuchtet vor die

matris in gremio.

Alpha

es et

O!

(Forster 1970, 10)

less in

The

English version of the carol has even

common

with Godley's

poem

about the motor bus.

than by

Another question to be addressed more, perhaps, by literary historians critics on this occasion is whether the fi-equent use of one language in a cancionero written predominantly in another language reflects a shift in political or economic power. The extensive use of German in the Cannina Burana is not due to any external shift but may possibly, when compared with largely monolingual Latin anthologies of an earlier period, indicate changing social patterns and the rise of vernacular literacy.-'^' The use of Castilian by many Portuguese poets in the Cancioneiro geral, on the other hand, is probably due in large measure to growing Castilian political hegemony, and the same explana-

tion

may

apply to the increasing use of Castilian in Catalan can(oners of the

is

same period (though more caution

tion 4).

needed here, for reasons discussed in sec-

third question to

lingual culture of medieval royalty

be considered is the international and therefore multiand aristocracy (for various aspects of that

Peter Dronke's redating of the Cannina Burana to the early thirteenth century,

on

literary as well as art-historical

and paleographic grounds (1962), against Otto Schumann's

latter hypothesis.

widely accepted date of c. 1300 (1926), would reduce the probability of the

166

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

1928 and Jaeger 1985). The traveling poets of the thirillustrate the fluidity of that culture in one way, the knights errant of the fifteenth century (M. de Riquer 1967, 1970) in another. Before the rise of the nation-state, the association between language and loyalty to one's country scarcely existed (Chaytor 1945, chap. 3). To attempt to study one lyric tradition in isolation is thus to distort sociohistorical
culture, see Prestage

teenth century (C. Alvar 1977)

as

well

as literary reality.

All these questions, and more, arise

in the medieval lyric.
I

from any attempt

to study bilingualism

erary historians
ever, a

critics and litdo so satisfactorily, hownumber of bibliographical and philological tasks must be undertaken.

can do no more than indicate paths that

to follow. Before they can

may wish

8.

Implications for Action

well
as

First, it is clear that as

analyzing individual

poems and studying

individ-

ual poets,

we need

to consider poetic anthologies as an object of research in

"il faut

themselves. Aurelio Roncaglia observed that

tique generale des chansonniers et

en premier lieu developla

per systematiquement ce que j'appellerai un controle croise entre

la

stemma-

stemmatique particuliere des compositions individuelles" (1991, 36). The possibility that a cancionero was influenced in its visual or conceptual design by another cancionero or group of them, with which it has nothing in common textually, needs more attention than it has so far received. Henry H. Carter argued, briefly but convincingly, that the Cancioneiro da Ajuda was modeled on a royal scriptorium manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Carter 1941, xii); it has even been suggested that Ajuda itself is a product of the Alfonsine scriptorium. I have given reasons for believing
that the Cancionero de Baena's conceptual structure,

though not

its

intellectual

content, derived from the Provencal chansonniers

205).-^^ Similarly,

(Deyermond 1982, 204

la

Victor de Lama's

work on

the Cancionero de

Catedral de

^'Julian Weiss disagrees

are, in their basic

on two grounds (1990, 4042).

First,

he accepts that "the

vidas

conception, similar to the general rubrics preceding the

work of the major

poets in Baena's anthology," but, he adds, "they are far

more

elaborate than anything written

by the
tion,
style

Castilian" (42). Similarly:

"The

razos,

which

describe the circumstances of composias far as

correspond in their basic function to the rubrics of the individual poems; yet

and substance

are concerned, they share nothing in

I

comparative judgment of length and quahty;

are usually

had
. .
.

said

common" (42). Weiss is right in his much the same: "The vidas and razos
is

much

longer than Baena's rubrics

but the similarity

I

unmistakable, and

is

much
razos

too close to be coincidental" (1982, 205).

similarities in function

still

believe that opinion to be correct.

Castilian rubrics

Weiss goes on: "The

to sell their wares

between the

and the

vidas

and

stem from something

much more
fairly

simple: they both originate in the desire

to extol the literary

of compilers
of their

and

at the

same time

and

social merits

patrons" (42). Yet these are

common

motives in the compilation of poetic anthologies,

fairly

and
It is

if Weiss

were

right,
at

we

should expect the vida plus razo pattern to be

I

widespread.

not.

Looking

such anthologies in a wide variety of languages,

is

have been struck by

his Cancionero

the scarcity of that pattern (Weiss's impression

different:

"Baena structured

ALAN DEYERMOND
Segouia has

167

stemma of musical relationships may be quite one (Lama de la Cruz 1994), and an iconographic stemma may well be different from both (most of us are familiar with the work that has been done on woodcuts in early editions of Celestina). We are still only at the beginning of a serious study of medieval European poetic anthologies, though some important work has already been done, both in surveying a tradition (e.g., Gonzalez Cuenca 1978, Dutton 1979) and in tracing the relationships of a family of cancioneros (Fiona Maguire's codicological paper of 1991 is a model here). And, of course, Julia Boffey's book (1985) stands as a

shown

again that the

textual

different

from the

in a

way

that

was

common

in the

European
is

lyric tradition," 43).

Moreover, Baena shows

term
says

familiarity
"la

with Provencal precedent. As

well

known, he

uses the Provencal-derived

gaya ciencia." Second, Weiss believes that adequate precedent for Baena's pattern of
is

rubrics

to

be found in the textual tradition of the Galician-Portuguese

cancioneiros.

He

that "the basic

arrangement of the three large

cancioneiros

is

by genre, and within

that

by

author; but internal evidence also proves that in smaller anthologies the opposite practice (by
author, then genre) was also followed, and this was the system selected

by Baena"

(41).

This

statement

is

supported by

reference to Tavani (1969c), but Tavani's findings

do not

adequately support the opinion. Tavani's reconstruction of the manuscript tradition distinguishes four stages: small manuscripts of individual poets (1969c, 153-67), then "raccolte

poetiche dedicate ad un solo autore e di proporzioni maggiori" (167-72), then collections of

medium size containing the work of a number of poets (172-75), and finally the big cancioneiros. The evidence about the third stage is ambiguous: Tavani refers to "una serie di
chierici-trovatori riuniti assieme nella stessa sezione del canzoniere,
ai

con poesie appartenenti

generi piu disparati" (174; see also 178), but he does not mention arrangement by genre
at this stage,

within the work of a single poet

and

his study as a

whole points firmly towards

is

genre

as

the

main

basis for organization

once the stage of single-poet manuscripts

is

past; the
this

existence of a single-genre anthology, the Cancioneiro da Ajuda,

hypothesis.

powerful evidence for

Even

if that

were not the

case,

we

should

still

lack evidence for anything in the

Galician-Portuguese textual tradition that resembled the Provencal vida plus razo system.

Weiss (1990)

says:

These

cancioneiros

supply the additional precedent for Baena's anthology in the

occasional use of rudimentary rubrics. These

come down

to us mainly in the section

devoted to
filled in

satiric

verse in the
left

two

Italian collections (unfortunately, the scribes

never

the spaces

for rubrics in the Canioneiro da Ajuda). (41)

are, as

The

rubrics that are

found

Weiss

says,

rudimentary, though he finds one exception:

where

the compiler gives rare details about Martin [Soares]'s origins and his excellence

as a poet.

This

may have

reflected a

wider practice, current in smaller anthologies

authority

now
That
of

whose purpose was to preserve and confer of an individual or local community of poets. (41)
lost to us,
is

upon

the

work

possible, but the hypothesis rests

it

on

slender evidence

much too
initial

slender,

think, to

justify preferring

to the clear similarity

between Baena's

rubrics

and the Provencal pattern

uida plus razo.

tice

Even

the closest approximation in Galician-Portuguese to Baena's prac-

the razo-type rubrics in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, with an

extent corresponds to the vida

poem

that to

some

is

not

as close as

the Proven^al-Baena resemblance.

168

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

We now, thanks to the monumental achievement of Brian Dutton and his collaborators (1982, 1990^^ 91), have the equipment with which to respond to that challenge. In the wider European context, we need to bring together specialists in different languages to pool information and to bounce ideas off each other. The 1989 Liege conference {Lyrique 1991), at which two-thirds of the papers were concerned with topics wider than a single anthology, made an excellent start
challenge and an inspiration to hispanomedievalists.
for the

Romance

languages, and the publication of the discussions as well as

I

the papers adds to the value of the volume.

have for the

last

few years been

at which each of a dozen lyric languages of the MidAges would be represented by a specialist, so that common problems in the study of candoneros as units could be identified and possible solutions discussed.

thinking of a conference
dle

The time

has clearly

Second, we a union catalogue of poetic anthologies and other formally constituted poetic manuscripts and early printed texts compiled in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and about 1600, in all languages (including Arabic and Hebrew). There would be obvious advantages in including all manuscripts and early printed texts containing lyrics, but these might be offset by delays in completing the project. The catalogue should, in addition to codicological details, history of the manuscript, and library location, list the poets (with number of poems in each language, in the case of a bilingual poet), and give the number of anonymous
need,

come to pursue as a minimum,

this idea.

"*

An announcement

of

new

collaborative project, "Intavulare: tavole di canzonieri

romanzi

(lirica delle origini),"

directed by

Anna

Ferrari,

is

distributed with Lyrique 1991.

It

will provide for

each major manuscript anthology a volume containing indexes of first

all

lines

and authors, with

within the

relevant supplementary material. This will

as

make comparative
i

studies

Romance field much easier, preparation). The practical reasons for

table.
I

wiU Anna M. Gudayol

Torrello's dissertation (in

Latin,

the exclusion of English,

German,

and other
is

languages from the Intavulare project are easy to understand, though the exclusion
also regret that the

regret-

announcement makes no mention of Brian Dutton's work, though it is implicitly recognized by the absence of Castilian from the list of volumes in press and in preparation. The extent to which Dutton and his collaborators have surpassed the
bibliographical tools available for the study of other lyric traditions

may be gauged by com(Brown and

relatively

paring Dutton and Krogstad 1990-91 with

Tlie

Index of Middle English Verse

Robbins 1943; Robbins and Cutler 1965). The

Index, indispensable

though

it is, is

unsophisticated and inflexible and lacks the copious indexing of Dutton and Krogstad. Julia

Boffey and two American collaborators have recently begun work on a replacement, which,
it is

to be hoped, will build

as

on Dutton's

technical achievements and conceptual structure, as

well

on

the vast quantity of information in the original Index. Information about the

Intavulare project

may be

obtained firom Professor Ferrari, Facolta di Lettere, Dip. Studi

Piazzale

Romanzi, Universita La Sapienza,

fessor
versite

Aldo Moro

5,

00185 Roma,

Italy,

or firom Pro-

Madeleine Tyssens, Faculte de Philosophic

et Lettres,

Dep. d'Etudes Romanes, Uni-

de Liege, Place Cockerill, 4000 Liege, Belgium.

ALAN DEYERMOND
poems.

169

detailed inventory of each anthology

would make

the catalogue so
it (at

extensive that only the wealthiest scholars could think of acquiring

until the price

least

of

CD-ROMS
left

inventories are best

and the necessary hardware falls sharply). Such to those working in a single language, either as a

comprehensive Dutton-style inventory for all the material in that language or as a single-manuscript volume of the type mentioned in note 38. I do not think it is unreasonably optimistic to suppose that at least a tentative union catalogue could be produced fairly rapidly. Without it, those of us who are interested in comparative medieval lyric studies will be working in, at best, the
twilight.

Third,

we need
is

teams to work on editions of bilingual and multilingual

cancioneros. Segovia

now much
five

better

known, thanks

to

Lama 1994, but

least

a full

edition and study

late

would probably
of all

require the collaboration of specialists in the

one musicolof the PixMcourt Chansonnier, though linguistically less varied anthologies could be covered by a smaller team, and those without music and confined to two languages might sometimes need only a single scholar. An adequate study of a multilingual poetic court, though it could occasionally be carried out by one widely read and linguistically talented scholar, is in general another obvious case for teamwork. Fourth, editions and studies of the work of bilingual poets such as Avinyo, Nuno Gonzalez, Fernam da Silveira, and Torrellas, once rare, are now being undertaken with increasing and welcome frequency in Catalonia, and it is to be hoped that Portuguese scholars will follow this example. This task too could advantageously be done in collaboration, since there are not many scholars who are equally familiar with fifteenth-century Castilian and Catalan or with Castilian and Portuguese, lyric poetry and archival materials. (To avoid any misunderstanding I should add that many monolingual poets, indeed, the great majority, are also overdue for such monographic treatment and that where valuable contributions remain unpublished in theses and dissertations [e.g.. Foreman 1969 on Quiros, V. Richardson 1981 on five early Baena poets, and Tillier 1985, 124-27 on Juan Tallante] they should be made accessible in
medieval
lyric

of the languages used and of at

ogist.

A similarly large

team would be needed

for a full study

way

that

would protect

the authors firom plagiarism.)

even though the percentages of bilingual poems, or poets, or cancioneros are relatively low for instance, about 10-12 percent of all late medieval poetic anthologies within a given linguistic tradition seem to be to some exFifth,

they are high enough to make nonsense of any attempt to study the late medieval lyric tradition of any language in isolation.'''^ My work, still obviously very tentative, on bilingualism
tent bilingual (see the evidence in section 4)

^^

The same

is,

of course, true

in other areas

of research: A.

I.

Doyle observes

that "it

has been a

common

mistake to suppose that one can reach any reliable conclusions about

books and

their users in the fourteenth

and

fifteenth centuries

by confining one's view to

books

in

one language only" (1983,

163).

170

BILINGUALISM IN THE CANCIONEROS

has reinforced a conviction that has 1980s, the course

grown on me

since

planned, in the early

on medieval

lyric for the

I

MA in Medieval Studies at Queen

originality for this point

Mary and

Westfield College.

do not claim any

of

view: Peter Dronke and Stephen Reckert, in very different ways, have for

many

years

been demonstrating with consistent

list

brilliance the
I

need

for a

multilingual approach to lyric (see Reckert 1993). Neither do

the depressingly long
literature

of those who insist be familiar with some other subject. Of course it is possible to study many poems and many poets satisfactorily within the bounds of a single language. But if we want to study some poets, or any lyric tradition as a whole, a multilingual approach is inescapable. We cannot even, in most cases, confine ourselves to pairs of languages: as we have seen, Castilian exists side by side in cancioneros with Catalan, Italian, Latin, and Portuguese, in a different way with Galician, and occasionally with Arabic, Basque, English, Flemish, and French; French coexists with Basque, Castilian, English, Latin, and Provengal; English with Castilian, Flemish, French, Italian, Latin, and Welsh; Latin with Castilian, Czech, English, French, and German; and so on. The web of relationships in medieval European lyric cannot be cut at any point without distorting the pattern, and I am not sure that my restriction of

wish to join that before studying medieval

one must

first

that statement to

Europe

is

justified."*"

Queen Mary and

Westfield College

'"'

am

grateful to

Mr. John Gornall

for a

copy of his unpublished paper,

to Dr. Victor

(now pubUshed: Lama de la Cruz 1994) before its examination, and to Professor Jacques Joset and Mr. John Perivolaris for supplying me with elusive bibliographical items. Professor Vicente Beltran, Dr. Roger Boase, Dr. Juha BofFey, Dr. Lluis Cabre, Dr. David Fallows, Professor R. Geraint Gruffydd, Professor Thomas R. Hart, Professor David Hook, Dr. Tony Hunt, Dr. Linda Paterson, Dr. Silvia Ranawake, and Dr. Jane Whetnall very kindly commented on the first draft of this paper,
to use his dissertation

de Lama for allowing

me

correcting
references.

many
I

errors

and providing

me

with invaluable information and bibliographical

draft at the

have

also benefited

from the discussion of the second

Conference,

from the information provided by Professor Michael Gerli and Professor Regula Rohland de Langbehn. In the final stage of transforming successive drafts into the
and
especially

published version,

have been greatly helped by the detailed comments and suggestions of

I

the editors, Professor Gerli and Professor Julian Weiss. Their confidence that
a
little

could, with

help, realize their Platonic ideal

it

of a paper on bilingualism

in the cancioneros
all this

was

ill-

founded, but

led

me

to the solution

of a number of problems. For

assistance,

my

heartfelt thanks.

Reading Cartagena: Blindness, Insight and Modernity

in a

Cancionero Poet

E.

MICHAEL GERLI

Veritas est aedequatio verbi et

ret

Cancionero

poetry's status as a philological

phenomenon

(e.g.,

the

monu-

mental textual work completed by Brian Dutton 1982, 1990-91), or simply as a social document recording the lyric musings of a declining medieval aristocracy (e.g., Boase 1978), has obscured the artistic merit, innovation,

and
it.

intellectual

complexity of many of the individual poets

has conditioned a repudiation of

we

find prac-

ticing

Worse

still, it

many of these

poets

of serious intellectual, literary, and cultural interest. Until very recently, with few exceptions (notably Whinnom 1981, Macpherson 1985, and Weiss 1990), the only critical responses directed toward the majority of canas objects

cionero poets

strictly sociohistorical

seems that
ing
class

it

have been circumscribed to a negative, to a philological, or to a one. When they are read, if they are read at all today, it is always as a duty. Seen only as the mouthpieces of an effete rul-

given over to the pursuit of abstract, mannered, verse, cancionero poets

have been labeled little more than textual curiosities or practitioners of a "primitive" form of poetic discourse against which to measure the lyric flights taken by the revolutionary Boscan or the divine Garcilaso (Lapesa 1985), who
boldly

accommodated the themes and forms of

letters.

the Italian Renaissance to

Spanish

Despite the philological enterprise, the exploitation of cancionero poetry

the black backdrop by

as

which

to contrast
as a

Renaissance, or

its

depiction

and construct the splendors of the microcosm of the decline and crisis of the

medieval world, none of these gestures accounts for several disconcerting facts: (1) that cancionero poetry was perhaps the single most persistent cultural activity
in Spain
it

during a period spanning nearly one hundred and

staple

fifty years; (2)

that

remained the

form of Spanish poetry almost into the seventeenth cen-

172

READING CARTAGENA
and
(3) that

fail to appreciate its very status as an innovaand as an intellectual pursuit. My purpose here is to illustrate the rich, unexplored literary and cultural possibilities offered by one of these poets, Cartagena, and to seek to articulate by way of this example the w^ealth of cerebral complexity, as well as the artistic, linguistic, and ideological significance of the poetry written by him and others at court during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. By beginning with the fundamental premise that the prevailing models governing the discussion of cancionero poetry often fail to take note of the interpretive criteria offered by the texts themselves, and by

tury;

we

persistently

tive art form, as literature,

appealing to the texts themselves,

allure for the thoughtful

it is

possible to discover cancionero poetry's

modern reader and

vindicate

its

condition

as a signifi-

cant literary idiom worthy of our interest.

Until very recently, despite the fact that Cartagena was one of the most

we were not even 1987 one leading contemporary specialist on Renaissance Spanish poetry (in his annotations to Cristobal de CastiUejo's "Reprension contra los poetas que escriben en verso italiano") mistakes our poet for his maternal grandfather's brother, Alonso de Cartagena, the humanist bishop of Burgos (Rivers 1987, 52 n. 42). Yet during his short life (145686), and well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Pedro de Cartagena, our poet, was celebrated as one of the most inventive lyric voices of his age (see Avalle-Arce 1974a). Castillejo considered him one of the paradigmatic voices of the cancionero tradition, and he invokes him to counter the strange lyric heresies imported from Italy by Boscan and Garcilaso. At the same time Castillejo places Pedro de Cartagena in the company of Juan de Mena, Jorge Manrique, Bartolome de Torres Naharro, and Garci Sanchez de Badajoz (Rivers 1987, 52). Similarly, the poet Tapia, next to Santillana the single most copied poet of the entire cancionero corpus (Dutton 1982, 18990, where he appears with 75 entries), pays lasting homage to the departed Cartagena by declaring that it was the latter's example that compelled him to write
copied poets in the various editions of the Cancionero general,
assured of his identity. Indeed,
as late as

verse:

Por vos el dulce trobar en mi mano titubea, y por vos, a mi pensar, mi trobar deve quedar baxo y de baxa ralea. Porque vuestras invenciones
y nuevas coplas
estraiias

levantan lindas razones

que

a los

duros coraf ones

las

abren luego

entranas.

Y
a

con vuestro seso neto mi seso le acaesce

al

como

simple lo discrete

E.

MICHAEL GERLI

173

como

al

bovo

lo perfecto,
fol.

qu'en mirallo s'embevesce. (IICG,

152

r,

vf

Deferring to Cartagena's undisputed mastery of poetry, Tapia above all praises him for the novel inventiveness of his verse, the subtlety of his wit ("vuestro
seso neto"), and the depth, novelty,
for Tapia this
is

and complexity of his thoughts. However,

as a

not enough. In the same panegyric, he goes on to compare

Cartagena to Santillana, just to conclude that

marques:

poet Cartagena surpasses the

Que yo he visto coplas vuestras y d'aquel gran trobador, el marques, que con sus muestras las mas diestras son siniestras,
pero vos
levais la flor. (fol. 152v)

Later, Garcilaso de la Vega,

Fernando de Herrera, and Baltasar Gracian

also

can be so? A brief look at one or two of Cartagena's compositions, I believe, will answer the question and oblige us to take more seriously Castillejo's, Tapia's, Garcilaso's, Herrera's, and Gracian's judgments. Like many cancionero poets, though perhaps more than most, Cartagena exemplifies a profound preoccupation with language and the paradoxes posed by its utterance and understanding. He illustrates this at the level not only of written and spoken language itself, as we shall see, but of language in its broadest sense, by perceiving the material world as a text challenging readers to decode it. In his poetry everything is seldom what it seems. For Cartagena, understanding the meaning of visual and verbal texts implies intellectual effort, and as a result, ambiguous images and tropes of obfuscation are deliberately deployed in his compositions to illustrate the point and to test the wits and the linguistic acumen of his readers. Indeed, his preoccupation with interpretation and the possibility of misunderstanding is perhaps his major intellectual concern and certainly his most recurring and well-focused poetic motif In all this he betrays an obsession with the contradictions of signification and the emptiness of language the difficulty of establishing agreement between signs and their meaning that seems to shape fifteenth-century Spanish courtly culture.
this

distinguish Cartagena as a touchstone of poetic wit and virtuosity.^

How

'

All citations

from the Cancionero general (IICG)

are taken

from Dutton's edition (1990-

91).
^

los ojos"

diate

Herman Iventosch (1965, 221-27) ventures that Cartagena's "Entre el corazon (IICG fol. 86v-87r) may well have served as Garcilaso de la Vega's most immemodel for the composition of his Sonnet 10, "jOh dulces prendas por mi mal halladas!"
Indeed,

In his

1580 Anotaciones to Garcilaso's poetry, Fernando Herrera

for his great uncle

cites

Cartagena in

his

explanatory notes (see Gallego Morell 1972, 323); v^hile Gracian (1969, 1:238-39, 253),

though mistaking him

ples

Alonso de Cartagena, uses

his verse as

prime exam-

of poetic wit and conceit.

174

READING CARTAGENA

As I have argued elsewhere, the view that truth resides solely in linguistic perception seems to underlie the poetics of cancionero verse (see Gerli 1990
91), w^here the craft of poetry
is

conceived essentially

as a

counterfeit art (Jingir

and fingimiento are the terms most often used in formulating its theoretical definition) in both the allegorical as well as the constructive sense. Indeed, the notions of substitution, proxy, and counterfeit are so widespread in cancionero poetics that at certain moments the anxiety produced at the ersatz and surrogate nature of gestures, words, and images conspicuously becomes the object of a poem itself, as in Cartagena's imaginative "No juzgueis por la color." In "No juzgueis por la color," Cartagena seeks to disabuse some ladies, explaining that the red he and his gentlemen friends are wearing fails to reflect their inner gloom:
Otra suya porque
el
le

dixeron unas damas que por que dezia

tristes,

otros
vestir

companeros suyos que estavan

publicavan
el contrario

que en su

porque ivan vestidos

de grana, y Cartagena responde por todos.

No juzgueis
sefioras,

por la color, que nos cobria,

el

qu'a

las

vezes

amor

haze muestras d'alegria

con qu'encubre su dolor. Por do nuestro Colorado en su ser sera muy cierto al sepulcro comparado, que de fuera esta dorado
y de dentro el cuerpo muerto. (IICG, fol. 88r)
In this composition, Cartagena plays not only with the idea of courtly love as
a deceptive

game but with

the notion of the perils of interpreting texts that are

seen, as well as written and spoken.

Through
as

his

evocation of the essential

duplicity of his brightly colored clothes, his ingenious verses insist that visual

images and allegories must be uttered,

fully

well

as

observed, in order to be
a language in rebus,
verbis.

more

understood and that the red he

is

passion,
fails

a red herring

an unstable emblem of
may

displays, rather than a

joyous mark of

which

to be mutually interchangeable with the language in

In his essentially semiotic conception of words and plastic images Cartagena

leads us to understand that perception

only be a form of habituation and

to realize

new meanings and

the possibility of dichotomy and contradiction in

all signs. His confrontation with the values traditionally apportioned to the symbols and the language of love provide, really, a challenge to the worn pictorial tropes of medieval rhetoric (typos, schema, ftgura, paradeigma), which are implicitly shown here to be unreliably metaphoric, laborious, and essentially

dishonest.

E.

MICHAEL GERLI

175

and language to mediate realities becomes dubious in both are perceived as unmetonymnic and seen to pose problems of perception and interpretation rather than to constitute a medium for knowledge, communication, and consensus. In its gallant measured verses, Cartagena's composition becomes a form of rhetorical, literary, and pictorial iconoclasm, which teaches us to distrust the logocentric and pictocentric un-

The

ability

of

signs
as

Cartagena's

poem,

derstanding of the universe. As he does

this,

he dramatizes the radical estrange-

from its visual and linguistic bonds to the world. Indeed, in his brief poem the world itself, no longer a mirror of divine truths and a repository of facts, becomes a fiction, and its portrayal now provokes anxieties in our desultory attempts to decipher it. The poem ends by fending off the surface enticements of visual perception and characterizing negatively what on the exterior seem to some as affirmative representations of joy and ardor. In one stroke, through this optical and verbal conceit, Cartagena seizes brilliantly the rhetorical, emotional, and intellectual feints, the perfidious role playing, at the heart of cancionero poetry and at the base of late medieval love theory and

ment of the

self

courtly ideology.

The dichotomy of sign and sense in Cartagena's clothing may be read as a metaphor for his conception of love poetry itself, where the colors of speech, the colores rhetorici of the medieval arts of composition, are themselves inferred to be unstable, illusory, and deceptive substitutes for what they are intended to mean. The poet, as Juan Alfonso de Baena (ed. Azaceta 1966, 1:15), Alvarez Gato (ed. Artiles Rodriguez 1928, 54), and others insist, traffics in amorous illusions and is best when he is a fabricator of the real-seeming lies of love, since poetry itself is an artifice, "un fmgimiento," in Santillana's words (ed. Gomez Moreno and Kerkhof 1988, 439). Cartagena understands this and, rather than conspire in the perjury of love and language, he prefers to rid us of their false representations by exposing their dangerous complicity. Language is thus employed to deconstruct not just the myth of the univocality of signs but that of the consubstantiality of love and eloquence. Cartagena introduces
game of poetry as well as to the game of love, and he enacts the fundamental alienation of the linguistic self from its ties to the empirical world. Both visual and rhetorical colors, rather than clarifying, lead us to stumble among blinding illusions of passion that continually tempt us to grasp for false hopes and false truths, just to end by defrauding us. Language and art fail now to imitate feeling and understanding, and they become the field where anxious losing battles for the truth are waged. Cartagena's "No juzgueis por la color" finds its origins in a discrete yet little-studied cancionero tradition, and doubtless stems from his meditation upon that tradition the so-called courtly inuenciones, which combined visual and material elements named devisas with letras or motes (texts intended to gloss ingeniously a plastic, visual image, often an item of clothing). Tapia, as we saw above, reserved special praise for Cartagena's mastery o inuenciones However, in "No juzgueis por la color" Cartagena boldly extends the art of the invencion beyond the clever, epigrammatic gloss of a material thing to explore not the
the problematics of perspective to the

176

READING CARTAGENA

analogous relationship between language and visual figures but the negation of one by the other and the contradictions posed by both. His poem leads to the realization that words and things belong to parallel but competing codes and
that
it is

perhaps more possible to find ambiguity and juxtaposition in the

as

reading of emblems than complementarity and understanding. Visual

verbal texts for Cartagena quite simply
his
fail

well

as

to be mimetic, as the

meaning of

to rest upon the mutually contradictory relationship of images meanings upon the inability of signs to embody the intentions we credit to them. In an astonishingly modern stroke, Cartagena's own self-portrait, symbolized in the red he wears, when seen, or rather exegetically read by the poet, is virtually deprived of its external representational content. It is consequently given meaning only by the context the poem gives it. In "No juzgueis por la color," the key to enlightenment and understanding paradoxically lies in withdrawing our gaze from the physical world. When we do so, we see the color in its correct referential perspective he displays himself as a mere painted image offering only spurious insignias of love and cheer. His bright exterior in fact cloaks somber thoughts of pain, anguish, and visions of death. By denying visual perception its function, Cartagena constructs a view removed from the outer image but closer to the clarity of true vision, or revelation, which for him is essentially an emotional and intellectual enterprise. The need to grapple with the paradoxes and antitheses of perception runs throughout the rest of Cartagena's poetry. In another composition, for example, he explores further the tension between the need to see and understand and the perils of sight, leading us deeper into the dim labyrinth of texts, images, and interpretation he constructs. This poem plays ironically with the iconography of the white dove. Doubtless recognizing the flying dove as a symbol of reconciliation, thought, meditation, and language, Cartagena tampers with its message of hope, love, and understanding, which for the medieval Christian always lay in its pictorial representation (the dove is of course the explicit sign of faith and the Pentecost, where God bestows the gift of tongues and the understanding of the Word, where He restores linguistic unity and sense through His love and the promise of the gospel). Indeed, here the dove's traditional meaning is inverted and finds its correct, vexing, and confounding sense only in the vanishing point of the suffering soul of the lover:

poem comes
their

and

Otra suya porque su amiga

le

mostro una paloma hlanca

que bolava, y

il

dlzele lo que significa.

El ave que

me

mostrastes

dos diferencias figura

que que

me ponen
si

division;
la

bien vos

miraste,
tristura

su blancura y

mi

dos contrariedades son.

Yet

in this

poem

Cartagena

is

not content just with assigning a negative

E.

MICHAEL GERLI

177

value to the traditionally auspicious Christian image of the flying dove.

He

then goes on to restore the white dove's positive epiphanic sense, but only because in its contrary mirroring of his dark sadness it signals the joy he feels

upon

suffering for his lady:

Mas yo pierdo la querella de mi pues mi mal m'alegra,

aunque mi ventura
es

negra

no

lo es la causa d'ella. (11 CG, fol. 88r)

In this composition, Cartagena establishes the possibility of various perspectives

and meanings and endows the white dove with an inescapable, dynamically changing, indeed manifold, sense whose multiple messages can only be adequately known within the context of his developing interpretation of it. His emphasis eschews sight and prior knowledge of symbolic meanings and shows the nature of understanding to be a process of unfolding revelation. Cartagena's poem on the drama of the dove thus stands independently as a monument to individual perception rather than as an example of a narrative sequence presupposing the flawless cooperation of image, text, and the reader that guides us along a firm course of easy comprehension to a universally understood conclusion. It establishes that the truth may be, and often is, misread and that it emerges only from an arduous, changing process of private perception lacking external guarantors. In short, his poem alerts us to the persistent necessity of
interpretation.

Cartagena's awareness of ambiguity, dichotomy, and contradiction leads to

its

almost consuming pursuit in

his verse

and becomes one of the distinguish-

ing marks of his lyric idiom. In another

poem by him
full

dedicated to

"Un

loco

Uamado Baltanas," for example, not upon visual conundrums but

of "lo que os" and "locos":

the composition's
entirely

malicious sense hinges

upon

the equivocal aural

homophony

Loc'os haze her hazana,

Baltanas

mi buen amigo.
daiia.

Loc'os mata, loc'os

loc'os dizen, loc'os digo, loc'os fuer^a, loc'os ciega, loc'os haze her
tal

obra,

y y loc'os dexa os Uega, por loc'os falta y no sobra. Assi que loc'os diria,
y loc'os quiero dezir, y loc'os escriviria, y loc'os quiero escrevir, es que deveys de comer
cosas para la cabe^a,

loc'os el seso niega,

178

READING CARTAGENA
por qu'el seso que tropie^a no va lexos de caer. (14CG,

fol.

210v)

reader,

Here, Cartagena humorously probes the authority of spoken language, as the depending on his temperament and inclination, is constantly challenged

to

succumb

another

to,

or deflect, the phonic enticement of fun

at the

expense of

the irresistible allure of being interpretively mischievous and transin

all its

gressive.

Yet

flippancy and devilment, Cartagena's composition ad-

dresses important issues

though clever and

calls

fun, deepens

of discursive and textual authority. The verbal play, our awareness of the irony of language and
is

attention to the fact that understanding

always

at risk in

unexamined

texts.

The

interpretive instability of this linguistically deranged

poem

does

nothing less than raise the fundamental issue of the nature of the truth and the awareness of the recurring, easy possibility of misreading it and toppling into
misunderstanding.
In another context, for Cartagena poetry and eloquence are themselves

deceptive and

embody

self-indulgence.

a mendacious discourse whose sole end is not praise but Responding to his lady's request to expose the dishonest

words of men, he
that

places himself in the position of revealing the hidden truths

aficion:

move

the fraudulent "art" of displaying masculine

No
si

creais

mucho

lo

que nadie pena ha encarescido,

si

que dezir su razon buena, bien mirais, se condena

para ser

menos

creido.

For Cartagena, eloquence and truth exist in inverse proportions; words of love and anguish constitute empty gestures which, though visibly and audibly real, do nothing more than conceal fickle desire:
Fingen
los deseperados,

dizen lo que olvidan luego;

estos son los bien librados,

que pensais que van quemados, ellos van libres de huego.

Accomplished players in a performance, well-spoken suitors enact a simulacrum of love before the world in which the truth is falsehood and lies are offered up as the truth:

por mas disimular en pla^a, donde ay mas gente,

alii

comien^an negar,
qu'es afirmar,

un negar
lo

que por ventura miente.

Finally, in a notably

wry

reference to the deceitful measure of his

own

fluency.

E.

MICHAEL GERLI

179

above.

Cartagena subtly alludes to two of the three poems that He concludes that insincere lovers:
. . .

we

have examined

lo secreto

tienen sobre falso armado;

qu'el

que mas

cierto es sugeto

ni troca bianco
ni prieto

por prieto, por Colorado. (11 CG,

fol.

87v)
linguistic

In the end, for Cartagena the only reliable

emblem of love remains

confusion and the absence of eloquence, the inability to convey what the heart holds, made difficult by the desire to conceal emotion:

Qu'el que tiene passion no ha de saber dezir de que manera padesce, sin una ravia encubierta

cierta

d'un morir por encubrir. (IICG,

fol.

87r)

Cartagena's poetry, then, becomes the locus for the formulation of a theory of the deceptions of the gestures both of love and of rhetoric. His poetic personality centers around the potential for hoax in language, passion, and even the images offered up by the material world. His verse becomes a point where the essential fraudulence of speech, image, and the visible displays of love meet, become one, and vanish into the distance. The value of Cartagena's poetry stems from the conscious and persistent exploration of the uncertain dynamic that he establishes between signs and their meaning. In his compositions there is a deliberate deployment of illusive images indicating that the semantic congruence between signans and sij^natum can never be taken for granted in either of the arts of love or poetry. There is a recurring questioning of the notion that language can be duplicative that its thoughts and objects are essentially connected to the words and signs used to portray them. Cartagena's poetry thus enacts a drama of perception in which things as well as utterances are rendered conventional, but especially those words and objects that, when taken at face value, are judged as illustrations of passion. In his expressions of courtly love, signs become detached from their real meaning, and they constitute a questionable medium for the grasping of

the truth.

Cartagena's elegantly subtle verse shows a deep mistrust of all sense experience, underlining the
latter's

ephemeral nature, while

stressing that the net-

work of correspondences between the language of imagery, the sounds of speech, and their referents may never be secured. Though on the surface
Cartagena's poetry deals with the fifteenth-century conventions of courtly
love, the acts of seeing, hearing, reading,
tinually strain within a

and understanding in the poetry conwidening gap in which the verbal, the visual, and the intellectual experience is estranged. In dramatizing this struggle of perception, his verse thus speaks eloquently to our contemporary sensibilities.

180

READING CARTAGENA

While Cartagena's poetry was written over half a millennium ago, in readit today, though we are far removed from the social triflings of love at court, we are ineluctably led to reflect self-consciously upon the limits of our
ing

perception and to appreciate how precariously visual and verbal images meet our eye and ear. The difficulties of perceiving the sense of things are repeatedly asserted in the poems we have examined in phrases like "no creais ... si bien mirais," as Cartagena creates a world that is constantly in need of close scrutiny and translation as a result of the ongoing transformations of meaning in it. Each of his poems somehow concerns a form of language (oral,
still

own

and its failure to tell the truth in "mannered" love poetry, Cartagena speaks pointedly to the postmodern imagination by showing us how insight requires much more than simple seeing and believing and how it calls for judicious reflection on the demanding balance between the poles of the empirical and the spiritual world. Conjecture and interpretation, rather than representation, constitute the center and soul of the arts of love and poetry for Cartagena, and in them both, insight supplants vision as his verse becomes the setting for a conflict between signs and the thoughts and emotions they allegedly signify. As Patrick Gallagher remarks about Cartagena in his study of The Life and Works of Garci Sanchez de Badajoz, he was in the vanguard of a new, highly intellectualized and intense poetry that flourished at the end of the fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth centuries "in which passion and poetic artifice were wedded: the school which refined the paradox and cultivated antithesis in order to express, ever more subtly, elegantly and ingeniously, the tensions of courtly love" (1968, 211). In reading him today, Cartagena is still capable of enacting a fervent struggle in which the poet, the lover, and the reader are made to feel pulled in several directions simultaneously.
visual, gestural),
its

discursive conventions,

confrontation with the need to

know

it.

In his

The unmistakable

self-conscious exploration of, and anxiety about, the

is

me-

diatory role of language and text in Cartagena's poetry

not an anachronism

imposed upon his compositions by contemporary readers. Rather, it reflects one of the most profound, yet still unexplored, intellectual predicaments in late fifteenth-century Iberia and is at the heart of many of the early academic and humanistic attempts to describe and formulate linguistic norms for the vernacular. To be sure, Cartagena was not alone in his heightened preoccupation with truth, signification, and the authority of language. His concerns were shared by many of his contemporaries and criss-cross fifteenth-century Spanish culture. They may be found in authors as diverse as Nebrija, Fernando de Rojas, Cartagena's learned great uncle Alonso de Cartagena, and Fernan Perez de Guzman. The latter, for example, exhibits serious misgivings that even historical discourse,

with

its

responsibility to the truth,

may

often be fallacious.

Struggling distrustfully against what he believes to be a mendacious tradition

of historiographical texts, Perez de Guzman begins his Generaciones y semblanzas with a note of interpretive cynicism that undermines history's textual authority:

"Muchas vezes

los

acaes^e," he says, "que las coronicas e estorias que fablan de poderosos reyes e notables prin^ipes e grandes fibdades, son avidas por

E.

MICHAEL GERLI
fe e

181

sospechosas e in^iertas e

les es

dada poca

abtoridat" (ed. Tate 1965,

1).

be found in the academy, where Nebrija, doubtless responding to an intellectual environment that openly began to challenge the broader notion of a logocentric universe, emphatically confronts the issue in his University of Salamanca repetitio, solemnly pronounced at the end of the academic year in 1486 (published in 1503). Invoking first the judgment of Quintilian ("litterarum figurae ad hoc sint excogitatae 'ut custodiant uoces'" ["letters were invented so as to "safeguard words"] Instituto oratoria I, vii, 31), Nebrija's orthodox dissertation goes on to portray the invention of words as a gift of Providence to humankind ("atque munus hoc litterarum, quod nullum mains ab homine uel potius diuina quadam prouidentia est inuentum ..." ["and this gift of letters, the greatest invention of humankind, or rather of Divine Providence ..." 34-35]) and concludes by raising the specter of the moral and civic perils that would ensue
reaction to the question of textual authority
also
if

may

such a truth were to be denied:

Primum
plerique

disputationis nostrae

fundamentum ab eo
litteras

proficiscatur in

quo

omnes

facile

consentiunt:
quasi per

ea potissimum de causa fuisse

signa
iis

excogityatas, ut per

illas

quaedam

tum

absentes uiui, turn

posteros morituri certiores facere possemus

de rebus quae ad priuatam

publicamue utilitatem pertinerent. Nam quemadmodum Aristoteles tradit, eo modo litterae uerba humanis uocibus informata designant quo uerba ipsa res mente conceptas quae per ea significant. Quod si non quattuor haec ex ordine sibi inuincem consentirent dico res conceptus uoces litterae .interirent utique commercia et publica fides qua hominum societas continetur, interirent omnes artes et scientiae quae uitam humanam cultiorem reddunt, interiret denique hie ipse sacrarum litterarum splendor quibus ad christianam relligionem instituimur et docemur. (ed. Quilis and Usabel 1987, 36)

of my disputation, which nearly all easily acknowledge, is this: were invented above all so that we, the living, through them might be able to communicate with the dead and with posterity concerning those things that are both privately and publicly useful. Thus, as Aristotle teaches, letters signify the words uttered by the voice, the same way that words themselves signify the concepts that are expressed through them. However, if these four elements (i.e., things, concepts, sounds, and letters) did not concur, communication and public trust,

[The

basis

that letters

which

sustain

human

association,
cultural

sciences,

which enrich

life,

would collapse completely; the arts and would collapse; and finally, the very

splendor of Scripture, which equips and instructs us in the Christian

religion,

would

collapse.]

Clearly, Nebrija's emphatic affirmation of the providentially ordained nature of language constitutes resistance to an intellectual and cultural milieu that was

rapidly contradicting the ancient sacred truths of his assertions. For Nebrija,

182

READING CARTAGENA

the traditional bonds between words and things were undoubtedly being
strained.

The latter half of the fifteenth century in Spain, as elsewhere, then, was haunted with questions of language and authority. This obsession was expressed not only in scholarly polemic but in the production of grammars and vocabularies (e.g., of Nebrija and Alonso de Palencia), as well as in implicit articulations of the problem in belletristic texts like Cartagena's. As lay culture experienced a veritable explosion of vernacular literacy and textuality in the form of poetry, theology, historiography, rhetoric, and philosophy not to mention the burgeoning bureaucracy devised to govern an increasingly powerful monarchy and centralized state language became a locus of inquiry, meditation, and anxiety in the early modern intellectual life of Iberia (see Law-

rance 1991).

As Michel Foucault (1971) and Timothy Reiss (1982) have argued, the
logocentric tradition of analogy that governed Western thought from ancient

times until the beginning of the Renaissance was supplanted

at

the

dawn of

modernity by

system of conceptualization based on reason and individualized

analogical discourse of associative patterning in favor of an
as a

logical identity. Reiss describes an epistemological transformation involving the

abandonment of an
tice

order of thinking involving "the expression of knowledge

reasoning prac-

which the mind seeks to understand the world from the vantage point of its own autonomy. At the center of this intellectual and cultural revolution, ultimately culminating in the emergence of the
the world" (1982, 30) in

upon

Cartesianism in the seventeenth century,

lies, as

Foucault

asserts,

the realization

of the dissociative, conventional nature of language and a heightened awareness of difference (1971, 17). By the end of the fifteenth century, linguistic practices of any kind, but especially reading and writing, provided within this new cognitive paradigm occasions to explore dissimilarities rather than to
affirm the essential likenesses

between
felt

all

things.

Writers like Cartagena doubtless

the heightened awareness of difference

symptomatic of modernity, described by Reiss and Foucault, and came to explore ambiguity, verbal dexterity, irony, and the perfidy of linguistic expression in
all

their compositions.

actually explores the general

assigned to things that

As we have seen, Cartagena in his courtly poetry problem of meaning or how intentions may be intrinsically do not possess them, reflecting in the con-

text of courtly verse the broader intellectual question of language's ability to

signify

the ineluctable enigma that lay at the heart of the

new humanist

ide-

ology. In his ambitious, complicated verse, Cartagena always reverts to

initially beliefs, fears,

hopes, passions, and desires manifestations of subjectiviand projected upon, the world in order to portray, interpret, and understand it. While he does this, he also uncovers the intricacies and contradictions in the problem of its representation. In a word, Cartagena's poetry leads us to discern in it a challenging intellectual program whose end is the investigation of the process of the embodiment of meaning and ultimately of the meaning of meaning itself The celebrity of Cartagena's verse in Spain
ty

how

are directed

at,


E.

MICHAEL GERLI

183

during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries doubtless stems firom his success in probing and integrating the enigmas of love, language, imagery, and communication, plus his explicit demonstration that in order to
understand
itself in

visual,

spoken, and written images, the mind needs to reconstitute

the seclusion of its

own

language.

and by extenIf, after our brief examination of Cartagena's courtly verse and cultural prospects offered by cancionero poetry in sion the rich literary
of and exreality, plore realities of their own. I feel certain that Cartagena himself would concur in this judgment, since the task of poetry for him, it would appear, was indeed just that: to underscore the errors that ensue from mistaking texts, reading, and experience for truth, actuality, and understanding, and the need to construct new intellectual realities grounded in the notion that all signs are speculative despite the best evidence offered by our senses or our attempts to read them. I will close with a remark made by Paul De Man, from whom I have taken part of my title. De Man notes that
general
feel
is

we
then

obliged to abandon the idea that literature

a reflection

we might want

to consider the notion that texts fabricate

prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read,

and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified. A literary text is not a phenomenal event that can be granted any form of positive existence, whether as a fact of nature or as an act of the mind. (1983, 107)
Fifteenth-century Spanish culture, the same culture that produced Perez de Nebrija, the cancioneros, and Cartagena, understood this well and
this intuition

Guzman,
through

placed

itself

squarely at the threshold of modernity.

Georgetoum University

V:

Politics, Society,

Culture

Jews and Converses

in Fifteenth-Century Castilian

Cancioneros:

Texts and Contexts

JULIO RODRIGUEZ PUERTOLAS

There now exists relatively abundant scholarship on the role of Jews and
converses in fifteenth-century Castilian cancioneros, especially for the period extending from the Cancionero de Baena (c. 1426) to the appearance of the Cancionero general (1511). In it, one can find studies devoted to the larger phi-

losophical and theological questions (which are a special feature in Baena) as

converses seek to enof studies that purport to represent the real or imagined social and physical characteristics of these two groups, their problems, customs even dietary habits and taboos not to mention the persecutions, racial and reHgious discrimination, and even pogroms. The philosophical and theological themes of this poetry have been explored by Fraker (1966a, 1966b, 1966c, 1974) and by Ciceri (1991), and the bittereven coarse polemics and insults directed against Jews and converses have also been examined. There are also careful studies of one poet, a single cancionero, or a particular text relating to converse or judaic issues (some examples of such scholarship are cited below). Nonetheless, the greater part of this work can legitimately be characterized as fragmentary in medias res when measured against the larger historical context in which this poetry is found. That is to say, little effort has been made to place cancionero poetry within the larger historical coordinates of its production; to explore its thematic range (which extends fi-om serious religious and philosophical questions to the most brutal representations of the Other the Jew and the converse) or to clarify its broad chronology, which parallels closely the contradictory events of history itself, taking us in the span of a century (1391-1492) from initial public persecutions to final expulsion from the Peninsula. Indeed, little has been done to take full measure of the connection between cancioneros and Jews and converses, which
as to

well

assorted doctrinal polemics in

which Jews and

is

gage Old Christian authors. Similarly, there

a series

188

JEWS AND CONVERSOS

extends well beyond 1492 into the cultural and social history of the Golden

Age.
It is

imperative, therefore, to attempt to situate the problematic of Jews and

conversos in the cancioneros

within a broad historical framework and to follow

closely the evolution of the ]&W\s\v/ converso question, that

itself,

is, of anti-Semitism during the social and political upheavals of the Trastamaran Dynasty. To

it is easy to see that anti-Semitism may be back as the civil war between Pedro I of Castile and his half-brother, Enrique I of Trastamara (1360s). It is well known that during that struggle Trastamaran propaganda, intent upon proving Pedro's "illegitimacy," set in motion a defamatory campaign that proclaimed Pedro's Jewish origins and culminated in a series of popular ballads referring to the monarch by the contemptuous and allusive name of Pew Gil. Moreover, the Trastamaran rebels were not averse with a helping hand from their French allies to persecuting violently the Jewish population each time a town was taken during the civil war that brought them to power. This is the case, for example, with the city of Najera (1360), whose siege is narrated with chilling detachment by Pedro Lopez de Ayala, a turncoat and notable anti-Semite (traits that would later inform his Libra rimado de palacio)

be

sure,

upon

close examination,

traced

as a latent

theme

as far

muerte de los juporque las gentes lo facian de buena voluntad, e por el fecho mesmo tomaban miedo e recelo del Rey [Don Pedro], e se tenian con el Conde. (Lopez de Ayala 1931, 106; for Jews and Castilian chronicles, see Gutwirth 1984)
los judios.

Llegaron a Najara, e ficieron matar a

dios fizo facer el

esta

Conde Don Enrique

[de Trastamara]

at the hands of his half-brother in 1369 is said to mark the war with the ascension of the bastard Trastamaran Dynasty; yet it is also the harbinger of a conflict between nobility and monarchy, which was to endure until the crowning of the last Trastamaran monarch, Isabel I, in

Pedro's assassination

end of that

civil

the next century.

Leaving aside

legal dispossession, brutal extorsion,

and other similar meaI

sures, institutionalized anti-Semitism, often

bordering on terrorism, begins in

(1379-90), thanks

Castile during the reigns

of Enrique

II

(1369-79) and Juan

to the preaching and actions of Ferran Martinez, archdeacon of Ecija and

prouisor of the archbishopric of Seville (Amador de los Rios [1875] 1960, 449-55). There was, hence, a long-standing cHmate of official, antiJewish sentiment that led directly to the events of 1391 (now in the reign of

canon imd

the third Trastamaran king, Enrique

all

III), which was subsequently adopted in kingdoms of the Peninsula. The pubhc anti-Semitic outcries of Fray Vicente Ferrer helped inflame the volatile atmosphere created by Ferran Martinez and his Trastamaran patrons: the former embarked upon an anti-Jewish campaign marked by dark Apocalyptic themes and intimidation. Indeed, the spectacular conversion of Selomo Ha-Levi, chief rabbi of Burgos, took place just in time, in 1390. Along with the rest of his family, he was transformed by the cleansing waters of baptism into the pious Pablo de Santa

the Christian

JULIO RODRJGUEZ PUERTOLAS

189

Maria, later the bishop of that city (Serrano 1942; Cantera Burgos 1952). All
this
Ill's

occurs against the backdrop of the political and social conflicts of Enrique
minority, provoked mainly by the personal ambitions of his tutors and the

regents of the realm.

In 1391, the Jewish communities (aljamas) of the Peninsula were bathed in

by Christian mobs. The ancient mudijar custom of multiThe pogroms of 1391 were followed by a string a veritable rosary of conversions; more sermons from Fray Vicente Ferrer; new anti-Semitic laws, such as the measures adopted by the Cortes de Valladolid in 1405; and by new pogroms (Cordoba, 1406). Add
blood and
set afire

ethnic living (convivencia) had been forever abjured.

III by his Jewish physician, Don Mayr, evoked in later anti-Semitic literature (Amador de los Rios [1875] 1960, 495), and the historical events framing the Jewish/ converso debates in the cancioneros become even more striking. During the regency of Fernando de Antequera and Catherine of Lancaster (140619), uncle and mother of Juan II, there was a series of events that dramatically aggravated the existing tensions betweens Christians, Jews, and conversos. In 1410, for example, the rabbis from one of the synagogues in Segovia desecrated the Host. The guilty parties were hung, and their temple was expropriated and transformed into a Christian church: the Church of Corpus Christi. These events were followed by a failed attempt to poison the city's bishop, a plot said to be hatched by Segovian Jews to avenge the temple's confiscation (Amador de los Rios [1875] 1960, 560-61). Shortly after, there ensued a new round of sermons from the indefatigable Fray Vicente Ferrer, w^ho preached throughout the Kingdom of Castile (Catedra 1994). His pulpit was a platform both for the anti-Semitic statutes adopted by Murcia in 1411 (Gutwirth 1984) and especially for the infamous Ordenamiento sobre el encerra-

to this the alleged poisoning of Enrique

vividly

miento de

los

judios e de

los

mows

(Valladolid, 1412), a veritable

friar

monument

to

and painstakingly drafted by the now bishop of Burgos, Pablo de Santa Maria (Amador de los Rios [1875] 1960, 532-37; Gutwirth 1984). In 1413, fast on the heels of all these events, the famous Disputa de Tortosa took place. In this public debate, under the supervision of Pope Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna), fourteen learned rabbis and one converso, Jeronimo de Santa Fe (the pope's personal physician and a former rabbi), competed over the relative superiority and eternal verities of Christianity and Judaism. As one might expect, the result was a spectacular triumph for Christian doctrine, which culminated with the conversion of a number of the debating rabbis (Pacios Lopez 1957; Lasker 1977). Two years later, in 1415, Benedict promulgated a harshly anti-Semitic bull, while the following year Jeronimo de Santa Fe set in motion a campaign of flagrantly anti-Jewish literature with his Hebraeo Mastix (The Whip of the Jews). In time, and as a marvellous example of poetic justice, Micer Francisco de Santa Fe, one of Jeronimo's sons, was burned in effigy in Zaragoza after Micer Francisco's last-minute suicide in the cells of the Inlegalized intolerance inspired

by the Valencian

190
quisition prevented

JEWS AND CONVERSOS

him from being burned

in vivo

(Amador de

los

Rios [1875]

1960, 837).

Anti-Semitic pamphleteering was notably enriched in 1432 by the

familiar converso, Pablo de Santa Maria,

now-

who pubhshed
among

his Scrutinium Scriptura-

rum (The Scrutiny of the

justifies the

Scriptures).

Here,

other things, he explains and

persecutions of 1391 on the grounds that

la

Dios excito a

generosa

muchedumbre

[multitudo valida] a

vengar

la

sangre de Cristo [Deo ultionem sanguinis Christi excitante],

tomando por
[in

instrumento a un arcediano de Sevilla ignorante, mas de loable vida

litteratura

que predicaba contra los judios, en defensa de los sagrados canones. (Amador de los Rios [1875] 1960, 577; see also 578-83)
simplex
et laudabilis vita],
It is significant to note that this text appeared in the reign ofjuan II (141953) and that anti-Semitism continued to be rampant even during the rule of this relatively tolerant monarch. Shortly after the appearance of Santa Maria's Scrutinium Scripturarum, in 1435, the library of Enrique de Villena was burned, an act charged with anti-Semitism as well as with the well-known allegations of Villena's sorcery (Gascon Vera 1979). All this, and much more, must be kept in mind to understand fiiUy the significance of the debates one finds in collections like the Cancionero de Baena. In the seasoned but still-relevant words of the Count of Puymaigre, Baena's "curieux recueil" (Puymaigre 1873, 1:12122)

la vie des Espagnols du XV^ siecle. Ces moines dans leurs frocs, ces nobles dames avec leurs robes de brocard, ces juifs plus ou moins convertis, ces medecins arabes, ces professeurs de theologie, ces nonnes de Seville qui se pretendent plus belles que celles de Tolede, tout ce monde vit d'une vie
fait

profondement entrer dans

fer, ces

chevaliers bardes de

qui se rapproche de
feve,

la

notre, s'amuse a de petits vers, celebre le roi de

la

demande

des etrennes, propose et devine des enigmes, s'agite dans

le

tous ces details secondaires que neglige I'histoire et qui vous

montre

sous

un

aspect vraiment humain.

Dans

le

Cancionero de Baena tout se

mele d'une etrange fa^on.

In
fact,

when we
...

read the Cancionero de Baena

"muy

lejos

estamos del ahistoribecause in

cismo
the

de

la

frescura primaveral, atemporal y universal de los trovadores

is

galaico-portugueses" (Bianco-Gonzalez 1972, 40). This

many of

poems copied

in Baena's collection

we

find ourselves

"en

la

coyuntura

exacta" of the

moment

(43); therefore, as

Bianco-Gonzalez continues:

Si se leen estos

vacios;
el

poemas sin sus conotaciones historicas, resultan aridos y encarna en su tiempo, cobran el colorido de La Historia, acido sabor de la medieval Castilla, su violencia, su incertidumbre, su
si

se los

feudalismo agresivo. (1972, 48)

JULIO RODRIGUEZ PUERTOLAS

191

In spite of everything, the final harmonious vestiges of the Castile of three

rehgions

8081).

may still be found in the Cancionero de Baena (Cantera Burgos And paradoxically, at the same time, much of the evidence for

1967,
this is

found in the verses composed by converses, which are filled w^ith allusions to Pedro de Luna (Benedict XIII), the antisemitic patron of the Disputa de Tortosa maecenas also of Fray Vicente Ferrer and the promulgator of the virulent bull of 1415 (Cantera Burgos 1967, 79-80). But the true meaning of these poems cry out for further study: poems by Villasandino, Ferran Manuel de Lando, and others that until now have been simply glossed over in silence. The question arises: just what do these allusive poems, some even dedicated to Luna and other brazenly anti-Semitic figures, tell us? From another perspective, poems by Jews on Jews, and by converses on conversos, are as abundant as they are complex, and also call out for specific and detailed sociohistorical analysis and contextualization, above and beyond what has already been said about them by a variety of literary critics and historians.' Indeed, in addition to what has been revealed by these critics, it is imperative that we pay special attention, as Bianco-Gonzalez (1972) suggested, to occasional poems with clear historical settings; that is, compositions dedicated to kings, nobles, and various other characters and events. The same may be said for the material found in later cancioneros, right up to the General of 1511, all of which include poems of remarkable interest. The questions, therefore, arise: how can one relate all this material to discrete historical and social, to personal and sometimes changing attitudes that take shape during the internecine struggles of Castile during the second half of the fifteenth century; to the intensifying confrontation between nobility and monarchy; to the rise of anti-Semitism and the manifestation of an overt hostility toward Jews and conversos; to clan, family, and class interests? Also, how does it all relate to the constable of Castile, Alvaro de Luna, and what he represents? What does the sum of all this mean in terms of the progressive loss of traditional values; of the timid but significant gains of the bourgeoisie, a class of httle importance until then; of the material success, on the one hand, of conversos and merchants, and on the other, of the landed oligarchy? In conjunction with the questions just raised and the events already enumerated, there is, too, a series of significant anti-Semitic as well as pro-converso events and texts that provide a notable backdrop for the poetry produced at

mid-century:

'

60), Fraker's study

For more general treatments, see the survey of satirical verse by Scholberg (1971, 303of Judaism in the Cancionero de Baena (1966a, 9-62), and the brief intro-

ductory remarks of Rodriguez Puertolas (1968a, 50-51; 1981a, 18-20), and Gerii (1994, 2426). For studies with a more specific focus, see Marquez Villanueva (1974, 1982), Cantera

Burgos (1967), Rodriguez Puertolas (1986), Sola-Sole and Rose (1976), Rose (1983), Arbos (1983), Condor Orduna (1986), and Ciceri (1991).

192

JEWS AND

CON VERSOS

1449

1450 1453 1459

Just

Alonso de Cartagena, Defensorium uniThe appearance of a virulent antisemitic pamphlet in the form of a putative letter from Juan II to a gentleman {hidalgo). Pedro de la Caballeria's Tractatus Zelus Christi contra Judaeos. The public execution of Alvaro de Luna. Fray Alonso de Espina's Fortalitium Fidei contra Judaeos, Sarracenos.
insurrection.
tatis christianae

The Toledo

(favoring the conversos).

what can

all this tell

us about the civil

war during the reign of Enrique IV

its disgrace, and the power? The so-called Farsa de Auila (1465) recounted in the chronicles, in which Enrique is dethroned in effigy, signals the climax of this conflict, and it cannot be understood without recognizing the part played by Jews, conversos, and members of "new" aristocracy of obscure origins, such as the Giron and Davila families. Nor can we ignore the bitter satire of texts like the Coplas de la Panadera (1445), the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo (1464) by Fray liiigo de Mendoza, and the scandalous Coplas del Provincial (146566). In addition to all this, we have to consider another set of

(145474), in which the monarchy reaches the nadir of

its

noble oligarchy achieves the peak of

historical coordinates:

1465

The Hieronymite
converso apology.
Israel.

friar

Alonso de Oropesa completes

his

pro-

Lumen ad

revelationem gentium et gloriam plehis tuae

1467 Racial and political riots in Toledo. 1468 The "Ritual Crime" of Sepulveda. 1473-74 Uprisings and pogroms against conversos in Cordoba, Valladolid, Segovia, and Jaen (where constable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo is murdered at the hands of "Old Christians").
It goes, too, without saying that in the world of the cancioneros, it is the Cordobese converso Anton de Montoro whose tragicomic verse most keenly reveals his tormented personal life and the mistreatment of the ethnic and social group to which he belongs. The greater part of Montoro's verses is autobiographical; in it he speaks in equally explicit and ironic terms about himself as an object of discrimination and of scorn resulting from his converso condition.

A painful

case in point

is

the pathetic composition he dedicates to Isabel

I,

in

which he summarizes his anguished life, asks for her protection from the violence occasioned by the persecutions in Cordoba during 1473-74, and concludes with a sinister note of humor, begging the queen to put off all futher mistreatment "hasta alia por Navidad, / quando save bien el fuego" (ed. Ciceri and Rodriguez Puertolas 1990, 76), a clear allusion to the fires of intolerance set by reactionary racist forces. In his poetry, Montoro provides a perfect illustration of what Baruch Spinoza was to say later in the seventeenth
century when confronting the question of anti-Semitism: "One should neither laugh nor cry, but, rather, understand" (cited in Aubery 1962, 374).

JULIO

RODRIGUEZ PUERTOLAS
I

193

The

year 1474 signals the beginning of the reign of Isabel

of Castile,

after

the death of her brother Enrique IV.

Queen

Isabel's

succesion marked the

outbreak of a
Beltraneja (the

new

civil

war

(this

time with Portuguese intervention), which

la

contested the rights of her brother's heir, the unhappy princess Juana, called

determined to impugn her legitimacy and confirm the prerogatives of the dead king's sister. The Inquisition was established on Castilian soil in 1480. The war to take Granada commenced in 1478, with the active assistance and participation of many Jews, who provided logistical support, medical assistance, and consultants to the Castilian Crown and its troops. Despite rendering these indispensable services, the gradual conquest of Moslem cities was accompanied by the sacking of their Jewish quarters (for example, Malaga in 1485 and Gibralfaro in 1487). In the meantime, an inflamatory inti-converso and anti-Semitic pamphlet, the so-called Libro del Alborayque, circulated in Castile and Andalusia (in which, to be sure, the only proper name to appear is that of Diego Arias Davila, conuerso, favorite, and chief accountant of Enrique IV, and an individual well known to readers of fifteenth-century Castilian literature, since he also surfaces in the Coplas de la Panadera, the Coplas del Prouincial, in the works of Gomez Manrique, and in assorted cancioneros) The year 1490 witnessed another of the socalled "Jewish ritual crimes," the infamous case of the Niiio de la Guardia (a case involving accusations against Jews of crucifying a Christian boy at Easter). Indeed, all levels of society were laying the basis for one of the most consequential events of the upcoming annus mirabilis: the royal edict commanding the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. In Portugal, this was followed by King Manuel I's wedding present to his bride, Isabel, daughter of the Catholic Monarchs: the expulsion of the Portuguese Jews in 1497. The rest of the story of Iberian anti-Semitism is well known and provides the crux for the so-called Black Legend. However, the historical, social, and literary events occuring after 1492 cannot be fijUy explained unless we under.

daughter of Beltran) by her detractors

who were

stand the situation outlined above.

And

perhaps, as far as literary issues are

It is

concerned, cancioneros provide

fundamental point of departure.

important

to underscore the fact that, despite everything, the 1492 Edict of Expulsion
failed to achieve the religious unification

of the Peninsula; neither did the con-

quest of Granada nor the mass "conversions" of

Moslems and Jews. As

ex-

plained elsewhere:

The

presence of an important middle-class converse group in Peninsular

society and of an ever-increasing popular antisemitic sentiment

reached mythical proportions

Hispanic
racial purity (purity

when

it

which combined with an imagined

arts)

of blood, honor, religion, anti-intellectual-

ism, horror of commerce and the "mechanical"

produced an

irratio-

nal belief in the superiority of a class and caste within a divine History,

economy, and

culture.

(Rodriguez Puertolas

et

al.

1981b, 1:135-36)^

should add that in spite of popular stereotypes, Jews and converses were not uniquely

194

JEWS AND CON VERSOS

Indeed, Americo Castro was able to speak ironically of the existence of

a "porkophyllic

and porkophobic"
is,

literature

{tocinofila

and

tocinofoba)

based

on
to

dietary prohibitions against pork present in texts throughout the

Golden

Age

(Castro 1974, 25-32): that

of a

literary

and

historical

meaning assigned
del tocino"),

ham and bacon ("un sentido historico-literario del jamon y whose roots may be traced directly to the cancioneros.

example of the importance of the larger historical is provided by Mosen Diego de Valera (c. 1412-88), son of Alonso Chirino, the renowned converse physician. Courtier, military man, emissary of kings, political theorist, chronicler, and conspirator, Valera was also a poet, although for Menendez Pelayo the latter activity produced, in accordance with this critic's overall appreciation of the cancioneros, "versos pocos y malos" (1944, 2:237). Here, I can do no more than sketch the historical importance of Valera's verse, and of the twenty-one surviving examples I shall mention only three. The first of these is the esparsa with the rubric "Al senor conde don Alvaro,
instructive
setting for understanding cancionero verse

minor yet

fecha

el

domingo de Pascoa

ante de

la

presion del maestre de Santiago" (Torre

y Franco-Romero 1914, 254-55). The addressee of the poem is Alvaro de Estuniga, Valera's master at the time of the poem's composition, and Juan 11 's chief bailiff, though in spite of the rubric not yet count, but heir to his father Pedro de Estuniga. This poem is attested only in the Cancionero de Gallardo (MHl), which was compiled about 1454 and which contains several topical poems explicitly related to Luna and his recent downfall. Of interest here is that reference to Easter Sunday "before the imprisonment of the Master of Santiago" (i.e., Alvaro de Luna). The rubric seems to offer the prospect of an historical poem with political content: the arrest and downfall of Alvaro de Luna. However, it fails to keep that promise: it is little more than a eulogy of the Estuniga clan, along with the expression of good wishes for the future. Yet, the discrepancy between what the rubric says and insinuates and the text itself is significant. To be sure, that Easter Sunday in 1453, Alvaro de Estufiiga was waiting with his troops at Curiel for an order from Juan II to go to Burgos and arrest the king's hitherto favorite Alvaro de Luna. The order arrived while Estuniga and the members of his household were dining, and hence,

an urban bourgeois group. Kamen, for example, points out that "there was a considerable variety in the social position of Jews in the peninsula" and that during the fifteenth century

Jews moved out into the countryside; many were peasants, not just involved in small trades and minor professions. Thus, by the end of the fifteenth century they were "no longer a
significant bourgeoisie" (1985, 10-11).

JULIO RODRIGUEZ PUERTOLAS

195

partio de Curiel

noche del domingo de Pascua, don Alvaro Destuniga e dio el cargo de la gente de armas a mosen Diego de Valera. (Cronica dejuan II, 678)
a

dos horas de

la

The following day, Easter Monday, the conspirators arrived in Burgos; on Wednesday, Luna was taken prisoner by Estuniga and his band, in the forefront of which was Diego de Valera. Don Alvaro was publically executed in
Valladolid shortly thereafter.-^

Therefore,
felicitations to

when

Valera penned his brief and ostensibly innocuous lyrical

it is

Estuniga in celebration of Easter Sunday,

clear that

both
days.

knew

full

well what lay in wait for

in tragic rather than

them

in the
is,

coming hours and

Valera's brief, seemingly occasional, composition

in irony

in fact, a text implicated

happy circumstances, circumstances in which conversos played a decisive role especially those, like Valera, who were closely identified with the centers of power and the vested interests of the traditional aristocracy and unlike other members of the same caste, such as Juan de Mena, who were staunch supporters of the new "bourgeois" policy articulated by the

and

slain constable.

In light of all this,

it is

regrettable that Brian

1422

as

the date of Valera's

poem,

year

when

Dutton (1990-91, 1:478) gives Valera would have been ap-

proximately ten years old (though Dutton gave the correct date in his Catdlogo-indke, 1982; see ID0393, with 1253 as an obvious misprint). It is, of
course, the later historical events of 1453 that

endow

the poem's apparent in-

souciance with a certain sinister irony. Here

El qu'en este santo dia

is

the complete

poem:

redimio
vos de,

el

linage

umano

seiior, alegria

e vos faga

con su mano

sienpre ser virtuoso

pues vos

dandovos luenga salud, fizo en juventud

tan conplido de virtud,

e vos faga tan famoso, seno de virtud e tenplo: de vuestra noble memoria

ser

quede a todos por exenplo por universa gloria. (MHl,

fol.

383r)

Once Luna had been sacrificed, mosen Diego de Valera had no misgivings about writing verse with an openly partisan political agenda. Just like other poets of the time, he therefore pens his Cancidn al maestre de Santiago, which

The

best account of these events and their political ramifications

affair,

is

by

Round

(1986).

For Valera's role in the

see especiaUy 32, 36-37, 44,

and 87-88.

196

JEWS AND CON VERSOS

found only the the Candonero de Gallardo. However, was not so callous as, for example, Santillana or Fernando de la Torre, whose stern verses on the same subject are implacably partial, even smugly vindictive. Valera appropriates the well-known Boccaccian motif of the fall of illustrious men (a topos that in contemporary Castile immediately conjured up images of Alvaro de Luna), as well as the ubi sunt theme, which had resonated earlier in the verses of poets like Ferran Sanchez de Calavera (upon the death of Ruy Diaz de Mendoza) and would later be taken up by Jorge Manrique in his elegant elegy written on the death of his father. However, if we recall Valera's direct role as an active minion of "capricious" Fortune, even the most clearly identifiable topoi take on a menacing and
like the previous
is

poem

much

to his credit, Valera

cynical cast:

^Que

fue de vuestro poder,

grant condestable de Espana,

pues ningun arte nin mafia

non

lo

pudo

sostener?

^Que

valio vuestro tener

la

quando quiso
sin

Fortuna

derribar vuestra coluna

poder vos sostener?

(Torre y Franco-Romero 1914, 251-52).

third, and last, political composition by Valera I wish to explore is cast form of what is known as a por que and which glosses the ills and turmoil of contemporary Castile. The poem doubtless belongs to the reign of Enrique IV, although it is difficult to date in the absence of concrete historical references. The por que, or per que, is a curious poetic genre whose first manifestation in Castile may be traced to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (died 1404) in the Candonero de Palado (SA7, compiled about 1440). Structured around a series of unanswered questions, the Dicdonario de Autoridades defines it as a "defamatory libel" ("libelo infamatorio") and adds that similar compositions were called pasquinades in Rome, and "among us perques or provindales" (Periiian

The

in the

1979, 81-99).
Several of the questions Valera raises are truly audacious, and viewed as a

whole
litical

his

poem
many

paints a bleak picture

of contemporary

Castile,

which coin-

cides with

other texts from the period that have similar social and po-

agendas:

^por que tanto vandero

dicen qu'es nuestro senor?

^por que los malos caben

JULIO RODRIGUEZ PUERTOLAS

197

donde no devien caber?

ipor que menos valemos

sienpre sirviendo mejor?

Y
la
It is

ipor qu'es tanto cayda

virtud en nuestra Espana?

which was written in the of the contemporary political situation, has also been attributed to another converse, Juan de Mena.'' But whatever our reading of this particular poem, the undisputed fact that Mena champions an antinoble policy and the cause of Alvaro de Luna contradicts the stereotypical image of the converses as a homogenous social group sharing a common poUtiinteresting to note, too, that another por que,
is

1430s and which

also bitterly critical

cal ideology.

In short, the poetry of mosen Diego de Valera provides a study in miniature

of what

still

remains to be done

as

we

consider the role played by Jews and

a simple task, this enterprise

converses in the Spanish cancioneros. Far

from being

of contradictions, surprises, and ambiguities, as well as revelations. The work that remains to be done is well beyond the scope of any formalist or folkloric approach, and it is imperative that we begin now to establish the unique links of a vast number of cancionero compositions to concrete historical and social events, and thereby uncover the larger historical significance of this considerable body of poetry. To complete this task it will be necessary, as in any other form of literary study, to eschew abstractions and cliches and to lay bare the ideological and social postulates of the poems and
will doubtless

be

full

their authors in their concrete historical

moment.

It is,

to be sure, a task calling

for interdisciplinary collaboration

ologists.

Yet

it is

one

that will

between literary critics, historians, and socidoubtless produce inestimable, and even start-

ling, results.^

Universidad

Autonoma

de Madrid

The poem, "Por que

Its

tan sin trabajo"

is

attested only in the Cancionero de Gallardo

its

(MHl).
ever,

attribution has

been placed in serious doubt by

recent editors, Perez Priego

(1979, 262-67) and de Nigris (1988, 491-92),

on both

political

and metrical grounds.

Howbe

my

reprint

of Perez Priego's

text

and

my

defense of an attribution to

Mena may

consulted in Rodriguez Puertolas 1981a, 171-79.

'

Since

this essay

the Inquisition in Spain.

was written, Netanyahu (1995) published his book on the origins of Though controversial, it is packed with documentary evidence conit

cerning the period and personalities surveyed here, and

would need

to

be taken into ac-

count by any

fliture research

on Jewish and

converso poets.

Power and Justice

in

Cancionero

Verse

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

The King's Many of the

Ages such

Limits: Epistemological Considerations.'

political principles expressed in proverbial ^on'/e^ia

of the Middle
treatises like

as Flores defxlosojla

and

Libro de

los

den

capitulos,

reappear in numer-

ous doctrinal works of the fifteenth century, especially in rhymed

the collections of Prouerbios by Fernan Perez de
future marques de Santillana.

Lopez de aim were to exhibit the conservative traditionalism of his thought, Perez de Guzman adapts the title of the initial chapter of the Libro de los den capitulos, "El capitulo que habla de la ley e del rey," as a rubric to one section of his Coplas de uidos y virtudes ("De buen rey e buena ley," stanzas 17481).^
Ifiigo

Guzman and

Mendoza, the

As

if his

'

The

present paper deals with materials that have been treated only marginally by
185fF.

Rodriguez Puertolas (1968a,

is

and 206-48) and Nieto Soria (1988, 152-64).

ethical theory in support
scholars,

My thesis
it

that

both poets and

letrados

drew on

of strong royal power;

thus

differs

from the
is

thesis

of both these

My

thesis

strengthened in

from Nader's conclusions (1979). theoretical terms by Waltz (1993), who distinguishes between
and above
all

an "old world," where individuals necessarily accept

social place they

as

an ethical model and obligation the

were

bom

into,

and the "new world" of the

modem

era

where mobility
role

has

became

so great that our actions in the social

game
still

are

what determine the

of each

individual.

The

boundaries between these two worlds evolved throughout the fifteenth

prevailed amongst the nobility of that

century.
period.
^

However, medieval schemes of thought

On
and

the literary and ethical traditions of the Prouerbios by Perez de

their links

llana,

with popular

refraneros,

see

Le Gentil (1949, 452) and

pointed to the

establishing a

network of relevant

texts,

Round
I

Guzman and SantiRound (1979). In precedence set by Sem Tob,

Lopez de Ayala's Rimado
a

and

to his

list I

would add
Libro de
los

the Flores de ftlosojta (ed. Knust 1878);

de

palacio;

and the

den

capitulos

(which
78,

have consulted in

photocopy of Santander,

Biblioteca de

Menendez y

Pelayo,

MS.

fols.

52-100). Lopez de

Guzman

continued the

sententiae tradition in Floresta de Phildsophos (ed.

Foulche-Delbosc 1904b). For the most recent

work on

Santillana's Prouerbios, though with no reference to sources, see Perez Priego (1992) and (1993). Weiss (1991b) has studied Perez de Guzman's position, and concluded that his

200

POWER AND JUSTICE

starts from this traditional ideological base, however, Perez de introduces important innovations into the civic problems that form the subject of this study. While his thirteenth-century predecessors failed to

Although he

Guzman

inquire into the origin of the law, Perez de

roots and sources.

Guzman

proceeds to discuss

its

he examines numerous questions and, in the context of monarchy, postulates that the king is not only the interpreter of the law but that the law is in fact his work. In addition, he argues that royal power should be measured in terms of personal merit rather than inherited position
sure,

To be

or courtly propriety:
el

"Yo do

esta excelencia / del rey sobre los derechos, /

tal

si

rey por notables fechos / meresce

preminencia"

(Vicios, stanza 180).^

Here emerges a thought that could possibly justify absolute monarchy, although in essence Perez de Guzman is referring to the righteous exercise of power based on personal morality a problem that always threatens hereditary monarchies."* This view holds that royal power should not depend on the exercise of sheer force sustained only by hereditary rights ("non por singular potencia nin por sangre generosa") but on personal merits related to the virtues inherent in the responsibilities of the royal condition, among them the capacity to make decisions: "E que sepa asi escoger / que en el quede la sentencia"

(Vicios, stanza 181).

Perez de Guzman's ideal

is

that

of a prudent and circumspect monarch able

is

to direct the fate of his kingdom, as

stressed again in the passage

es

on "Quien

deve regir e quien

servir":

"Aquel reino
(III,

bien reglado / en que los discretos

is

mandan"
his

(Vicios,

stanza 197). This

model

comparable to the one that

Aristotle defends in his Politics

14-18) and in more generalized terms in

circulation
Politics}

Nichomachean Ethics (VI, 5-13; VIII, 10), a book that had a much wider amongst the Castilian laity during the fifteenth century than the

king

Fernan Perez himself never had the opportunity to live under the rule of a who lived up to his ideal image. Only Fernando de Antequera, while

metapoetic passages define

his personal

and national identity

in such a

way

as to

express his

individual interest in the struggle for power. Weiss argues that he presents "his
'natural'

own

voice

as

and

'eternal' rather

The

ill

faith that this

obvious product of an individual parti pris" (108). evaluation presupposes is based on an ideological reading of the texts,
as the

than

which, according to Waltz's parameters, would be anachronistic for the fifteenth century. ^ Quotations from Perez de Guzman's verse are taken from Candonero castellano, vol. 1, ed. Foulche-Delbosc 1912. For brevity of reference, I cite simply poem tide and stanza
all subsequent quotations, I regularize orthography according to modem usage. For an interesting excursus on the need to adapt the rigid codes of law and chivalry according to circumstances and personal discretion, see Fernando del Pulgar's portrait of San-

number. In
*

tillana, in Claros uarones de Castilla (ed.

Tate 1985, 99-100). See

also

Nieto Soria (1988, 157-

59),
this

whose examples, unlike

is
^

the previous ones,

as

come from

authors

who

are not

noblemen;

an important difference,

we

shall see.

On

the reception of Aristotelian ethics in later medieval Spain, see

Pagden (1975) and

Heusch

(1991).

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

201

acting as regent of Castile, and then later as king of Aragon, closely approxi-

mated Perez de Guzman's paragon. Yet even King Fernando's character was not exempt from suspicion when, years later, Perez de Guzman composed the
king's portrait in his Generaciones y semblanzas. In the intervening years, Fer-

nando had been involved

in the political

tumult caused in Castile by

his sons,

the infantes de AragSn, and in his biography Fernan Perez voices doubts about the legitimacy of Fernando's conferral of riches and titles in Castile upon his
heirs.

Though he makes
"cada uno

allowances for the fact that experience has

shown
si

how

de los grandes que alcan^an poder e privanga, toma para

at

quanto puede once stated, remain

Perez de

de dignidades, ofi^ios e vasallos" (ed. Tate 1965, 12), doubts,

the very heart of his likeness of Fernando de Aragon.

Similarly, in his sketch

of Juan
if

II,

prudently composed after the king's death,

assigned the throne to one so inept as of Castile. This monarch, though intellecJuan tually capable of absorbing any doctrine or advice (ed. Tate 1965, 38-40), had treated the affairs of the state with manifest disinterest, leaving decisions in the hands of Don Alvaro de Luna, his favorite. Perez de Guzman's ambiguous portrait ofJuan II reflects this author's preoccupation with baronial insurgency and the process of social transformation that would lead the Castilian middle class to greater power in the fifteenth century. It also bears witness to his amazement at the voluntary conveyance of power from the crown into the hands of favorites, as practiced by Juan II and his mother, Catherine of Lancaster. It is clear that Perez de Guzman's criticism of the monarch fails to match his theoretical propositions on monarchy.
in order to punish the people

Guzman wonders

God had

In fact,

education
uerbios,

on several occasions Perez de Guzman expresses the conviction is more important than genealogy in building character. In his

that

Pro-

he declared in epigrammatic form that virtue is not hereditary (stanzas 6263, 70), just as he defends this idea in a more discursive fashion in his Coplas de vicios e virtudes, stanzas 265-70. Indeed, there he argues that "si de la
sangre
<e>

la

virtud descendiese / esto bastava a ser buena

la

gente, / e necessario

moral Seneca" {Vicios, stanza 269). It should be stressed that the author does not refer to some innate excellence but specifically to the question of moral upbringing: the examples presented point not only to the fact that men and women from low or even illegitimate estate may
seria

non

que

escriviesse / el

people but that he also knew of he saw "por desamparo o cura negligente / de sus mayores, venir entre tal gente / que resultaron torpes, nescios e viles" (Vicios, stanza 267). This point of view confirms that Perez de Guzman is convinced of the value of moral education and of the efficacy of ethical maxims to every person subject to divine rules "que honestad e virtuosas costumbres / todas descienden del padre de las lumbres / / que del nos viene todo optimo
virtuous
cases

become

when brought up by good

of nobles

whom

don"

(Vicios, stanza 270).

II

Juan

received an excellent education and, according to the testimony of

cited above, profited

Perez de

Guzman

his counsellors' advice. In spite

by it and was able to understand fully of this, however, the king's personality did not


202
suit the responsibilities

POWER AND JUSTICE

he inherited.

He

failed to

perform

his role as arbiter in

the political and judicial arena

when

called

upon

to intervene in disputes that

w^ere closely linked to the exercise of his power.

King Juan was

deficient in a

way

that

was not provided

for in the ethical education prescribed

by Perez de

Guzman. The contradiction between theory and observed reality in Perez de Guzman (Romero 1945, 126) allows us to perceive the contradiction between personal inclination and the moral duties life imposes on kings as well as on
others. Perez de
tice. Political

Guzman

stresses a rift

between

social

image and personal prac-

theory offered no remedy for

this

because success on the throne

depended entirely on the personality of the heir himself During the late Middle Ages the difference between a virtuous personality and that of a good regent was not defined in texts devoted to the problem of royal education. Aristotle differentiates between prudence as the power of discrimination, and the virtues as the forces necessary to act honorably. However, this is not reflected in the medieval system of virtues: in the Middle Ages prudence is in fact one of the virtues. This accounts for the reticence to describe politics as a domain of the practical world as opposed to a system of moral values. Medieval authors deal only with the moral system, which accounts for every

human

action. Thus, the fourteenth-century collections

of

proverbs juxtapose chapters on monarchy with others devoted to the virtues

and obligations of the common man, and they provide no ready synthesis for w^homever w^as burdened with royal responsibility. The king's role is seen only from the perspective of his function as ruler, and the moral system only from the perspective of free will, vice, and responsibility. There is no distinction between the ethical character and the social condition of the king or the duties
concern him. Waltz proposes the fundamental difference between "Old World" societies whose individuals were determined by what he calls their "name" which implies the existence of generalized and unquestioned rules of the social game (chess was a common image for feudal society), and "New World" societies, in which a radical mobility leads each individual to define himself in
that

different simultaneous roles. Waltz's distinction leads us to believe that in the

late-medieval nobility only an overqualified or neurotic person

the obligations inherent in his social station:

ziehungen sind von derselben Art und sind

zigen

would reject "Okonomische und politische Beimmer zugleich auch moralische Be-

ziehungen. Jeder Mensch-jedenfalls solange er in der 'Welt' lebt

hat einen ein-

erwachsene Leben iibemimmt. AUe Namen, die er im Lauf seines Lebens erwerben oder verlieren kann, beruhen auf dieser Grundlage" (1993, 116, author's emphasis).^ We are dealing

Namen, den

er mit

dem

Eintritt in das

''

"Political

and economic relationships

are

relationships.

Every person
foundation."

of the same kind and are always

he
lives 'in this

also moral

at least in so far as

world'
lose

has a single

name

that

he receives in
based

his adult life. All the

names he can receive or

throughout

his Ufe are

on

this

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

203

with definite positions to which an individual has access by birth and that he stations that, though they allow room for the develophas to learn to occupy ment of individual personality, still require identification with the attitudes

conventionally attributed to them. Each person was required to adjust to fixed social expectations, through concepts such as honor or virtue, which were instrumental in helping the individual to occupy the social space he was assigned

by Providence, or

in the case

of ineptitude, determined

his

exclusion from

it.

With

reference to Enrique IV, Nicholas

Round

remarks: "Enrique, of

course, was destined to have little choice; a grande del reino like Inigo Lopez had little enough" (1979, 228). The throne, coveted more than other honors due to the wealth and power that went with it, was liable to be occupied even by people who lacked appropriate qualifications since, as Perez de Guzman

puts

it

in his Generaciones, "a los reyes

menos

seso e esfuer^o les basta para rigir

omnes, porque de muchos sabios pueden aver consejo" (ed. Tate 1965, 5). For Perez de Guzman, therefore, royal power depended on the discretion and the decision-making ability of whoever wore the crown (see Vicios, stanza 181, quoted above). In this respect his portraits of Enrique III and Fernando de Antequera prove very valuable. It is essential that the king accept his role and want to arbitrate the many disputes he is called upon to resolve. Failure to do this, as in the case of all the fifteenth-century Castilian monarchs before Isabel la Catolica, meant rebelling against the only known and generally accepted rules within the power structure that determined the beliefs of that period. Therefore, before formulating the hypothesis that there were competing ideologies in Castilian politics of the fifteenth century, we need to gain a fuller conceptual understanding of monarchical power. To do this, we need to clarify exactly what beliefs were expressed and point out, as far as possible, the cracks and weaknesses within them.

que

a otros

The Univocal Nature of Ethical Thought

By
definition, medieval justice in
its

public dimension

is

a royal and, to a

was disseminated amongst the laity by vernacular versions of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and various Senecan treatises translated by Alonso de Cartagena. It was further reinforced by treatises on government, moral tracts such as Fran^esc Eiximenis' De natura
certain extent, aristocratic attribute. This concept
angelica (Castilian translation 1434),
del rey de

Aragon (1450),

as

well

mances.^ In the cancioneros

this

memoirs like Panormitano's Dichos y hechos by some key passages in sentimental roissue appears both in didactic verse and in the
as

'

The

Llibre dels angels

by Eiximenis was

translated for Santillana

by Miguel de Cuenca

and Gonzalo de Ocana,

BN

Madrid MS. 10118. For relevant

passages, see
I

Book

II,

v, fol.
fols.

31v-32r and V,
52r-53r.
in Cdrcel

ii,

fol.

97v. For Panormitano's Didios y hedws

use the 1554 printing,

With regard de Amor and

to the sentimental romance, situations

Crisel y Mirabella

Uke those described

in the trials

echo concepts discussed by Pedro Diaz de Toledo in

9. Justice, so far

his glosses to Santillana's Proverbios

4 and

considered only theoretically,

is

204

POWER AND JUSTICE

prose glosses accompanying important poems or collections of proverbs.

Among
Gomez

the most noteworthy examples are Pedro Diaz de Toledo's glosses to

the collection of proverbs attributed to Seneca, Santillana's Proverbios, and

Manrique's Querella de

la

govemacion^ Lesser known, but equally rele-

vant, are

Gonzalo de Santa Maria's later glosses to the Disticha Catonis? The political thought encountered in all these texts is ethically framed, except in those cases where it refen to concrete circumstances. Its theory never adapts pragmatically to actual circumstances, nor does it seek to devise politically necessary measures.'" Political reflection in these

works,

when

it

does

one or another side of the political fence and mocks his adversaries or talks ill of them in his texts. Yet, an ethical reading reveals that deep down, regardless of the faction with which they are aligned, the political ideology of all these works is fundamentally rooted in one set of ideas. Usually, this fact is clearly and calmly expressed, so that this aspect of the message would seldom be misunderstood. Moreover, it
refer to facts, favors satire: the author opts for

forces

modern

scholars to argue that certain historical events coincide in aphis

pearance but not in their deeper meaning. In

refers to this elusive

book on

royalty,

Nieto Soria

phenomenon, when he

states that

now
If the

put to the

test

and made an

integral part

of the plot in prose

fiction.

These

fictional
it

experiments emphasize that judgment depends on the discretion of those

who

carry

out.

king does not perform the virtue "epiqueya" (discussed below) and adheres merely to
unfair resolutions that will drive society

the
to

words of the law, he brings about harmful and

ever-growing violence.

On

this issue,

agree with LUlian

thesis,

von der Walde Moheno,

Grisel

y Mirahella de Juan de 1994; see the chapter

"

Flores,

unpublished doctoral

Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico,

glosses to "El irado
a

"Amor y ley." For the Senecan proverbs, see especially Diaz de Toledo's
es

haun

el

mal piensa que

quote fi-om the

consejo," (f LIIIv),
la

"Muchos ha de temer
la ira

quien muchos temen" (f

(f

LXXXr), and "Desecha

Toledo's Glosas a
castellano, ed.

crueldad e

que

es

madre de crueldad"
1495

LXXVIIIv).

Prouerbios de Seneca con

la esclarnacion

la glosa,

Seville

(BOOST

2129). For Diaz de

y querella de

la

govemacion de

GSmez

Manrique, see Cancionero

Foulche-Delbosc (1915, 130-47); the same author's Closas a los Prouerbios de Santillana has been consulted in the Cancionero del marquis de Santillana (B.U.S. MS. 2655),

ed. Catedra
'^

and Coca Senande (1990).

Gonzalo Garcia de Santa Maria, Caton en latin e en romance, Zaragoza: Hurus [c. 1493], Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Incunabulum 401. E.g., stanza 112: " 'ludicis Auxilium, sub
inicua lege rogato': ...

Ca

las

mismas

leyes,

segun

se

demuestra, codician ser con razon

entendidas"
'"

(fol.

dVv).

Among

the scholars

who,

as far as

could check, consider the question of different

to locate clearly divergent patterns.

ethical models,

Deyermond was
found

the only

one

He

points

to

one model
folk that

that corresponds to the alliance

is

of the king with the bourgeoisie and the comI,

mon

in the Cronica de

Domjoao

by Femao Lopes (1443); and there

to marginal social groups

is

glimpse of a third position, the "ideal of civic humanism" derived fi-om ItaUan models

(Deyermond 1986, 181 and

represent

189).

Deyermond's sources belong

and

new

systems instead of competing aspects of traditional ones.

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

es posible incluso la coexistencia

205

a partir

de una misma imagen

de dos
el

interpretaciones absolutamente enfrentadas, justificando, por tanto,

in-

tento de materializacion de dos realidades politicas radicalmente opuestas.

En este sentido conviene observar la presencia de lo que cabria valorar como una diferenciada vision estamental de cada una de estas imagenes,
si

bien hay que reconocer que

la

se

pueden encontrar excepciones en

ellas.

esta

solidaridad estamental en
10)

interpretacion de cada una de

(1988,

What Nieto Soria describes as images are, in fact, the objective correlatives of ideas of regal superiority, sovereignty, and related concepts. Nieto Soria's scheme may also be applied to ethical considerations: it appears that caste interests, doubtless present and in need of a spokesman, were not articulated in any systematic philosophical way but only through the images encountered in
factional debate.
It is in this light that we should reexamine the telling distinction made by Helen Nader (1979) between letrados and the nobility. She agrees with others in identifying an innovative and humanistic inclination among the nobility, as opposed to a continuation of scholastic erudition among certain letrados. ^^ However, this distinction cannot adequately explain the differences in the ethical positions taken by individual members of each group. Nader suggests that the nobility may have considered historical change a consequence of the need

to adapt to different circumstances, whereas for the letrados historical change

was viewed

as part

of a providential design,

as a

righteous reward or punish-

ment

'2 (1979, 130-31).

Like
force.

all

the forces and products of a decadent political world, the nobility,

its

to preserve

position and privileges, was obliged to act as a conservative

To do

this

lyze the legislative activity

any

new

rights

needed to vindicate acquired and intangible rights, to paraof the state, and strictly defend common law against or claims that might emerge. However, according to my readit

" Kohut (1982a) considers

Santillana's generation as the socio-cultural

summit of hu-

manism. Perhaps one could apply to

early fifteenth-century Castile the conclusions reached

by Rico

for fourteenth-century Catalonia,

where the noble

estate

was more humanistic than

the letrados (Rico 1983). Lawrance (1986) has argued for the existence of fifteenth-century
Castilian vernacular

humanism;

in this respect

he was perhaps anticipated by Romero's

comments (1945, 136) on Perez de Guzman.

'^

the timidly humanistic spirit that enlivened the patriotic ideals of

This

is

similar to Penna's earlier

fase

argument

that

"como

todas

las

fuerzas y los productos

de fenomenos politicos en
privilegios debia actuar

de decadencia,

la

nobleza, para conservar su posicion y sus

y,

como

ftierza

conservadora
la

para hacer esto, debia reivindicar de-

rechos adquiridos e intangibles, parahzar

actividad legisladora del estado y defender rigida-

mente

el

derecho consuetudinario en contra del derecho actual que tenia que desarrollarse"

(1959, XIV).

206
ing, the texts

POWER AND JUSTICE

do not provide the necessary basis for estabhshing a distinction of this kind. Moreover, analysis of this distinction is hindered by the conflicting interests within the very groups identified by Nader. For example, in the case of Pedro Diaz de Toledo we have a letrado employed in the service of the marques de Santillana; Fray Inigo de Mendoza, on the other hand, represents an alliance between members of the two groups. To complicate matters further, we find hybrids of both groups: there was also the category of learned knight (i.e., Enrique de Villena, who is usually viewed as a true scholar [e.g., Weiss 1990], although he in fact belonged to the royal family). At the other end of the spectrum there were also clergymen firom noble families, letrados by profession who, like Cardinal Pedro Gonzalez de

Mendoza, nevertheless did not receive rigororous university training. A great number of the poems that address questions of power and justice come, in fact, from the very social group that Nader terms the "Mendoza family." To be sure, many of the prose texts are also associated with this house, as they were written by their secretaries or friends. The widely connected Mendoza family, related to nearly half of noble Spain, did not constitute a closed clan but one whose members procreated outside marriage, adopted and brought up people who were not their kin, and entered into alliances that they subsequently
broke because of inheritance disputes or simply because their political affiliations changed. However, the bonds of kinship often softened clashes, preventing greater hostilities, and the ties of firiendship and affection often prevailed, in the case of the poets "in the family," over the interests of the groups in
dispute.

Ideas of Justice in the Cancioneros

As before, during the

fifteenth century the treatment

of the theme of justice

is

linked to the goal of personal ethical development within a system of moral

philosophy that encompasses the virtue of justice. Thus, Fernan Perez de Guzman (Confesion rimada, stanzas 92-101) considers choler as a private vice

without relating it to the administration of justice. And even when he favors benevolence when passing judgment on the young (e.g., Vicios, stanzas 7585), one could say that he is attempting to shape general attitudes toward youth and that he is not referring to the attitudes of a judge in the official sense. Nevertheless, justice constitutes the most important part of the precepts addressed to a ruler in his public capacity, and it is this aspect ofjustice that most concerns key passages in a series of verse treatises written during the reigns of

Juan

II

and Enrique IV. Moral and

are Perez de

historical texts alike treat topics related to

the exercise of power. For the purposes of this discussion, the

most important

poems

Guzman's

Prouerbios (1425), the Coronacion de las cuatro

and ConfesiSn rimada; Santillana's and Doctrinal de privados (1453); Mena's Laberinto (1444), and his Pecados mortales, with the continuation by Gomez Manrique, and the latter's Querella de la governacion. To appreciate the role played by the theme of justice in them, the thematic panorama of these poems needs to be sketched; for the
virtudes cardinales, the Coplas de vicios y uirtudes,

Prouerbios (1437),

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

sake of brevity, however,

207

my discussion will not take into consideration their chronology or textual and thematic relationship. All the passages I shall cite are simply a representative sample of themes found, with only slight modifications in all these works. It is possible that a detailed study of the differences between them would help to identify ideological fractures in the system that as yet I have been unable to discover. The roots of their ideas lie in the texts whose importance I have already emphasized: the paroemiologic collections and vernacular versions of Aristotle's Nichomachean
Ethics

and
all

Politics.

justice, a part

we are dealing with the public version of the concept of of political philosophy, as Perez de Guzman puts it in his Coronacion de las cuatro uirtudes cardinales. In this poem, when Prudence speaks (stanzas 2133) she says:
In
instances

Los decretos e de mi han

el

las

leyes

fundamiento;

los principes e los reyes

que govieman con buen tiento, yo non so su fimiento en vano escriven doctores; por demas, emperadores
si

usan de su regimiento. (Stanza 23)

And Temperance

(stanzas 48-61):

Yo

justicia

mezclo la rigorosa con la clemencia; enfreno la impetuosa fortaleza con sufrencia; amonesto a la prudencia. (Stanza 48)
is easily affected by choleric by the three great poets of the reign

As

in the private sphere, justice in the ruler

is

inclinations; this

commonplace

cited

of Juan
bios,

II:

Fernan Perez {Confesion rimada stanzas 92-101), Santillana

(Prover-

stanza 28), and Juan de

Mena

{Contra

los

pecados mortales, stanzas

106-

107).'^

However, when they

deal with justice as a virtue of the ruler, the

ideas

of greed and favor

also enter the picture. In

Fernan Perez's Coronacion

we

read (stanzas 7-20):

Afeccion de

las

personas

non

turbe tu egualan^a,

por ^eptros nin per coronas

'^

For

Santillana's Proverbios,

with the author's

own

prose glosses,

follow the edition of

los

Gomez Moreno and Kerkhof (1988,

I

216-67,

at 232); for

Mena's Contra

pecados mortales

have had to

rely

on Foulche-Delbosc
I

(1912, 120-33, at 132); since his edition does not

number

the stanzas,

shall also

add page references.

208

POWER AND JUSTICE

non
se tuer^e tu balan^ a;

nin pierdan su esperanf a

los pobres,

ni se fazen
los ricos

por ser menguados, mas osados por su abondan^a. (Stanza

9)

In this aggregate of ideas, the concept of enforcing the law while seeking the
just

mean between

rigor

and clemency

is

often related to the question of

is

advice or counsel. In some isolated cases, the issue of judicial temperance

determined by the source of the law itself. In this respect Perez de Guzman offers a very balanced view of the customs concerning the accused, both in the Proverbios and in Vicios. To cite just one example from the first text:
Es virtud e
la justicia

muy

loable

executar

mas de natura amigable no menos el perdonar.

La justicia fasta el cabo todo el mundo asolaria luengo perdon non alabo que da del mal osadia. (Proverbios,

stanzas 14-15)'^

In a similar, though less tempered fashion, Gomez Manrique's continuation of Mena's Pecados mortales views the administration of justice from the angle of clemency (stanzas 236-37):

Pues no fieras con furor, por que sea tu castigo no ferida de enemigo, mas correcion de senor; otras vezes con amor amonestando perdona, por que sea tu persona digna de perdon mayor. '^

On the

other hand, in

De

vicios

y virtudes

("De reyes

e juezes," stanzas

307-14)

Perez de

Guzman

criticizes the

common
ruler:

practice according to

which honors

were dispensed

as favors

by the

Sino ya por qu' el miserable pueblo sea remediado,

'* '^

See

also stanzas
I

18-19, 28, 31-33, 53, and 61-64.

I

Since

have not had access to the more recent edition by Gladys Rivera,
at 148).

quote
before,

Gomez
stanza

Manrique's continuation from Foulche-Delbosc (1912, 133-52,

is

As

numbering

my

own.

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

mas por que remunerado sea el que a el es amado. (Stanza 312)
In his continuation of Mena's Pecados mortales,
es the

209

Gomez Manrique characterizwhich

inherently disinterested nature of Justice through an allegory in

Prudence passes judgment on Reason and Will (stanzas 220-22; Foulche-Delbosc 1912, 146). However, the profound social implications of not yielding to special ecomonic interests are best illustrated in the concluding stanzas (25960), where he summarizes the advice he has given to the rulers of the state:

Nunca dedes
de
de
justicia

los oficios

por dineros.

Old con
los

vuestros oidos

pobres sus querellas,

dellas

y mostrando pesar

consolad los afligidos;

scan los malos punidos,
los

asi seres

buenos remunerados; bien amados

delos vuestros y temidos. (Foulche-Delbosc 1912, 151)

In Santillana's Prouerbios, dedicated in 1437 to Prince Enrique, the heir to

As so often o[ speculum principis, the work is primarily concerned with the development of the prince's personal virtue, and in no way does the author confine himself exclusively to the specific tasks concerning the political education of such a distinguished personage.'^' Within this panorama, justice is the only theme that takes up a large section of the Prouerbios since, because it also occurs in passages devoted to love, fear, prudence, wisdom, and patience, it exceeds the stanzas that were expressly devoted to it (stanzas 24-27) and occupies a total of twenty-seven out of one hundred stanzas. This is a substantial proportion of the work, and its prominence is evidently related to the roles ofjudge and arbiter Don Enrique would later perform as a ruler.
the throne,
find a detailed discussion of the question of Justice.
in the tradition

we

'^'

His general moral system has been analyzed by

Round

(1979, 228),

who

chose to

highlight only
that

one of those passages (stanza 74) which impress us only when we remember the poem was addressed to the heir to the throne. Although it is possible to detect
Santillana goes

references to specifically political events and motives, they are veiled in moral generalities.
Still,

beyond

the usual

scheme which, according

to Lapesa (1957,

206-14)

treats

only the cardinal virtues. Santillana does not deal with certain other aspects of monar-

chical

power, such

as

the call to unify the Spanish states or conquer Granada, tasks

to the future

which
in the

other writers

recommend
la

Enrique IV roughly around the same period: see

Fernando de

Torre

(ed.

Diez Garretas 1983, 360);

1:449).

Ruy

Paez de

la

Ribera's

poems

Candonero de Baena
principes, discussed

(ed. Azaceta, 1966, nos.

295-97); and

Gomez

Manrique's Regimiento de

by Le Gentil (1949,

210

POWER AND JUSTICE

on the
the
part

In essence, Santillana advises a conscientious handling of justice

of the monarch to
in Proverbios
stanza;
it is

gamer the

affection of his subjects. This notion

is

developed
first

from the

initial

admonition "ama e

seras

amado" of

subsequently amplified in stanza 5 and finally expanded in stanzas

6-9 with
Ueros,"
1.

specific

recommendations concerning the amicable way subjects

1.

should be treated, including advice against paying heed to slanderers ("nove57) or judging rashly ("de continente,"
77).

By

contrast, Santillana

recommends heeding good counsel and listening to the advice of the experienced. After an excursus on the importance of study (stanzas 1323), he deals with the specific topic of justice (11. 18586), in which he recommends disinterested judgment (stanzas 2425) and provides examples where a king or
legislator

himself has abided by the law (stanzas 2627). Santillana warns

in anger,

against

judgments passed

and he counsels moderation

as

in

punishment
and

(stanza 28).

He recommends

taking heed of a culprit's sincere contrition (stanza

29) and counsels the exercise of clemency (defined

"amor
la

/ e caridad,"

contrasted with the "cruelty" of a pardon "contrario a

razon / de humani-

dad," stanzas 3032).

In this work, the theme ofjustice conforms to a very concise model, whose key elements would reappear years later in Santillana's sonnet 33 (discussed below), confirming that we are dealing with the one of the author's most deeply held convictions. Yet, while dear to Santillana, the ideas he develops are essentially topical and belong to a long tradition of which the opening stanzas of the Proverbios are but one more example. Juan de Mena also included numerous admonitions to the king in his LMberinto de

Fortuna (ed. de Nigris 1994, 65-185).

Mena
is

begins with an abstract

his

definition followed

by varied examples, disseminating

thoughts on justice

throughout the work. His definition of justice

Justifia es

as follows:

un ^eptro

qu'el ^ielo crio,

que

el

grande universo nos faze seguro,

habito rico del animo puro

introduzido por publica pro,

que por
es

igual peso jamas conserve

todos estados en sus ofi^ios;

mas:

aqrote

que pugne
si

los vi^ios

non

corruptible por

nin por no. (Stanza 231)

illustrate

Concrete examples subsequently

tering portrait of Juan
II's

the point. For example, his

flat-

sister.

Queen Maria

de Trastamara (Alfonso the

his

Magnanimous's wife and regent in Aragon during places special emphasis on the quality of Justice:
asi,

long sojourn in

Sicily),

con

la

mucha justif ia que

muestra,
el

mientra mas reinos conquiere

marido,

mas

ella zela el

ya conquerido:
la

jguarda que gloria de Espaiia

vuestra! (Stanza 77)

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

While dealing with simony and rapaciousness
Juan
II:

211

in the

Church, Mena's

censure of adulation (stanzas 93-98) concludes with the following advice to

La vuestra sacra e real magestad en los subditos tal benefit io que cada cual use asi del ofifio que queden las leyes en integridad. (Stanza 98)
faga
Justice is mentioned in many of the stanzas that give moral weight to the work, as, for example, in the section devoted to peace-loving kings (stanzas 21418) or in the conclusion of the episode devoted to the Circle of Mars:

Muy
de
la

claro pringipe, rey escogido,

los

que son

fuertes

por

esta

manera

vuestra corona magnifica quiera

el

tener con los tales

ca estos

reino regido;

mas aman con justo sentido la recta justi^ia que non la ganan^ ia, e rigen e sirven con mucha constan^ia e con fortaleza en el tiempo devido. (Stanza 212)
Despite their poetic context, in these words
authors considered above,

we

hear the voice of the

letrado

par excellence, whose concepts match in every essential respect the ones of the
all

of whom were interrelated and formed part of a

small stratum of the Castilian nobility.

The most impassioned works by Gomez Manrique and Fray liiigo de Mendoza, both of whom may be considered Juan de Mena's successors, belong to a younger generation of poets. They make clear their disgust at the civil strife in Castile during the reign of Enrique IV. Works like Querella de lagovernacion,
ethically glossed

by Pedro Diaz de Toledo

in the debate

in his apologetic

commentary, and

the admonitions of Fray liiigo de

a

Mendoza

to Ferdinand the Catholic,

mark

new dimension

against the turbulent status

on justice. They begin by reacting quo, which is the specific source of their

explicitly
criticism.

Rodriguez Puertolas (1968a, chapter 7) has demonstrated this in relation to the Coplas de Vita Cristi, and it is possible to find similar arguments in Gomez Manrique's Querella, written according to Pedro Diaz at the beginning of his
career.'^ Fray liiigo's criticism needs to

clear instance

be analyzed with care, because it is a of the "single image" that embraces contradictory facts described
it is

by Nieto

Soria:

directed against both the

Montagues and the Capulets,

as

"
(1915,

On

this

poem,
Its

see Scholberg (1984, 31).

early date
is

follow the edition of Foulche-Delbosc

poem

authorities
le

imphed when Pedro Diaz names as estabUshed poetic Perez de Guzman and Santillana, and alleges that Gomez Manrique "sy el tienpo
415).
el alcan^ e a los caualleros

da logar a continuar e continua, yra en

nonbrados e publicara su

yngenio de buenas e fructuosas cosas" (Foulche-Delbosc 1915, 132).

212

POWER AND JUSTICE

To the conEnrique IV was the object of such harsh censure that the text was acturedrafted, and a gloss was added about defamation and retraction (stanza
were
factional interests at

it

were, because on no account does he ever support the king.

trary,
ally

109). In other words, if there

work

here, according

to Nader's system
in his career,

it

would be

right to include Fray Inigo, at least at this point

among

the rebellious noblemen.

is found in many of Fray poems. As presented in his Dechado del Regimiento de Pnncipes /echo a la senora reina de Castilla y Aragon (ed. Rodriguez Puertolas 1968b), it is perhaps best understood in terms of the well-known conventions of judicial rigor. Here, the author advises the queen not to hesitate:

preoccupation with the concept of justice

liiigo's

con amor y pesar

de degoUar
la

oveja inficionada
la

por guarecer

manada.

No
que

piense vuestra excelencia

es

clemencia
la

perdonar

mala gente. (Stanzas 78)

al-

Fray Inigo 's counsel came to take on a more radical and explicit tone in his
legorical exposition

on King Fernando's

heraldic device found in the Francis-

can's Sermon trovado sobre el yugo y coyundas que su alteza true por devisa. In this work explicit absolutism inspires Fray Ifiigo's plea to the monarchs to control

the

wayward

Castilian aristocracy:

"Tomad

la

lan^a en

la

mano,
he

/ sojuzgad

vuestro reinado" (ed. Rodriguez Puertolas 1968b, stanza 18). And, arguing
that the nobility needs to control

and protect their

own

estates,

stresses that

they also must subject themselves unconditionally to the power of the divinely

ordained king:

pues son tan obligados por derecho y por virtud a someter sus estados al yugo, mansos, domados de la real celsitud. (Stanza 21)
associated with the and he presents the battle of Aljubarrota as an uprising of the nobles against royal power. He then proposes to replace seditious followers with new, trustworthy ones:

Fray

liiigo

develops

this

theme through bovine imagery

yoke

in the king's heraldic device,

arareis

con

los leales

y a

los

ronceros cuitrales

dadles tras los colodrillos

pues teneys hartos novillos. (Stanza 24)

In passages such as these, one can perceive what

Nader argues was the posture

rebels. Finally

taken by the

letrados

with regard to the subjugation of

Fray

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

liiigo articulates

213

port of centralized

an unsurprising defense of monarchical absolutism. His suppower opposed to feudalism is not tempered by his subse-

quent admonitions to rule the kingdom with a steady and fair hand. According to Rodriguez Puertolas, that the Franciscan took sides at all is due to his place in society: "Mendoza no puede escapar a su condicionamiento sociologico e diriideologico, pues les echa la culpa a los seiiores y no a los labradores giendose contra los revoltosos que apoyaron al principe Alonso" (1968b, bcx). Unfortunately, Nader does not mention this interesting member of the Mendoza clan in her book, nor does she define his place in society. Notw^ithstanding Rodriguez Puertolas' assertion, I personally doubt that it was Fray Inigo's place in society that ultimately determined his partisanship. On the contrary. Fray Inigo's ancestry is the same as that of those authors whose factional interest he contradicts since, as Rodriguez Puertolas tells us, he was related to both the Mendozas and the Cartagenas. Rodriguez Puertolas (1968a, 32) quotes a passage from Fernan Diaz de Toledo's El Relator, which asserted that by the middle of the fifteenth century even the most ancient families of the Castilian nobility descended from Jews. As Sicroff demonstrates (1960), many sources confirm the intermarriage o( converses and nobles which, as stated in Alonso de Cartagena's Dejensorium Unitatis Christianae, was not only considered legitimate but was often admitted and used as evidence in discussions of ancient lineage. Nobles and scholars alike expose the need for the prudent exercise of royal power through justice. The virtue of clemency is evoked in poems not only by magnates but also by letrados like Juan de Mena and by the royal counselor Pedro Diaz de Toledo. Fray liiigo de Mendoza's position may be comparable to that of Pedro de Escavias, as described by Michel Garcia. Commenting on the Coplas sobre las diuisiones del reino, Garcia expresses amazement "por el hecho de que los dos campos enemigos sean igualmente condenados por Escavias. No quiere distinguirlos en su poema; por el contrario los reune en una sola jauria auUadora. Juan II no es el unico bianco al que Escavias asesta sus ballestazos: todos sus contemporaneos resultan culpables a sus ojos, culpables de la ruina de Castilla por fxitiles motives" (1972, xcvi). Bearing in mind the possibility that single images may have multiple interpretations, this should not be surprising if we accept that there just might have been (or that in fact there were) sectors of society, even among the rich, for whom ethics was more than a mere pretext. It is also possible to view all of them as "members of the nobility or obedient officers in their service," as di Camillo does (1991, 161), or to see a letrado like Pero Diaz de Toledo as "literary propagandist" of the nobility (Weiss 1991b, 96). Although we have not dealt with actual censure of prevailing governmental
. . .
. . .

practices, readers interested in social criticism

may

consult the various studies

of Rodriguez Puertolas.

Of course,

the moral and political system sketched

as a

here appears also in poems that contain doctrinal matters among them those by Pedro de Escavias.

secondary theme,

214
Critical Attitudes
the epigraph,

POWER AND JUSTICE

Towards
Political

Thought

Santillana's sonnet 33, addressed to

when

Enrique IV and composed, according to he was aheady in power, offers a miniature portrait of the

prince

as

judge:

Con

vulto alegre,

manso

e reposado

Old a todos, Hbrad e proved:

fazed que ayades
ca ninguno
las

gentes en grado,
sin
sea,

domina

merged.

Commoquiera que
(ed.

comendemos
por derecho. Moreno and Kerkhof 1988,
72).

estos dos actos vuestros

Gomez

commended "by be governed by a just and kind ruler. Maria Rosa Lida (1952a, 277) sees the sonnet as a testimony of the magnate's self-interest, because such a weak king would assure Santillana greater personal domains within the feudal system. Lida's reading is based on her underestimation of Santillana's poetic work. She reproaches him for his lack of concern with fame, considered as a guarantor of ethical beliefs. Lida takes for granted Santillana's image of society, in
Santillana refers here to the administration ofjustice,
it is

which

is

right" to the lord, because

a right, as the text says, to

which royal power is significantly diminished. The power of the monarch would be weakened by the arrogance of a small sector of society constituted by the powerful noble families with kinship ties to the king, or by the famiUes'
function,
its

who

question de facto the monarch's right to rule to the detriment of

legitimate purpose. This

view

legitimizes a vision of absolutism according

to

which power

is

centered in the hands of the monarch and then subsequent-

ly passed

down

to the lower strata of society.

God, the supreme power, would

latter, in turn,

delegate absolute authority to the king "from above," and the

delegates to his subjects only those powers that are necessary for the right

administration of the res publica (Ullman 1961, chapter 1). This image corresponds to the one drawn by Nader (1979, 21-35 and chapter 6) and said to be present in the historiography of the letrados: Pablo de Santa Maria, Alonso de

Cartagena, Rodrigo Sanchez de Arevalo, Alfonso de Palencia, and Andres Bernaldez.

The

political

theory of these learned authors was confirmed, according

Nader, by
cies:

a long-standing historical belief that legitimized centralist

final

tenden-

the moral, political, and geographical recuperation of Spain under the leadership

"Thus the

object of the state to these writers

became Hispania

of the divinely inspired and appointed Castilian monarch" (Nader 1979, 24). In the general terms outlined by Ullman (1961), the image of royalty by divine imposition is rivaled by another notion, according to which power emanates from below. The king's subjects delegate to the ruler the functions
considered necessary for the wellbeing of the
nation of power from the lower
strata
state.

Since the subjects are the

source of power, they are also authorized to control

how

it is

used.

The emathe

could exist

as a possible variant in

second group of historians identified by Nader (1979, 25), namely, the warrior

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

class,

215

whose most notable exponents were Pedro Lopez de

Ayala, Fernan Perez

de Guzman, and Diego de Valera. Penna makes a statement that approximates Ullmann's vision and is similar to the restricted sense of Nader's model. He
argues that the almost mystical respect for the law
ecclesiastical oligarchies

among
it

the military

and

had

a practical function, since

theoretically limited

monarchical power (1959, xiv). The noble historians, however, are neglected by Deyermond,
es the centralist

who reinforc-

of Mena's and Santillana's verse (1986, 178-80). Beceiro Pita (1986, 320) goes even further and implicitly contradicts Nader when she quotes a passage from the Espejo de la nobleza by Diego de Valera to illustrate the latter's autocratic concept of power. My own sources, however, suggest that Deyermond is correct in not distinguishing between them; perhaps Ullmann's second model may only be realized in the Iberian Peninsula in marginal texts such as the Cronica de Domjodo I, to which Deyermond alludes. This is supported by Di Camillo's recent conclusion that the satirical compositions of the fifteenth century "parecen ser obras de eruditos ocasionadas por rivalidades de bandos y, por tanto, no son mas que ataques personales entre los mismos detentores del poder" (1991, 168). The noble historians, according to Nader, consider royal authority only firom within the framework of the moment, and they rank moral and specifiin his account
cally political

argument

needs higher than loyalties or hierarchies, making personal ac-

tions

and

attitudes prevail

over the king's position. The prevaiHng notion of

justice provides important insight into the possible existence

if

of these

factions,

indeed they actually existed.

been extensively treated in Nieto Soria's book. He shows how rest of Europe traditional theories of monarchy, and he offers various illustrations of legal and hterary texts where the figure of the annointed king is explicitly mentioned. In addition, Nieto Soria includes many examples like Fray liiigo de Mendoza's verses that deal with the annointment of the Catholic Monarchs ("fuestes sefiores ungidos, / ungidos y prometidos / de aquesta mano de Dios" [ed. Rodriguez Puertolas 1968b, 318-46, stanza 11]). This image confirms the righteous independence of the united Castilian and Aragonese monarchies vis-a-vis their European rivals. The book shows how, because of its very nature, the image of the king ordained by God may be related to the legislator's or judge's. There are many passages in Nieto Soria's book where he adduces evidence against the positive construction of the king's image, but his study fails to track any sustained opposition to royalty, which might have confirmed Nader's thesis. Still, Nieto Soria provides one reason why such an opposition may be possible, since the formulation of certain facets of the the king's image, specifically the one defined as "poderio real absolute" (1988, 124-27), appears only in documents concerning Juan II and Enrique IV. That is to say, the emphasis on "poderio real absoluto" appears precisely at the moment when royal power is weakest and always leads to new political revolts. The emphasis on "poderio real absoluto" must be regarded as a gesture more indicative of intention than fact, a detail that corroborates perfectly

The

issue has

Spain shares with

216

POWER AND JUSTICE

Suarez Fernandez's thesis (1964) that the Trastamaras furthered centralism. At the same time there emerges a rich prose literature on the subject, and we
witness the flourishing of the moral and pohtical treatises in the doctrinal
cancioneros, where the uncertainties arising from ineffigovernment continue to be treated. It is, of course, fair to wonder if these works were destined to improve the institution of monarchy or, as my renowned Argentine colleague suggests, to undermine its foundations. If one wishes to locate Perez de Guzman's or Santillana's natural place in one of the two categories postulated by Nader, there is no doubt that they each belong to the second. At the same time, we must wonder about the extent to which their ideas on kingship were meant to provide a basis for a functional use of the monarchy, as Nieto Soria maintains (1988, 55, 110, 111),

poetry collected in the

cient

rather than constituting a challenge against absolutism. In such a case

we

would

find that ethical conduct and political pragmatism

would

take priority

over dynastic or ideological considerations. As one of the most powerful

nobles in the realm, Santillana belongs to the king's entourage in addition to

being

a relative, albeit a distant

as

one without

a claim to the throne. Santillana's

function
relation

counselor, assumed in sonnet 33, allows

king's deeds

between the

have

king

who

"listens

him to measure closely the and his attitudes. He thus determines that to to everyone" and treats them "with mercy" is the

"right of every subject."

The same ideas may be seen in contemporary texts, like the letters of Diego de Valera to three generations of monarchs or in the "Carta de Fernando de la Torre al rey nuestro seiior, al rey don Enrique IV de este nombre."'^ Although de la Torre was a nobleman of a lower rank than Santillana, his epistle
is

similar to sonnet

33 in that
alto e

his

own

stance proves as critical as Santillana's

quien Dios de poderoso principe rey e Senor escrevi e presente" (ed. Diez Garretas 1983, 340). To be sure, similar statements can be found in many previous and later texts. The justification of those exhortations
refers to "aquella osada, enojosa e desvariada letra, a

when he

su gracia,

que

al

muy

muy

is

often rather implicit.

a los reyes nuestros seiiores sobre el caso acaescido"

Diego de Muros
taries.^'^

"III,"

worth quoting the "Exhortacion (c. 1497) composed by one of Cardinal Pedro Gonzalez de Mondoza's secrethis subject
it is

On

The

"caso acaescido" refers to the attempt against the

life

of Ferdi-

nand the Catholic in Barcelona in 1492 (see Suarez Fernandez 1992, 139), which provides the occasion to remind the monarchs of the necessary qualities of a good ruler. The chief functions of the monarch are, according Muros, to

'*

Valera's letters
la

may be

consulted in Penna (1959), especially numbers

1, 2, 4,

and

9.

For de

Torre's epistle, see Diez Garretas (1983, 343-60). For an example of their

common

audacity towards

" On Muros,
Oro
(1976).

monarchy see Valera's letter 3. see Nader (1979, 184); Gonzalez Novalin (1972, 1975-76); and Garcia Although the last two scholars publish his treatise, I quote directly from BN

Madrid I-1321bis

(BOOST

2095).

My own

edition

is

forthcoming in Atalaya

6.

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

rule fairly

217

and always look to

"la

comun

utilidad, libertad e virtud, e

non

la

without a noble title, a scholar and a theologian who was to become bishop of Mondonedo (150511) and Oviedo (151124). He defends the conventional position
vuestra propia" (folio alVv).
are dealing with a person

Here we

in that he devotes the second chapter of the "Exhortacion" to religion

justice,

and

reserving the
(folios

last

three pages for counseling the use of moderate

judgement

bllv-bVr).

Muros

uses the technical

term "virtud epiqueya,"

rooted in a philosophical-judicial discussion dating back to the prologue of Cartagena's translation of Seneca's De Clementia}''^

Muros'
that, as

disquisition

is

compatible with the notion of a royalty ordained by

c. 1497, folio alVv): this is Ullmann's first model Nieto Soria demonstrates, was ubiquitous in medieval Spain. We find that within such a conception of monarchy it is possible to think of civic life as a process regulated by the will of the sovereign and that the king's free will is likely to be influenced by others. The possibility of bringing influence to bear upon the monarch inspires the authors to offer their ideas about the king's role in the social order and to admonish him when he fails to respond to the requirements of equity, opulence, liberty, and the virtue of his subjects (e.g., Muros c. 1497, foho bVIv).

the grace of God (see

Muros

Justice

in Glosses and Commentaries of the Prouerbios addressed to the future Enrique IV includes two commentaries or glosses, one of which belongs to Inigo Lopez de Mendoza and the other to Pedro Diaz de Toledo. The author's glosses elucidate the learned allusions in his verse and explicate his literary and historical sources. In

and Pow^er

The

text

some

instances, such as the case

of Assuerus, they

clarify the sense

as in

of the exem-

plum, while in others they reinforce the moral,

(stanza 26),

the example of Lentus

es

whose
la

gloss states that

"non poco enxienplo

han cargo"
(ed.

o deve ser a todos

aquellos que de

vara de

la justi^ia

Gomez Moreno and

Kerkhof 1988,

231).

Pedro de Diaz's glosses are much more thorough, erudite, and explicit. For instance, he recasts the gloss on Assuerus, neatly narrating the biblical story and adding a moral where formerly readers had to find one between the lines. ^' Moreover, he enriches the conceptual dimension of the subject with technical

^^

Cartagena glosses epiqueya in the following terms: "quando

esta se fase

con buena
su rigor
la

intension e donde e

como

se

deve

faser,

tenprando

las leys

positivas e

amansando

con razonable eguaUdad,

scripta disc,

es acto

de epiqueya, mas cresentar

las

penas allende de quanto

ley
es

dado
^'

non es aquello epiqueya, ca la inclination del que tiene abito desta virtud menguar e ablandar las penas" (Cartagena BN Madrid, MS. 10139, folio 48r).

are

We lack a critical edition of this important text; my quotations, cited by gloss number, from Catedra and Coca Senande's transcription (1990) of Salamanca, Universidad MS.
is

2655 (Dutton SA8). This

compiled under

the most authoritative cancionero of Santillana's work, possibly

his supervision for his

nephew Gomez Manrique about

1456.

218
terms and notions such
encia" (gloss
4),

POWER AND JUSTICE

as

"ley natural," "razon natural" (gloss 2), "experi(e.g.,

and

"las leyes positivas"

glosses to 63,

69, 93). In

addition, he frequently adds ideas of his

resist

own,

as in

the case of the right to

the exercise of force, even if

it

implies refusing to abide by an unjust

legal ruling (gloss 4):

todo hombre segund ley natural esta cosa solicita e permissa de defender su vida de defender su azienda e de defender su honra por quantas vias e maneras el podra, con ^iertas modifica^iones que los derechos

ponen que, si algund juez injustamente me condepna a pades^er en mi persona alguna lision e dafio e quisiere esecutar en mi persona la sentenfia que sin pena alguna mis parientes e amigos me pueden ayudar a resistir al juez e buscar manera de como yo libre mi persona e estado.
.

In this context it is important to recall the extensive passages narrating the w^ell-known episode of Esther and Assuerus, which concludes with the assertion "como dize vna ley ^ euil: Mas santa cosa es dexar por penar el pecado del culpado que penar al ino^ente e sin culpa" (gloss to stanza 9).

Pedro Diaz de Toledo

the Querella de
la

also defends
I

Gomez

Manrique's forceful criticism in

among the many devoted to judicial concepts. They answer in similar fashion the question posed by the magnates: "^Qual era cosa mas conviniente al reino e a las comunidades, que se rigiesen por buen rey o por buena ley?"
govemacion.

quote only two passages

Segund dizen los juristas, los reyes son sujebtos a la ley natural e a la ley divina; e aunque en algunos casos las puedan modificar e limitar, del todo non las pueden quitar; e aunque sean libres e sueltos de sujeb^ion
quanto
a las leyes positivas, honesta cosa faran

regir e governar

por

ellas. (ed.

de ser sujebtos, de Foulche-Delbosc 1915, 139)

se saver

And

Diaz de Toledo concludes that

aquesta ley general ha menester, para ser justa, que aya executor pru-

dente e derecho e justo que aplique

e a tal executor

la

ley a la yntengion del

que

la fizo;

como

aqueste llama Aristotiles epieques, que es palabra

la ley; e la virtud por donde se faze que quiere decir tenpran^a e ygual-

griega que quiere dezir templador de

este

tenplamiento
ley. (ed.

se llama epiquexa,

dad de

Foulche-Delbosc 1915, 145)

The

of these examples confirms that the monarch is the one person who to change the legal system, an observation found in an earlier author like Fernan Perez de Guzman.
first

has the

power

Conclusion Power and justice,

as

they are dealt with in some poetic

cancioneros,

compositions found in Castilian

treatises and other form part of a broad-ranging dis-

cussion manifested in nearly every literary genre cultivated in fifteenth-century

Spain. Questions regarding the legitimate scope of monarchical

power and

the

REGULA ROHLAND DE LANGBEHN

righteous administration of justice are constantly brought forth, yet

219

no new no case is royal power or the right of the king to his position ever questioned. However, due to both the number of texts in which these themes are elaborated and the critical treatment to which the monarch is exposed, we can observe a generalized concern among writers not
ideas are formulated, because in

to abolish the institution but to improve

it.

Perhaps these authors, whose works were widely disseminated in

did not write these texts solely
that their kings, often
tises,

cancioneros,

moved by

artistic inspiration

but in the hope

trea-

more fond of poetry than of the study of political

it

would be

better disposed to their reasoning if

was couched in works

it

more

closely suited to their inclinations. Poetry was, as Santillana put

e carta, a

in his

mayor perfection e mas auctoridad que la soluta prosa" (ed. Gomez Moreno and Kerkhof 1988, 440). It can be seen that the themes of power and justice, considered in the first half of the century as integral parts of a moral system, are treated in more concretely political terms from the reign of Enrique IV onward. In addition, the explanatory glosses, composed mostly by Pedro Diaz de Toledo, reinforce the role played by poetry in the discussion of political ethics, by clarifying its themes with newly
Prohemio
vehicle "de

adopted technical terms.

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Male Sexual Anxieties

in

Carajicomedia:

Response

to

Female Sovereignty

BARBARA

F.

WEISSBERGER

1986 book, and Poetics In theirStallybrass andThe White lament of Transgression,tocultural historians Peter Allon the tendency devalue popular
Politics

or comic works, arguing that

it

distorts Uterary history.

They

reaffirm Bakhtin's

contribution to cultural studies of the Middle Ages, namely, the notion that
popular, carnivalesque culture
is

inseparable from official, high culture, the

two

being in

mutually structuring and invading. But they recognize that application of Bakhtin has become mired in a debate among practictioners of New
fact

Historicism and cultural materialism over the political significance of carnival,

that
is,

whether

it is

truly subversive

quo.^ Stallybrass and

White attempt

to

of or ultimately contained by the status overcome the stalemate of the subver-

sion-containment debate and render Bakhtin's insights more analytically powerful by insisting that a binary extremism has been fundamental to the entire
process of cultural signification and organization in Europe since the Middle Ages (1986, 6-15). They focus on four cultural spheres in which a high/low hierarchy operates: geographical space, the social order, psychic forms, and the human body, but they pay special attention to the last one, insisting that discourse about the grotesque human body multiple, bulging, over- or undersized, protuberant and incomplete, its openings and orifices emphasized has

a privileged role in social classification (2-3).

The
realist

Cancionero de obras de burlas

is

a veritable treasure trove

of grotesque

discourse about the body, from the "Aposento en Juvera," in

which

grossly fat

man

provides lodging for the entourage of the papal legation on

its

1472

visit

to Castile, to the "Pleyto del

Manto," an account of

a lawsuit to

'

For critiques of reductive Bakhtinian readings see chapter 6 of Gurevich (1988). Booth

(1982) and Bauer and McKinstry (1991) provide feminist critiques of various aspects of

Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque.

222

MALE SEXUAL ANXIETIES

carajo,

determine the preeminence of the cono or the

to the longest
It is,

poem

in

the collection and the subject of this essay, "Carajicomedia."

however, a

treasure trove that remains largely unexplored, despite a spate of editions in the
last

two

decades:

two of the

entire collection

and two more of "Carajicome-

dia" alone. Cancionero studies have given us a vivid example of scholarly resistance to

taking seriously "low" genres and styles in a recent reenactment of the hun-

dred-year-old debate on "the meaning of courtly love." In The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature, Alexander Parker attributed the modern depreciation

of Spain's medieval love

lyrics

not to any defective

artistry

of the works

themselves but to the pervasive and pernicious influence of materialism in

modern

times (1985,

2).

In Lapoesia amatoria, Keith

Whinnom countered with

on the
its

of the very and ideaUzing language of love is rife with erotic double entendres.^ Where Parker wanted to see a religious longing to unite with the divine, albeit misplaced onto a less worthy human beloved, Whinnom pointed to a lightly veiled desire to "yager con fembra plagentera." Whinnom's spirited defense of the cancioneros led him to a general criticism of hispanomedievalists: "No creo que los medievalistas corramos el riesgo de infravalorar el idealismo de la Edad Media. Al contrario, me parece muy probable que lo hayamos sobrevalorado" (1981, 24). Whinnom's groundbreaking work on the pervasive amphibologia obscena of fifteenth-century amatory verse, which began nearly thirty years ago (1966, 196869), has encouraged much-needed close readings of individual cancionero poems (see Deyermond 1978, Macpherson 1985, and Fulks 1989, to cite just three representative examples). But the resistance to its bawdiness is still very much in evidence, for example, in Macpherson's stated preference for poems in which the obscenity is less directly expressed, those in his view "designed not to offend, but to compliment the lady and to rejoice in an event of significance to both" (1985, 62). Both in its masculinist assumption that the cancionero poets represent women's experience in any way, much less equally with men's, and in its valorization of gentility over obscenity, Macpherson upholds the cultural superiority of idealism over materialism, of the "high" over the "low," and perpetuates the notion that the characteristic ambiguity of courtly love
a defense
cancionero poetry's merits
is,

of

by

insisting

validity

aspects Parker rejected, that

the extent to

which

idealized

lyric
It

is just good clean would seem then

fian.

that the obscenity

also

of the

cancioneros has
it

been neglected

not only out of scholarly jjM^or but

because

exposes the "ungentleman-

For modern editions of the entire Cancionero see Jauralde Pou and Bellon Cazaban

(1974), and the

more

accessible

contained (without glosses) in Diez Borque (1977); the edition by Varo (1981)
usefiil.
*

one by Dominguez (1978). The "Carajicomedia" alone is is the most

Although published

in 1981, five years before Parker's,

Whinnom's book was

written

with knowledge of that work.

BARBARA
ly " basis

F.

WEISSBERGER

223

of courtly longing and lays to rest once and for all the traditional estimation of this literature as "pro-feminist.'"* Only recently have critics begun to examine the serious cultural function underlying the playfulness of Spanish
courtly love lyrics.^ Lacarra (1988), for example, notes the
superiority even as

way

in

which the

court poet's idealization of the dama actually upholds the ideology of masculine
it

appears to overturn

it.

And Weiss

(1991a) has skillfully

analyzed the central role such verse played in the male courtier's creation and
affirmation of his masculine identity before his peers and superiors, a social
transaction in
exchange.''

which females function

that the higher the value

as

sexual and symbolic objects of

The premise

of the exchange object, the greater

puts
it

the status accrued to the courtier poet

representation of her

who

into circulation, puts into

and the of her aristocratic subjects. Very little has been written on this subject. R. O.Jones's 1962 essay "Isabel la Catolica y el amor cortes" is useful for its overview of the numerous cancionero poets who encomiastically addressed the queen as the courtly beloved.^ One common feature of such paeans is the sacrilegiously gendered maternal comparison of Isabel to the Virgin, as in the following verses of
sharper focus the other perspective of this essay: namely.
Isabel

Queen

power and gender

in the literary creations

Anton de Montoro, written

reyna soberana /
si

shortly after her accession to the throne: "Alta

la hija

fuerades antes vos / que

(ed.

de Santana / de vos

el hijo

de Dios / recibiera carne humana"

1984, 131). But Jones does not

Cantera Burgos and Carrete Parrondo

the equal frequency with which Thus Alvarez Gato complains that the inequality of virtue and status between him and his beloved causes him to tremble in her presence "si quiero hablar no oso / si quiero callar no puedo;

comment on

the queen inspires paternal fear in the poets.

como

hijo temeroso / ante el padre rrencilloso /

(cited in

me

cubro de vuestro

miedo"

Jones 1962, 61). Cartagena represents his courtly goddess as double-gendered, as simultaneously paternal and maternal: "Una cosa es de

^
it

Classic formulations

of

this

view can be found

in

Onate (1938) and Omstein (1941);

is

persists in recent scholarship, e.g.,

^

Dominguez

(1988, 31-45).

The

discussion of the mascuhnist ideology conditioning courdy lyrics

more devel-

oped

for other

European

Hteratures, notably Provencal

and Old French. See, for example.

see

Bums
''

(1985),

Kay

(1990, especially chap. 3), and Finke (1992).

cancionero poets,

For feminist readings of individual female

Fulks (1989) and

Whetnall (1992).
'

For documentation on the influence of chivalric

literary

and

visual representations

on

Isabel's poUtical formation, see

Michael (1989). His approach does not take gender into

life as

account and assumes a naive conflation of art and

the masculinist chivalric ideology

well as an uncritical absorption of

on

the part of the queen: "Like the lives of their Trasta-

led

maran predecessors and Burgundian and Hapsburg successors, the hves Isabel and Fernando were the books they read and the tapestries they viewed in which they splendidly acted out the roles that the literary chivalric code assigned to them" (110).

224
notar / que
rifar /

MALE SEXUAL ANXIETIES

mucho

tarde contesce / hazer que temer y

amar

/ esten juntos sin

Dios pertenesce" (cited in Jones 1962, 57). Clearly, these cannot be dismissed as mere courtly topoi, given Isabel's real as opposed to ascribed power. The converse Montoro makes pathetically clear the power the queen and her policies wield over one particular group in a poem Kenneth Scholberg has called "una de las protestas poeticas mas impreesto a

porque

sionantes del siglo

XV"

(1971, 319).

Here

again, but

more

urgently,

we

find

the construction of the

monarch

as

feminine and forgiving, accomplished by

assimilating her to the tradition of "Jesus as mother":

Pues, reyna de gran estado,

hija de angelica

madre,

aquel Dios crucificado,

muy

abierto su costado

e ynclinado,

dixo: "Perdonalos, Padre."

Pues reyna de auctoridad,

esta

muerte

sin sosiego

cese ya por tu piedad

y bondad
hasta alia por Navidad,

quando saue bien

(ed.

el

fuego.

Cantera Burgos and Carrete Parrondo

1984, 134)

"Carajicomedia" also takes pains to construct Isabel's power in terms of gender and sexuality, albeit in a very different tone. I will base my analysis of
this

ambitious w^ork on two theoretical propositions:

first,

that the critical

separation of "high" and "low" culture and the accompanying devaluation of

the latter distorts literary history (though not quite in the sense suggested

by

and second, that feminist criticism, premised on the inevitable association of gender and power, is uniquely qualified to address if not correct that distortion. To do so, I will confront "Carajicomedia" with the work it parodies, Juan de Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna. The two poems neatly frame the life of Isabel, since Mena addressed his to Juan II two years before the birth of the daughter who would inherit his kingdom, and the anonymous parody, first appearing in the 1519 Cancionero general, was probably composed near the end of her life (Varo 1981, 80). Placing a text whose obscenity exemplifies the "low" style on an equal footing with Mena's epic, the epitome of the "high," reveals that they are both examples of the highly sexualized political discourse that was wielded alike by supporters and opponents of Isabel. Carlos Varo's view that "Carajicomedia" is a libertarian defense of pleasure and a critique of political and moral repression in Isabelline Spain is undeniable (1981, 49). But it is possible to go beyond this formulation to show that in this case the carnivalesque critique, what Arthur Stamm calls "the radical opposition to the illegitimately powerful" (quoted in Stallybrass and White 1986, 19),
[1966]);

Whinnom

BARBARA

F.

WEISSBERGER

225

is profoundly affected by the gender of the illegitimately powerful one. The poem's marked anxiety about masculine sexual inadequacy becomes a response to female sovereignty, in itself an anomalous condition that inverts the entire medieval gender hierarchy. Finally, reading "backwards" and "upwards," I will argue that the sexual terms of "Carajicomedia" 's parody uncover the extent to which Laberinto's own authorization of male sovereignty depends on more concealed, but no less urgent, anxieties about female sexuality and marriage. Thus the opposite poles of this poetic hierarchy together will be seen to affirm two primary tenets of feminist theory: first, as Gayle Rubin formulated in a nowclassic essay (1975), that control of and traffic in women lie at the heart of social organization and political institutions; second, that relationships of gender and power in the family are elementary political forms (Bristol 1985, 178). My reading of "Carajicomedia" is admittedly paradoxical, for on the face of it we might well expect a carnivalesque text like "Carajicomedia" to celebrate Isabelline power as an instance of the "women on top."*^ As I later suggest, a possible answer to the paradox lies in Isabel's own self-fashioning as the restorer of patriarchal religious, moral, and social values to Spain. "Carajicomedia" is a fine example of the carnivalesque style in almost every sense. On a most fundamental level it accomplishes a thoroughgoing inversion of the hierarchy of upper body over lower body. This is all the more striking because of the remarkable care taken to preserve the sonorous metrical regularity and rhyme scheme of the original arte mayor, even as every "high" element of the original's content is debased. Thus, Mena's majestic first line, "Al muy prepotente Don Juan el segundo" (stanza 1) becomes the equally impressive "Al muy impotente carajo profundo" (p. 150).'^ Only after letting the metrical identification of Juan II with a flaccid penis sink in does the poet go on in the second verse to assign the member to its rightfiil owner, the poem's protagonist, Diego Fajardo. The classical allusions so prominent in Mena's poetics are similarly debased. Thus, in the second stanza, Mena's Virgilian evocation "Tus casos falaces, Fortuna, cantamos" (stanza 2) is altered but shghtly to read "Tus casos falaces, Carajo, cantamos" (p. 152). Similarly, Mena's proud affirmation that the deeds of the Cid and Castile's other martial heroes are equal to those of the Romans, but are forgotten "por falta de auctores" (stanza 4), allows the parodist to insist that Diego Fajardo's heroism "en amores" matches that of the Cid "en bataUas" and that his fame is "daiiada por ser de sus obras los coiios autores" (p. 153). This is not, alas, a recognition of female auctoritas, of some early modern
.

The

phrase

"woman on
late

top"

is

term used by Davis (1975) in her discussion of fesquote from Vasvari

tival
'^

gender inversions in

medieval France.
I

All references to Laherinto in the text are to stanza numbers;

Fainberg's edition (1976). References to "Carajicomedia" are to page edition (1981).

numbers

The

exact stanza-to-stanza correspondence between the

in the Varo two works breaks

down

in stanza

48 of the parody.

226
"ecriture feminine."

MALE SEXUAL ANXIETIES

It is a

mock-lament over the inadequacy of the

phallus,

not
sic

as

pen, but

as penis.

Generically, then, the "Carajicomedia" inverts a clas-

epic into an elegy, a lament for the death from old age of Diego Fajardo's
as

penis (although,

we

shall see, it

does have a mock-epic ending).

The transcodings characteristic of carnival are also in evidence in this text. The poet in Laherinto has a vision of the allegorical wheels of time past, present, and future containing seven astrological circles that reveal to him the cure
to Castile's moral and political
ills.

Diego

Fajardo's search for a cure for his

two round and and one long and motile, that suddenly appear between his legs. But his visionary journey through the seven astrological circles takes place on a purely spatial plane, specifically, Castile and Aragon, beginning with stanza 58, "La orden primera de la Luna, aplicada a Valladolid" (p. 193). Guiding him on his tour is a grotesque counterpart to Mena's beautiful young Providencia: "una puta vieja, alcahueta, y hechicera" (p. 155; the influence of Celestina obviously extends beyond the work's title). Fajardo's urgent plea to this senexa makes explicit the sexual disorder that will inform the entire work:
"carajo cansado" begins with a similar vision of three "wheels,"
still

Dame
eres a

remedio, pues tu sola una quien pedirle me atrevo,

pues resucitas y hazes de nuevo lo muerto, lo viejo, sin dubda ninguna.

las

Pon mi potencia en cuemo de luna, venas del miembro estiendan, engorden,

(p.

vayan mis hechos en tanta desorden, que no dexe casa que no tenga cuna.

155)

As
is

will

become

clear

to accomplish exactly

when we turn to Laberinto, Diego Fajardo's elusive goal what Mena exhorts Juan II to prevent: the bastardizadel todo se

tion of Castilian bloodlines.

noso

/ fuego de

Venus

Thus Mena's urgent "e los viles actos del libidimaten" (stanza 114) is turned upside down
(p. 226).^

in Fajardo's libertine

"Hodamos de forma que fama tengamos"

"Carajicomedia" debases the
status

On
in part

a material level

of Laberinto

as

equal

wisdom and

philosophical auctoritas to the classical epics, a status created in

by the poem's medieval and Golden Age commentators like Heman Nuiiez and El Brocense.'^ "Carajicomedia" comes with its own version of the famous Hernan Niifiez glosses, complete with Latin quotations from the
Putas Patrum
(p.

155), biblical references ("Inter natus

muherum non

surrexit

maior puta vieja que Maria la Buy^a" [p. 163]), and citations of auctores hke "Putarco en la Coronica de las illustrisimas Bagassas" (p. 193). The heroes and heroines of ancient Greece and Rome and contemporary

'" I address the issue of genealogy at greater length below. " See Weiss (1990, chap. 4), for discussion of the role of commentary an "intellectual nobility" in the late Middle Ages.

in the creation

of


BARBARA
Castile that
F.

WEISSBERGER

227

views in the House of Fortune are replaced in "Carajihorde of Spanish /jwr^s. The awed protagonist's task is to relate their virtues, to individualize and immortalize them. So we meet the miracle worker Ana de Medina, "en cuyo coiio se pruevan Uegar / carajos elados, s'encienden de fuego" (p. 180). And Gracia, of whom the gloss says "Publica su coiio ser ospital de carajos, o ostal de cojones" (p. 180). In all, sixty-six whores are named in the poem, an entire "estirpe de putas atan luxuriosa" (p. 179) that mocks the Gothic "stirpe de reyes atan gloriosa" (p. 43) Mena proudly

Mena
a

comedia" by

claims for Spain.

whores however, profoundly ambivalent. As such it exemplifies an aspect of carnival that undermines the essentialist view of festivity as populist and subversive. This aspect is that, as Stallybrass and White note, "carnival
she leads

Fajardo's attitude toward his Celestinesque guide and the horde of

him

to

is,

often violently abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups

women,

ethnic and religious minorities, those

abjection" (1986, 19).

who

don't belong

in a process

of displaced

On

the face of it, certainly,

many of Fajardo's
example
is

"vidas putescas"

seem

to celebrate female sexual appetite.

An

the

story of Francisca de Saldana,

who

marries a certain Arab

named Catamaymon.

her family objects, she answers with a saucy "mas quiero asno que me que cavallo que me derrueque" (p. 186), a bawdy take on the proverb "mas quiero asno que me lleve que cavallo que me derrueque" (p. 186). But the joke also betrays a simultaneous masculinist projection of the primacy of the penis and the corresponding fear of its inabiUty to fill the void of the vagina. The reiterated allusions to the menacing size of the whore's vagina and its engulfing capacity makes this clear; for example, Francisca de Laguna bears the telling moniker Rabo d'Azero [Iron Ass] (p. 170) and La Napolitana is similarly noted for her "rabadilla, que tenia muy hundida y tan grande como una gran canal de agua" (p. 171). And several of the anecdotes are darker in tone. There is, for example, the comeuppance Mariflores gets when she insults
llene

When

two

stablehands:
d'ella los dos, la
cavallar,
. . .

metieron en casa del Almirante y meconvocaron toda la famiUa de casa, y luego de presente se hallaron por cuenta veynte y cinco ombres de todos estados, bien apercibidos; y, prestamente desatacados, comen^aron a desbarrigar con ella hasta que la asolaron por tierra y le hicieron todo el
tida

Pues travando

en una camara

coiio lagunajo d'esperma. (194)

The story ends with the leader of the group calling in two black stableboys, at which point the panicked Mariflores runs off, to the merriment of all. Although both tales are racist as well as racy, the former puts the extraordinary sexual prowess attributed to the Arab at the service of female pleasure, while
the latter uses the similar prowess attributed to blacks to enhance the sadistic

humor of a gang
I

rape.

aware that the "horizon of expectations" for humor among the early sixteenth-century audience of "Carajicomedia" may have made no such dis-

am


228

MALE SEXUAL ANXIETIES

tinction

work

between these two jokes. But the degree of exphcit misogyny in the I wish to make, which is the inadequacy of Fajardo's erection to deal with so many aggressively insatiable females. As he whines to
is

beside the point

his guide:

Pues do ay tantas putas, ninguna obedece

carajo

ninguno que no

sea

muy

loco;

para

esto te llamo, sefiora,

qu'el triste del

mio
a

y invoco, de cuerdo padece.

(p.

165)

The

old

whore provides
hand, but
it is

temporary solution by taking Fajardo firmly (and

Before accepting his forced retirement, however, the hero summons up the strength for one more fight. In an hilarious mock-epic battle between the "carajos" and the "coiios" reminiscent of the battle of Carnal and Cuaresma in Libro de buen amor, the poet parodies stanza by stanza Mena's stirring account of the battle between Christians and Moors at Gibraltar, led by the ill-fated Conde de Niebla. The well-armed warrior and his troops charge forward "dando empuxones, a modo de guerra" (p. 227), but the soldiers are met not with fear but with delight:
literally) in

a losing battle.

Los coiios, veyendo crecer

los rabafios,

y viendo carajos de diversas partes venir tan arrechos con sus estandartes, holgaron de vello con gozos estraiios.
Fajardo's forces

(p.
as

227)
Niebla's did, but they are

do not exactly
ninguno

die

from drowning,

engulfed
asi los

when

"los floxos carajos a entrar se tornaron, / los cofios hambrientos

d'ellos ni canta ni llora" (p. 229).

tragaron, / que

This debacle

brings to an obvious climax the poem's accumulated references to the all-de-

vouring vagina.

It

also strengthens the parallel,

made

explicitly in the

opening
is

invocation, between Fortuna and Carajo. As Niebla's military

to the unpredictability of the seas, so Fajardo's sexual
cally to the insatiability

power

subject

power

is

subject specifiinstability

of the vagina and more broadly to the

of

sexual roles.
vision,

The

array of libidinous

women who populate

the hapless Fajardo's

be they compliant whores ("Madalenica ... la qual nunca dio esquiva [p. 214]), or savvy procuresses ("Mas la sabia mano de quien me guiava / viendo mi floxo carajo perplexo, / le sova, le flota le estira el pellejo" [p. 168]), express not a "metafisica del placer" (Varo 1981, 47) but a fear of the uncontrollability of the feminine: "Pues do ay tantas putas, ninguna obedece / carajo ninguno que no sea muy loco; / para esto te llamo, sefiora, y invoco, / qu'el triste del mio de cuerdo padece" (p. 165). As I will show in what follows, this fear of the uncontrollable, unstable power of the feminine the ever-present threat of the erica to the carajo is a response to the absolute power of one particular female, represented as "the mother of all whores" ("la
respuesta"

prima de todas
'^

las

putas del universo"

[p. 198]).'^

am

indebted to Julian Weiss for pointing out the importance of the "Carajicomedia"

BARBARA
The
first

F.

WEISSBERGER

229

Diego Fajardo's pixa and the who in 1974, by a stroke of scholarly fortune, was able to identify the protagonist of the parody. He was the son of Alonso Fajardo, a priest and a hero of the Reconquest of Granada. In 1486, in recognition of his assault on Ronda, Isabel and Ferdinand granted Alonso a privilege "para que pudiese establecer mancebias en todos los pueblos conquistados y que se conquistasen."'^ Soon he owned brothels throughout the former Kingdom of Granada, including a particularly lucrative one of one hundred prostitutes located in Malaga (p. 74). In 1492 that city initiated a protracted legal fight against the abuses o{ the putero Fajardo and his henchmen.''* Upon his death Alonso bequeathed this valuable property to the son who had accompanied him on his military missions, Diego Fajardo. It was left to Carlos Varo to note that of the some five dozen prostitutes who parade through "Carajicomedia" no fewer than eight are tocayas (namesakes) of Isabel. Each of them furthermore bears an epithet that associates her with the queen, for example, the "ramera cortesana" Ysabel de Leon (189), or Ysabel la Guerrera "amiga de Fajardo" (172). This plethora of Isabelline prostitutes could be coincidental, but their coinciding on at least two occasions with explicit references to the queen is not. Varo suggests that these are in fact "guifios de complicidad" directed at Isabel and that if proven, "las implicaciones politicas de la 'Carajicomedia' darian a la parodia un sesgo y una intencion en los que hasta ahora las ediciones anteriores del Cancionero de burlas no habian reparado" (p. 172).'^ But the editor cannot fully accept his own conscholar to connect the demise of

pohtics of the Cathohc

Queen was Alfonso

Canales,

poet's use of the

Conde de Niebla

episode and of the Carajo/Fortuna parallelism.

Mena

develops the comparison between the "desordenan^a" of fortune and the unpredictability of
the seas in stanzas 11-12.
'^

Cited by Canales (1976, 74) from

document

in a nineteenth-century lawsuit to
his

recover the property for the Fajardo family. After Diego Fajardo's death,

devout widow,
she obtained

Leonor de Mendoza, convinced her son Luis

Papal bulls to convert the mancebia into a
the Mercederian Friars to oppose the plan.

to cede her the brothel.

When

beaterio,

her son objected and enUsted the help of

So

great

was the scandal

that followed that in

1519
^*

(the date "Carajicomedia"

first

appeared in print) Charles

intervened, ordering the

"beaterio de Magdalenas Arrepentidas" to be placed under royal protection.

Galan Sanchez and Lopez Beltran (1984) study

this litigation

and

later

Fajardo family

lawsuits over the property.

''

Some of these

implications have been noted by

as

Marquez Villanueva

(1987). First, the

Catholic Monarchs, in spite of their reputation

highly moralistic rulers, did not face

is

squarely the problem of unchaste clergy (the ascribed author of "Carajicomedia"

Fray

Bugeo Montesino, an obvious

allusion to Isabel's favorite preacher,

Ambrosio Montesino).
it

Secondly, Isabel and Ferdinand's "progressive" pohcy toward prostitution treated

as

another

source of royal revenues and a reward for the loyal service of their courtiers (446). Lacarra
discusses

ways

in

which

royal officials profited from prostitution during this period, e.g.,

all

from

the "derecho de perdices," a tribute exacted from

in

prostitutes

by decree of the monarchs

1476 and 1498. In her opinion,

it

was Fernando

who was

largely responsible for these

230

MALE SEXUAL ANXIETIES

queen
la

elusion, namely, that the poet really does call the

"la

prima de todas

las

putas del universo ...

la

fragua de los carajos ...

(p.

diosa de la luxuria, la

madre de
that

los

huerfanos cojones"

198).

He

hastens to reassure his readers

acusacion, no exenta de desvergonzado atrevimiento, no tiene la mas remota justificacion historica, pues, al contrario, la reina castellana fue modelo como mujer y como esposa. El primer testimonio en este sentido nos lo ofrece el historiador oficial de los Reyes Catolicos, Hernando del Pulgar, con nobles y energicas palabras: "dio de si un gran exemplo de casada, que durante el tiempo de su matrimonio e reinar, nunca ovo en su corte privados en quien pusiese el amar, sino ella del Rey, y el Rey
la

della." (p. 74)

The mention of Pulgar here

is

particularly apposite if we

keep in mind what

less

New

Historicism has demonstrated, that historical texts are no

construc-

tions than fictional texts. '^

From

this perspective,

Varo's

own

apologia for the

queen belongs
Palencia,
rival's

to the simultaneous

and contradictory historiographical conof

a

struction of Isabel as "perfecta casada" and "mujer viril" that Pulgar, Alonso de

and other

cronistas initiated as part

campaign to

discredit her

claim to the throne and justify her

own

accession.^^

Isabel's

disputed succession to the Castilian throne and the subsequent

difficult consolidation

lation

of her power are intimately associated with the manipuof what might be called a "discourse of impotence." Enrique IV's ru-

his putative inability to control the sexual appetites of and the resulting supposed illegitimacy of their daughter are issues that have been debated by historians for more than five hundred years. ^*^ This is not the place to delve into the many ways that Isabel's propagandists we must assume with her full approval, if not instigation took political advantage of these unproven sexual deviances. Here I can only reiterate what I have suggested elsewhere, that one of the new queen's most pressing tasks, at least in the early years of her reign, was the reassertion of patriarchal values in

mored homosexuality,
his wife,

in

"normas impositivas y represivas," since they were identical to ones that had been Aragon for a century (1993, 39-40). For a feminist treatment of prostitution
Spain, see Perry (1990).
in particular skillfully analyzes
"^

in effect

in early

modem

Montrose

New

Historicism's

acknowledgment of the

of texts" and the "textuality of history" (1986, 305). His work on the literary construction and reproduction of the power of Ehzabeth I of England in the historical docu"historicity

ments of her reign provides

a stimulating

model

for similar

much-needed

studies

on

the

CathoUc queen.

" At

the same time, as Tate (1994) demonstrates in the case of Palencia, the official
(as

were ambivalent about Isabel's "prurito de dominar" noblewomen, hke Beatriz de Bobadilla and Leonor de Pimentel).
chroniclers
'"

well

as that

of other

See Eisenberg (1976). For the most balanced

(1964).

modem

view of these matters, see

Azcona

BARBARA
Castile, values that

F.

WEISSBERGER

231

had been allegedly inverted by the impotence (figurative or of her father and half-brother.''^ But how was she to achieve these goals, which had to include the restoration of legitimacy and male dominance in the royal family and by extension in the nation, while claiming absolute
literal)

pow^er for herself?^^

is that she had to marry. Impossible was the strategy adopted by the other Elizabeth, who successfully propagated the belief that the inviolability of the English body politic depended on the inviolability of her physical body. Elizabeth I skillfully replaced the queenly obligation to insure the monarchic succession with the princely obligation to nurture the state. ^' Isabel chose a less impregnable position in marrying Ferdinand, presenting herself simultaneously as queen consort and queen regnant. Her very public insistence on the equal status of the two monarchs, as evidenced by the "capitulaciones de matrimonio,""^^ was due not only to the long-standing Castilian-Aragonese rivalry but also to the traditional inferiority of woman in marriage. Another strategy used by Isabel to forge a nation-state and impose her power on it was her extirpation, through the Inquisition and her muchvaunted religious reform movement, of contaminating feminine or effeminate elements in Spain: Jews, witches, homosexuals, or Muslims. Diego Fajardo's ambivalence toward the carnivalesque heroines of "Carajicomedia" he admires, despises, but mostly feels threatened by their libidinal energy is more than a criticism of the hypocrisy of the clergy and nobles who profit sexually and financially from the traffic in women, more than a critique of the queen's complicity in it. It is a continuation of a discourse that Isabel and her supporters so effectively used against Enrique IV and Juana of Castile. But in "Carajicomedia" it is her ally rather than her rival who is accused of impotence. This comic turning of the tables is an attack on Isabel's perceived masculinity, manifested in her anomalous status as female sovereign and in her unauthorized assumption of the virile, authoritarian role Mena tried to fashion

One

answer, perhaps the crucial one,

for her

for her father in Laberinto de Fortuna.

''^

explore
at

this further in

my

"La construccion de

la

femineidad de Isabel

la

Catolica,"

presented

the

XI Congress of
(1987),
for

the Asociacion Intemacional de Hispanistas, Irvine, Calif.,

August, 1992; submitted for publication.

^"

See Jordan
as

sixteenth-century British

political

writers'

rejection

of

gynecocracy
^'

an inversion of the

traditional, divinely sanctioned

gender/power hierarchy.

Marcus describes the various

as

strategies Elizabeth

used to reinforce the sense of her

"body pohtic"

male by,

e.g.,

dwelling on her virginity; referring to herself as prince rather

than queen; appealing to her composite nature

the frailty of her female

"body natural" comwriters, princi-

bined with the strength of her "body pohtic"; giving her famous Armada speech in martial

costume (1986, 138-39). The

pally Shakespeare,

effects

of this self-fashioning on contemporary

have been studied extensively.

is

" The document

reproduced in Puyol (1934, 80-84); Ferdinand reneged on

it.

232

MALE SEXUAL ANXIETIES

influence of Mena's

The
a

poem on

Isabel's

moral and

political

education

is

commonplace of Spanish

literary history.

Menendez y Pelayo saw

Isabel's

reign as the fulfillment of Mena's utopic vision: "[Mena] puso sus suefios,

en el debil y pusilanime D. Juan II; pero aun en esto que hacia sino adelantarse con fatidica voz al curso de los tiempos, esperando del padre lo que habia de realizar la hija?" (quoted in Clarke 1973, 9). In her study of Las Trescientas as classic epic, Clarke romantically concurs:
sueiios de poeta al fin,

have failed to know well and from her most important poem of her century. She could hardly have failed to be impressed by the poet's vision of an expanded and unified Spain, a vision that may have been instrumental in moving her to the generosity and the courage necessary for the national expansion that took place under her reign. (9)
Isabel la Catolica could hardly
earliest years the
. . .

There were, however,

her father's destiny.

significant obstacles to the daughter's fulfillment

of

Not the least of these was her gender. As Constance Jordan has noted, women, whose domestic and political subordination was considered divinely ordained, were not deemed fit to rule in the early modern
period (1987, 42122).
praises the virtues

We

find evidence of the inconceivability of female

in the Circle

sovereignty in the Laberinto

itself,

of the Moon. Although

Mena
la

ofJuan

II's first

wife, Maria of Castile, he can only conceive

of her ruling

"si fuesse

trocada su umanidat, / segund que se lee de

de

Ceneo"

(stanza 76).

Circumstances made it possible for Isabel to achieve the inconceivable, to assume the throne of Castile as a woman. As I have discussed, those circumstances had much to do with the perceived sexual laxity Mena decries in his poem. In the space remaining I will use the transgressive perspective of "Carajicomedia" to briefly examine what has gone unremarked in Laberinto: its pervasive preoccupation with chastity, or more precisely, with male control of a
female sexuality perceived
It is

as

threatening to the sociopolitical order.

the seven circles in Fortune's wheels are

no accident

that

two out of

dedicated to the virtue of chastity. Mena's praise for the second exemplary

of the Moon, Maria of Aragon, wife of Alfonso V el acknowledges her success as guardian of the realm while her husband was engaged in the conquest of Naples, but he reserves his real enthusiasm for the rare female virtue of sexual self-control:

w^oman

in the Circle
is

magndnimo,

telling.

He

Muy

pocas reinas de Grecia

se falla,

que limpios oviessen guardado

los lechos

a sus maridos demientra los fechos

de Troya non ivan en fin por batalla mas una Esiona es esta sin falla, nueva Penelope aquesta por suerte. (Stanza 78)

More

problematically praiseworthy, at least for the

third

modern

reader,

is

the

masochism of the

and

final

woman placed in

the circle, the famous Maria

BARBARA
Coronel,

F.

WEISSBERGER

233

who

rather than sully her husband's

bed "quiso con fuego veneer

sus

fogueras" (stanza 79) by thrusting a firebrand in her vagina.

The

political

clear in the final stanzas

motivation for the extensive treatment of chastity becomes of the circle. There the poet exhorts Juan II to "la

vida politica siempre zelar, / por que pudi^i^ia se pueda guardar" (stanza 81), and calls for the nobility to live chastely so that "en vilipendio de muchos linages, / viles deleites

non

vi^ien

la

gente" (stanza 83). While

it

is

true that

Mena
that

goes on to define

castidat as the

avoidance of any vice,

it is

equally clear

he

finds female adultery particularly disturbing.

The

necessary link be-

tween monogamy,

patrilinear inheritance,
is

and monarchy studied by Georges

Duby
In this

(1983) for medieval France

clearly

drawn here

for Castile as well.^-^

way

the most important political

poem of

the Trastamaran dynasty

attributes the interruption

state to

of Castile's national mission and the disorder of the

becomes even more obvious in the Circle of Venus, which complements the first circle in its praise of those who "en el fuego de su juventud" (stanza 100) turn vice into virtue through the sacrament of marriage. But the third circle is mostly concerned with attacking those responsible for the "muchos linatges caidos en
committers of incest, and homosexuals (stanza 101). Mena's preoccupation with "el amor ilicito" is not confined to the appropriate circles of Diana and Venus but obtrudes at other moments as well. In the Circle of Apollo, for example, after extolling the prudence of ancient philosophers, prophets, and astrologers, he condemns their negative counterparts, the necromancers and witches. Figured here is the infamous Medea (stanza 130) but also the less well known Licinia and Publicia, Roman adulteresses who murdered their husbands with poisoned brews. Their crimes provoke an outburst that, as Maria Rosa Lida notes (1950, 290), is a grotesque misapplication of the Sermon on the Mount. Christ's injunction not to let one's left hand
(stanza 100): the adulterers, fornicators,
especially,

the weakening of feudal patriarchy. Mena's gendered agenda

mengua"

know what
their wives

one's right hand

is

doing

when

tion to husbands to apply a swift and secret

of sexual misdeeds

(stanza 132).

giving alms becomes an admoniremedy should they even suspect We can only guess what kind of

remedy

is

implied.

^ Of the movement

toward centralization and consolidation of power within the family

unit in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a

movement

that benefited the

church and the

monarchy, Aronstein notes

that

"the

move

to patrilinear descent both obscured

it

and

strengthened the woman's role in the generation of the family; while

effectively

reduced

name and his inheritance to produced an increased anxiety about chastity and potential betrayal. A man could not choose his heir, by law that right fell to the oldest born within his marriage. What
another,
it

her to the mere conduit through which one male passed on his
also

if his wife, sold

by her family and purchased by

himself, claimed the right to traffic in

henelf?" (1991, 119).

234 That

MALE SEXUAL ANXIETIES

Mena

views the family

as a

the advice he gives the king

as patriarch at

microcosm of the state becomes the end of this circle:

clear in

Magnifico principe, non lo demande la grand honestad de los vuestros siglos

que se crien mortales vestiglios que matan la gente con poca vianda;
sufrir
la

mucha

clemencia,

la

ley

mucho

blanda

del vuestro

tiempo non cause malicias

de nuevas Medeas e nuevas Publi^ias;

baste la otra miseria

que anda. (Stanza 135)

As

husband must control

has

his

unruly wife, so a king must control his disor-

derly subjects.

The foregoing
of
Castile's

shown

the extent to

which Mena connects the decline

noble families, the stagnation of the Reconquest, and the general

civil unrest of the times to a loss of pudigia, "virtud nes9esaria de ser en la fembra" (stanza 131). No doubt I might have posited the interrelatedness of power, gender, and sex in Laberinto without the carnivalesque aid of "Carajicomedia," but my point here is that the existence and popularity of the "low" text absolutely compels such a reading of the "high": the politics of impotence

and sexual license expose the politics of virility and sexual control. At the same time, it is necessary to reiterate that "Carajicomedia" 's transgression of "high" culture is profoundly contradictory. True, the parodist mocks the masculine, authoritarian, repressive values that Mena urged on the weak king. But he simultaneously attacks the dangerous appropriation of those same values by Isabel, both in her anomalous status as female sovereign and in her virile self-fashioning. In this sense, the poem's contestatory aim is deeply compromised. I will conclude by recalling the image that graces the cover of Carlos Varo's excellent edition of "Carajicomedia": an Iberian ithyphallic bronze. Whether
expressive of the post-censorship euphoria after the death of Franco or intend-

ed to encourage idle bookstore browsers to part with their money, is not this of a man with an erection nearly as long as he is tall also an ironic overcompensation, an unwitting admission of the enduring cultural power of impotence?
statuette

Old Dominion

University

Cultural Studies on the

Gaya Ciencia

MARK
students

D.

JOHNSTON

humanities can be unaware or teachen Few cipHnary conglomeration known

in the
as "cultural studies"

that an interdis-

has lately

come

to

the forefront of current humanistic scholarship, especially in the study of

contemporary culture. The arrival of cultural studies in the wake of so many semiotics, structuralism, reader-response, post-structurcritical models alism, the French Freud, deconstruction, New Historicism, and so forth might incline the more cynical (or the overworked) among us to dismiss this new methodology as another seasonal change in theoretical wardrobe decreed by the designers of academic fashion. However, the development of cultural studies in fact antedated these later trends and the field had produced a very extensive body of scholarship well before its ascendency in the United States. Consequently, it would be hard to deny its increasing importance and even harder to find nothing of value or interest in its diverse range of concerns. Indeed, for anyone curious about fifteenth-century Castilian literature, cultural
other

studies
craft

may offer some particularly useful perspectives for analyzing the poetic known in that era as the gaya ciencia and usually called today the "candoI

nero lyric." In this essay

want

to review

some of those

perspectives, describe

and suggest in conclusion how their application encourages us to rethink our own involvement in the teaching and study of Castilian literature. Obviously, this brief survey can only deal very generally with two fields as broad as cultural studies and the gaya ciencia. For that reason I have avoided firequent references to theorists of cultural studies and will discuss in detail only a few passages from the Cancionero de Baena
their value for understanding the gaya ciencia,

for purposes

of

illustration.

The other

essays in this

volume

offer excellent

detailed guidance for readers

new

to study

of the

cancionero lyric; to those

interested in exploring scholarship

from cultural studies, the works cited by During (1993), Easthope (1991), Hall (1980), Johnson (1987), and C. Nelson (1991) offer excellent points of departure.

Gaya Ciencia and Multidisciplinary "History" The claim that cultural studies can help understand

fifteenth-century Castilian

236
gaya

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

ciencia may seem implausible to anyone familiar with the focus on contemporary questions that characterizes most cultural studies. Engagement with current affairs either in the lived experience of real subjects or in actual exercises of social and political power is virtually a defining feature of this field. Studying the past certainly limits this engagement, but I suspect that insistence on this distinction indicates the still evolving theorization of cultural studies and must change as the field considers arguments from the philosophy of history or the methods of social history. Cultural studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalism already face the methodological problem of understanding the historical alterity of the Middle Ages, which scholars like Jauss (1977) and Patterson (1987) have explored for medieval studies. My conclusion will suggest some specific ways that application of cultural studies

to the gaya ciencia engages current academic, political, or social questions, thus
fulfilling

the obligation to analyze cancionero lyric "then and

now, there and

here."

As

it

happens, works from cultural studies do regularly appeal to "history,"

this

but they use

term to mean contemporary context rather than past events.

Cultural studies characteristically gives close attention to the particularity,

complexity, and specificity of culture. This concern for context has fostered an
aggressively interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and even antidisciplinary perIts objects and techniques of investigation borrow freely from all of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. This eclecticism is clearly a virtue for many scholars in cultural studies, who prefer to resist dogmatic theorizing in favor of employing whatever disciplinary methodologies are necessary to produce knowledge. At the same time, it promotes careful critical analysis of the social, political, or economic conditions involved in any discipline's definition of its objects and procedures. The deliberately interdisciplinary scope of cultural studies thus reinforces awareness of the field's engagement with contemporary society. This interdisciplinary concern for historical context seems imperative to developing our understanding ot\\Q gaya ciencia. The need to consider the larger social, political, or economic implications of the cancionero lyric ought to be patent from Juan Alfonso de Baena's well-known characterization of this art in the prologue to his great anthology:

spective.
fields

Es vna escryptura e conpusycion muy sotil e byen graciosa, e es dulce e muy agradable a todos los oponientes e rrespondientes d'ella e conponedores e oyentes;
la

qual ^ien^ia e avisa^ion e dotrina que d'ella depende

por gratia infusa del senor Dios que la enbya e influye en aquel o aquellos que byen e sabya e sotyl e derechamente la saben fazer e ordenar e conponer e limar e escandir e medir por sus pies e pausas, e por sus consonantes e sylabas e acentos, e por artes sotiles e de muy diuersas e syngulares nonbrangas, e avn asymismo es arte de tan eleuado entendimiento e de tan sotil engeno que la non puede aprender, nin aver, nin alcan^ar, nin saber bien nin como deue, saluo todo omme que sea de muy altas e sotiles inuenfiones, e de
e es avida e rre^ebida e alcan^ada

da e

la

MARK

D.

JOHNSTON

237
derecho juysio,

muy

eleuada e pura discretion, e de

muy sano

e tal

que

aya visto e oydo e leydo

muchos

e diuersos libros e escripturas e sepa de

todos lenguajes, e avn que aya cursado cortes de rreyes e con grandes
sefiores, e

que aya

visto e platicado

muchos fechos

del

mundo,

e, final-

mente, que sea noble fydalgo e cortes e mesurado e gentil e gra^ioso e polido e donoso e que tenga miel e a^ucar e sal e ayre en su rrasonar, e otrosy que sea amador, e que siempre se pregie e se finja de ser enamorado; porque es opynion de muchos sabyos, que todo omme que sea

enamorado, conuiene a saber, que ame a quien deue e como deue e donde deue, afirman e disen qu'el tal de todas buenas dotrinas es doctado. (ed. Azaceta 1966, 1:14-15)

Baena's characterization of gaya

to a very

ciencia

requires us to relate poetic composition

wide range of nonpoetic skills. Some very useful historical scholarship already provides the ground for understanding this relationship. Historians since Huizinga (1970) and Elias (1983) have recognized that courtly literature somehow depends on the social or political conditions of court society. Hexter (1979b) argued in a well-known essay that fifteenth-century nobles already
appreciated the importance of education, especially literary training,

strument of social influence and "means whereby

a place in the service

men

as an innobly born should win

of the princely commonwealth"

(64).

Hexter's

article,

originally published forty years ago, includes terms that anticipate those

of cur-

we believe "knowledge power," then we are obliged to examine very carefully the "social appropriation and distribution of these very valuable scarce goods" (45), which late medieval courtiers produced and consumed. The issues identified by Hexter in this way anticipate arguments suggested more recently by social theorists such as Giddens (1979), Bourdieu (1991), and Chartier (1985, 1993). Refinements to Hexter's basic argument appear in studies by Bumke (1991), R. F. Green (1980), Jaeger (1985), Oostrom (1992), and other scholars. Many of their arguments probably apply broadly to all the aristocratic courts of later medieval Europe. So Aldo Scaghone concludes his survey. Knights at Court (1991), with the claim that progressive refinement of all courtly skills resulted from "knight/courtiers constantly operating under the creative stress of a need
rent cultural studies. For example, he suggests that if
in

some measure

is

by serving the power structures at the same time were seeking their own personal ennoblement by rising to a privileged status of free, refined agents" (1991, 310).
to justify their social function
that they

To
gaya

understand

how those

functions, structures, or agents contributed to the

ciencia

described by Baena,

tion regarding the social, poUtical, and

century Castilian court.

need much more extensive informaeconomic conditions of the fifteenthCultural studies has often adapted ethnographic methclearly

we

ods for acquiring such information; any useful attempt to create a cultural perspective on the cancionero lyric will undoubtedly require us to undertake an

"ethnography of the gaya

ciencia."

238

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

Gaya Ciencia as Relationality Simply amassing more historical evidence about the poets or audiences of cancionero lyric does not in itself, however, constitute cultural studies of the gaya ciencia. The fundamental concern for context requires as well a scrupulous
attention to social relationality, that
is,

to

all

the manifold dependencies, intri-

cacies, hierarchies, alignments, divisions, overlappings, or articulations that

culture of individuals or groups. Race, class, ethnicity, gender, and age are among the most basic relations, but their organization in a particular culture is always complexly specific. Exponents of cultural studies typically refuse any reduction of these multifarious relations, whether by deterministic formulas of cultural materialism (such as the economic determinism fostered by "vulgar Marxism") or by expressive summations of an entire era (such as the idealizations of Geist nourished by German Idealism). All relations are interactive, mediating one another as cause or effect while retaining their specificity and irreducibility. Hence cultural studies strives to demonstrate or at least to question the heterogeneous, diverse, and "decentered" relations that
exist

among the

sexuality,

organize the apparent "unities" in a culture.

Analyzing the manifold

the gaya
ciencia

social, political,

or economic relations involved in

obviously requires investigations that go well beyond the limits

literary history or criticism.

of conventional of our
ciencia.

Most importantly,
(if

this relational

analysis requires us to
interests

abandon an exclusive focus on the

literary text as center

all

and to consider instead with equal

not greater) attention

a par

those nonliterary practices mentioned in Baena's characterization of the gaya

In short,

we must

be willing to investigate poetry on

with other
perspec-

social, political,

or economic activity. Adherence to a

strictly literary

tive has led

some

scholars to question the propriety of Baena's attention to

courtly pastimes

(e.g.,

Weiss 1990, 48-50) or to compare

as

his

prologue

dis-

paragingly with descriptive texts such

the Cronica de

Don

Pero

Nino (Kohut

1982b, 12627). At best isolating objects of literary analysis in very limited conclusions. At worst,
it

this

way

allows

leads us to regard the composition

as

of so

many

canciones, dezires,

or coplas simply

an end in

itself.

This perspective

inevitably generates paradox, as

when

Azaceta claims that chance must have

played a major role in the composition of most cancioneros because each one

seems to be the
activities

fruit

of its
his

own

circumstances rather than a product of identifi-

able literary principles (1966, l:xxxiv).

strictly literary

conception of the

of Baena or

contemporaries ultimately leads to rejection of their

Moreno Hernandez exhaustively produced by writers associated with Archbishop Alonso Carrillo but concludes that these lyrics were merely "an ephemeral ideological prop" for the prelate's political intrigues (1985, 19). This characterization of these texts as unimportant and association of their transience with political ideology neatly illustrate the complete subordination of nonliterary to literary relations. Cultural studies of the gaya ciencia must reject this perspective to understand how composing lyrics was a "signifying practice" whose "meaning" was not limited to literary values but included the whole inventory of "symsocial, political,

or economic function. Thus,

studies the poetry

MARK

D.

JOHNSTON
skills

239
and

bolic capital" suggested in Baena's inventory of courtly

Finally,

virtues.

we

logue

itself.

should recognize that all these relations apply to Baena's proHis comments on the gaya ciencia were not only an objective de-

scription but a motivated, contingent attempt to represent activities that

were

likewise motivated and contingent. Potvin has cogently argued for the need to re-insert the cancionero lyrics into their historical context (1989, 9). The kind

of relational

analysis

advocated in cultural studies not only decenters

also resists

literary

texts as objects

of investigation but

reading those texts (or any rep-

mere expressions of other social, political, or economic activity. Texts and other representations are no less specific, irreducible, or factitious than other cultural products or practices. Reading them chiefly as expressions
resentations) as

of other ideas or activities not only limits our understanding of those ideas or activities but may even lead us to treat the texts as expressions of our own interests. For example, the principles of organization that Azaceta finds in Baena's anthology are remarkably coincident with those of modem philology: chronology, esthetic merit, theme, content, genre, stylistic "school," and rhetorical intention (ed. Azaceta 1966, l:xxxiv). Certainly it is optimistic to imagine that the authors of cancionero lyrics were especially concerned to represent

by modem scholars. A comparable to the attitudes of early twentieth-century anthropologists toward "primitive" cultures.
their thoughts or circumstances as
utilitarian attitude

documents

for study
is

toward these

texts as

"evidence"

Cultural studies can help us to regard the gaya

ciencia

practice involving diverse interests, causes, and effects,

instead as a complex which we engage from

complex circumstances. Our objects of inquiry thus never and space thanks to some force such as "tradition," but become immanent in our investigations through the ongoing production and reproduction of those objects.
our
equally

own

come

to us fixed, transcending time

Gaya Ciencia The attention

simply
as

as Practice, Discourse,
to contextual relations

and Form
refusal to accept

and

any representations

expressions of that context allow cultural studies a very wide

virtually the

domain
and

of investigation: "culture" includes

customs,
arts,

whole range of
all

a society's

values, beliefs, institutions,

and so

forth, in

their symbolic

The correspondingly broad terms "practice," "discourse," and "form" commonly serve to name these objects of study in cultural studies. The unexamined epistemological or ontological status of these objects might trouble theorists (like deconstructionists) more accustomed to
material manifestations.

arguments based closely on speculative philosophy, but the wide application of as "practice," "discourse," and "form" aptly serves the interdisciplinary scope of cultural studies. Moreover, each term involves some fundamental assumptions about culture as a field of inquiry. First, the category of practice adopts a broadly anthropological view of culture as any activity, firom individual behaviors, associations, and representations to collective customs, institutions, and languages. This concern for praxis obviates evaluating the truth or adequacy of an activity in favor of asking what it does or how it
terms such

240

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

It

functions.

helps resist reliance

on

texts or other representations

and instead
activities as

maintains attention to the active relations that constitute the cultural experi-

ence of

human

subjects.

Second, the characterization of some

promoted by the theories of Michel Foucault) helps avoid dichotomous divisions between word and deed or form and content and favors description of behaviors as systems of meaning without relying on literary terms such as "style," "imagery," or "rheapplied to objects ranging from language, toric." Third, the term "forms" texts, and media to modes of experience, ideologies, and myths discourages regarding these objects only as signs. Even when they result from signifying practices, it treats them as levels, structures, or patterns "formations," as it were that are immanent in practice or discourse. While paying attention to cultural forms, one must not, however, forget that they always exist thanks to diverse causes and effects; forms do not act on their own, apart from their conditions of existence. Consequently, analysis of any cultural form always involves a certain abstraction, an operation that demands methodological self"signifying practices" or "discourses" (a term especially

awareness to avoid the

facile

reductions of cultural materialism or the insupera-

ble structuralist dichotomies of signifier and signified.

Discussion of the gaya ciencia in terms of practice, discourse, or form hardly seems problematic. After all, it is obvious that composition of court poetry was a practical activity and a mode of discourse that involved manipulation of conventional forms. Scholars working from Marxist perspectives have long

on the practical import of this poetic craft. For example, Julio Rodriguez Puertolas suggested in 1968, in his first anthology of social poetry (1968c), that this lyric served as a means of "intervention" in contemporary affairs. Nonetheless, his explanation of this engagement did not go much beyond asserting a meaningful relationship between contemporary conditions and cultural representations. He observes only that political and social events notably influence the thought of intellectuals and writers in the fifteenth century (1968c, 48). This seems clear in specific situations such as the death of the Castilian heir Prince Juan in 1497, which many court poets lamented in verse (Mazzochi 1988). Less obvious are the wider relations that enabled, fostered, or required the "influence" of social and political events on particular literary acts. Roger Boase's 1978 monograph. The Troubadour Revival, marks a major advance in efforts to treat the cancionero lyric as a mode of social and political practice. Boase's ultimate argument is that the gaya ciencia was an exercise in archaism, adopted as "a response by the dominant minority to the disintegration of medieval values and institutions" (1978, 151). The functional purpose of this response remains somewhat unclear, however: did it actually serve to resist disintegration? to construct alternative values and institutions? to address a subordinated majority? The correlation of Hterary with social or political practices and forms needs at the very least to differentiate explanations based on the "expression" of subjects' "interests" from those based on a "response"
insisted

to structural social tensions (Geertz 1973).

Still,

these hesitations

do not

alter the

fundamental value of Boase's attempt

MARK

D.

JOHNSTON

241

to analyze the nonliterary functions of the cancionero lyric. Indeed, he

sizes the practical character

empha-

of this discourse more generally in observing that "the composition of love poetry was a sign of good breeding, a means of contending for favours and one of the most popular forms of entertainment. It was essentially a non-professional activity in which all those who attended the court were encouraged to participate" (1978, 152-53). Weiss has extended even further this argument regarding the practical function ot\\Q gaya ciencia; he concludes that the aristocracy's enthusiasm for literary composition "was encouraged by a blend of social and political factors: not just literary fashion, but also by the spread of lay literacy amongst a baronial class anxious to use the written word as a means of enhancing social status and gaining political influence" (1990, 233). Cultural studies
that status or influence, as well as
all
is

designed to analyze the production of

the other collective relations that might

be involved

in these lyrics.

Gaya

Ciencia as

Production and Transformation

ciencia as a revival

Boase's analysis of the gaya

of

earlier literary discourse also

suggests another fundamental concern of cultural studies: the conditions of

production, circulation, transformation, appropriation, representation, reception, assimilation, or self-production through which culture exists. As it happens, Boase's explanation of these conditions for the cancionero lyric relies

heavily

on appeal

to "tradition"

force for maintaining that discourse. That

which operates as a virtually autonomous is, his argument assumes that some

functions, value, or conception of the original troubadour lyric necessarily

of cultural studies would Ukely decry an instance of the "productivism" often found in the work of cultural materialists. That is, it presumes that conditions of production determine subsequent use of a product. If the sense of particular poetic forms,
available to later users. Scholars
as

remained
this

assumption

or vocabulary remains constant, this involves cultural production; it does not occur automatically. As it happens, analysis of the arts de frotar suggests that
styles,

fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poets did not recognize the linguistic or

hterary "traditions" that

we

identify today (see

ciencia will

M. D. Johnston

1977, 1981).

Cultural studies

on the gaya
and place

always seek to explain

as

its

production

(including apparent revivals or repetitions)

tions in every time
that the

an effect of determinate condi-

product appears.

treat a text like Baena's cancionero not "product" but as a moment in the "production" of the gaya ciencia. This productive character is probably easier to appreciate in the royal clerk's anthology than in an individual poem, since this kind of compilation so
this

Moreover,

explanation

would

only

as a literary

readily displays

over

a period

its constructed nature. Baena evidently compiled his collection of years, an exercise in Uterary "processing" that modern scholars

might consider

less satisfactory

than a single, neatly dehmited act of composi-

tion, Baena's dedication to his

practices responsible for this

volume suggests the intersection of cultural somewhat diffuse process. His cancionero presents

242

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

escriptas e puestas e asentadas todas las cantigas

muy

dulses e graciosa-

mente assonadas de muchas

e diuerssas artes, e todas las preguntas

de

muy

sotiles

inuenciones, fundadas e respondidas, e todos los otros

gentiles dezires,

muy

lymados

bien escandidos, e todos los otros

muy muy
el

agradables e fundados pro^essos e requestas que en todos los tiempos

passados fasta aqui fisieron e ordenaron e composieron e metrificaron

muy esmerado

famoso poeta, maestro

e patron

de

la

dicha

arte,

Alfonso

Aluares de Villasandino, e todos los otros poetas, frayles e religiosos, maestros en theologia, e cavalleros e escuderos, e otras muchas e diuerssas
personas
sotiles,

que fueron

e son

muy

grandes desidores e

ommes muy

discretos e bien entendidos en la dicha gra^iosa arte.

e dezidores aqui adelante

De

los quales poetas

por su orden en
libro,

este

dicho libro seran decla-

rados sus nonbres de todos

por estenso. El qual dicho

obras de cada vno bien con la gratia e ayuda e bendi^ion e esfuerfo del muy soberano bien, que es Dios nuestro Seiior, fiso e ordeno e conpusso e acopilo el indino Johan Alfonso de BAENA, escriuano e
ellos, e relatadas sus

seruidor del
senor,

con

muy alto e muy noble rey de Castilla Don Johan, nuestro muy grandes afanes e trabajos e con mucha diligen^ia e afecla

tion e grand deseo de agradar e conplaser, e alegrar e seruir a

su grand

Realesa e

muy

alta Sefioria. (ed.

Azaceta 1966, 1:3-4)

The compilation of

so

many

individual lyrics associated with this general

is

"art" reminds us that the gay a ciencia

already an organized cultural practice,

whose ongoing production Baena

of its products. His endeavor
involves

selectively represents

also illustrates

how

cultural

through an anthology production typically

some transformation
by

in the products circulated.

a certain

At the very

least,

Baena's great anthology requires

pulates time and space

operation of "abstraction" that mani-

collating so

many poems composed

as a

in different

circumstances.

More

importantly, he performs this task

royal clerk render-

ing a service to his monarch, a complex act of production whose results de-

pend on various Equally complex

level

relations

of duty, patronage, favor, reward, and authority.

occur at every of circulation, from private acts among individuals (such as the direct exchange of poems) to public acts among larger groups (such as the jochs Jlorals or publication of the Cancionero general). Even reading Baena's anthology involves some degree of private or public transformation in the products that it circulates, insofar as any reading submits them to new uses as entertainment, models of courtly skill, and so forth. This view of culture as a process of continuous transformation rejects the kind of self-sufficient unity that literary criticism often assumes in texts, authorial intentions, traditions, styles, genres, or

relations determine the transformations that

themes. Cultural studies instead

fosters attention to all those features

of repetition, adaptation, assimilation,

hybridization, negotiation, and so forth that literary analysis

as

may

well regard

"mis-readings" or even "mis-takes." Attention to these concrete transforma-

tions allows a fuller understanding

of the gaya

ciencia

than do broad categories

MARK
like

D.

JOHNSTON

243

"humanism," "scholasticism," "medieval," "Renaissance," or "Pre-Renlittle diversification. There is in fact scant "explanation" in the claim that any literary practice in this era "supone un estudio, inseparable de la tradicion retorica y filosofico-teologico que enlaza lo clasico pagano a lo judeo-cristiano a lo largo de la Edad Media" (Moreno Hernandez 1985, 45). Rather than admiring the longevity of the cultural forms inherited firom antiquity, cultural studies would seek to analyze the significance and conditions of that inheritance for the practitioners of the gaya dencia. The circulation of cultural forms may undergo abrupt alterations according to diverse circumstances of class, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and so forth. The need to understand these alterations has popularized concepts like Roger Chartier's principle of "appropriation," which focuses attention on how diverse sectors of a society use the "same" cultural products in different ways. This perspective w^ould certainly apply to the relationships between gaya dencia and other uses of vernacular literacy in religion, commerce, or political affairs. Especially interesting would be consideration of the seemingly paradoxical ways in which candonero lyrics use discourses of love and spirituality. The social significance of this usage is probably much more complex than a simple devotion to courtly love as a kind of "secular religion" (see the arguments of
aissance," since these categories allow

Gerli 1981).

Gaya

Ciencia as

Power

Cultural practices, discourses, or forms do not appear, circulate, and change

thanks to some transcendent "will to culture." Rather, they exist dynamically thanks to manifold, particular relations, such
as

order, regulation, domination,

we commonly regard as exercises of power. These relations are perhaps most obvious when they involve the unequal distribution of cultural products among different groups or individuals, but cultural studies
or subordination, which

assumes that any practice, discourse, or form

arises firom and generates relations of power. Potvin has recently analyzed the strictly textual relations through which poets accomplish "une affirmation de son pouvoir par la prise en charge de son propre texte a travers le processus dorenavant renverse de I'ecriture/

lecture" (1989, 61).

However, understanding the

detida requires a

social

production and circulation of the gaya

it

much

wider-ranging study of the relations of power that

its

involves. Literary histories of the candonero lyric typically describe

place in

fifteenth-century Castile

by invoking

broad dichotomy

like

"popular" and

"learned,"

which

defines cultural levels that

(e.g.,

somehow

"interact" or "interfere"
is

with one another

Deyermond 1981
it

or Marcos 1986). This dichotomy

probably not very satisfying to any of us today, especially

century authors already found
only three
estates.

when

fifteenth-

difficult to

construct social models based

on

Cultural studies excels in analyzing

how

societies organize
a large

their practices, discourses,

and forms of culture. For example,

body of

scholarship applies Mikhail Bakhtin's arguments regarding heteroglossia, the

dialogic imagination or carnival. His

model seems

particularly applicable to

244

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

(Cano Ballesta 1986). Still, on some very reductive distinctions between the discussions by Flannigan 1990 and Gureare themselves cultural forms that

scurrilous or parodic lyrics such as the rimas cazurras

the Russian theorist's analyses rely

popular and

official culture (see

It

vich 1988, 176-94).

seems necessary to recognize that variable distinctions

specific contexts

between the "popular" and the "learned"

occur through relations of power in
tinuous reproduction.

and must undergo con-

Much work
The
role

in cultural studies has investigated

how

differences in race, gender, class, ethnicity, or sexuality organize that produc-

tion in particular contexts.

of these differences in the gay a

class

ciencia is

obvious in several respects.

sustains the association

First, a

fundamental distinction of

obviously

society. Baena's dedication

ly

invokes the social

of the gaya ciencia with the court and aristocratic and prologue assume that association. He specificalorder of the court when characterizing the audience for

his cancionero:

Ca

sin

dubda alguna,

si la

su

leyere en sus tienpos deuidos,

merged con el

[i.e.,

the king] en este dicho libro

se agradara e deleytara e folgara e

tomara muchos conportes e plaseres e gasajados. E avn otrosi con las niuy agradables e gra^iosas e muy singulares cosas que en el son escriptas e
contenidas,
la

su

muy

redutable e real persona auerra rreposo e descansso

en

los trabajos e afanes e enojos; e otrosi

desechara e oluidara e apartara

e tirara de sy todas tristesas e pesares e pensamientos e afligiones del

spiritu,

que muchas de uezes atraen

e causan e acarrean a los prin^ipes los

sus

muchos

e arduos nego^ios rreales.

assi

mesmo

se agradara la realesa

de la muy alta e muy noble e muy esclare^ida reyna de Castilla doiia Maria nuestra seiiora, su muger, e duenas e donsellas de su casa. E avn se agradara e folgara con este dicho libro el muy illustrado e
e grand seiioria

muy

gra^ioso e

muy

generoso prin^ipe don Enrrique, su

fijo,

e final-

mente en general
seiiores

se agradaran

con

este

dicho libro todos

los

grandes

de sus reynos e senorios, asy

los perlados,

infantes,

duques,

condes, adelantados, almirantes,

como

los maestres, pryores, mariscales,

dottores, caualleros e escuderos, e todos los otros fidalgos e gentiles

ommes,

sus donseles e cryados e ofi^iales de la su casa real,

(ed.

que

lo ver e

oyr e leer e entender bien quisieren. This passage

offers

Azaceta 1966, 1:45)

an excellent opportunity to contrast the emphases of

literary history or criticism

and of cultural

studies. Literary analysis

of this pas-

sage readily recognizes

its

use of rhetorical gradatio and congeries, adherence to

allusion to conventional doctrines

commonplaces of exordial decorum, or

literature as recreation for the spirit (well analyzed

of by Olson 1982). Nonetheless, the effect of gradatio only occurs through representation of real or imagined distinctions in social, political, and economic status. Baena's representation tells us little unless we also investigate the advantage, interests, or con-

trol

in short, the

power

involved

in identifying ^<jyfl ciencia

class

with these

levels

of court society. Inflections of power by

appear in

many

cancionero lyrics

that include personal invective regarding social origins.

These works contribute

MARK

D.

JOHNSTON
among

245

to a voluble discourse of nobility, lineage, and virtue

fifteenth-century

Castilian aristocrats. In several cases, class distinction attaches itself literally to

a writer: the artisan origins "el

Ropero"

(see

of Anton de Montoro earned him the sobriquet of Lope 1990; Gerii 1994-95); similarly, the humble back-

ground of the minstrel Juan de Valladolid evidently induced the derisively from his contemporaries (analyzed by BattestiPelegrin 1990 and Rubio Gonzalez 1983-84). The condensation of these distinctions into nicknames perhaps shows how these differences required constant reproduction in a context where they might otherwise disappear, thanks to the opportunities for social, economic, and political mobility available at
ironic identity of "Juan Poeta" court.

These nicknames and invective were only a few of the practices available to engaged in constant efforts to break, realign, reorganize, and advance their groups, interests, or status. Models for analyzing these efforts
social agents

already exist in recent literary scholarship: perhaps cancionero invectives contrib-

ute along with heraldry or marriage rituals to the "symbolic production" of

aristocratic alliances

(Bloch 1983, 75-76); or perhaps these alliances are the

narratological "Subject" of the invectives, just as family appears to be in

some

romances (Vitz 1989, 103-4). Cultural

studies can extend these insights reall

garding literary representation into broader analyses of forms of power involved in invective.
Struggle involving racial difference

the discourses and

to other societies of later medieval Europe, thanks to the dual circumstances of the ongoing Reconquest and anti-Semitism. Invective involving race occurs throughout the cancioneros, especially in verses denouncing the perversion and perversity ofJews (Rose 1983). A relationship between literary culture and race most notably appears in lyrics that identify racial origins with inept poetic talent. However, these identifications do not merely show that converses or moriscos were considered poor poets but also implies some social, political, or economic disadvantage for them. That is, the act of denouncing others as conversos or moriscos does not by itself
if that
is

excel

the right

word

compared

is

another area where Castile seems to

damn them:

rather it makes them and their writing subject to evaluation according to the relations of power organized by those racial distinctions. An obvious but important aspect of this discourse is the writers' own acceptance

of those relations and

a converse or morisco.

functions both

as

distinctions: very few of them write in defense of being This agreement enables their mutual invective, which thus a means of reinforcing their group identity and of disputing

their relative status within that group. Studying the racial insults in cancionero
literature

could contribute substantially to cultural studies on anti-Semitism in

fifteenth-century Castile, especially because these texts

would

diversify the

narrow focus on theological

subject (e.g.,

literature usually
least,

found in

historical studies

of the

Cohen
ciencia

1982). At the very

investigating these issues regard-

ing the gaya

tion

could help advance our understanding of the converse quesrole in the

beyond the point where Americo Castro left it. Finally, distinctions in gender must have played a fundamental

246

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

of power that define production of the gaya ciencia, to judge from the number of women who contributed to the cancioneros (about half a dozen in Perez Priego's anthology, 1989). The virtual absence of courtly women poets desperately needs further investigation and explanation, as Whetnall argues (1992). We probably will not learn much about the organization and performance of gender in Castilian court culture by scrutinizing the few extant texts of women writers for more bio-bibliographical data. Florencia Pinar has told us all she is going to tell (Fulks 1989; Snow 1984). On the other hand, a wide range of very suggestive theories concerning gender in courtly love and culture offer some new perspectives on this limited material. Arguments by Bloch (1991), Diamond (1989), or Finke (1992) could readily apply to cultural studies of cancionero verse. Finke suggests, for example, that the feminine roles defined in the literature of courtly love effectively excluded the intervention of female poets because courtly love constituted an "euphemerization" of the economic power that only men contested (1992, 42). At the same time, cultural studies offers an opportunity to advance investigation of the practices and discourses called "courtly love" beyond their literary forms. For example, Bratosevich (1984) explains well how Santillana's serranilla to the Mo^uela de Bores organizes fictions of social difference but still concludes that the Marques's poem ultimately closes upon itself as a self-referrelations

very Umited

its entire perspective is courtly. However, as soon as whether this closure applies to the fictions of difference in gender, we recognize an opening for analyzing both the ideology of courtly love in the poem and the relations of power that in fact enable Santillana's representation. Thus, it becomes possible to ask how the sexual conflict represented in the poem was already a social relationship, which the text reproduces and trans-

ential artifact, insofar as

we

ask

it possible for a noble of an encounter with a peasant girl? The question seems almost naive. Yet, answering it involves much more than simply defining the structures of representation in one lyric; it leads us to consider the relations of power that were conditions of this rep-

forms in
like the

its

representation.

What

circumstances

made

Marques

to write such a characterization

resentation as well.

Ultimately, analyzing

how

class, race,

or gender organize relations of power

its

in the gaya ciencia can help us to escape a reductive definition of

practitio-

ners as

autonomous "authors." Even

in cases

where we

possess substantial bio-

graphical information about an individual's other endeavors

cially in those cases

or perhaps

espe-

literary history

and criticism

typically treat

any individual

who
Even

writes as an "author" and then, if possible or necessary, adds qualifying

categories Uke letrado, converso, petty noble, aristocratic, plebeian, and so forth.

Potvin's excellent attempt to study the exercise of

power

in the cancio-

neros maintains this essentialized ideal

of the "poet" (1989,

29). Cultural studies

which tends to obscure the particular condiof the gaya ciencia, especially in the production of "occasional" poetry. This reduction not only effaces the differences between kinds of literary actors, it assumes the fact of their agency, as though they were
can help us avoid
this

reduction,

tions involved in any exercise

MARK

D.

JOHNSTON

247

as

completely self-motivating subjects. Lingering Romantic notions of the poet individual creative genius perhaps encourage this view. In any case, its

difficulties

become obvious when we

not exist
er

at all

or

consider categories of authors that did

scarcely existed, such as

"women

writers," "peasant poets,"

or morisco troubadours. These nearly oxymoronic categories force us to consid-

what

social,

political,

or economic relations were powerful

exclude them. At the same time,

ful

we must

also ask

what

relations

enough to were pow^erits

enough

to sustain those practitioners

of the ^aya

ciencia

who

did exercise

discourse.

Gaya Ciencia as Ideology The discourse, practices, or forms

ly receive the label

that enable individuals to

make

sense of

experience, explain their material conditions, or "give meaning to

life" typical-

"ideology" in cultural studies. Theories of ideology are

as

diverse as the interests of the field and often emphasize different functions or

on the complex ways that ideologies relate social agents working with Hterary materials from the gaya ciencia, we might find useful the definition offered by a literary scholar such as Easthope, who characterizes ideology as "the degree to which a text
relations.

Some

focus

to their conditions of existence. In

carries out a particular ideological

maneuvre, namely, the transformation of a

sense of social being into a version of personal consciousness" and thus concentrate our analysis

on

this

"strategy for

reworking

social

and

'objective'

modes

as

personal and subjective" (1991, 132). Baena's anthology performs an

ideological

maneuvre of

this sort in its presentation

of Alfonso Alvarez de
ciencia:

Villasandino.
identify

The

rubrics that introduce the selection of Villasandino's writings

his

him and
se

work
las

as

the epitome of the gaya

Aqui
las

comien^an

cantigas

muy escandidas

e grafiosamente asonadas,
los desires

preguntas e rrespuestas

sotiles e

bien ordenadas, e

muy

limados e bien fechos, e de

tienpo
el

infinitas

inuen^iones que

muy sabio
el qual,

e discreto varon, e
la

muy

ordeno en su syngular conponedor en esta

fiso e

muy

graf iosa arte de

poetria e gaya ciencia, Alfonso Aluares de Villae lus

fasta

por gratia infusa que Dios en el puso, fue esmalte corona e monarca de todos los poetas e trobadores que oy fueron en toda Espaiia. (ed. Azaceta 1966, 1:171)
sandino,
e espejo e

It is interesting to notice that this maneuvre consists in equating Villasandino and his work with the perfection of the gaya ciencia. The other poems that Baena compiles presumably offer less accomplished examples of this art. This implicit hierarchy of achievement is expHcit in the courtly poetic contests, such as the jochs florals, which Enrique de Villena describes in his Arte de trobar (ed. Sanchez Canton 1919). This zeal to define preeminence in the gaya ciencia and to celebrate perfection with ceremonial awards suggests that both this literary activity and courtly protocol help sustain a common ideology. Hence, we might ask, for example, whether homologous relations governed the exchange of verse invectives and the letras de batalla that arranged armed duels.

248

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

relations

These

remain largely unexplored, but

we might assume

that the

com-

position of courtly lyric involved competition for a status above and

beyond

the benefits gained from the exercise of literacy alone.

From a strictly literary perspective, Baena's celebration of Villasandino seems an overt exercise in "canon formation." Considered as an ideological maneuvre, this celebration also uses the individual figure of Villasandino to "personify"
all

the general differences in

class,

gender, and race involved in defin-

ing a courtly poet.

Through

this personification,

Baena's anthology and

many
per-

subsequent Castilian cancioneros are able to represent the gaya

sonal practice undertaken
talents

ciencia as a

by individual

subjects

endowed with

particular

and status. Thus Villasandino's preeminence is not due to his invention of the gaya ciencia or some other aetiological fiction that we might regard as a function of literary "tradition." Rather, this "monarch" of poets serves chiefly as an ideological hat rack for displaying the "crown" that all his subjects covet.
Later pretenders include Imperial, Mena, Santillana, or Perez de
seize the throne

Guzman, who

of literary preeminence thanks to their own efforts and to the industry of interested supporters like Pero Diaz de Toledo (Weiss 1990, 12930). These poets and their admirers successfully intervene in the production of the gaya ciencia through glosses, cancioneros, commentaries, and other resources of literary re-production. The celebration of Villasandino by Baena or of Santillana by the dutiful letrado Diaz de Toledo perhaps illustrates an argument from Pierre Bourdieu: professionals who administer delegated power like
clerics or intellectuals
cise,

tend

to idealize the practices that they themselves exer-

thus setting these practices into social or political positions above their

own

(1991, 196). The circulation of these idealizations provide experiential depth in time and space for their group identity. Finally, the elevation of these

vernacular
juglares

auctoritates

drawn from the

nobility coincides with the demise of the

recognize broadly that by the early fifand other literate courtiers were dispossessing the juglares of the moral, cultural, and economic distinctions that previously legitimated them as poetic artisans in courtly society. The career of Juan de Valladolid offers a late, but virtual paradigm of the relations and conditions involved in this struggle between the juglares and the new practitioners oi gaya ciencia. In short, Baena's celebration of Villasandino should inspire us to consider more carefully and broadly how the cancioneros contributed to the circulation of courtly ideology. The great anthologies produced relations of cultural power that enabled some social agents to advance while compelling others to retreat. They especially achieved this by promoting individual practice o{ the gaya ciencia and recognition of this discourse as a worthwhile courtly achievement. These two aspects are not identical: indeed, recognizing the ideological construction of these lyrics requires us to distinguish the value of each compositional product from the value recognized for their production in general. These two aspects mutually reinforce one another: writing lyrics manifests courtliness, and courtliness is a prerequisite of lyric virtuosity. This conjuncture would seem circular were it not for the diversely constructed relations of
social levels.

from lower

We

teenth century the

letrados

MARK
power
that each

P.

JOHNSTON

249

element involves. The ideological strength of this identificaby Anthony Giddens (1979, 69) as a fiandamental principle of social systems: practicing the gaya ciencia reproduces (indeed, fortifies) the very relations that sustain the practice.
tion evidently displays the "dual structuration" identified

Gaya

Ciencia as Subjectivation

Finally,

much

w^ork in cultural studies has explored the complex and fundais,

mental question of "subjectivation," that

the conditions and relations in

which individual
cially stress

subjects attain their practical identities.

Many

analyses espeaffect indi-

how

relations

of power and configurations of ideology

vidual experience, rather than discuss

tures

power and ideology

as collective "struc-

of domination" or "value systems." Studies based on the theories of

Louis Althusser (1971) particularly emphasize how the production of ideology in consciousness constitutes "subjects." This subjectivity may be as contradictory, divided, or conflicted as the practices, discourses, or forms involved in

that ideology.

Even

analyses that

do not follow Althusser

still

reject traditional

conceptions of an unchanging

"human

nature" or of a radically autonomous

individual subject in favor of arguments that treat "subject positions" as both

consequences of self-production and effects of social production. Hence, cultural studies is broadly concerned with the subjective function of all practices, discourses, or forms and their interrelations. Literary texts rarely enjoy a central
or self-contained place in these relations but more often contribute to the
circulation of culture, including forms of subjectivity, that occurs in
all

social

production.
Cultural studies
a

on

cancionero literature

would

therefore require investigating

much wider

range of subjectivating forms in language, signs, ideologies,

and so forth. Many forms of this kind circulated in the hisof the gaya ciencia, where they constantly recombined and modified one another. Surely one of the most difficult fonns to understand is the broad circumstance that subjects themselves regard as their "experience," since this typically involves a myriad of coincident relations functioning at
discourses, myths,
torical context

many
es,

different levels.

Somewhat

easier to recognize are the practices, discours-

or forms that allow subjects to position themselves in specific relations of

It is

power.

not

difficult to see that

many

cancionero lyrics

perform the kind of of

"self- fashioning" that

Greenblatt (1980) studied for sixteenth-century England.

cancionero love lyric manifests the "self-conscious use

Weiss examined

how

poetry to create and ceremoniously act out an identity" (1991a, 254). Greenblatt's "New Historicist" arguments emphasize the fiindamentally oppositional
character of this discourse, beginning with the basic distinction of self from
other. Cultural studies offers even broader perspectives for analyzing the

diverse and

complex
all

relations that

inform

this positioning.

Baena's anthology

includes

many

diverse examples: Claudine Potvin has calculated that roughly

one

third of

the pieces in his cancionero involve one poet writing against

another (1989, 53).

ic, social,

The

correlation of literary distinction with other

economor pres-

or political distinctions presumably creates

status, authority,

250

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

tige

in other words, positions a subject to advantage

but
later.

these correlations

are scarcely easy for us to recognize five

hundred years

We readily imag-

ine that differences in race, gender, or class will involve major disparities in the
relative

power of any

subject's position, as

other distinctions to positioning a cultural subject remains

noted above. The contribution of less obvious. For

skill, gracia,

example, the various claims regarding certain poets' divinely endowed poetic and schooling continue to prompt scholarly debate (see Fraker
1966a, 63-90; Lange 1971, 94-103; Weiss 1990, 25-40).

The

interrelations

of

these very particular forms

all

require

much

broader investigation for us to

ciencia.

understand the "subject of poetry" produced by the^^jy^j

The

cancioneros

certainly offer

much

useful material for pursuing such

inquiries,

especially in their occasional lyrics.

Each of these
along with
its

texts gives a

particular construction
tions

of its

historical context,

contingent rela-

of power, configurations of ideology, and subject positions. In effect, poem provides us with a point of departure for exploring the coincidences of its construction with other relations, configurations, or positions. As an example, we might consider three related poems by ViUasandino and Francisco de Baena. Their rubrics represent their occasional context thus:
every occasional

[No. 104] Este dezir a manera de disfama^ion fyzo e ordeno el dicho Alfonso Aluares de ViUasandino contra vna dueiia deste reyno por manera de la afear e deshonrrar por rruego de vn cauallero que gelo rogo

muy

afyncadamente, por quanto la dicha dueiia non quisso a^eptar amores del dicho cauallero. (ed. Azaceta 1966, 1:210)

sus

[No. 105] Este dezir de rrespuesta

Alfonso Aluares de ViUasandino a
la

fizo e

ordeno por

la

dicha duena
al

Francisco de Baena, escriuano del adelantado Diego de Ryuera,

dicho

sobredicha rrequesta de deshonores

que

fizo a la dicha duefia, la qual respuesta

(ed.

va por

los

consonantes del

dicho Alfonso Aluarez.

Azaceta 1966, 1:213)

[No. 106] Este de rreplica^ion fizo e ordeno el dicho Alfonso Aluarez de ViUasandino contra el dicho Francisco de Baena a la su respusta que le dio al su dezir primero qu'el fyzo contra la dicha dueiia; la qual replication va muy bien fecha e muy bien ordenada e por los mismos consonantes que primero comen^o en su dezir. (ed. Azaceta 1966, 1:216)
This exchange of poems
illustrates

well

how

exercise of the gaya ciencia in-

volves positioning a subject according to multiple levels and types of relations.

First, the text presents the first two lyrics as courtly services rendered by ViUasandino and Francisco de Baena on behalf of others. Such service was evidently a common practice, but the relationship involved remains unclear. Should we regard the unnamed lady and gentleman as patrons of ViUasandino and Francisco de Baena? Did the poets gain any remuneration beyond an opportunity to display their courtly skills? What ideology explained this practice? ViUasandino 's reply especially leads us to consider the value of his perfor-

mance

as

a servant.

Francisco de Baena 's response

on behalf of the lady

MARK

D.

JOHNSTON

251

includes several lines evidently directed to Villasandino himself: a reference in

home town) and various poor speaking. Consequently, Villasandino replies directly to Francisco de Baena, denouncing the latter's versifying skills. In this way, the surrogates in this exchange (Villasandino and Baena) position themselves as literary antagonists, thereby mimicking the sexually antagonistic relationship between the principals whom they serve (the spumed gentleman and offended lady). This positioning involves not only a homologous relationship but similar terminology: Baena and Villasandino direct toward one another the same kind of scurrilous insults that they craft for their patrons. Thus, this exchange recalls Pierre Bourdieu's arguments regarding the "political mimesis" practiced by subordinates, in which "by pursuing the satisfaction of the specific interests imposed on them by competition within the field, [they] satisfy in addition the interests of those who delegate them" (1991, 181). This competition typically involves symbolic strategies that range from outright insult to the award of official names or titles (ed. Azaceta 1966, 1: 23842). Through these strategies, competitors in a field distinguish themselves legitimately and work to restrict the number and scope of their competition at any moment. The exchange between Villasandino and Baena evidently involves this sort of strategy for positioning themselves as literary servants. At the same time, their poems presumably provide strategies for the gentleman and lady whom they defend to
line 16 to rustic dalliances in lUescas (Villasandino's

allusions

to

satisfy their interests as well,

although understanding the relations involved in

as

their duel

by poetic proxy

certainly requires investigating the specific condi-

tions of many other courtly practices (such remain little known.

the conduct of rivalries) that

However, we can broadly appreciate the contribution of ideology

strategies in the

to these

ways that these poets or rivals attempt to represent their individual opponents according to general social types ("easy woman," "bad poet," "rustic squire," "uncouth courtier" and so forth). The "positioning" accomplished through this strategy is one of the most obvious features in cancionero polemical lyrics. Careful study of this "positioning" can useflilly connect textual forms (such as genre, style, or wordplay) with the intersections in their authors' and readers' subjectivities and identify their function as devices for creating relations of subordination, domination, respect, submission, and so forth. This function implies a much larger field of practice in which this kind of
"personalizing" invective operated to represent
sion as
class conflicts

or sexual aggres-

well-known types or norms of individual behavior. These types or norms called into play by the text would be the object of "cultural studies" on courtly love or politics in the gaya ciencia. In short, texts like these offer one
kind of evidence for studying the formation of collective and individual identities, by abstracting the social forms through which individuals sustain them-

of this "in-formation" helps us to recognize the contending relations involved in their distinctive subject positions.
selves subjectively. Careful analysis

Ultimately, however, the difficulty in understanding the burlesque allusions,

sexual euphemisms, and indecent slang in these three

poems

also

reminds us

252

CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE GAYA CIENCIA

do not allow us
direct access to a unitary, transcendent level
as

that their texts

of

meaning, which

we

can recognize just

easily in

other texts or objects.

Rather, meaning always occurs through diverse signifying practices, which

we

must labor
insult (as

to understand as well.

Reducing those

practices to the general

Bakhtinian function of "carnival" and then differentiating them by types of

proposed by Potvin 1989, 47-64) does not really acknowledge that This kind of reduction especially tends to obscure how subjects position themselves through the reproduction of their forms: each poem may offer a further transformation of the stylistic devices, allusions, and even discursive
diversity.

positions involved in their polemics.

Conclusion

The

issues

reviewed in

this essay at best

name only some

basic points

of de-

parture for exploring

much

broader and more complex problems of fifteenthdifficulty

century Castilian society.

The
past.

of investigating these historical prob-

lems

is,

as

noted already, a

common

objection to pursuing cultural studies

about the more distant

argue, fulfilling the

This difficulty prevents, some scholars would

engagement with contemporary issues that cultural studies ought to include. However, I think that it is fairly easy to see how the investigation ofgaya ciencia proposed here involves us in two related and highly contested contemporary problems: the first is the struggle over definitions of culture and literature in our academic institutions; the second is the reorganization of national culture in the Spanish state since Franco. Engagement in these two areas "here and now" almost inevitably results, I would argue (or hope), from undertaking cultural studies on the gay a ciencia "there and then." First, cultural studies as an academic discipline is already deeply engaged in
current debates over multiculturalism, the value of mass or "popular" culture,

and the preeminence of the literary canon (or "high" culture generally) in the United States. This engagement is likely to affect anyone attempting serious work in cultural studies, even on medieval Castilian court lyric. For academic
scholars, the gaya ciencia epitomizes
all

the difficulties

now

recognized in
as

teaching and studying a body of "literature" understood normatively

"great

books." Simply put,

de Baena in the

how

does one explain teaching or studying the Cancionero

or La casa de Bemarda Alba?

company of classics such as the Poema de Mio Cid, Don Quixote, Even the simplest explanation based on "universal
development of a
tradition," or "representa-

human
tion of

values," "importance for

its

era" must confront precisely the questions that cultural studies put
cultural ideology necessary to

of "low" or "high" culture produce categories like "literature," "tradition," or "representation." Of course these questions extend to the works of Per Abbat, Miguel de Cervantes, and Federico Garcia Lorca as well. Exactly how do we explain the immanence of human values, tradition, or historical information in any texts circulated among different audiences over many centuries? Perhaps we can safely ignore these questions in teaching literature to our students; after all, they must accept our syllabi and curricula

in the foreground, such as the social distribution

and the production of

MARK

D.

JOHNSTON

253

almost wholly "structured in dominance," to use the famous phrase of British

cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall. However, addressing these questions becomes more urgent w^hen w^e must offer our scholarly work to potential publishers or to institutional promotion and tenure committees. Medieval Hispanists tempted to pursue cultural studies on the cancionero lyric must be prepared to defend their work to colleagues who insist on defining their disciplinary enterprise as the study of literature. Even academic scholars whose teaching duties include courses on "culture or civilization" may find that this traditional pedagogical category does not readily accommodate cultural studies. Second, cultural studies on the gaya ciencia certainly demands as well some
critical assessment of the assumption that Castilian remains the national language and literature of Spain since the death of Franco. Most North American foreign language pedagogy has failed almost completely to consider the impli-

cations of the reorganization of the Spanish state into autonomias.

As

it

hap-

pens, the Cancionero de Baena

students the labor of reading

is

not a monolingual

text.

When we

spare our
arbitrary

its

Galician lyrics,

how do we justify this

construction of "literature" to colleagues from Santiago de Compostela? At the

very

least,

Baena's preference for Galician over Catalan precendents o( the gaya

ciencia

should compel us to analyze our

own

construction of "Spanish literary

tradition" for the Iberian Peninsula.

More

broadly, the perspectives of cultural

studies can help maintain awareness of

how

our professional

interests

depend

upon,

resist,

or benefit firom the contemporary struggle to reorganize cultural

power

in the Spanish state. Ultimately, our study of the cancioneros as cultural products should draw us to examine our own ideological construction of "national languages," if not the categories of "nation" and "language" themselves.

The gaya

ciencia is certainly

not the only historical problem that lends

Its

itself

to analysis through cultural studies.

explicit definition according to class

differences, evident function as an exercise

claims to literary value do

investigations of this

of social power, and apparent an especially tempting object for study for kind. Moreover, Alan Deyermond has suggested that the

make

it

may well exceed the combined corpus of and German lyric (1980, 96). If this is so, then this situation alone should inspire our curiosity about the circumstances of such copious production, circulation, and reproduction. The interdisciplinary scope of cultural studies ensures that any conclusions about the cancioneros will probably have considerable value for scholarship beyond the field of later medieval Castilian lyric. Indeed, the match of cultural studies with the gaya ciencia may offer Hispanists a felicitous opportunity, as the poets might have said, to guide the wheel of scholarly fortune in medieval studies.
extant corpus of cancionero verse
similar English, French,
Chicago, Illinois

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Index

absolutism 13, 14, 212, 213, 214, 215,

216, 231
Abulafia,

Beltran, Vicente [Vicen9 Beltran] 4-6,

7, 143,

155

Todros 138

Bernaldez, Andres 214

agudeza 107
see also wit

bihngualism 10-11, 137-70, 253

bilingual cancioneros

14249

Alfonso X,

el

Sabio 97, 138, 144,

154-

bilingual poets
its

149-52

55
his Siete partidas

poetic uses 15264

112

percentage of 148-49, 169

see also cancioneros, bilingual;

allegory 62, 78, 87, 174

maca-

Altamira, Vizconde de 105-106, 115

Althusser, Louis 249

ronic verse

Blecua, Jose

Alvarez Gato, Juan 32, 33, 36, 129,

131, 175, 223

Boase,

Manuel 80 Roger 2, 15, 240-41

Boffey,Juha 141, 148, 167

132, 173,

ambiguity 104, 121,

177, 182, 222,

176,

Bonifaci Calvo 154-55, 164

251-52

book, concept of

5, 49,

51-52

anti-Semitism 12, 188, 189, 190, 191,

192, 193, 245

Boscan, Juan 81, 88, 171, 172

Bourdieu, Pierre 237, 248, 251

bourgeoisie
111, 191,

Andreas Capellanus 95, 99, 131-32

Arabic verse 138, 139, 140, 144, 146,
157, 158, 161
Aristotle 200, 202, 203,

193-94,

195,

201, 204
see also class

207

Brownlee, Kevin 6364, 66

Aubrun, Charles 22, 25, 26

author, concept of 5-6, 16, 62, 246
see also dezidor, poeta

Brownlee, Marina

S.

7-8, 11-12

Burrus, Victoria 9-10, 15

Avinyo, Mossen 143, 151, 152, 169

Ayllon, Peralvarez de 130
Azaceta, Jose Maria 238, 239

Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti 142 Cancioneiro da Ajuda 166, 167

Cancioneiro da Vaticana 142

Cancioneiro geral

{\6KE) 145, 147, 152,

(Coimbra, Universi-

Baena, Francisco de 25051 Baena, Juan Alfonso de 38, 50, 83, 99,
103, 117-18, 140, 166-67, 175,

163
Cancionero
taria

COl
PN4

1011) 29
(Paris,

236-37, 238, 241-42, 244, 24748, 253

see also Cancionero de Baena

Cancionero

Nationale, esp.

226) 143, 144

Cancionero

PN6
PN7

(Paris,

Nationale, esp.

Bakhrin, Mikhail 14, 221, 243-44, 252

see also carnival
ballads

228) 30, 31, 32, 43

Cancionero
(Paris,

Nationale, esp.

188

229) 31, 43

290

INDEX

Cancionero

PN8
PNl 1

(Paris,

Nationale, esp.

Cancionero de Palacio (SA7) 27, 46, 145,

230) 28
Cancionero
(Paris,

196
Nationale, esp.
Cancionero de Pero
Guillen de Segovia

305) 143
Cancionero

PNl 2
SA4 SA5

(Paris,

Nationale, esp.

(MN12) 46 Cancionero de Ramon

36, 37

de Llavia

(94RL)

313) 28
Cancionero
taria

(Salamanca, Universi-

Cancionero de Salvd Cancionero

de

(PNl 3) 40
delle

2139) 37
(Salamanca,

San Martino

Scale

Cancionero
sitaria

Univer-

(PMl)
Cancionero

29, 30, 33, 34

de

2244) 40, 41-42

Vindel

(NH2)

44,

46,

Cancionero
taria

SAlOa (Salamanca, Universi-

143, 151
Cancionero del British
34, 43, 152

2763) 44

Museum (LBl)

30,

Cancionero de Baena (PNl) 16, 19, 29,

34, 37, 41, 48, 52, 54, 59, 99,

Cancionero del marques de Barberd

28, 30, 34

(BMl)
etc)

103,

139,

145,

150,

187,

191,

235, 236-38, 239, 241-42, 244,

Cancionero general

(IICG, 14GC,
145, 152,

247-48, 249-50, 252-53

as historical
its its its

15, 42, 52, 56, 82, 97, 101, 103,

document 190

104,

131,

144,

187,

compilarion 40, 50, 241-42

conceptual structure 16667
date 38

191, 224, 242

see also Castillo,

Hernando de

Cancionero llamado Flor de enamorados

see also Baena,

Juan Alfonso de

146
Cancionero musical de Elvas (EHl) 147 Cancionero musical de Palacio
43,

Cancionero de don Pedro de Aragon (BC3)

39-40
Cancionero de Egerton (LB3) 28, 32, 34

(MP4)

27,

147-48
104,

Cancionero de Estuniga
Cancionero de Gallardo

(MN54) (MN17)

45, 144

cancionero verse

30, 34,

and Golden Age

7,

53,

80,

194, 196, 197

Cancionero de Herberay des Essarts (LB2)

109, 171, 173, 182-83, 226

approaches to 1-3, 16, 79-81, 88,

89, 168, 171, 197,
as as

22-27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 41, 44,

45, 119

222 253

ideology 238, 247-48

Cancionero de Juan Fernandez de Hijar

power

85, 91, 164, 243-47,

(MN6)
Cancionero

30,
de

32
la

as relationality

23839
238, 239-41

Catedral

de

Segovia

as signifying practice

(SGI) 145, 147, 148, 166-67, 169

Cancionero
de

court funcrion 82, 83, 87-88, 96,

111,
115,

Martinez

de

Burgos

124,

132,

241, 244,

(MN33) 28
Cancionero de
28, 38, 44

248, 249-50

MSdena (MEl) 24-25, 27,

defined by Baena 23637

in the

academy 25253

Cancionero de obras de burlas

(190B)

15,

its

audience 12, 87, 99, 109, 124,

130, 221-22, 229

Cancionero de Oiiate-Castaneda
32, 43, 50
its

126-27, 132, 244

(HHl)

its

pubUc character 83-84, 109

poetics of 174

compilation 5456

INDEX
canaoneros
as "literary"

291

Catholic Monarchs 96, 215, 229

objects 5, 52, 166
as

courtly lovers 11617, 223

bilingual

142-49

see also
I

Fernando de Aragon;

Isabel

compilation of 4-6, 22-46, 50, 5456, 141, 142, 166

Celestina see Rojas,

Fernando de

formal unity 50, 51, 53-54

function of 5051

Cerquiligni, JacqueUne 7, 8, 60, 61,

62, 65

meaning of term
origins of

4, 48,

140-42

Cerveri de Girona 156

Chansonnier de Charttilly 139, 142, 143,

musical 147, 148, 149

49

149
Chansonnier Escorial {EM2) 147, 148
Chansonnier Mellon (YBl) 147, 148 Chansonnier
148, 169
chansonniers 142, 144, 149,

printed 35-37
publication history 1822
their textual transmission 22, 2427,

Pixhecourt

(PN15)
166

147,

39, 46, 166, 167

see also book, concept of; chansonniers;

individual candoneros

Chartier,

Roger

5,

237, 243

Cartfoner del Ateneu Barcelones 146

chastity 84, 122,

232-34

Carajicomedia 1415,

22134

Cardona, Alonso de 123

Carmina Burana 144, 148, 149, 158,
159, 164, 165
carnival 14, 221, 225, 227, 231, 234,

romance 112, 113, 119 chivalry 84, 121, 200, 223

chivalric

chronicles 115, 180, 192, 195, 230

Clarke,

Dorothy

Clotelle 59, 62, 73,

232
class 89,

243, 252
Carrillo de Huete,

111, 160, 191, 238, 243,

244-

Pedro 101-102

45, 248, 250, 251,

253

Cartagena, Alonso de 172, 173, 180,

192, 203, 213, 214, 217

see also bourgeoisie; nobility

codicology 4-5,

6,

48 of

Cartagena, Pedro de

8,

11-12, 15, 103,

see also candoneros, compilation

114, 116, 121, 122, 123, 171-83,

Colon, Hernando 44
color symbolism 114, 123, 174, 176

223-24
his popularity

172-73, 182-83

conversos

12,

13,

187-97, 213,

224,

Carvajal 144, 151, 152, 160, 163, 164

Castaiieda,

245, 246
see also anti-Semitism;

Guiomar de

(wife of Jorge

Jews

Manrique) 87-88, 115

Castiglione, Baldessare 82, 89, 90

convivenda 189, 191

Coplas de

la

Panadera 30, 41, 192, 193

CastiUejo, Cristobal de 80, 172, 173

Castillo,

Coplas de Mingo Revulgo 41, 192 Coplas del Provindal 192, 193

Hernando de

50, 51, 97, 101,

104, 105, 108, 131, 141

Castro,

Costana 124
court of Aragon (Naples) 27, 33, 137,
144, 146, 151, 160, 164

Americo 194, 245

8, 31,

Catalan verse
142,

41-43, 137, 139,

145,
146, 148,

143,

144,

court of Navarre 25, 27, 155

150, 151, 163, 165, 169, 253

see also individual authors

courtUness 9-10, 82-83, 84, 111, 116,

117-18, 237, 248

see
also

Catedra, Pedro 145

courtly

love,

as

game;

Catherine of Lancaster 149, 201

courts, life at

292

INDEX
etymology of 62
Divina Commedia, see Dante Alighieri
diuisas

courtly love 9-10, 92, 175-77, 17879, 180, 222, 223, 243, 246, 251

and secrecy
as

8,

82-92, 114-15, 127

(emblems)

10,

102-109,

116,

and youth 118

175
d'Orleans, Charles 15051

game

84, 86-87, 91-92, 98-110,

112-33, 174, 175

moralists' disapproval 121

Dronke, Peter 96, 138, 148, 170

Dutton, Brian
2, 21,

23, 47, 108, 141,

problem of defining 9597, 113,

222
see
also

157, 168, 195

lovesickness;

marriage;

Eagleton, Terry 14

women,
courts,

role in courtly love

Easthope, Anthony 247

kriture fiminine

225

defined by Alfonso
life at

112

Eiximenis, Francesc 203

Elias,

111-13 137-40

Norbert 111, 112, 237

I

literary 27,

Ehzabeth

(of England) 230, 231

see also candonero verse, court function; courtliness; courtly love, as

Encina, Juan del 43, 51

English verse
62, 165,
8,

138, 147, 149, 161-

game
cultural materialism 15-16, 221, 238,

253
13, 15, 33, 192,

Enrique IV (of Castile)

240, 241
cultural studies 15-16, 221,

193, 196, 203, 206, 209, 211-12,

23553
252
165,

214, 215, 216, 230, 231

and multidisciplinary history 235-37

culture, concept of 239, 242,

Enriquez, Fadrique 103, 106

Escavias,

Pedro de 43, 5556, 213

"high" and "low"

15,

164,

Estuniga, Alvaro de 194, 195

221, 222, 224, 234, 243-44, 252

Fajardo, Alonso

229

Dante Alighieri
his

7, 156,

164

Fajardo,

Diego 225, 226, 227, 228,

David 141, 148, 149, 150
criticism
14,

Divina commedia 5978, 164

229, 231
Fallows,
feminist

Davila,

Diego Arias 193

Paul 183

De

amore, see Andreas Capellanus

83,

127,

221,

De Man,
253
dezidor,

223, 224, 230

Deyermond, Alan 10-11, 204, 215,

concept of 7, 60, 78

Fernandez de Oviedo, Gonzalo 116,

117 Fernando de Antequera 31, 189, 200
201, 203

see also author; poeta

dezir (genre) 7, 8,

60-61
see Imperial,

Fernando de Aragon,
see also Catholic

el

Catolico 116

see also dit

17, 221, 212, 216, 223, 229,

231

Dezir a

las siete virtudes,

Monarchs

Francisco

Ferrer, Fray Vicente 188, 189, 191

Diaz de Toledo, Pedro 203, 204, 206,

211, 213, 217-18, 219, 248
Disputa de Tortosa 189, 191
dit

feudalism 14, 213, 214, 233

Finke, Laurie 246
Flores deftlosofia

199

(French genre)
as

7,

59-62, 67, 71, 78

Foucault, Michel 182, 240

mode 62

Foulche-Delbosc,

Raymond

INDEX
French verse
143,
112, 138, 139, 145, 146, 148,
142, 149,

293

8,

ideology

8, 9,

13, 14, 54, 84, 88, 91,

144,

127,

175,

182,

197,

200, 204,

150, 154, 155, 156, 161, 253

see also
dit;

207, 216, 223, 237, 246, 247-49,

250, 251, 252, 253
see also masculinism

individual authors

Galician-Portuguese verse

2,

49,

50,

Imperial, Francisco 12, 140,

his

248

51-52,

112,

138,

139,

141,

142,

Dezir a

las siete uirtudes 7,

5978

144, 145, 149, 154, 155, 156, 167,

inuencidn (genre)

10, 83, 86,

101-10,

253
Gallagher, Patrick 180

114, 115, 116, 175

liiigo

game theory 9899

Garcia, Michel 5-6, 7, 43, 213

llana,

Lopez de Mendoza, see Santimarques de

Inquisition 193, 231

Garcilaso de

la

Vega

3, 8,

79-82, 84,

intertextuahty 8, 66, 78
Isabel
I

88-89, 171, 172, 173

his

(of Castile) 14-15, 41, 97, 101,

116,

Cancion

V 89-92
12,

103,

147,

188,

192,

193,

Gaunt, Simon 154, 160

203, 223-25, 229-32, 234

see also Catholic
Italian verse 8,

gender 8-9,

14-15, 89, 90, 91,

Monarchs
148, 141, 154,

165, 238, 243, 244, 248, 250

80-81, 137, 139, 144,

147,

and power 224-34, 245-46

see
also

145,

146,

masculinism; masculinity;

156, 160, 161, 163, 164

see also individual authors

women
Gerh, E. Michael
8,

11-12, 15, 16
Jauss,

German

verse 139, 144, 158, 159, 160,

Hans Robert
12, 138,

62,

236

165, 253

Jews

187-97, 213, 231, 245

Gongora, Luis de 109

Gonzalez de Mendoza, Pedro (Cardinal) 38, 40,

expulsion of 193
see
also

anti-Semitism;

conuersos;

206, 216

Gower, John 150

Gracian, Baltasar 107, 109, 173

Hebrew verse Johnston, Mark 13, 15-16

Jones, R. O. 43, 223

Guevara 33, 34, 115, 124, 132

Harley Lyrics 149, 161

Juan

II

of Castile 53, 99, 100, 101-

102, 103, 189, 190, 192, 194,

201-

202, 206, 211, 213, 215, 224, 225,

226, 232, 233

Hebrew

verse 138, 157-58, 164

7,

Hermida Ruiz, Aurora

8-9, 15

Juan Manuel
152

II

(poet)

103, 108-109,

Herrera, Fernando de 89, 173

homosexuality 158, 230, 231, 233

Huizinga, Johan 10, 98-99, 110, 237

Juana,

Juan Poeta, see ValladoUd, Juan de Queen of Castile 40

humanism
243

79, 160, 180, 182, 204, 205,

juglares 157,

justice,
5, 8, 49,

248 theme of 206-14, 217-19

Huot, Sylvia

142
Kerkhof,
kharjas

Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego 196 Hurus, Juan 36

Hurus, Paulo 35, 36, 37

Maxim

2, 39,

46

157-58, 160, 164

294

INDEX
Mena, Juan de 229
36, 37, 44, 46, 54, 55,

Laberinto de Fortuna, see

163, 193,

Lacarra, Maria Eugenia 128, 223,

204, 206, 208, 209, 211, 218

Lando, Ferran Manuel de 191

language, fascination with 10, 1112,
15,

Manrique, Jorge
172
his Coplas

2, 52, 54, 55, 82, 152,

109-10, 173-83
also

por

la

muerte de su padre 3,

see

bilingualism;

invencion;

35, 36, 40, 45, 48, 196

his

logocentrism;

rhetoric;

wit;

love lyric

8, 35, 36,

84-88, 114,

wordplay
Lapesa, Rafael 80, 81, 83, 86, 88-89
Latin verse 137, 138, 139, 140, 141,
142, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165

115

March, Ausias 42
Maria de Navarra, condesa de Foix 25, 26, 27
Maria,

Queen of Aragon
210, 232

(sister

ofJuan

Le Gentil, Pierre 8, 60-61, Leonor de Navarra 23, 25,

letra

97, 116 26, 27

II)

Maria,
II)

Queen of
38, 100,

Castile (wife of Juan

(genre) 10, 101-10, 175

14,

232

letrados

199, 205, 206, 211, 212,

marriage 225, 231, 233, 245

213, 214, 246, 248

and courtly love 131

Martinez de Toledo, Alfonso 85, 120

Lewis, C.

S.

95

Libro de buen amor, see Ruiz, Libro de

los

Juan

Marxism 238, 240

masculinism
9, 91, 92, 127,

den

capitulos

199

223, 227

Lida de Malkiel, Maria Rosa 116, 214,

mascuhnity

8, 12, 15, 85, 86, 87,

88-

233
literacy 165, 182, 241,
literature,
as

89, 92, 223

248

see also gender; virility

Mejia, Pedro

120-21
2, 27, 29,

recreation 112, 242, 244

5, 7,

Mena, Juan de

32, 38, 39,

concept of

16, 53, 183,

252-

54, 55, 127, 152, 172, 195, 197,

53 "second degree" 78
logocentrism 175, 182
12, 61, 65, 68, 77,

213, 215, 248

his Coplas contra los siete pecados mortales

35, 36,

207

his Laberinto de Fortuna (Tresdentas)

Lopez de Ayala, Pedro 188, 215 his Rimado de Palacio 6, 49-50,

188, 199

15, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 39, 40, 43,

54,

46, 48, 210-11, 224-28,

Mendoza, Inigo de
13
his

54, 192, 206,

231-34 212-

Lopez de

Villalobos, Francisco 121

lovesickness 120-21, 123, 131, 132

Vita Christi 27, 30, 35, 36, 38,

Lucan 70
Luduena, Hernando de 117, 118, 122
Luna, Alvaro de 13, 53, 99-100, 104,
106, 115, 123, 191, 192, 194-96, 197

215 Mendoza, Juan de 103, 105

39, 42, 46, 48, 211,

Menendez

Pelayo, Marcelino 81, 89,

194, 232

macaronic verse 163, 164, 165

Meun, Jeun de his Roman de

la

Rose 59

Machaut, Guillaume de 60, 62, 150

Macias 26, 27, 40, 99

Michael, Ian 223

minstrel, see juglares

Macpherson, Ian 9-10,

Manrique,

15,

222

Gomez

27, 30, 32, 34, 35,

misogyny 85-86, 91, 92, 126, 129, 227-28

INDEX
monarchy, nature of 199-203, 214-17, 218-19
female 221-34
see also absolutism; justice;
Generaciones

295
99-

his

y semblanzas

100, 180, 201, 203

Petrarca, Francesco 46, 81, 83, 90, 91,

power
54, 55,

150, 164

Montesino, Fray Ambrosio 54, 229

Petrarchism 79-82, 83, 84, 90, 92

Pinar, Florencia 33,

Montoro, Anton de 29, 152, 192, 223, 224 moriscos 245, 247 Muros, Diego de 216-17 music 142, 147-48

33,

246
60, 68, 78, 246,

Pizan, Christine de 78
poeta,

concept of

7,

247
see also author; dezidor

muwalM

157-58, 160, 164

Poeta, Juan, see Valladolid, Juan

Portugal, Pedro de 29, 52, 150

Nader, Helen 14, 205-206, 212, 213,

Portuguese verse 145, 147, 152, 163,

214-16
Nebrija, Antonio de
180,

169
181,
182,
see also Candoneiro geral

183
neoplatonism 81, 92

Potvin, Claudine 239, 243, 246, 249

power, theme of

13, 86,

199-219
power;

New
Nieto

Historicism 221, 230, 235, 249

see also cancionero verse, as

Nichols, Steven 7
Soria,

gender and power

Prieto,

Manuel 204-205, 211,

111,

215-16
nobility 14, 52-53, 88, 89, 97,

prostitution

Antonio 80 226-30

Provencal verse 112, 138, 139, 141,

144, 146, 149, 151, 152-54, 155,

115, 191, 205, 212, 213, 237, 241,

245

156, 164
7,

Nunez, Hernan

226

see also individual poets

Puertocarrero 114, 125-26

obscenity 222, 251
orality 8, 49, 51, 61

Pulgar, Fernando de 200,

230

Ovid

63, 66, 90, 95

Quevedo, Francisco de 92, 109

Quintilian 181

Palencia, Alonso de 182, 214,

230
race

Panormita,
42,

el

(Antonio Becadelli) 43,

193,

227, 238, 243, 244,

245,

203

248, 250
see also conversos; Jews; moriscos

Parker, Alexander A. 81, 97, 222

patriarchy 15, 225,

233-34
del

Rambaut de Vaqueiras 152-54,

156, 160, 164
de
la

155,

Pedro

(of Castile) 188

cancionero

Pequeno

marques

Romana (MN15) 29, 34, 40, 45 Perez de Guzman, Fernan 13, 14,
183,
199,

Reiss,
27,

Reconquest 209, 214, 229, 234 Timothy 182

rhetoric 7, 174, 175, 179,

Resende, Garcia de 141

29, 32, 34, 36, 41, 50, 54, 55,

244

202,

206,

207-208,

Ribera, Suero de 40, 120, 163

215, 216, 218, 248

his Coplas de vicios e virtudes 29, 30,

Rico, Francisco 79, 81, 102, 108

Rimado

de Palacio, see

Lopez de Ayala,

199-200, 201, 206, 208-209

Pedro

296
Rodriguez Puertolas, Julio 12-13, 211, 213, 140 Rohland de Langbehn, Regula 1314
Rojas, Fernando de 110, 163, 180

INDEX
Severin,
Solaz,

Dorothy

4,

141

Pedro Annes 15657

Peter 221, 227

Stallybrass,

Stuniga,

Lope de 44
249-52

Roman

de

la

Rose see

Meun, Jean de

subjectivity 12, 15, 182,

Roncaglia, Aurelio 48, 53-54, 166

Ropero de Cordoba, see Montoro, Anton

Tapia 123, 172-73, 175

textual criticism 6, 20-21,

de

48

Rubin, Gayle 225

Ruiz, Juan 8
his Libra de buen

Torre, Fernando de
Torrellas,

la

196, 216

Pedro 26, 27, 38, 129, 146,

amor

6,

4950, 54,

151, 169

160, 228

Torres Naharro, Bartolome de 172

Torroellas, Pere, see Torrellas,

Pedro

Saint Ignatius of Loyola 119

Saint Paul 63, 64, 66

tournaments 10, 100-101, 103, 104,

110, 113, 114
tradition,

San Pedro, Diego de 36, 48, 54, 83,

86-87, 103, 104

concept of

5,

239, 241, 248,

252
Trastamaran dynasty 145,
188,

Sanchez de Arevalo, Rodrigo 214 Sanchez de Badajoz, Garci 30, 43, 172 Sanchez de Calavera, Ferran 37, 196

216,

233
Trescientas,

see

Mena,

Laberinto

de

Sanchez de
Sanseverino,

las

Brozas, Francisco (El

Fortuna

Brocense) 226
Violante
(dedicatee

of

Urries,

Hugo

de 22, 23, 25

Garcilaso's Cancion V)

8991
Valdes,Juan de 109
Valera,

Sansone, Giuseppe 60
Santa Maria, Gonzalo de 204 Santa Maria, Pablo de 188-89, 190,

Diego de 99, 215, 216

248

12, 23, 44, 124,

194-

214
his Siete edades del

Valladohd, Juan de 25, 26, 33, 245,

mundo 29
2, 7, 22, 27, 29,

Santillana,

marques de
173, 196,

Varo, Carios 224, 229-30

30, 32, 37, 39, 48, 54, 55, 139,

Vega, Lope de 80, 92

vidas

172,

203, 206,

215,

and

razos 49,

16667

216, 248
his

Villasandino, Alfonso Alvarez de 27,

32, 44, 50, 52, 55, 99, 145, 149-50,

Carta Prohemio 41, 49, 51-52,

60, 175,
his

219
29,

191, 247, 248, 250-51 199,

Prouerbios

203,

204,

Villena, Enrique de 150, 190, 206,

Virgil 67,
virility

247

206, 209-10, 217-18

his serranillas 3,

225

246

86, 88, 89, 91, 231, 234

his

sonnet

XXXIII 214
215
see

Vita Christi, see

Mendoza,

Iriigo

de

satire 157, 192,

Selomo

Ha-Levi,

Santa

Maria,

Waltz, Mathias 199-200, 203

Weiss, Julian 49, 51, 86, 88, 166-67,

Pablo de

Seneca 89, 201, 203, 204, 217

sentimental romance 13, 28, 114, 203

199-200, 213, 223, 241, 249

Weissberger, Barbara 1415

204

Whetnall.Jane 143, 246

INDEX

297
patrons 138, 139, 178, 250-51

Whinnom. Keith
White,

2-3, 11, 28, 80, 86,

as

103, 108, 133, 222

concept of 8, 15, 130

poets 131, 139-40, 246, 247
role in courtly love 83, 84-86,

Williams,

AUon 221, 227 Raymond 6

91-

wit 88, 101, 109, 114, 122-23, 125,

133, 173

92, 113-15, 119, 121-31,

246

silenced 9, 83, 86
their sexuaUty 225,

examples of 102-109
see also invenciSn;

227-28

wordplay

see also gender; misogyny;

monarprosti-

Wolkenstein, Oswald von 139, 160

chy,

female;

patriarchy;

women

12, 87,

90-92, 105, 116, 157-

tution

61, 164, 221-34, 251

wordplay 101, 102, 103-104, 109, 110, 251

and rape 158-59, 227

as as

courtly fiction 122, 127

objects

of exchange 223, 225,

Zumthor, Paul

8, 61, 164,

165

233

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