Medieval Cantigas

The medieval cantigas are the first great literary monument of the Portuguese language. Composed in Galician-Portuguese roughly between the late 12th and the mid-14th centuries, they form a corpus of around 1,680 compositions by some 150 poets, drawn from across the Peninsula and beyond. For more than a century this was the obligatory language of Iberian lyric poetry — whether the poets writing it were Galician, Portuguese, Leonese or Castilian.

Troubadours, jograis and segréis

Troubadour poetry was not meant to be read in silence: it was song, performed to instruments before a court. Three kinds of author or performer were distinguished, ranked by social standing. The trovador (troubadour) was the nobleman who composed for pleasure and prestige, taking no fee; the jogral (jongleur) was a low-born professional who sang and played for money, often performing others’ work; the segrel held an intermediate position, a knight of lesser means who lived partly by his poetic craft. The model reached the north-western Peninsula by way of the Occitan troubadour tradition of Provence, but the result was a school with a physiognomy all its own.

The Arte de Trovar — a fragmentary treatise that opens one of the songbooks — sets out the genres and the technical vocabulary of this school. There are three major genres.

The three genres

Cantiga de amor (love song)

In the cantiga de amor, a male I voices the love-suffering — the coita — caused by an idealised, unattainable lady, the senhor (then a grammatically feminine form). It is the genre most indebted to Provençal fin’amors: the woman appears as a superior being, rarely individualised, and the lover submits to her “love-service” with no hope of return. King Dinis, the most prolific of the Portuguese troubadours with some 137 cantigas, was fully aware of this lineage.

Cantiga de amigo (song of a friend)

The cantiga de amigo is the school’s great originality: it has no direct parallel in Provence and is rooted in a native popular lyric. Here the voice is female — a young woman speaks of her amigo, her absent sweetheart, addressing her mother, her sisters, her friends, or the elements of nature (the sea, the waves, the flowers, a stag). Despite the female voice, the authors were men. Subtypes are distinguished by their setting: barcarolas or marinhas (by the sea), bailadas (dance songs), cantigas de romaria (set at a pilgrimage) and alvas (the dawn encounter).

Cantiga de escárnio e maldizer (song of mockery and slander)

The third genre is satirical, and medieval theorists distinguished two degrees. In the cantiga de escárnio, the criticism works through palavras cubertas — veiled allusion, double meaning, ambiguity, without naming the target. In the cantiga de maldizer, the attack is direct and named, and may descend to raw insult and obscenity. The targets ranged from ladies and nobles to rival jograis, and took in the manners, hypocrisies and scandals of the court.

The art of trovar

Technically, a distinction was drawn between cantigas de refrão (with a repeated refrain) and de mestria (without one, held to be more learned). The most characteristic formal device, above all in the cantiga de amigo, is parallelism: stanzas are repeated in pairs, varying only the final word of each line, often by simply swapping a rhyme word or a synonym. Bound up with it is the leixa-pren (“leave and take”): the second line of one stanza-pair returns as the first line of the next, driving the poem forward in a spiral.

The songbooks

Almost the whole secular corpus reaches us through three great manuscript collections, the cancioneiros. None is the original: the oldest is a copy from the late 13th century, and the two largest are Italian Renaissance apographs, made in the circle of the humanist Angelo Colocci from a model now lost — probably the Livro das Cantigas of Count Pedro of Barcelos, son of King Dinis.

Songbook	Where kept	Copy	Contents
Cancioneiro da Ajuda	Ajuda Library, Lisbon	late 13th c.	~310 cantigas, almost all love songs; illuminated, unfinished
Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (formerly Colocci-Brancuti)	National Library, Lisbon	Italy, c. 1525	~1,560 cantigas, all three genres; includes the Arte de Trovar
Cancioneiro da Vaticana	Vatican Apostolic Library, Rome	Italy, 16th c.	~1,200 cantigas, all three genres

The music

The cantiga was inseparable from its melody, yet almost all of the music is lost. Two precious witnesses survive. The Vindel Parchment, rediscovered in 1914, preserves seven cantigas de amigo by Martim Codax, six of them with their musical staff — the only extensive musical record of the secular Galician-Portuguese lyric. The Sharrer Parchment, identified in 1990, carries fragments of seven cantigas de amor by King Dinis, likewise with music. They are the slender threads that still let us imagine how this poetry sounded.

Decline and legacy

The school declined after the death of King Dinis (1325), as the troubadour model exhausted itself and Castilian gained ground as the courtly language of culture. Yet its founding weight is immense: the cantigas document the medieval language at a decisive stage and fix motifs — the sea, absence, the coita, longing before it had a name — that run through all later Portuguese poetry. When the manuscripts were rediscovered in the 19th century, they gave the language back the memory of its first lyric voice.