Medieval Literature and the Songbooks

The first great body of writing in Galician-Portuguese is neither narrative nor religious: it is lyric. From roughly the end of the 12th century to the middle of the 14th, the courts of the north-western Peninsula cultivated a sung poetry — the cantiga — that became the prestige vehicle of amorous and satirical expression across nearly the whole Iberian Peninsula. This corpus, today known as the Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyric, has reached us through a handful of manuscripts: the cancioneiros, or songbooks.

The coming of the troubadour art

The fashion for trobar was born in Occitania (the south of present-day France), where, from the early 12th century, the troubadours composed in Provençal a courtly poetry built on fin’amors — idealised love for the lady. By way of the pilgrim roads to Santiago, of the courts and of dynastic alliances, that model reached the Peninsula and found in Galician-Portuguese its language of choice. For more than a century, even Castilian poets composed their secular lyric in this tongue: the poetic koiné of the Peninsula was Galician-Portuguese.

The three genres

Medieval poetics — preserved in fragmentary form in the Arte de Trovar that opens one of the songbooks — sorts the corpus into three major genres:

• cantiga de amor (love song) — a male voice; the troubadour laments the coita (love-pain) caused by an unattainable senhor, directly in the wake of the Provençal tradition;
• cantiga de amigo (song of a friend) — a female voice, of native roots and without parallel in Occitania; a young woman speaks of her amigo (her sweetheart) to her mother, her friends, or the elements of nature;
• cantiga de escárnio e maldizer — personal and social satire, ranging from veiled allusion (escárnio) to open insult (maldizer).

Troubadours, jongleurs and segréis

Composing and performing the cantigas fell to figures of distinct rank. The trovador was, strictly, a noble-born author who composed for pleasure and prestige; the jogral (jongleur) was the professional performer who sang and played, often from court to court; the segrel was a poet-singer who lived by his craft yet aspired to the troubadour’s dignity. There were also the soldadeiras, women attached to the entertainment — the most famous, Maria Balteira, a recurring target of the satirical songs.

Form and music

The cantiga was, by definition, text meant to be sung. A distinction was drawn between songs de refrão (with a refrain repeated after each stanza) and those de mestria (without a refrain, and technically more demanding). The cantigas de amigo make frequent use of parallelism: stanzas that echo the previous one with slight variation, chained by the device of leixa-pren — the last line of one pair of stanzas returns as the first line of the next. The effect is circular, almost incantatory.

Of the music, almost everything is lost. Only two witnesses of the secular lyric survive with notation: the Vindel Parchment, with six of Martim Codax’s seven songs noted, and the Sharrer Parchment, a fragment of love songs by King Dinis identified only in 1990.

The songbooks

The bulk of the corpus — over sixteen hundred secular cantigas, attributed to some hundred and fifty poets — survives in three great collections:

Songbook	Sigil	Date	Contents
Cancioneiro da Ajuda	A	late 13th c.	mostly love songs; a royal copy, with unfinished illuminations
Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional	B	16th c.	the largest collection; an Italian copy made in the circle of Angelo Colocci
Cancioneiro da Vaticana	V	16th c.	related to B; held in the Vatican Apostolic Library

The two great apographs (B and V) are sixteenth-century copies made in Italy, in Colocci’s humanist milieu, from an antecedent now lost. Without that Renaissance curiosity, most of the poetry would have vanished.

The religious lyric followed its own path: the Cantigas de Santa Maria — over four hundred Marian compositions gathered, in Galician-Portuguese, under the patronage of Alfonso X of Castile (1221–1284) — survive in richly illuminated codices with their musical notation almost wholly intact.

Peak and decline

The school’s high point coincides with the reign of King Dinis (r. 1279–1325), himself the most prolific troubadour known, with over a hundred cantigas. It was his natural son Pedro, Count of Barcelos, who is among the figures linked to the compilation and ordering of this legacy. Across the 14th century, however, courtly taste shifts: the Galician-Portuguese lyric gives way to Castilian cancionero poetry and to prose, and the tradition dies out as a living practice.

Legacy

The troubadour lyric fixed, very early, a literary language of remarkable suppleness, and founded themes — the saudade of the absent love, the landscape as confidant, biting irony — that run through all later Portuguese literature. Camões read it; Romanticism rediscovered it; and the 20th century restored to it the central place it deserves at the origins of the Peninsular lyric.