A History of Spanish Literature: From Oral Tradition to the Renaissance
The Oral Poetry Tradition
The Mastersinger
Lyric poetry was expressed through song, dance, and other performative arts. Epic poetry was also accompanied by music. Both lyrical and epic poems were performed by minstrels, singers, and actors who entertained people in towns and castles.
The Original Peninsular Lyric
The jarchas, short lyrical compositions in Mozarabic (the Latin language spoken in Muslim territory), represent a significant form of early Spanish lyric poetry. Transmitted orally, these poemillas, often centered around themes of love, were sometimes incorporated into texts written by Arabic and Hebrew Andalusian poets. The jarchas bear a strong resemblance to poems from mainland Europe and other regions, exhibiting themes of love, songs voiced by a female persona, expressive simplicity, and short verses. However, they also possess elements that align them more closely with the Eastern world.
The Cantigas de Amigo
The Cantigas de Amigo share several characteristics with the jarchas, including the themes of love and the use of a female voice. However, there are also notable differences. The Cantigas de Amigo are generally longer, feature stanzas linked by parallelism, and frequently reference nature, reflecting the reality of peasant life in Merino Galicia as opposed to the urban Moorish environment.
The Epic Tradition
Epic poetry narrates the exploits of a hero who is an ancestor of the people who sing the epic. While based on historical events, epic poems often incorporate fictional elements. These poems, known as epics, were recited or sung, accompanied by a melody, and typically celebrated the deeds or accomplishments of great heroes.
The Cantar de Mio Cid
The Cantar de Mio Cid exists in a manuscript copied in the fourteenth century. The unity and perfection of the text suggest a single, learned author. The Song’s 3,730 verses are grouped into series of lines, or stanzas, of varying lengths, all sharing the same assonantal rhyme. The lines are irregular, lacking a fixed meter, and are divided into two parts by a distinct pause.
The language of the poem is remarkably clear. Other notable features of the text include frequent appeals to the listeners, exclamatory expressions, a consistent narrative pace, and the use of direct dialogue. The oral nature of the epic also explains the remarkable freedom with which verb forms are used and the employment of epic epithets and appositions, which serve to elevate the heroes. Frequent parallels aid the minstrels in memorizing the poem.
The poem is divided into three parts: the Song of Exile, the Song of the Wedding, and the Song of the Reproach of Corpes. Internally, the structure is defined by the process of the hero’s loss of honor, its recovery, and its subsequent reaffirmation.
The content of the poem can be analyzed from three perspectives:
- Political: The poem depicts the conflict between León and Castile. El Cid, a Castilian knight, captures the king of León.
- Socioeconomic: The Song expresses ideals of upward mobility that resonated with both the minstrel and the audience.
- Individual: The hero, Rodrigo Díaz, banished by the king, faces the formidable challenge of reclaiming his honor.
The Rise of Prose
In the latter half of the thirteenth century, Castilian prose emerged and flourished, driven by King Alfonso X the Wise’s ambition to establish Castilian as the language of culture in place of Latin. Alfonso X promoted the translation of works from various Eastern languages, leading to the development of a renowned translation school in Toledo. Throughout the twelfth century, Castilian also became the language of numerous tales and exempla of Eastern origin.
The Conde Lucanor
, best-known work of Don Juan Manuel. Nephew of Alfonso X the Wise, her numerous writings are intended to provide the nobles of the time patterns of behavior appropriate to their establishment and useful for maintaining social and economic position.
Count Lucanor is divided into five parts. The first and most important consists of fifty examples that the author takes a variety of sources and are always in the same way: Count Lucanor presents a practical problem Patronio counselor, who, to advise it tells a story.
Theater
There are two types of theater: The religious and the profane
The religious theater was born inside the temples, then went out and need a proper stage. But it was finally banned in churches and in the vicinity, because they considered shameless attitudes increasingly free of the actors.
As for the theater profane, minstrels in his performances included dances, mimes and other shows semiteatrales, who were known as the Games of derision.
The Renaissance
The term Renaissance defines cultural and social period following the Middle Ages, when reborn interest in Greek and Latin authors. The culture, the arts and sciences are a necessity of the times. The kings granted privileges to the universities because it fulfills an essential social function.
The most important features of Renaissance culture relate to the bourgeois mentality. The man becomes the center of the world and hence is often synonymous with humanism of the Renaissance. This also explains vitalism and the art of Renaissance literature and the splendid courts and palaces, with their parties and luxuries. He sings of love and pleasure, in a society away and the medieval. It is a time of optimism, nature seems to be available to the man. Rationalism is a feature of the new era. And hence the birth of the way of progress. It is considered that knowledge makes man better. This desire for improvement has to do with the ideas of Neoplatonism, philosophical conception according to which material reality is a spiritual reflection to be achieved than by knowledge or by other pathways to the spiritual.
In Spain, the man knows its peak in the first third of the sixteenth century. This Spanish humanism of the century is influenced by the ideas of Erasmus of Rotterdam Dutch, who advocates a religion free from superstition, pure, intimate and personal. But Erasmianism quickly fell from grace, as a result of the Catholic reaction to the Protestant threat. In 1550, prohibits certain Spanish to study in European universities. The following year he published the first Index of Forbidden Books. Thus began the censorship of books, are seen by the power and danger.
Most of the population remained illiterate and the current was read aloud in groups. The groups were literate, particularly in the cities among aristocrats, clergy and bourgeoisie.