Medieval Literature: Popular and Highbrow Traditions
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, popular literature flourished as an anonymous, orally transmitted art form created by and for the people.
Popular Literature
- Narrative (in verse): Its purpose was to narrate events, awakening the interest of the people, entertaining, and informing.
- Lyric: The subject of popular poetry was varied, with compositions addressing the theme of love predominating.
Highbrow Literature
From the thirteenth century, a kind of scholarly literature written for nobles was cultivated.
- Narrative (prose): Aimed to entertain while offering advice and instructing the readers.
- Lyric: The themes that predominated in love poetry were educated social criticism and death.
Popular Lyric
During the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, anonymous short compositions were transmitted orally from generation to generation.
- Metric: Irregular minor art asonante.
- Rhyme-style: Simple techniques of repetition, heightened tension.
Mozarabic Lyric
Language spoken by Christians who lived in Arab lands. Jarchas are known compositions at the bottom of Arabs and other more extensive Hebrew compositions called moaxajas. The theme is a loving girl who laments the absence of her husband.
Castilian Lyric
Popular character compositions are transmitted orally.
Principal structure: Carol: chorus, moving, vult verse, chorus.
Other forms:
- Albada lyrics: Theme of love in which lovers show their feelings in the morning.
- May or Maya: To celebrate the arrival of spring.
- Work songs: Sung while working in the field.
- Galician-Portuguese Lyric: Can form in Galicia and Portugal, called ballads.
- Cantigas rates: From friend poems in which she expresses her grief over the absence of his beloved.
- Love: Compositions in which the knight laments the indifference of his wife.
- Of ridicule and cursing: Compositions with satirical intent or burlesque.
Castilian Epic
Arose indicated to extolling the great deeds of medieval heroes, transmitted orally by bards.
Epics: They are the stories told by the minstrels, generally anonymous. Narratives in verse-final: report of key developments and achievements of war and teach behavior patterns that serve as a model for society at that time.
- Content: Narrating historical events: act of war, conquest of a city.
- Protagonist: The hero becomes a model society based on their positive characteristics.
- Metrical: Verses divided in a censure hemistiches indeterminate number of syllables rhyme assonance.
Cantar de Mio Cid
The most extensive and best-preserved epic poem of our literature. Anonymous author which recounts the exploits of Rodrigo Diaz de Viva, El Cid.
Part Three: Song of exile, to sing the wedding song of the outrage of Corpas (infants da carrion).
Features:
- Purpose: It gives a great historical value.
- Protagonist: The Cid embodies the ideal human age. Brave, loyal. The minstrel uses epithets that are repeated to bind the value and honor of the hero.
- Metric: Consists of 3370 fourteen-syllable lines divided into two hemistiquios. Troubadour.
- Stylistic simplicity.
Ballads
- Simplicity and sobriety: Descriptions bleak, shortage of adjectives, use of dialogue to bring agility to the text.
- Oral-character: It requires the use of revenue resulting from oral discourse: repetition, apostrophes, exclamations.
- Fragmentary: Focus on a particular point in action.
The romances are formed by a series of octasílabos verses, assonance rhyme in pairs, the pairs free quedadndo.
Historical Classification
The epoch or event featuring real people reflected the same themes and the character created in epics.
Novelescos
Thematic varied asymptomatic deal invented. Feelings refer as the absence of Segan, loneliness. Untranslatable elements are fantastic.