Medieval Literature to Golden Age: Key Concepts
Medieval Literature (10th to 15th Centuries)
Medieval literature arose during the extended historical period of the Middle Ages, beginning in the 5th century.
- Symbol: Elements that have an arbitrary relationship with the object or idea they represent.
- Literature: Art used to express words.
- Stanza: A stanza in metrics is a group of lines linked by a fixed set of criteria: extension, rhyme, and rhythm. Verses are classified by the number of verses they contain.
- Style: The set of linguistic features characterizing an author, a work, or a specific time.
- Figures of Speech: (Literary or stylistic) Creative possibilities presented at the phonetic-semantic or syntactic level of language.
- Metaphor: The use of an expression with a meaning or in a context different from the usual.
- Hyperbaton: A literary figure that disrupts the natural syntactic order of a sentence. In Spanish, this order is typically Subject + Verb + Complements.
- Hyperbole: A trope involving significant exaggeration, increasing or decreasing the truth of what is said.
- Asyndeton: A literary device that eliminates conjunctions, often used to give flexibility to the text.
- Literary Genres: Different groups or categories in which literary content can be classified according to common characteristics. Classical rhetoric classified these into three major groups: Lyric, Epic, and Dramatic.
- Poetry: Expresses the author’s inner world (feelings, emotions) through a “poetic self,” transmitting a personal and subjective universe.
- Epic/Narrative: Various events are told involving characters in a specific time and space through a narrator, who gives voice to the facts.
- Dramatic/Theatrical: Action is represented in a specific time and space by characters in dialogue on stage.
- Epic Poem: The name given to epic works written in the Middle Ages. It recounts the exploits of a hero who represents the virtues of a people or community during the Middle Ages.
- Metrics: The measure of the lines (number of syllables).
- Romance: An epic-lyrical composition; narrative poems that tell stories and events or express emotions intensively.
- Paragraph: A unit of speech in written text that expresses an idea or argument or reproduces a speaker’s words.
Renaissance and the Golden Age
- Renaissance: A cultural current that revived Greco-Roman classical culture based on the ideas of Humanism, bringing a profound change in world view. It originated in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries and flourished in Europe during the 16th century.
- Middle Ages: The phase from the 5th to the 15th century; Medieval literature covers the 10th to 15th centuries.
The Renaissance (16th century) and Baroque (17th century) constitute the Golden Age of Spanish literature.
Morphosyntactic Level (Grammatical)
The linguistic unit is the sentence, whose research is encompassed within grammar. Morphosyntax or morphology studies the form and grammatical category of words and their ability to combine in a sentence. Syntax looks at the grouping of words into phrases, their relationships and functions, and the characteristics of the sentence.
- Grammatical Sentence: A linguistic unit with intonation, complete syntactic sense, and independence.
- Periphrasis: The union of two or more verb forms that function together as a single verb in the sentence.
- Passive Reflex: Constructed using the pronoun “se” attached to the noun and the verb form.