Medieval Spanish Lyric Poetry: Origins and Evolution
1. Medieval Lyric Poetry in Spain
The first manifestations of lyric poetry in the Iberian Peninsula reflect the confluence of languages and cultures that characterized the Hispanic Middle Ages. Thematic and formal similarities are evident in both the cultured lyric (Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, Arabic, and Hebrew poetry) and the popular lyric (jarchas, ballads of friend, and carols).
1.1. Cultured Lyric Poetry
This category includes the sirventes in Catalan and Provençal, the Arabic and Hebrew muwassaha, and the Galician-Portuguese ballads of love, jokes, and songs.
1.1.1. Catalan Lyric Poetry
Provençal poetry, which emerged around 1100 in Provence, was the first significant literary movement of cultured lyric in Western Europe. The Provençal language was its vehicle. It appeared in the Iberian Peninsula in the second half of the 12th century.
It was cultivated by minstrels who created a refined art, subject to rigid rules of verse and rhyme. They practiced two basic forms:
- Canso: A love poem with a male emitter and a female receiver, it was a literary expression of courtly love. Love was understood as a service of the lover who went through four stages (feñedor, precador, knowledgeable, and Drude).
- Sirventes: This form was used as an expression of anger, personal attacks, literary controversy, or moralizing discourse.
Other forms cultivated included the alba, pastorela, planh, and tenso.
1.1.2. Galician-Portuguese Lyric Poetry
Songs of love flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries, showing the influence of Provençal poetry, which arrived through pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago.
They are direct descendants of the Provençal tradition, both lexically and thematically. The poetic voice is a man who addresses a lady. The joy of love turns into sadness and torment in the ballads. Formally, they have a wide and artificial metric, and a complex strophic vision.
This lyrical tradition also includes songs of ridicule, which are composed of two types:
- Cantigas of derision: These are veiled and disguised satires of a personal nature, with an air of riddle.
- Cantigas of curse: These are direct attacks, without irony, targeting social groups or individuals in a cartoonish tone.
Within this lyrical tradition, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, the work of Alfonso X the Wise, stands out.
1.1.3. Arabic and Hebrew Lyric Poetry
In the 10th and 11th centuries, two types of stanzaic poems emerged in Al-Andalus: the zejel and the muwassaha. The underlying theme of these compositions is love, often of a homosexual nature. The setting is urban, and there are references to the flora and fauna of Al-Andalus. The zejel and muwassaha differ both in the language of composition and structure:
- The muwassaha was written in classical Arabic but was soon adopted by Hispano-Jewish poets who used classical Hebrew. The last stanza ends with a short poem called a jarcha, written in the Andalusian Arabic dialect or a mixture of both.
- The zejel was written in the Andalusian Arabic dialect and lacked a jarcha.
1.2. Early Popular Lyric Poetry
Manifestations of the original popular lyric are the Andalusian jarchas, the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de amigo, and the Castilian villancicos.
1.2.1. Jarchas
These are the final lines that concluded the moaxajas. Composed in vulgar Arabic or Hebrew, or in the Andalusian Romance language, their relationship with the muwassaha is not always the same: sometimes a connection is established between them, and other times they are independent. They can reach up to eight lines, but most jarchas consist of four lines (six-syllable and eight-syllable), preferably with consonant rhyme. The theme is almost always love: a young lover, the habib, tells her suffering to her mother, sisters, or friends in their urban environment. The jarchas are characterized by their simplicity and the scant use of expressive resources. A characteristic feature is the mention of the beloved through the noun habib.
1.2.2. Cantigas de Amigo
In the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo, the speaker is a girl in love expressing her feelings to her mother, sister, or friends. Common themes include sadness caused by the death or absence of the beloved, anxiety, melancholy, or joy at his return. Nature looms large in them. They have a popular language and a specific lexicon. Their form is usually a monorhymed verse, followed by a monorhymed chorus, but with a different rhyme. Their main stylistic resource is parallelism.
1.2.3. Villancicos
Castilian villancicos are poems whose opening lines are called carols. The rest of the composition is its gloss. Texts prior to the 15th century are not preserved, but the form is considerably older. The most common theme is love, and it coincides with the jarchas and cantigas de amigo: a girl in love laments her situation. The setting is a rural environment, where water becomes important. The villancicos are often characterized by the absence of adjectives, the predominance of verbs of motion and diminutives, hortatory and optative sentences, repetitions, and parallels.