Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the Cancionero de Baena to the Cancionero General

Abstract

Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the Cancionero de Baena to the Cancionero General. Eds. E. Michael Gerli and Julian Weiss. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. 297 pages. This volume represents a collection of essays given at a conference held at Georgetown University, Washington, DC February 11-14, 1993. As Julian Weiss states in the volume's Introduction, the volume's editors have tried to gather together a representative cross-section of current work, produced by scholars writing at different stages in their careers, some of them renowned specialists in medieval lyric, others publishing for the first time on the subject (3). methodological and thematic scope of the critical works contained in Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain is indeed wide, however there is an overall coherence to the book as a whole. This coherence is achieved through the general focus upon the socio-political context of cancionero verse in fifteenth-century Iberia that one finds throughout the volume as well as through the editors' decision to group the articles under more specific thematic rubrics. first section, Compilation and Cultural Meaning, begins with Vicenc Beltran Pepio's The Typology and Genesis of the Cancioneros: Compiling the Materials. this study, Beltran offers a detailed analysis of what he terms the genetic typology of the cancioneros themselves, focusing on the various processes of compilation that they represent. section ends with Michel Garcia's In Praise of the Cancionero: Considerations on the Social Meaning of the Castilian Garcia argues for a critical shift of focus from the contents of the anthologies to the manuscript 'container' itself (5) in order to gain a better understanding of their social meaning. next section, Traditions: Rupture and Renewal, begins with Marina S. Brownlee's Francisco Imperial and the Issue of Poetic Genealogy, in which she details Imperial's by no means disinterested handling of literary tradition, specifically the work of Dante. Aurora Hermida Ruiz's Silent Subtexts and Cancionero Codes: On Garcilaso de la Vegas Revolutionary Love investigates the underlying ideological codes in courtly lyric. Ian Macpherson's The Game of Love: Letra, Divisa, and Invencion at the Court of the Catholic Monarchs heads the next section, Courtly Games. His detailed analysis of specific cancionero texts is nicely complemented by Victoria A. Burrus' Role Playing in the Amatory Poetry of the Cancioneros. …