The Galician-Portuguese School
Study questions for week 4
Objectives: For nearly two hundred years (roughly 1180-1360), poets writing in the
Christian kingdoms of Portugal, Leon and Castile employed Galician-Portuguese as their
lyric language. The Galician-Portuguese school produced a large corpus of some of the
most sophisticated and attractive verse produced in medieval Iberia. In addition to a
large body of religious poems in praise of the Virgin Mary, there were three main modes
of secular lyric verse: male-voiced love songs (cantigas d’amor), female-voiced love
songs (cantigas d’amigo, written by men), and personal invectives and satire (cantigas
d’escarnio e de maldezir).
We shall take each form in turn, beginning with the male-voiced love song, the cantigas
de amor.
These poems exemplify the important phenomenon of courtly love. Our aim to is
examine how these lyrics exploit the conventions of courtly love to express a particular
form of masculine desire.
Readings (required):





Look through the examples of cantigas de amor included in the course pack, as
well as the poems by Alfonso X that illustrate the almost divine nature of poetic
creativity.
Read Alan Deyermond’s short summary of the phenomenon of courtly love
(KEATS)
Browse the extracts from Andreas Capellanus’s treatise on love, De amore, noting
especially how he defines love (you may wish to compare some of his ideas with
the short extracts from Ibn Hazm’s Arabic treatise).
The list of rhetorical terms on the ‘Galician-Portuguese poetics’ handout
(KEATS)
Study the language notes on Galician Portuguese and my Castilian translations
Lecture preparation questions:

Based on the poems by Alfonso X, what qualities make up the ideal poet? What
is necessary in order to write good verse?

Based on your reading of the extracts from Deyermond and Andreas Capellanus,
what do you understand by the term ‘courtly love’?
Seminar preparation:
We shall use the seminars to illustrate and develop the themes of the lecture. Your task is
to choose two cantigas de amor and make notes on the following points:
(a) their complex rhetorical structure, identifying as many examples of rhetorical
figures as you can, and comment on the role form plays in constructing meaning;
(b) how these poems exploit the conventions of courtly love, and to what effect;
(c) how desire is inflected by gender and class—in other words, what does it mean
to love as a noble man? Is this desire psychological, spiritual, carnal, etc?
(d) how (if at all) might you relate this poetry to medieval ideas about the body and
sexual pathology?
(e) how do the cantigas de amor compare with the muwashshah in their
representation of masculine desire?
Required seminar reading
Take notes on my article on ‘The conventionality of the cantigas de amor’ (KEATS),
which examines the ideological significance of the courtly love conventions and the light
they shed on the construction of aristocratic masculinity.