Key Forms of Medieval Spanish Literature and Poetry

Medieval Spanish Literature

• It was primarily an orally transmitted folk literature.
• As Vulgar Latin evolved, the Romance languages arose.
• The first texts in Castilian were the Glosas Silenses and Glosas Emilianenses (10th century), which were notes in the margins of Latin sermon texts from the monasteries of Santo Domingo de Silos and San Millán de la Cogolla.

Medieval Spanish Lyric Poetry

The first Castilian lyric songs were not written down; they were sung, and some have survived through the works of Hebrew or Arabic poets.

The Jarchas

These are short poems of three or four verses, written in Mozarabic at the end of longer compositions in Arabic or Hebrew (known as muwashshahas). They express amorous complaints from a woman's perspective. They date back to the 10th and 11th centuries and were discovered by Samuel Stern in 1948.

Galician-Portuguese Poetry

• Cantigas de Amigo: Lyrical compositions from a woman's perspective, lamenting the absence or delay of her husband or lover. Subgenres include albadas and barcarolas. Common stylistic devices include parallelism, rhetorical questions, and leixaprén (repetition with slight variation).
• Cantigas de Amor: Love poems from a man's perspective, influenced by Provençal lyric poetry (10th century). They focus on the theme of courtly love: the poet sings to a beautiful, inaccessible lady. This love is often adulterous and desperate, but the suffering is believed to ennoble the lover's spirit.
• Cantigas de Escarnio: Critical or satirical poems, often with social, political, or religious themes.
• Sacred Cantigas: The most famous are the Cantigas de Santa María, attributed to Alfonso X the Wise and written in Galician.

Popular Castilian Lyric

This was an oral tradition related to Arabo-Andalusian and Galician-Portuguese lyric poetry. It included songs about spring, fieldwork, weddings, and hunting.

The Villancicos

The earliest examples are the 15th-century villancicos (carols), which were spread on single sheets and collected in songbooks. The main theme was love, though they also incorporated other topics like spring and harvest.

The villancico is metrically related to the Hispano-Arabic zéjel and thematically to the jarchas and cantigas de amigo. Their preservation was made possible by their inclusion in songbooks of the era, such as the Cancionero de Palacio, the Cancionero de Upsala, and the Cancionero de Medinaceli.

Medieval Spanish Theater

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Greco-Roman theater was largely forgotten in Europe. Drama re-emerged in Spain in the 12th century with liturgical plays performed in churches. The only known surviving work from this period is the Auto de los Reyes Magos (Play of the Magi), of which only 147 polymetric verses remain. It shows French influence and is anonymous. No other written dramatic works are known until the 15th century.