Medieval Romance Themes and Literary Techniques

Theme of Romance

Romance Types

Historical Romance

Inspired more or less in historical themes or exploits of characters.

Chivalry Romance

Romances of the cycle known as Breton, dealing with the exploits of the knights of King Arthur's Court.

Moorish Romance

Features an idealization of the Muslim, seen as a courtier, a good lover, and a gentleman.

Ancient Religious Romance

Themes based on Biblical or Greek or Roman mythology, or romances of the lives of saints.

Epic-Lyric Romance

Invented themes. They fused romantic and lyrical expressiveness.

Mester de Clerecía: Features

It is educated, but attends the minstrel tradition.

Scholarship: Purely because it is subject to biblical scriptures in Latin, French, or Hebrew. We also collect items from the oral and popular tradition.

He writes with the intention to teach and delight.

• Tends to metrical regularity.

Style of the Couplet

Exhortatory Style (E. hortatory)

Achieved with the use of first-person plural imperatives addressed to the reader.

Exhibition Style (E. exhibition)

Achieved by anaphora and enumeration, but also with the use of the poetic Ubi sunt topic.

Sententious Style (E. sententious)

Interrogation is achieved by rhetoric or statements.

Techniques and Genres of La Celestina

La Celestina is a work that does not belong to a specific genre. Given its characteristics, it is not intended to be represented, but to be read in public.

La Celestina is a work with dramatic elements, given its structure through dialogue. It has essential differences from theater, which are:

• There is no division of scenes.
• Only the characters speak, and through their interventions we know the space, time, and situations.
• Space is changing and mobile.
• Time references are subjective and not closely tied to the development of the facts.

Topics in the Poetry of Garcilaso

Love

• Garcilaso wrote love poems with artificial language, rhyme, and repeated eight-syllable verses.
• Garcilaso used Italian metrical forms, influenced by Virgil and Petrarch, in which he expresses his feelings with simplicity of form. He sets out a number of parallels with Petrarch, as both idealize an impossible love that ends with the death of the two beloved.
• Garcilaso summarizes the theme of love in the complaint of the lover, melancholy or despair due to the scorn of his beloved, and in mourning for his early death.

Nature

• Often associated with love. The love scene is always set in a natural setting that is integrated into the poet's conflict and part of his moods, experiencing emotional parallel transformations of the feeling.

Mythology

• In Garcilaso, mythology plays a specific role by linking it with feelings. All the myths that appear in his poetry have a painful and tragic way that corresponds to his emotional situation.