"Cobras e Son." Papers on the Text, Music, and Manuscripts of the 'Cantigas de Santa Maria'

Abstract

Cobras e Son. Papers on the Text, Music, and Manuscripts of the 'Cantigas de Santa Maria.' Ed. Stephen Parkinson. Oxford, England: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000. 246 pages. This handsome set of essays sprang from a Colloquium held at Oxford in 1994 and contains papers and discussions from that productive gathering. The authors revised and expanded their studies in the intervening years, producing one of the most thoughtful and studious anthologies of work on the four extant Cantigas manuscripts to date. A persistent thread of Cantigas research over the years is their assessment within diverse critical contexts and historical camps. Does the music represent true Spanish folk melodies that grew up with romance vernacular songs, are they commingled with Hispanoarabic rhythmic patterns, or do they perhaps anticipate aspects of French troubadour music? Does the participation of Moorish and Jewish musicians among the European performers shown in the illustrations and documented for at least post-- Alfonsine times, support those theses? Does the use of Galician-Portuguese hint at any sort of detachment from content, an artificiality that makes the lyrics ring true only for aesthetes and prevents their penetration into the common culture of the masses? On the flip side of the coin, did the Cantigas' perceived popular style (use of refrains, folk melodies, links to dance, etc.) lower their potential prestige among Europeans outside of Iberia? Although the physical books themselves were manufactured and illustrated by Christian artisans, do their realistic depictions hint at native Iberian experiences at odds with the formalisms of the lyrics or music? How much are the miniatures influenced by foreign models, how much originality do they display, and to what extent is that inventiveness an accidental byproduct of the absence of formal precedents for illustrating these story poems? The essays in this anthology probe these and many other questions, and even entertain the possibility that all the extent copies of the Cantigas were produced after Alfonso's death, perhaps well into the fourteenth century. Manuel Pedro Ferreira, Music and the Cantigas de Santa Maria, returns to the polarized debate about Arabic features using recently published hispanoarabic songs that survive with their musical notion to argue that an independent Andalusian stamp cannot be dismissed. Mary O'Neill, in Problems of Genre Definition: the Cantigas de Santa Maria in the Context of the Romance Lyric Tradition, points out how the very multi-culturalism inherent within these lyrics and the internationalism of their settings may have militated against earning them the stature they deserve vis-d-vis songs linked to modern nation states, specifically the troubadour lyrics of France. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.