Spain and Portugal

Abstract

The over 500 Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo (“songs about a lover”) constitute a genre that is both contrastive and complementary to the male-voice cantigas de amor (“songs about love”). Older scholarship regarded the cantigas de amigo as reflective of an indigenous popular poetry, as distinct from the cantigas de amor, modelled on the courtly Occitan canso. However, more recent analyses have emphasized the similarity of the two genres, both practiced by the same poets. Nearly all of the authors are identified by—male—name. Sometimes the poems are designated as cantigas de refran (“songs with refrain”), as opposed to the more linguistically complex cantigas de meestria (“songs of master-craft”). The most typical structure is a parallelistic poem with a refrain and leixa-pren, “leaving and taking up,” that is, the incorporation of an earlier line into a later stanza according to a fairly strict pattern. The best of these poems are characterized by a haunting simplicity of language and subtly varied incremental repetition.