Abstract
Seven vihuela books, containing more than two hundred secular songs in five different languages, provide the only surviving examples of what was a widespread and extraordinarily popular practice of playing vihuela music in the sixteenth century. The vihuelists, their songbooks, and the dates and cities of publication comprise a diverse group that spanned the sixteenth century: Luis Milan, El maestro (Valencia, 1536); Luis de Narvaez, Los seys libros del delphin (Valladolid, 1538); Alonso Mudarra, Tres libros de musica (Sevilla, 1546); Enriquez de Valderrabano, Silva de sirenas (Valladolid, 1547); Diego Pisador, Libro de musica de vihuela (Salamanca, 1552); Miguel de Fuenllana, Orphenica lyra (Sevilla, 1554); and Esteban Daza, El Parnasso (Valladolid, 1576). Of the one hundred and forty songs in Spanish in these books, there are numerous villancicos, a few ensaladas, some sonnets, and, the focus of this chapter, just over two dozen ballads.1 If this repertoire were to reflect the surviving ballad corpus as a whole, it would be logical to expect these ballads to consist of a typical mix of Carolingian and Arthurian epics, frontier ballads (which tell the news of the Reconquest), chronicles, and courtly love poems. And indeed, such traditional ballads are represented, as well as some with innovative themes taken from the Bible and from Classical antiquity.
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