Las Cantigas de escarnio y maldecir de Alfonso X: problemas de interpretación y crítica textual by Juan Paredes

Abstract

MLR, 98.2,2003 483 differentlines taken by Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour. Mazzini is the protagonist of Ian Campbell's essay on 'Carlyle and Italy', where this political figure, together with Dante (and here Campbell pays tribute to Brand's 1985 paper on Dante and Carlyle), is shown to have moulded Carlyle's appreciation of Italy. This combination of Italy old and new is echoed in Hilary Fraser's essay on 'Ruskin, Italy, and the Past', but with differentimplications, for Ruskin was filled with nostalgia for the past, in the case of Venice for the age of Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto, or even for the pre-industrial Serenissima, which he had met on his early travels. He sees 'England's forthcoming ruin in terms of Venice's fall' (p. 96). The arts are also covered in David Kimbell's analysis of 'The Performance of lta? lian Opera in Early Victorian England', which as well as documenting the dominance of the ltalian repertoire over German and French, and showing how it differed in London from its counterpart in the main ltalian cities, analyses the audiences and notes the transformations of opera houses during that period. Brian Moloney's essay, 'Svevo and Joyce: "La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla"', rather than looking at the impact of Italy, considers the relevance of the Anglo-Saxon world for an ltalian, as ifpointing to a twentieth-century shiftin perspective. The collection is rounded offby Uberto Limentani' s sympathetic account of the early days of ltalian as a university discipline in Cambridge, when the firstSerena professorhip (named after the family of the Venetian patriot Leone Serena) was held by the engaging basketmaker Thomas Okey. This brief review hardly does justice to a volume that with its interlacing strands very effectivelyoffersa picture of the complex relationship between two cultures reciprocally illuminating each other in often unpredictable ways. University College London Laura Lepschy Las Cantigas de escarnioy maldecir de Alfonso X: problemas de interpretaciony critica textual. By Juan Paredes. (Papers ofthe Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 22) London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College . 59 pp. ?6. ISBN 0-904188-62-0. Thirteenth-century Galician-Portuguese poetry has only recently been appreciated once again for its inherent wit. In his introductory study, Juan Paredes examines the literary aspects of a small selection of the lyrics preserved originally by the philological curiosity of the fifteenth-centuryhumanist Angelo Colocci. He has chosen a difficultand much-pondered subject: the edition and decipherment of the satirical poetry attributed to Alfonso X. However, as the subtitle of his book implies, this is a study intended to raise awareness of problems, rather than to provide answers. Fur? thermore, as Paredes's survey of scholarship shows, there are many problems lurking in these brief lyrics,ranging from the textual to the contextual. Given this, it is understandable that he insists upon the separation between profane and ostensibly sacred lyrics (p. 10), although, as Stephen Parkinson and Anthony Lappin have shown, the boundary between sacred and profane in the Galician-Portuguese lyric corpus as a whole is anything but rigid (Parkinson, 'Miragres de maldizer?: Dysphemism in the Cantigas de Santa Maria', Bulletin of the Cantigueiros de Santa Maria, 4 (1992), 4457 ; Lappin, 'A Parody in the Cantigas de Santa Maria', ibid., 9 (1997), 71-75). Paredes's care in providing a thorough overview of previous scholarship means the two poems he edits are accompanied by useful bibliographical information. However, the burden of this past editorial tradition sometimes weighs heavily upon him. In the firstpoem he edits, 'Fui eu poer a mao noutro di-' (p. 31), he follows his predecessors and transcribes line 12 as 'cuidei morrer, a dix' assi: "Senhor"'. Both manuscripts, 484 Reviews however, give a slightly different reading, as well as a different line division (abbreviations silently expanded): 'e dixassy deus | senhor'. God's disappearance here is perhaps less a result of editorial atheism than of editorial agnosticism. However, readers with a passion for palaeography can construct their own text from the legible facsimile of the poem on the cover of the book. On other issues, though, Paredes is unafraid to break with tradition. He proposes a differentposition for...