The Galician-Portuguese cantigas, the history of emotion, and lyric as genre

Abstract

Among the diverse traditions sometimes grouped under the broad rubric of courtly lyric, the Galician-Portuguese cantigas—especially the cantigas de amigo and de amor, but to a substantial extent the cantigas de escárnio e maldizer as well—present perhaps the greatest formal homogeneity, marked by a devotion to structural and thematic repetition. This chapter shows how recent research in the history of emotion and lyric theory sheds light on the perennial questions of genre, conventionality, and sincerity raised by the dominant formal aspects of the cantigas. In particular, the foregrounding of poetic form and musicality in the parallelistic cantigas, often praised by critics for their quintessentially lyric quality, sits uneasily alongside transhistorical notions of the lyric as a medium for the first-person expression of emotional experience. After an overview of debates about conventionality and sincerity in the cantigas in relation to notions of lyric subjectivity, the chapter turns to the reflective relationship between the cantigas de amigo and de amor. Here, questions of gender, improvisation, and dramatization emerge as a field in which Galician-Portuguese poets playfully and self-consciously examined poetic convention. An analysis of key emotional concepts such as coita and desejo reveals how the cantigas challenge the very distinctions between repetition and variation, sincerity and irony or performance, thereby tying the notion of poetic creativity to the expression of emotion in unexpected forms.