Creative conventionsthe poetic legacies of the "cantigas de amor"

Resumo

This thesis demonstrates how the use of the conventions of the cantigas de amor has enabled poets, both in the medieval past and the present, to create identities in time and space. For many years, the traditional critical consensus was that when troubadours composed these songs, they subordinated their individuality to the collective anonymity of monotonously repeating inherited verse forms and motifs. More recent scholarship has rejected this perspective, highlighting their creativity (Beltran 1995 and Weiss 1997), the many and varied voices that speak through them (Arbor Aldea 2009b and Gutiérrez García 2010) and the multifaceted nature of the pain their poets express (Blackmore 2009). My thesis builds on this work by bringing the cantigas de amor into dialogue with modern theoretical frameworks and their long-term legacies in order to unlock new ways of thinking about what can be achieved when poets engage with conventions. My first chapter provides background information to the physical and material places of the cantigas, demonstrating how the transmission process has generated the sense of a formally and thematically structured corpus and how the competitive court needed conventions as a structuring device. In Chapter 2, I use Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on language to demonstrate how medieval poets could generate identities that were both legitimate and distinctive by using conventions in idiolectic ways. My point of entry into the world of variation and semantic subtlety we find across the cantigas is a small subset of songs categorized as being of ‘género incerto’ by one of the main online databases of medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric. In Chapter 3, I use Bourdieu’s definitions of ‘field’, ‘habitus’ and ‘cultural capital’ to explore how troubadours proved their ‘profit of distinction’ by giving the convention of coita, the pain they express, their own meaning. In this chapter, I also use Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic approaches to courtly love to demonstrate the possible narcissism of coita. In Chapter 4, I use theories on lyric time (Greene 1991 and Culler 2015) to understand the shifting temporalities of the cantigas de amor and the significance afforded to memory within them. Here I discuss songs that draw explicit links between composing, remembering and memorializing identities.Chapters 5 and 6 then explore some examples of how the conventions of the cantigas de amor have been heard and voiced in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Here I draw on contemporary medieval studies in order to show how our readings of the cantigas de amor can be enhanced by recent creative responses to them and vice versa. In Chapter 5, I discuss how the cantigas were politically re-purposed in Galicia at the end of the nineteenth century. I also explore how the neotroubadourism movement can help us to think about the ‘here and there’ nature of the cantigas de amor. In Chapter 6, I turn to the ‘transluçines’ Erín Moure includes in her contemporary cancioneiro, O Cadoiro, accepting her invitation to use Jacques Derrida’s theories on archive fever to think about courtly love and studying how she deals with the materiality of medieval Galician-Portuguese love lyric and its manuscript tradition.Together, these chapters demonstrate how the cantigas de amor have given writers across centuries, national borders and languages a way of positioning themselves in the world.