https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/8w32r679v

The printed lute song: A textual and paratextual study of early modern English song books

Islands of Castile: Artistic, Literary, and Legal Perception of the Sea in Castile-Leon, 1248-1450

Those who have studied the thirteenth-century Spanish text of the Cantigas de Santa María, attributed to King Alfonso X, recognize in that colorfully-illustrated text –which Richard Kinkade considers “one of the four most eminent, yet characteristic creations of the thirteenth century” (95)– 1 a compendium of religious thought, social norms, and legends prevalent in European Christian society of the time. Indeed, as has been noted by scholars such as Keller & Cash and Snow, the Learned King’s musical text gives modern readers insight into a wide variety of topics, concepts, and everyday customs as understood by Alfonso and his court. We are presented, for example, with songs about such mundane happenings as men playing ball in a park and a young boy falling in love (song 42), or a monk who secretly steals away to the monastery library one night to enjoy the pleasures of wine (47). We also find such pious topics as the personal reformation of a lustful knight (137), or a prisoner’s composition of Marian music (291). As a musical form of monastic devotional literature, the collection of cantigas also presents the reader with orthodox theological teaching promulgated by the Church during the thirteenth century: such cantigas as 306 and 320, the former of which recounts the story of a heretic who is cleansed of his lack of belief in the virginity of Mary, and the latter praising Mary for restoring the goodness to earth that Eve had taken away, respond to the ecclesiastic debates and formation of doctrine that were taking place during these years of the Central Middle Ages. In response to the formation of Catholic dogma taking place at this time, Greenia very nicely states that Alfonso X designated himself a “national broker in the economy of salvation” and that “he seemingly felt that he owed it to his people to serve them in facilitating their salvation.” His Cantigas “formed an ongoing project for the religious welfare of the masses, and as an unobtrusive educational tool” (340). As Dales has pointed out, one of the great theological discussions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the relation between earthly time and eternity, a topic richly debated among the philosophers of Antiquity, and later by Saint Augustine in his Confessionum liber and the De civitate Dei. Although more devotional than theological, the Cantigas de Santa María do reflect, within the texts of many of the songs and in the visual representations that accompany them, a great number of the theological debates of the day. The relation between time and eternity is one of them: Cantiga 103, entitled “Como Sancta Maria feze estar o monge trezentos anos ao canto

In Search of Paradise: Time and Eternity in Alfonso X's Cantiga 103

In the Cantigas de Santa Maria, King Alfonso X unveils an intricate cultural, political, and economic system that defines the relationship between Christian society and religious minorities. This article illustrates that the Cantigas must be understood as an ideological instrument of cultural codification that reaffirms the established Christian social order in relation to three principal groups: heretics, Jews, and Muslims.

Heretics and Infidels: The Cantigas de Santa María as Ideological Instrument of Cultural Codification

148 pages. A thesis presented to the Department of Art History and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Arts, Spring 2012.

/pdf/from-oppression-to-redemption-a-reexamination-of-illuminated-9iw72jm4n4.pdf

From Oppression to Redemption: A Reexamination of Illuminated Sephardic Haggadot in Thirteenthand Fourteenth-Century Spain

Daily Life Depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria

,i,@NALYZING narrative technique in medieval Smanuscript miniatures and their accompanying texts and achieving some sort of synoptic vision A sof the two was thought unproblematic only a few * * years ago. Despite strong contributions toward S'a theory of narratology in medieval studies,1 many researchers are no longer sure that we can believe in the stability of narrative in either text or images, let alone hope to make the two genuinely congruent. My own attempt here to justify a joint reading of the supposedly linear verbal narratives in the Cantigas of Alfonso X (1221-84) with the manuscript miniatures he commissioned and supervised is meant to suggest the possibility of a match-up, at least in this case, for somewhat curious reasons. Against expectations, it is the narrative discourse in the miniatures of the c6dice rico copy of the Cantigas that is apparently progressive and linear, while the lyrics with which the images are teamed loop back on themselves in a non-linear way.2

George D. Greenia

Papers

Daily Life Depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria

The Politics of Piety: manuscript Illumination and Narration in the "Cantigas de Santa Maria"