“Cantigas de Amigo” in Medieval Galician-Portuguese Lyrical Poetry: Crossing Traditions

I aim to show how lyrical poetry in Galician-Portuguese, from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, presents a fusional cluster of different traditions, the courtly Provençal and the folklore-oral, with influences of Mozarabic and semitic poetry. Circulation may also give way to crossings, as in the specific case considered here. The two types of love songs (“songs of love”, in the Provençal style; and “songs of boyfriend”, in the Iberian and oral tradition in Galician-Portuguese) are two clearly different types of love songs, often written and sung by the same troubadour. As such, they express a clear awareness of poetical, aesthetic and cultural divergences in lyrical poetry, which would pervade Portuguese lyrical poetry throughout its history, from Camões to Fernando Pessoa and beyond. My focus will be on these differences, which produce, since the inception of Portuguese literature, a definite dramatic poetry: fictional rural “girl” authorship, as opposed to courtly love and setting; two clearly different origins and poetics; the creation of fictional selves within lyrical poetry—and, in the “song of boyfriend” I will be dealing with, the coming together of vernacular and Mozarabic traditions.