Angelus or The touch of the Virgin: the Music in the Cantigas de Santa Maria (13th century) by King Alfonso X
Bárbara Dantas
Original title: Angelus ou O toque da Virgem: a Música nas Cantigas de Santa Maria (séc. XIII) do rei Afonso X
Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity
Keywords: Alfonso X, Architecture, Art, Cantigas de Santa María, Middle Ages, Music, Poetry.
Harmonious as a song, the Galician-Portuguese poetry, systematized by the zéjel metric, was the basis of the poetry of Cantigas de Santa Maria, a compilation that contains reports of miracles and praises to the Virgin performed in the second half of the 13th century at the request of the castilian king Alfonso X (1221-1284), creator, sponsor and supervisor of the work. In Cantigas, reality is overcome by imagination without limits and the relation of poetry with two other artistic forms (Music and image) makes it literary support in which the themes of the songs to the Virgin were formed. Music and image share with the poetry a sensitivity capable of expressing in different ways certain reports of miracles or praise. For this article, I present to you the Cantiga 276 of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. From iconographic and architectural analyzes, I realized the association between church bells, the architecture of the sanctuary towers where they are housed and the melody of the Angelus (The Virgin's Touch).
Memory and Rhapsody: The Divine Song in Archadia
Ciléa Dourado
Original title: Memória e Rapsódia: o canto divino na Arcádia
Published in Expressing the Divine: Language, Art and Mysticism
Keywords: Poetry, Power., tradition, truth.
The poetic activity of the Greek Golden Age, better known as Archadia, grew inside a pre-literate culture which was characterized, above all, by a mythological symbolism. The Archadian poetry points to the notion of the fantastic, of the sublime and of the divine in its purest form. The archaic Poet was endowed with the power directly by the gods, and such a power was non-negotiable and non-transferable. The lineage and succession of a rhapsodist was often brought out by Arete, the choice of the nobler.
New biographical data on Suero de Ribera: Castilian cleric, servant of the church in Italy and author of songbook poems in the 15th and 16th centuries
Jesús Fernando CÁSEDA TERESA
Original title: Nuevos datos biográficos de Suero de Ribera: clérigo castellano, servidor de la iglesia en Italia y autor de poemas de cancionero en los siglos XV y XVI
Published in The Kingdom of the Spirit
Keywords: 15th-16th Centuries, Biography, Cancioneros, Poetry, Suero de Ribera.
This research on the 15th and 16th century songbook writer Suero de Ribera, to whom up to twenty-five compositions are attributed, provides previously unknown documentation on his biography after locating him in various historical archives, documentation that probably refers to your person. From these, I establish his relationship with important figures in the social life of Rome and Naples, such as the Count of Oliva and the Cardinal of Capua, the Valencian Joan Llopis. And I venture his family background, Valladolid, the Castilian city of which he speaks in some of his poems.
Oh Fortune! Reminiscence of the Boecian Consolatio in the moral verses of Carmina Burana
Mariano OLIVERA
Original title: ¡Oh Fortuna! Reminiscencia de la Consolatio boeciana en los versos morales de Carmina Burana
Published in Music in Antiquity, Middle Ages & Renaissance
Keywords: Consolatio, Fortune, Philosophy, Poetry, Therapeutic.
The purpose of this article is to present reminiscences of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in three goliard poems by Carmina Burana. To demonstrate the identity of rhetorical and philosophical style: consolatio, between the poems of Book I-II of the Consolation of Philosophy and the selected Goliard poems. From which we will glimpse their potential to awaken consolatory and therapeutic philosophical reflection. All this in an almost abysmal leap between the 5th century AD and the 13th century AD. The survival of the consolatio, not only as a rhetorical-poetic style but also as a spiritual exercise that continues to be present in monastic and clerical life, will be substantiated. To do this, first, we will justify in general the importance of the Consolation of Philosophy in courtly and monastic life, that is, its reception in the Latin Middle Ages. Then we will elaborate on the philosophical practice and the exercises that emerge around the speeches and consoling verses, which although they lack argumentation, in their entire poetic splendour, awaken the philosophical reflection of the present towards past goods, the loss of virtue and the deceptive nature of Fortune. Everything is resolved in four movements: aegritudo or perturbatio, lethargum, avocatio mentis, revocatio mentis that make up the consolation or recovery of what makes the soul and reason “sick”. To culminate our journey on such a therapeuo, we propose the key content that all the work signifies, a comparative analysis between the Boecian verses and the Burano verses.
Semblance of Arabic Poetry
Juan BRANDO
Original title: Semblanza de la poesía árabe
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Al-Andalus, Arabism, Islamic Law, Middle Ages, Poetry.
We propose a brief approach to the Arabic Poetry of the later Middle Ages with a Reading key centered on the metaphors alluding to wine, wáter, tears, dew and flowers. Prohibition and desire, postponenment and melancholy by the absence of the beloved or exile, the pains drowned in wine, are the ways by which poetry becomes a consideration of trascendence and primordial unity.
The Cantigas of Santa Maria – a musical treasure of the reign of Afonso X, the wise man (1252-1284)
Lenora Pinto MENDES
Original title: As Cantigas de Santa Maria – um tesouro musical do reinado de Afonso X, o Sábio (1252-1284)
Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity
Keywords: Cantigas, Music, Poetry.
Produced in the alfonsine scriptorium, the Cantigas de Santa Maria constitute a true encyclopedia of medieval music. Inserted in the medieval European troubadour movement in its Marian aspect in which the Virgin Mary takes the place of the lady of the court. They survived in four richly illuminated manuscripts with the record of all their melodies on the staff of five lines and squares neums developed a little earlier by the master Guido D’Arezzo. Considered a treasure by the wise king, the books of the songs also possessed healing powers. Some cantigas record passages of the life of its royal author.
“With iron, fire and argumentation”: Crusade, Conversion and the Doctrine of the Two Swords in the Ramon Llull's Philosophy
Ricardo da COSTA and Tatyana Nunes LEMOS
Original title: “Com ferro, fogo e argumentação”: Cruzada, Conversão e a Teoria dos Dois Gládios na filosofia de Ramon Llull
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
Keywords: Crusade, Medieval Philosophy, Poetry, Ramon Llull, Theory of Two Swords.
Analysis of the Crusade’s propose, conversion and the Theory of Two Swords in the philosophy of conversion of Ramon Llull, based on the poems Lo desconhort (1295), Del consili (1311) and the works Llibre de contemplació en Déu (c.1271-1273), Liber de passagio (1292), Arbor scientiae (1295-1296), Liber de fine (1305), Disputatio Petri clerici et Raimundi phantastici (1311) and Liber de ciuitate mundi (1314).
