SOURCE: Garcia, Michel. “In Praise of the Cancionero: Considerations on the Social Meaning of the Castilian Cancioneros.” In Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the Cancionero de Baena to the Cancionero General, edited by E. Michael Gerli and Julian Weiss, pp. 47-56. Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998.

[In the following essay, Garcia concentrates on the importance of evaluating cancionero verse in collective form as poetic anthology.]

Nothing could be more timely than this collection of studies, now that Brian Dutton's compilation of cancioneros (1990-91) is finally completed, and now that—thanks to him—we have an exceptional opportunity to make an in-depth study of the entire corpus of fifteenth-century court poetry. My intention here is not merely to pay personal tribute to our late colleague but to recognize an exceptional fact: it is rare that a scholar has an opportunity to review the whole of a literary corpus and to be able to develop theories with the confidence that they are based on utterly reliable material.

Our debt to Brian Dutton for his monumental accomplishment is obvious, not only because of its great literary importance but because of the influence his catalogue will have on the way in which this and future generations of scholars focus their studies of fifteenth-century Castilian literature. By setting before us the complete panorama of surviving anthologies, Brian Dutton has opened up fields of study that we cannot afford to ignore.¹ I should like to point out the two most obvious: first, we are in a position to establish critical editions of the complete works of a much wider range of poets than ever before. Even in the case of forgotten (and forgettable?) poets, it is hard for philologists not to fulfill the obligation they owe to every author from the past whose works they happen to unearth.² The second is to establish critical editions of the major poems. So far this has been done in only a few of the most significant cases, such as Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna, Santillana's Comedieta de Ponça and Bias contra Fortuna, Íñigo de Mendoza's Vita Christi, Diego de San Pedro's Pasión Trobada, and Jorge Manrique's Coplas. These editions are the fruit of enormous labor, which previously could be justified only for the truly exceptional works; henceforth they will be possible even for poems of secondary importance.

The value of such projects cannot by any means be underestimated, and I consider them not just inevitable but essential, so long as they do not cause us to lose sight of our main objectives.³ In fact, I consider it more urgent to ask how we can exploit Dutton's new research tool to undertake a global study of cancionero production in particular and also to reassess our perceptions of fifteenth-century literary life in general. To this end, I think it vital that we confine ourselves to the reality of the cancioneros or poetic anthologies, whatever one chooses to call them.⁴ It is not my intention here to explore the ways in which we might classify the cancioneros (Vicenç Beltran has broached this topic in his essay in the present volume) but rather to use this opportunity to open debate on their definition and raison d'être within the literary and sociological context of fifteenth-century Castile.

Before I begin, I should point out that in my opinion the cancioneros should be the primary object of our research and that we must avoid from the outset the danger of regarding them as mere collections of texts or a fortuitous gathering of preexisting works. This is a very real danger. It is obvious that nowadays the existence of a poem in one of these cancioneros is not considered crucial information for the modern scholar or editor and that it has little or no influence on the definition of the text or its interpretation. Current editions usually relegate the codicological origin of the work to footnotes, where they also indicate the principal variants of the extant versions. But what interests them most is the text itself, whether published in isolation or included in a different context, namely, the complete works of the poet who composed it. The presence of a poem in one of these collections has at best been used as evidence for assessing the work's initial popularity. According to this line of reasoning, a cancionero is interesting only insofar as it includes unknown poems or the original version of a particular work. Thus we have the paradox that a cancionero is considered interesting only if it calls attention to itself by departing from the norm in bringing to light previously unknown works or unusual attributions.

Although I can make this point only in passing, our experience with these collections shows us that we have a natural tendency to attach less importance to the cancionero as such than to its contents. At best, cancioneros are simply overlooked; at worst, they are considered obstacles to the interpretation of the poems and the establishment of the texts. By contrast, I would argue that it is necessary to examine the cancioneros as literary objects in their own right. I shall advance several reasons for this view.

The first is that fifteenth-century cancioneros extend a long tradition of poetic anthologies compiled both within and beyond the frontiers of Castile. This in itself is significant.⁵ While Castilian collections began to appear only in the first half of the fifteenth century, the practice of gathering poems of different form and thematic content was a common practice elsewhere in the Peninsula. According to the invaluable evidence of his Prohemio e carta al Condestable de Portugal, Santillana recalls having seen a large anthology of Galician-Portuguese verse, owned by his grandmother, doña Mencía de Cisneros (the relevant passage is quoted below). As Santillana's testimony suggests, it is most probable that the Castilians inherited the practice from the Galician-Portuguese school and not the Provençal.⁶

However, it is appropriate here to refer to another model that is genuinely Castilian, represented by the works of the mester de clerecía of the fourteenth century. The Libro de buen amor by Juan Ruiz and the Rimado de palacio by Pedro López de Ayala bear an undeniable similarity to the later anthologies, although in my opinion critics have pushed the analogy to unacceptable extremes.⁷ To illustrate this, I would point to the frequent changes in register in the Libro de buen amor, the absence of certain poems announced by the poet himself, and the final gathering together of those pieces that apparently could not find a place in the main body of the book. For the work of Ayala, there is also ample proof of this organization: the autonomy of the Ditado sobre el Cisma and of the religious cancionero at the end of Part One of the Rimado (underscored by the inclusion of dates or transitional stanzas); Ayala's adaptation of the Book of Job, where several versions of the same passage are combined alongside a series of unconnected sections, giving the Rimado its heterogeneous character. Despite this evident lack of unity, with good reason we consider these works to be coherent. In part, no doubt, because the work is by the same poet. But this explanation is not very convincing, because there are limits to the coherence of themes and forms in an author's work, particularly when the book apparently includes his complete output in that genre. In fact, the principal characteristics of the two works in question—the artifice of the poetic whole, which consists in the attempt to balance comprehensive scope with a sometimes forced quest for formal unity—suggest a poetic conception similar to that which inspired the cancioneros, though with a much stronger sense of formal structure.

These traits also define fifteenth-century cancioneros, which strive to gather a maximum number of works and order them in such a way as to make the collection as a whole appear coherent.⁸ We must not lose sight of these fourteenth-century antecedents when we consider both the appearance and the characteristics of cancioneros in the following century.

In a way, the works by Juan Ruiz and Ayala illustrate, with far greater clarity than Galician-Portuguese anthologies, one of the major preoccupations of late medieval literati: the preservation of the texts, or, put more dramatically, the determination to prevent their disappearance. Their other characteristics do not diminish that sense of urgency. It is manifest in fifteenth-century cancioneros right from the very start: the Cancionero de Baena takes its initial impulse and shape as a compilation of the works of Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino. The same is true of several others, such as the Cancionero de Oñate, which, as I explain below, opens with the works of Fernán Pérez de Guzmán. In each instance, it is difficult to imagine that the operation does not entail the implicit desire to fix forever a body of poetry that is in danger of disappearing or, at least, of not acquiring the fame it deserves. The motives may evolve over time. In particular, the advent of the printing press could have influenced compilers to make the leap toward gathering together the complete works of given authors. But before the dissemination of printing, I see a desire to preserve a patrimony as the principal motivation, because the poets who merited such treatment had either died or stopped composing at the time their works were being compiled. The posthumous nature of the operation tells us much about its objectives.⁹

We know that the cancioneros did not compile works of certain authors merely to preserve them; yet the diversity of their materials, authorship, inspiration, and even language makes it difficult to give a simple account of the reasons for their formation. As Beltran argues in his contribution to this volume, we need a taxonomy of the criteria used for including the individual works or combination of works in a given context. In the meantime, however, I feel it safe to say that these criteria do not contradict but complement each other. How else could one explain, for example, the apparently random gathering of isolated pieces or short series of works alongside compilations that presume to be the complete work of a particular author? I would suggest that these smaller collections are not altogether in conflict with the more extensive ones. The principle is the same, except that their coherence does not stem from single authorship but is thematic, or chronological, or geographic, or follows other possible criteria, some of them possibly being very personal.¹⁰ Moreover, the presence of isolated pieces often illustrates the difficulties of obtaining certain texts, which can be included only if the compiler chances to have access to them. The criteria are complementary in that the preoccupation to preserve texts is (up to a certain point) quite in harmony with the desire to publish the entire production of the genre. To preserve and publish are, after all, the two facets of the very definition of the object “book,” whether in the age of manuscript production or in the early days of the printing press and possibly even beyond.

It is not by chance that these remarks on cancioneros lead toward their identification with the concept “book.” The idea I wish to set forth is that the cancionero is a book, with all that this concept implies: the demands of being both the vehicle and the object of literature. In other words, literature (and in our specific case, poetry) exists for and because of the book. This assertion is obvious, even when one grants due recognition to oral literature. A literature exists for posterity in the form of preserved texts, which not only testify to the existence of that literature but make it a reality and constitute its only possible field of study. Note the words of the Marqués de Santillana when he speaks of the volume of Galician-Portuguese poems kept in the home of his grandmother:

Acuérdome, señor muy magnífico, syendo yo en hedad no provecta, mas asaz pequeño moço, en poder de mi avuela doña Mençía de Cisneros, entre otros libros, aver visto un grand volumen de cantigas, serranas e dezires portugueses e gallegos; de los quales toda la mayor parte era del Rey don Donís de Portugal—creo, señor, sea vuestro visahuelo—, cuyas obras, aquellos que las leyan, loavan de invençiones sotiles e de graçiosas e dulçes palabras. Avía otras de Johán Suares de Pavía, el qual se dize aver muerto en Galizia por amores de una infanta de Portogal e de otro, Fernand Gonçales de Senabria.

(Gómez Moreno and Kerkhof 1988, 449)

The marqués recalled the names of the principal poets included in the volume, though not all are as well known as the Portuguese King Dinis, whom he feels obliged to emphasize given the identity of his interlocutor, the young don Pedro, condestable de Portugal. The details he provides about Suares de Pavía seem taken from the rubric that would have introduced his verse in that cancionero. What is striking is that after many years he was still able to describe the contents of a book that retained even its material form as “un grand volumen.” While it was defined by the works it contained, the codex retained its personality as a book, which distinguished it from the other volumes in doña Mencía's library.

That identification presupposes recognition of at least a minimum of elaboration, which is one of the defining qualities of the concept “book.” Inadvertedly, it passes from being a mere physical support for literary texts to being a real literary work in its own right. Is there anything in the cancioneros that would allow us to deny them these qualities inherent in a book? I think not. Moreover, in my opinion, they are the natural channel of fifteenth-century poetry.

This verse survives only through the collections in which it has been included. If there is anything the cancioneros have in common, despite their diversity, it is to have kept alive an entire production, that otherwise would have ceased to exist. Beyond this rather obvious fact, one can detect something else: a systematic desire to preserve it. To demonstrate this, one has only to take two examples from opposite ends of the chronological chain. Without the Cancionero de Baena (c. 1425), the work of Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino would be practically nonexistent. Without Hernando del Castillo's Cancionero general (first edition, 1511), over half the works of Jorge Manrique would have been lost: of the forty-nine poems attributed to him, thirty-two survive only in that collection. This documentary function was never lost from view, despite the temporal distance between the two anthologies.

But if the cancioneros had aspired only to preserve works that interested their compilers, they would have accomplished only half the purpose of the book. In reality, the existence of those collections contributes to the conceptual evolution of poetry itself. How does one define the poetic production preserved in the cancioneros? Above all, as an art of composing poems that is related above all to a social context. For the aristocracy, it was as much a sign of nobility as the luxury of daily life or the passion for the hunt.¹¹ It displayed the poet's adhesion to the cultural values that shaped the ideology of the governing class, with scarcely any concern for the specific values of literature. When Juan II or Álvaro de Luna composed their verses, they did not expect to be considered men of letters but only to share in and promote a social ritual of court life. For this reason, I feel it more appropriate to speak of production and not creation as such.¹² What is expressed through that medium is the social body itself, with a view to imposing from the top down social values and official norms.

Critics who delight in emphasizing the recurrence of themes and forms in cancionero poetry are only recognizing the efficiency of this means of promoting an ideology; yet they do not realize that it is above all a sociocultural phenomenon, and they thereby fail to understand why this poetry survived well into the sixteenth century, clear proof that the phenomenon survives the circumstances that brought it into being. This durability comes, I believe, from the literary quality of the texts, and I consider this to be the essential contribution of the cancionero compilers.

There is no hiding that such an assertion clashes with some of the characteristics of the cancioneros that are apparently incompatible with what we now regard as a “literary work.” How can we reconcile their heterogeneous content, their frequent anonymity, and the occasional amateurishness of their authors with our expectations of “literature”?

The apparent lack of unity in anthologies is a question that has been debated for a long time among scholars of Provençal poetry. But there is now a consensus that a unifying principle actually exists, and it has a name, “sylloge” in French (“silogio” in Italian). It is thus recognized that while the content of the collections may include a variety of pieces of different origin and authorship, they can still qualify as something more than mere anthologies. The unifying cement consists of two factors. The first concerns the sociocultural reality that surrounds the production of such works. As Roncaglia explains:

Ce sont des conditions où le sentiment d'une solidarité collective, enracinée dans un milieu socio-culturel polycentrique, mais typologiquement homogène, l'emporte sur la personnalité individuelle des auteurs [qui pourtant] ne sont point interchangeables.

(1991, 22)

This is in short a tonal unity, and it cannot easily be denied the Castilian cancioneros, which so often have been condemned for monotony and repetitiveness in theme as well as in form and vocabulary.

The second cohesive factor is the aim pursued by the compilers. Again I quote Roncaglia:

J'ai dit que les chansonniers se définissent à la rencontre d'un projet—qui peut-être un projet de choix, mais peut-être aussi l'intention de produire tout ce que l'on connaît—et d'autre part des conditions extérieures qui pouvaient limiter la disponibilité des modèles. Donc il y a un aspect matériel, mais aussi un certain aspect de choix.

(1991, 22)

Those two circumstances weigh heavily on any cancionero and help to strengthen the kinship that unites them. The more the compiler seeks to order his materials systematically, the more evident the principles that unite them become. In this case, perceptible discontinuities only illustrate the difficulties encountered in collecting the material and, by contrast, throw into relief the compiler's project. But I am not unaware that these two criteria define the cancioneros only in a negative manner. We must therefore find more positive arguments in support of my proposal.

The most convincing one would be to demonstrate that a collection could itself attain the status of a literary work. In this respect, we might find examples in the fourteenth-century works of mester de clerecía to which I referred above. Despite their obvious artifice, no one would deny that the Libro de buen amor and the Rimado de palacio should be considered accomplished works from a literary standpoint. In medieval Castilian literature they stand out in three respects: history, esthetics, and the author's personality. To what extent can these qualities be found in a cancionero? It would be easy to prove that they exist in some cases, such as in the Cancionero de Baena, for which we possess an unusually large amount of information: the identity of the compiler, the circumstances of compilation, esthetic criteria outlined in the prologue, and an obviously systematic ordering of the material. But it would be more interesting to take a lesser-known work in which the circumstances surrounding its compilation are not clearly defined, such as the Cancionero de Oñate-Castañeda (ed. Severin et al. 1990).

What strikes one most about this collection (c. 1485) is the keen awareness shown by the compiler for poetic developments that took place during the course of the whole century. This is illustrated by the way in which he gives prominence to the poets considered most representative of their generation. They are carefully selected and ordered in chronological sequence: Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Juan de Mena, el marqués de Santillana, Gómez Manrique, Fray Íñigo de Mendoza, Diego de San Pedro, Fray Ambrosio Montesino, Antón de Montoro, and Jorge Manrique. Merely enumerating these poets gives a clear idea of his priorities. The Cancionero de Oñate uses history as a structuring device, which means transforming the collection into something more than an anthology: a real historical manual of fifteenth-century poetry.

The impression is heightened by the choice of forms and themes that turn out to be the most representative in each generation. The Cancionero opens with a section devoted to twenty-three works by Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, a substantial part of which possesses a distinct structure: the second poem is a matins prayer (Loores a maitines), and the twentieth, an ultílogo. This constitutes the whole of his religious poetry—and it is presented as such—and it is rounded off with four large-scale poems, one at the beginning, the others at the end: in short, this is a most complete reproduction of the serious verse of “el señor de Batres.” He is the only poet who merits such treatment. It is as if the Cancionero had been placed under his authority, much as Villasandino was the authority for Baena's collection. Despite their high quality, in every way comparable to Pérez de Guzmán, and despite the compiler's obvious admiration, the inclusion of the other poets' works depends on other criteria. Mena and Santillana are seen as complementary to each other. Their works alternate in a sort of fictitious dialogue that ends with an exchange of preguntas y respuestas. This physical arrangement illustrates two of the principal characteristics of poetry during the reign of Juan II: that it was a collective activity and that it developed in the royal court. The reign of Enrique IV is represented by an austere poem by Gómez Manrique and by the typically critical tone of Franciscan verse. Lastly, the beginning of the Catholic Monarchs' reign is centered on one region, Andalusia, no doubt because of the compiler's own personal experiences. But even within these limits, the selection of works and poets shows an acute sense for the originality of that region's poetic production. The poet Montoro is an essential figure, and it is revealing that he is presented as a favor-seeking courtier, without resorting to the triviality of his minor verse. At the same time, the compiler brings to light the widespread patronage of Castilian nobles and the consequent composition of panegyric verse. Finally, the inclusion of Jorge Manrique indicates his ability to perceive new currents of quality.

Seen in this light, the Cancionero does not have the limitations usually attributed to anthologies. Despite the difficulties inherent in the task, especially considering limitations imposed by contemporary modes of literary dissemination, the compiler was not content merely to collect samples of the work of his own age, but he has provided clues that permit one to read and interpret not only the texts he himself gathers but also the entire corpus of fifteenth-century verse. It constitutes a literary work in the strict sense of the term.

The second criterion of literariness mentioned earlier, esthetics, is also present in this cancionero. It is manifested in several ways, and it gives a good account of the compiler's tastes. I have already mentioned his ability to capture the dominant poetic trends of each era, which displays his keen critical sense and a capacity to evaluate the merits of the works. He also shows great care in ordering the poems. But this is not simply a didactic question. The volume comes across as a well-balanced construction, with subtle patterns that suggest that esthetic concerns as much (if not more) as didactic ones went into its compilation. A good example of this is the last part of the Cancionero, devoted to the works of Pedro de Escavias. This section reproduces in condensed form the chronology of fifteenth-century poetic creation, within the limits of one lifetime.¹³ This relationship between collective production and the poetic microcosm of a single author evokes a classic mise en abyme, which has evident esthetic intentions.

Finally, even though the authorship of the Cancionero is not made explicit, the author's personality has certainly left its mark. It can be deduced from what I have just said about the anthology's organization. But clearly, whoever the compiler was—Pedro de Escavias, as I still believe—he obviously felt under no compunction to include this or that work for reasons other than his own. His control seems ever present, and any changes in his criteria for selecting works, whether due to objectively changing trends in contemporary verse or to his own literary evolution, are entirely deliberate and used to good advantage in the compilation of his cancionero.

One might argue that not all cancioneros lend themselves to the sort of analysis appropriate to the Cancionero de Oñate. I do not believe this to be a valid point. Each cancionero has its own history and therefore deserves to be analyzed in that light. In any case, any taxonomic study worthy of the name presupposes detailed analysis of both the structure and the process of compilation of each surviving cancionero.

I must emphasize once again the priority of this study over any other. Fifteenth-century poetry exists only because it was collected in the cancioneros, including that of Hernando del Castillo. A true understanding of that poetic production implies a prior understanding study of its original, almost exclusive medium. This position leads us to reflect on the concept of the poetic work itself. When we identify the work with its author, we risk committing an anachronism by applying a modern concept that was foreign to the medieval period. At the very least, we should explain what we mean by this concept before applying it to such a remote epoch. Although I would not go so far as to deny that fifteenth-century poetry had a personal dimension (some of the cancioneros clearly suggest this), we should not overlook its collective aspect, which finds its best expression in the collections compiled in the same era as when the verse was first composed. The reception of that poetry took place through the cancioneros, and it is through them that the public became conscious of poetic production and its underlying currents. I think this argument is more than enough to make us take careful note of those collections as a means of evaluating fifteenth-century Castilian poetry in its proper context.

Notes

1. Some of the issues I discuss in this study have also been raised in a colloquium held in Liège, in 1989, whose proceedings have been edited by Tyssens (1991); see especially the opening paper by Roncaglia, to which I return below.

2. I am currently preparing an edition of the complete works of Costana and a new edition of the verse of Pedro de Escavias.

3. Roncaglia is of the same opinion: “Les problèmes qui dérivent de cette situation sont nombreux. Pour commencer: faudra-t-il viser à l'édition documentaire des chansonniers, ou plutôt à la reconstruction critique des textes individuels? Voilà un dilemme qui n'en est pas un. Pour des raisons différentes, les deux tâches sont également nécessaires” (1991, 23).

4. On the problems of the term cancionero, see Severin (1994).

5. See Huot (1987). This book sheds considerable light on many issues that are crucial to our understanding of literary developments in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: e.g., the transition from oral to written literature, the increasing prestige of vernacular verse, and the gradual emergence of the concept “book.” But the corpus that concerns me here belongs to a later period, when vernacular literature enjoyed a different, more elevated status, which sets limits to the use I can make of Huot's arguments and conclusions.

6. The rubrics to the poems in the Cancionero de Baena fulfill a role similar to the vidas and razos of the Provençal collections. However, as Weiss has pointed out (1990, 42), there are significant differences in content and length, which cast doubt on the conclusions drawn by Deyermond (1982) as to the influence on Baena of the Provençal models of compilation.

7. For example, I do not believe that the fragments of cuaderna vía included by Ayala in his Rimado de palacio were composed continuously between the reign of Pedro I and the final years of the poet's life. For details, see Garcia (1982, 287-302).

8. The criterion of length could be used to distinguish the cancioneros. However, brevity was probably due more to an unexpected interruption than to the wishes of the compiler, and therefore, hypothetically speaking, the difference between the collections is not qualitative, only quantitative.

9. This is a topic that would repay further study. By its very nature, the process of compilation can conceal a great variety of goals on the part of the compilers. Consider, for example, that not all compilers (like Baena or Castillo) envisaged a wide audience for their collections. Perhaps the majority wanted to preserve documents that had exerted a personal influence upon them. The range of attitudes (those of anonymous compilers, publicists like Baena, or “theorists” like Encina) may have in common the nostalgic desire to preserve more than a century of poetic activity that signaled Castile's cultural splendor. On the motives of Encina and Castillo, see the brief but pertinent remarks of Weiss (1990, 237) and Andrews (1970).

10. I develop these points in my introduction to the Cancionero de Oñate-Castañeda (Severin et al. 1990, especially xix-xxii).

11. In this respect, it is very significant that among the numerous pastimes of the “grandes señores” mentioned in Baena's prologue, he also refers to the art of poetry (ed. Azáceta 1966, 1:12-13).

12. Production warrants an approach that is more sociological than literary, while creation presupposes a personal perspective on the work.

13. The compiler tries not only to trace the various stages of Escavias's poetic career—not hesitating to reject works that seem of little value—but also to illustrate the gradual evolution of Castilian verse during the same period.

Bibliography

Andrews, J. Richard. 1970. Juan del Encina: Prometheus in Search of Prestige. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Azáceta, José María, ed. 1966. Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena. 3 vols. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

Dutton, Brian, with Jineen Krogstad, eds. 1990-91. El cancionero del siglo XV, c. 1360-1520. Biblioteca Española del Siglo XV, Maior, 1-7. Salamanca: Univ. Press and Biblioteca Española del Siglo XV.

Garcia, Michel. 1982. Obra y personalidad del Canciller Ayala. Madrid: Alhambra.

Huot, Sylvia. 1987. From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.

Roncaglia, Aurelio. 1991. “Rétrospectives et perspectives dans l'étude des chansonniers d'oc.” in Lyrique 19-38.

Severin, Dorothy, ed. 1976. The Cancionero de Martínez de Burgos: A Description of Its Contents, with an Edition of the Prose and Poetry of Juan Martínez de Burgos. Exeter: Exeter Univ. Press.

—. 1994. “Cancionero: un género mal-nombrado.” Cultura Neolatina 54:95-105.

Tyssens, Madeleine, ed. 1991. Lyrique romane médiévale: la tradition des chansonniers. Actes du Colloque de Liège de 1989. Liège: Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l'Université de Liège.

Weiss, Julian. 1990. The Poet's Art: Literary Theory in Castile c. 1400-60. Medium Aevum Monographs, 14. Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature.