Not for boys
IT is a pleasure merely to handle a book like this, 647 quarto pages, weighing in at 1.5 kilos, a labour of love that will bring Rip Cohen no vast profits or literary prizes nor (all too probably) academic advancement, but will remain an essential piece of scholarship to be consulted by all interested in the body of poetry it illumines. Rigorously edited with a bilingual introduction, it is also agreeably odd.
The Cantigas d'Amigo are a subset of the larger body of some 1,680 songs first composed at the Castilian and Portuguese courts between 1200 and 1350. Richard Zenith published a useful selection of 113 cantigas with parallel English texts in 1995 (reviewed in the TLS, September 20, 1996), along with a commentary that is probably the best introduction in English to these fascinating texts. They consist of cantigas d'amor (love songs), cantigas d'escarnho e mal dizer (songs of mockery and slander) and the cantigas d'amigo (girls' songs usually addressed to friends or lovers). One of the oddest feature of the cantigas is that, though they were composed and sung at court, their language is provincial Galician — the language subsequently Latinised to constitute the Portuguese of Luís de Camões. It has long been accepted that they are modelled in part on Provençal troubadour poetry, probably modelled in turn on itinerant Hispano-Arab poets such as those anthologised in Ibn Bassam's Dahira (c1100).
Cohen labels his cantigas d'amigo "the largest body of female-voiced love poetry to survive from medieval or ancient Europe", and "an unexplored source for the history of woman's voice". The oddity is that these 88 poets are without exception male, the same poets who in fact who compose the other songs in the tradition. By "female-voiced", Cohen means they are songs placed in the mouths of mothers, sisters and lovers. He reinforces this with the claim, which others have made before him, that the cantigas d'amigo are the authentic record of an older oral tradition of women's songs which the male poets have simply collected rather in the spirit of the 13th-century Cecil Sharps. Their language, he argues, is marked by archaisms and by the "female nature" of its self-imposed limits, the sentiments are conventional, and the forms often simpler than in the other cantigas. For despite "the role of men as composers ... men cannot own a poetic tradition that was passed on for centuries from mothers to their children".
This may well be the case, the evidence being unsatisfactory on most counts. But it involves some dubious contentions. Given that all the cantigas are indebted to older oral forms, how can we confidently distinguish between those that have been "improved" by male inventiveness, and those that continue to reflect a female tradition? Is the fact that they are not witty, scabrous, linguistically up to date, or subversive in their sentiments to be taken as proof of their female origins? This hardly applies to collections of women's songs from modern oral cultures. Or could it be that this is how the male poets of the period thought it appropriate for women to be expressing their feelings?
Cohen promises a further study in which the cantigas d'amigo will be treated as "the primary source for an as yet unwritten chapter in the history of European culture". Suspending judgement and turning to the texts themselves, their most obvious feature is that they are lyrics for which we lack the music. They are gracefully turned, often using assonance rather than the full rhymes of the other cantigas, with a great deal of repetition and parallelism. They are addressed to lovers, usually absent, or with the lover as subject, to mothers, sisters and friends. Their settings are the village well, the stream, the wood, the beach, or the church porch where lovers can be encountered without the need for chaperones. There is a certain amount of innocent double entendre about stags and shooting arrows and about locks of hair, but the songs are not always innocent. The girl in one of Johan Airas de Santiago's cantigas knows perfectly well that whatever she gives her man he'll want something more. Pero Viviaez's "female voice" recommends a pilgrimage to San Simon de Val de Prados because while the mothers of her friends will be lighting candles they can dance on the steps where the boys will come to see them. Johan Garcia de Guilhade creates a short sequence in which the man insists he is losing his head and dying of love for his girl, to which she replies that she will believe him when it happens, "for I doubt I'll ever see him dead / or see him really lose his head" (Zenith's translation).
In short, though the songs are poignant, they are also intended to amuse, which brings us back to the audience for whom the male poets are writing, and to the original puzzle of the divergence between the provincial Galician language and the courtly setting. Commenting provisionally, extrapolating from artifice in style to artifice in gender seems an easy leap.
500 Cantigas D'Amigo, edited by Rip Cohen, Porto: Campo das Letras, p.647, 36.60euros. 972 610 590 0
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