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Abstract
This article proposes a new reading of four romances viejos as one of the earliest forms of neomedievalism in early modern Spain. First printed in the sixteenth century, but set between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, these romances emphasize Christian Iberia’s fragmentariness and disempowerment in relation to other medieval polities. This contrasts with other sixteenth-century neomedievalisms, from maurophile rewritings of the fifteenth-century Nasrid Kingdom of Granada to romances fronterizos. It concludes that they remind their early modern audiences of Iberia’s porosity and historic as well as ongoing interactions with other Mediterranean and northern European cultures.
Notes
1 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Obras completas, 12 vols (Madrid Espasa-Calpe, 1968–1973), XI (1973), Estudios sobre el romancero, 182 & 429.
2 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Romancero hispánico (hispano-portugués, americano y sefardí): teoría y historia, 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1953), I, 71–75. While Menéndez Pidal posited an earlier date for the Poema, subsequent critics have generally come to accept a later date of production as used here; see Irene Zaderenko & Alberto Montaner Frutos, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to the ‘Poema de mio Cid’, ed. Alberto Montaner & Irene Zaderenko (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018), 1–39 (p. 6).
3 See Diego Catalán, ‘The Artisan Poetry of the Romancero’, Oral Tradition, 2:2–3 (1987), 399–423, and Samuel Armistead, ‘Epic and Ballad: A Traditionalist Perspective’, Olifant, 8:4 (1981), 376–88.
4 Surviving ballads featuring the Cid differ significantly from the Poema de mio Cid. See Irene Zaderenko, ‘Épica y romancero del Cid’, La Corónica, 33:2 (2005), 231–45. Comparing the ballad ‘Pártese el moro Alicante’ to the Siete infantes de Lara story in medieval chronicles, John Cummins reached an analogous conclusion earlier. See John Cummins, ‘The Creative Process in the Ballad Pártese el moro Alicante’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 6:4 (1970), 368–81.
5 Roger Wright, Spanish Ballads (London: Grant & Cutler, 1991), 10.
6 Ian Michael, ‘Factitious Flowers or Fictitious Fossils? The romances viejos Reviewed’, in ‘Al que en buen hora naçio’: Essays on the Spanish Epic and Ballad in Honour of Colin Smith, ed. Brian Powell & Geoffrey West (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1996), 91–105 (p. 97).
7 Vicenç Beltran, El romancero: de la oralidad al canon (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2016), 5.
8 Mario Garvin had earlier made the similar, somewhat radical argument that the romancero emerged as a genre only with the advent of print in the sixteenth century: ‘la imprenta creó un género a caballo entre lo literario y lo editorial basándose para ello en la reunión de muchos textos de variado origen' (Scripta manent. Hacia una edición crítica del romancero impreso [siglo XVI] [Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2007], 51).
9 Alejandro Higashi, ‘Los romances “añadidos” del Cancionero de Romances: una hipótesis sobre el fragmentismo del romancero viejo’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 68:2 (2020), 605–40.
10 Medievalism has been defined by Anglophone scholars as ‘a discourse of contingent representations derived from the historical Middle Ages, composed of marked alterities to and continuities with the present’ (Nickolas Haydock, ‘Medievalism and Excluded Middles’, in Defining Medievalism[s] II, Studies in Medievalism, 18 [2009], 17–30 [p. 19]). Neomedievalism is often used to describe ‘texts, objects, performances, and practices that are not only post-medieval in their provenance but imaginative in their impulse and founded on ideas of “the medieval” as a conceptual rather than a historical category’ (Louise D’Arcens, ‘Introduction. Medievalism: Scope and Complexity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens [Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2016], 1–13 [p. 2]). Nadia Altschul contends that the distinction is unnecessary and that neomedievalism avoids the confusion between medievalism and medieval studies, particularly in Hispanophone contexts (Nadia Altschul, ‘Introduction: Postcolonizing Neomedievalism’, in Iberoamerican Neomedievalisms: The ‘Middle Ages’ and Its Uses in Latin America, ed. Nadia Altschul & Maria Ruhlmann (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, forthcoming). In line with Altschul, this article denotes all recreations of the period to 1492 neomedievalisms.
11 Şizen Yiacoup, Frontier Memory: Cultural Conflict & Exchange in the ‘Romancero fronterizo’ (London: MHRA, 2013), 3.
12 Although the suggestive conclusion is drawn that it succeeds ‘in disassociating the Muslim invasion from political and military ineptitude or disunity among the Visigothic élite at the time of the conquest’ (Yiacoup, Frontier Memory, 47).
13 Georges Cirot, ‘La Maurophilie littéraire en Espagne au XVIe siècle (suite et fin)’, Bulletin Hispanique, 46:1 (1944), 5–25.
14 In the so-called romancero morisco nuevo, ‘los moros […] se proyectan siempre sobre el telón de fondo de una corte caballeresca medieval, situada en la España musulmana y preferentemente en el mitificado reino de Granada’ (Mª Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, Vidas fronterizas en las letras españolas [Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2005], 47).
15 Luce López Baralt, Islam in Spanish Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Andrew Hurley (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 278.
16 Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 5.
17 Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 45.
18 Christina Lee, The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2015), 187.
19 Lee, The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain, 2.
20 See Vicenç Beltran, ‘Imprenta antigua, pliegos poéticos y cultura popular (–1516)’, in La literatura popular impresa en España y en la América colonial: formas, temas, géneros, funciones, difusión, historia y teoría, ed. Pedro Manuel Cátedra, Eva Belén Carro Carbajal, Laura Mier, Laura Puerto Moro & María Sánchez Pérez (Salamanca: SEMYR, 2006), 363–79.
21 Javier Irigoyen-García, ‘Moors Dressed As Moors’: Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2017), 8 & 11.
22 Concrete evidence is available in the case of ‘Asentado está Gaiferos en el palacio real’, multiple sixteenth-century printings of which survive. It was also taken up by Cervantes and Góngora, underlining its resonance after the turn of the seventeenth century. See Romancero General, o Colección de romances castellanos anteriores el siglo XVIII, recogidos, ordenados, clasificados & anotados por Agustín Durán, 2 vols (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1834), I, 252.
23 See Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino, Diccionario bibliográfico de pliegos sueltos poéticos (siglo XVI) (Madrid: Castalia, 1970), 547, for a record of the pliego. An earlier testimony of the story is in the Cancionero musical de Palacio (c.1470–1500) (Menéndez Pidal, Romancero hispánico, I, 287). The ballad’s popularity is attested to by other surviving pliegos (see Rodríguez-Moñino, Diccionario bibliográfico de pliegos sueltos poéticos, 546–50), as well as its reproduction in both of Nucio’s Cancioneros (sin año [c.1546] and his Cancionero published in 1550), and the first part of Esteban de Nájera’s Silva de varios romances (1550) (Victor Millet, Épica germánica y tradiciones épicas hispánicas. ‘Waltharius y Gaiferos’: la leyenda de Walter de Aquitania y su relación con el romance de Gaiferos [Madrid: Gredos, 1998], 98–100).
24 See Robert Surles, ‘Genesis and Legacy: The Course of a Legend’, Hispanófila, 83 (1985), 1–21.
25 Manuel Fernández Chaves & Rafael Pérez García, ‘The Morisco Problem & Seville (1480–1610)’, in The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, ed. Kevin Ingram, 4 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2009–2021), II (2012), The Morisco Issue, 75–102 (p. 82).
26 Their forced conversion followed edicts by Charles V in 1525 (Stephen Haliczer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834 [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990], 246). Carrasco Urgoiti describes Aragonese mudéjares as ‘perfectamente encajada dentro de la estructura del reino’ (María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, El problema morisco en Aragón al comienzo del reinado de Felipe II [Madrid: Castalia, 1969], 8).
27 Quotations are taken from Primavera y Flor de Romances o Colección de los más viejos y más populares romances castellanos, ed., con intro. & notas, de Ferdinand Wolf & Conrad Hofmann, 2 vols in 1 (Berlin: Asher & Co, 1856), II, 229–48, l. 9. This version details all minor variations between Nucio’s Cancioneros and the Silva. All three follow the Cromberger pliego suelto (Millet, Épica germánica y tradiciones épicas hispánicas, 100). Further references are to this edition and will be denoted by line number in the main text.
28 Millet, Épica germánica y tradiciones épicas hispánicas, 173.
29 Julian Weiss, ‘Reconfiguring a Fragment: Cultural Translation and the Hybridity of Roncesvalles’, in La pluma es lengua del alma: ensayos en honor de E. Michael Gerli, ed. José Manuel Hidalgo (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2011), 387–405 (p. 399).
30 See Rodríguez-Moñino, Diccionario bibliográfico de pliegos sueltos poéticos, 546–50.
31 Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 8.
32 Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 176. One of the cases explored by Kinoshita, La Fille du comte de Pontieu, similarly depicts a woman in an unsatisfactory (childless) marriage (176–99).
33 See José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez, ‘The Iberian Polities within Europe: Politics and State Building’, in The Iberian World: 1450–1820, ed. Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim & Antonio Feros (New York/Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 62–76 (p. 66).
34 See Beatriz Mariscal Hay, ‘Gaiferos y su caballo: avatares de un romance, del Quijote a la tradición oral moderna’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 57:1 (2009), 221–30.
35 Silva de romances (Zaragoza, 1550–1551), ed., estudio, bibliografía & índices por Antonio R. Rodríguez-Moñino (Zaragoza: Publicaciones de la Cátedra Zaragoza, 1970), 309–10.
36 Beltran, El romancero: de la oralidad al canon, 117–24.
37 Including the Refundición Toledana of the Crónica de 1344 (c.1460) and Florián de Ocampo’s compilation of Alfonso X’s chronicles (1541).
38 Juan Antonio Llorente, Compendio de la historia critica de la Inquisición de España, trad. Rodríguez Buron, 2 vols (Paris: Tournachon-Molin, 1823), II, Historia de la Inquisición de España, Desde la muerte de Carlos Quinto hasta la revolución de 1820, 65.
39 See Juan Bautista de Avalle-Arce, ‘Sobre un romance noticiero’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 40:1 (1992), 117–30.
40 Giovanni Caravaggi, ‘Esteban G. de Nájera y Juan Coloma’, in Poesía y corte: entre filología y pragmática, ed. Vicenç Beltran & Isabella Tomassetti, Revista de Poética Medieval, 28 (2014), 177–87 (p. 181).
41 Silva de romances, ed. Rodríguez-Moñino, 12.
42 The Castilian nobility are portrayed as morally degenerate in comparison to the legend’s Andalusi characters (Rebecca De Souza, ‘The Critique of Toxic, Noble Masculinity in Los Siete Infantes de Lara’, La Corónica, 48:2 [2020], 41–68).
43 ‘¡Ay Dios qué buen caballero, fue don Rodrigo de Lara!’, in Romancero tradicional de las lenguas hispánicas (español-portugués-catalán-sefardí), ed. & notas de María Goyri & Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 12 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1957–1985), II (1963), Romanceros de los condes de Castilla y de los infantes de Lara, ed. Diego Catalán, con la colaboración de A. Galmés, J. Caso & M. J. Canellada, 104–07, l. 2. Further references are to this edition and will be given by line number in the main text.
44 Rodrigo demonstrating his valour against an Andalusi rather than a Leonese army is present in two further contemporaneous ballads, ‘Ya se salen de Castilla’ and ‘A Calatrava la vieja’ (Menéndez Pidal, Romanceros de los condes, ed. Catalán, 97–104). The ubiquity of this change adds weight to the argument that it was made in light of the sixteenth-century print context.
45 See Diego Catalán, La épica española: nueva documentación y nueva evaluación (Madrid: Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 2001), 29–30. The ballad ‘A Calatrava la Vieja’, found in Nucio’s 1550 Cancionero, also calls her ‘doña Lambra de Burueva’.
46 James Amelang & Mercedes García-Arenal, ‘Religious Conversion and Identities in the Iberian Peninsula’, in The Iberian World: 1450–1820, ed. Bouza, Cardim & Feros, 245–60 (p. 248).
47 See Pliegos poéticos españoles en la Universidad de Praga, prólogo de Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 2 vols (Madrid: s.n. [Tip. de Gómez Menor], 1960), II, 137–40 for the pliego. For Nucio’s versions see his, Cancionero de romances impreso en Amberes sin año, ed. facsímil con intro. de Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1914), fol. 229, and Martín Nucio, Cancionero de romances (Anvers, 1550), ed., estudio, bibliografía & índices por Antonio Rodríguez Moñino (Madrid: Castalia, 1967), 284. For Nájera’s versions, see Rodríguez-Moñino, Silva de romances, ed. Rodríguez-Moñino, 212.
48 Diego Catalán Menéndez-Pidal explains that these changes affect the ‘ambiente “histórico” en que se desarrolla la aventura’ (‘Memoria e invención en el romancero de tradición oral [II]’, Romance Philology, 24:3 [1971], 441–63 [p. 445]).
49 On the likely dating of the pliego to c.1520, see Edward M. Wilson, ‘On the “Romance que dize mi padre era de Ronda” ’, in Medieval Hispanic Studies Presented to Rita Hamilton, ed. A. D. Deyermond (London: Tamesis Books, 1976), 267–76 (p. 268).
50 Some critics have taken for granted the Christian identity of the speaker’s parents (see, for example, Edward M. Wilson, ‘On the “Romance que dize mi padre era de Ronda” ’). David Nirenberg argues conversely that their relationship is cross-cultural, demonstrating ‘a sense of the sexual fluidity of the frontier’ (‘Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain’, The American Historical Review, 107:4 [2002], 1065–93 [p. 1074]).
51 ‘Mi padre era de [Aragón], y mi madre de Antequera’, in Romancero, ed. Paloma Díaz-Mas, con estudio preliminar de Samuel G. Armistead (Barcelona: Crítica, 1994), 231–32 (ll. 12–14 & 6). All subsequent quotations are taken from the pliego version transcribed in this source and are given by line number.
52 Muslim women giving themselves to Christian men ‘were viewed as a physical and symbolic acknowledgment of Christian military, religious, and sexual potency’ in literature (Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015], 145).
53 José Carlos Terradas explains the double entendre: ‘en los romances de malmaridada […] tendríamos un cazador (el amante) que caza (seduce) a la esposa. Y hay otro cazador (el marido) que los descubre’ (‘Los romances de malmaridada a la luz de códigos cultos’, Hesperia. Anuario de Filología Hispánica, 10 [2007], 207–22 [p. 219]).
54 Modern versions feature a dialogue at the end that cements their mutual affection, which Diego Catalán argues must date back to earlier versions given its ubiquity (‘Memoria e invención en el romancero de tradición oral [II]’, 447).
55 See James Brodman, ‘Municipal Ransoming Law on the Medieval Spanish Frontier’, Speculum, 60:2 (1985), 318–30.
56 See José López de Coca Castañer, ‘Vélez de la Gomera y su puerto durante la primera mitad del siglo XVI’, Historia. Instituciones. Documentos, 20 (1993), 207–30.
57 See Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, ‘Iberia, North Africa and the Mediterranean’, in The Iberian World: 1450–1820, ed. Bouza, Cardim & Feros, 106–25 (p. 112).
58 Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 8 & 10. Hershenzon overturns the idea that the sixteenth century marked the divergence of Christendom and Turko-Muslim civilizations, given intercultural networks and exchange persisted into the next century.
59 Mercedes García-Arenal & Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism, trans. Consuelo López-Morillas (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), 4.
60 Barton demonstrates the frequency of medieval Iberian interfaith marriage until the eleventh century. While from the twelfth century Christian legislation was strengthened against it, ‘Muslim rulers—in both the Peninsula and the Maghreb—would continue to acquire slave concubines through the spoils of war for generations to come’ (Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines, 145). There was also less juridical anxiety over men’s sexual relationships with women from another religious group on both sides (Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines, 147–48), suggesting illicit unions such as the one in ‘Mi padre’ continued into the late Middle Ages.
61 See David Nirenberg, ‘Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain’, Past & Present, 174 (2002), 3–41. In the early sixteenth century, ‘the Crown encouraged New Convert men in Granada to marry Old Christian women by offering them significant legal privileges’, although this policy was rescinded by the 1570s because their children were often raised Muslim (Max Deardoff, ‘The Ties that Bind: Intermarriage between Moriscos and Old Christians in Early Modern Spain, 1526–1614’, Journal of Family History, 42:3 [2017], 250–70 [p. 263]).
62 For a record of the pliego see Jaime Moll, ‘Tres volúmenes de pliegos sueltos de la Biblioteca de Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber’, Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 48:184 (1968), 285–308, 298, No. 22; reprinted in the second edition of Romancero General, ed. Agustín Durán, 2 vols (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1861 [1st ed. 1851]), II, 672.
63 See Bernard Vincent, ‘L’Expulsion des Morisques du Royaume de Grenade et leur répartition en Castille (1570–1571)’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 6:1 (1970), 211–46.
64 See María del Mar Gómez Renau, Comunidades marginadas en Valladolid: mudéjares y moriscos, s. XV–XVI (Valladolid: Diputación Provincial de Valladolid, 1993).
65 John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), 234.
66 Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 5.
67 ‘Por Guadalquivir arriba, cabalgan caminadores’, in Romancero general, ed. Durán (1861), II, 672 (l. 9). Further references are to this edition and will be given by line number in the main text.
68 ‘The heartland of the Emirate and Caliphate was the Guadalquivir Valley’ (Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages [Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1979], 69). The river was central to al-Andalus’ economy and trade, carrying ‘by far the largest volume of goods’ (Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 [Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1994], 22).
69 María Martínez, ‘Influencias islámicas en la indumentaria medieval española’, Estudios Sobre Patrimonio, Cultura y Ciencias Medievales, 13–14 (2012), 187–222 (p. 189).
70 These celebratory performances date back to the Count of Barcelona’s 1150 wedding (Juan Carlos Fernández-Truan & Marie-Hélène Orthous, ‘El juego de cañas en España’, Recorde. Revista do História do Esporte, 5:1 [2012], 1–23 [p. 5]). See also Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 89–108.
71 Irigoyen-García, ‘Moors Dressed As Moors’, 16.
72 He suggests that the juegos de cañas instead ‘reflected the cultural and political anxieties of the people producing them rather than a desire to learn where this cultural practice came from’ (Irigoyen-García, ‘Moors Dressed As Moors’, 13).
73 Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 138.
74 On the importance placed on women in the Poema, see E. Michael Gerli, ‘Liminal Junctures: Courtly Codes in the Cantar de Mio Cid’, in Oral Tradition and Hispanic Literature: Essays in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead, ed. Mishael M. Caspi (New York/London: Garland, 1995), 257–70.
75 The dialogue between a vassal and a petulant king is apposite at the start of Philip II’s reign, which was beset with internal and external challenges: ‘a succession of events in the 1560s—the revolt of the Granada Moriscos, the stepping-up of the Turkish naval attack, the revolt of the Netherlands, and the outbreak of the French wars of religion—had kept him consistently on the defensive’ (Elliott, Imperial Spain, 262).
76 Barbara Weissberger, ‘ “¡A tierra, puto!”: Alfonso de Palencia’s Discourse of Effeminacy’, in Queer Iberia, ed. Josiah Blackmore et al. (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1999), 291–324 (p. 295).
77 On multiple occasions the Poema’s narrator marvels at the appearance of the Cid’s retinue after the victories at Alcocer and Valencia. See Cantar de mío Cid, ed., prólogo & notas de Alberto Montaner Frutos, estudio preliminar de Francisco Rico, 3ª ed. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2007 [1st ed. 1993]), 33 & 124. These accoutrements are likely Andalusi, given where they were won, but this is not explicitly confirmed.
78 Although Granadan moriscos were treated harshly upon arrival, evidence survives of Old Christians being punished for calling them ‘cerdos o moros’ which ‘demuestra un grado de humanidad por parte de los gobernantes’ (Gómez Renau, Comunidades marginadas en Valladolid, 133).
79 Mike Rodman Jones, ‘Early Modern Medievalism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2016), 89–102 (p. 90).
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