ECHO – Poetry and Poets of the Cancioneiro Geral

Coord: Cristina Almeida Ribeiro

The project ECHO: Poetry and Poets of the Cancioneiro Geral started from a double notice: (i) the increasing interest in 15th-century Iberian poetry and in the songbooks that assured its transmission led, in the last decades, to significant advances in the knowledge of collections, genres, texts and poets; (ii) in spite of being a part of that vast poetical whole, whose identity grew stronger by means of an intensive cultural exchange, favoured, according to the capricious rhythms of History by alliances and confrontations, embassies and exiles, elective affinities and undisguised emulation, Portuguese poetry of that period has remained an almost unexplored domain, waiting for a systematic and consistent analysis. Aware of this gap, the team members intend to fill it, by producing, through a comprehensive study of literary, linguistic and historical data, the tools necessary to a new approach of Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral (1516) and thus contributing to the full integration of this work into the map of 15th-century Iberian songbook poetry.

Objectives

1.      To create a new and multifaceted framework to the study of a poetry deeply based on the Iberian tradition of Castilian matrix, always in intense dialogue with it, but interpreting it often in an original way and sometimes moving apart, which means:

• to establish a typology of poetic genres and a rigorous classification of every text in the Cancioneiro Geral;
• to register every reference to the poets in Resende’s collection both in manuscript and printed sources from the 15th and 16th centuries and in recent studies on the history of that period, in order to get information about their lives and family connexions, their functions at court and abroad, and the cultural and political circles they belonged to;
• to register every reference to the Cancioneiro Geral and its poets in printed literary and historiographical sources from the 16th to the 21st centuries, in order to get information about the reception of 15th-century poetry and the knowledge of its authors;
• to characterize the songbook language as a testimony of the specificities of Portuguese in the second half of the 15th century, with identification of generational traits and individual particularities.

2.      To produce a set of digital publications, informed by all the work previously described, to be delivered by the end of 2024:

• Bibliographical database;
• Dicionário do Cancioneiro Geral: Poetas e Arte Poética;
• Edition of the Cancioneiro Geral.

Recent and planned activities
 

• 2023. Participation in the XIX Congresso Internacional da Associação Hispânica de Literatura Medieval (Alcobaça, 5-9 Set.): 3 papers. 
• 2023. Participation in the VIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Convivio para el estudio de los cancioneros y de la poesía de cancionero (Salamanca, 1-3 Mar.): 1 keynote speech, 3 papers.
• 2022. Participation in the Coloquio Internacional “Del siglo XV al siglo XXI: mujeres, poetas y textos perdidos en torno al Cancionero de Baena” (Vigo, 18 Jun.): 1 paper.
• 2021. Participation in the VII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Convivio para el estudio de los cancioneros y de la poesía de cancionero (A Coruña, 3-5 Nov.): 1 team member in the Organizing Committee, 3 papers.

Previous activities
 

• 2017. [Lisboa, 21.07; with the project “Nobles, Oficiales y Cortesanos en el entorno del Cancionero de Baena” (UVigo)] Seminário aberto “Esses Poetas a que Chamam Menores…”
• 2016. [Évora, 06-08.10; with CIDEHUS (UÉvora), CITCEM (UPorto) e CLP (UCoimbra)] Congresso Internacional Poesia de Cancioneiro e Cultura de Corte: Nos 500 Anos do Cancioneiro Geral.
• 2014. [Lisboa, 6-7.03] X Colóquio da Secção Portuguesa da AHLM: Memória. Homenagem a Teresa Amado.
• 2012. [Lisboa, 3-5.12] III Congreso Internacional de la Asociación CONVIVIO para el Estudio de los Cancioneros y de la Poesía de Cancionero.
   

Key publications
 

• Antunes, Maria Helena Marques. 2019. “Fernão Brandão, um poeta polifacetado”. In Josep Lluís Martos y Natalia A. Mangas (eds.). Pragmática y metodologías para el estudio de la poesía medieval. Alacant: Universitat d’Alacant. 371-378.
• Antunes, Maria Helena Marques. 2019. “‘Se comigo nom m’engano’: Duarte da Gama entre sátira e lirismo”. In Isabella Tomassetti (coord.). Avatares y perspectivas del medievalismo ibérico. San Millán de la Cogolla: Cilengua. II, 1027-1036.
• Antunes, Maria Helena Marques. 2018. “Poesia colectiva e círculos poéticos: o caso dos poetas ‘acidentais’”. In Ana Maria Machado, Hélio J. S. Alves, Luís Fardilha e Maria Graciete Silva (coord.). Arte poética e cortesania: o Cancioneiro Geral revisitado. Lisboa: Colibri. 235-245.
• Ribeiro, Cristina Almeida. 2021. En busca de la poesía perdida en la corte portuguesa de Juan I y Felipa de Lancaster. Romance Notes 61.2: 253-262. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/841570.
• Ribeiro, Cristina Almeida. 2019. “Quando a voz própria não basta: invocação do outro e construção da autoridade no Cancioneiro Geral”. In Tobias Brandenberger e Maria Ana Ramos (eds.). Vozes e letras: polifonia e subjectividade na literatura portuguesa antiga. Berlin: LIT Verlag. 93-111.
• Ribeiro, Cristina Almeida. 2018. “Uma estranha confissão e algumas peças mais: João Gomes da Ilha no Cancioneiro Geral”. In Ana Maria Machado, Hélio J. S. Alves, Luís Fardilha e Maria Graciete Silva (coord.). Arte poética e cortesania: o Cancioneiro Geral revisitado. Lisboa: Colibri. 179-195.
• Ribeiro, Cristina Almeida. 2017. “Vox, auctoritas y vox ficta: Juan de Mena en el Cancioneiro Geral”. Crítica Hispánica, 39:2, 117-134.
• Silva, Maria Graciete Gomes da. 2019. “Figurações do serviço amoroso: Dona Joana de Mendoça no teatro da corte”. In Isabella Tomassetti (coord.). Avatares y perspectivas del medievalismo ibérico. San Millán de la Cogolla: Cilengua. II, 1217-1225.
• Silva, Maria Graciete (com Ana Maria Machado, Hélio J. S. Alves e Luís Fardilha, coord.). 2018. Arte poética e cortesania: o Cancioneiro Geral revisitado. Lisboa: Colibri. 
• Silva, Maria Graciete. 2018. “A vida posta em balança: interpelação e desconcerto em alguns poemas de Jorge de Resende”. In Ana Maria Machado, Hélio J. S. Alves, Luís Fardilha e Maria Graciete Silva (coord.). Arte poética e cortesania: o Cancioneiro Geral revisitado. Lisboa: Colibri. 197-205.
• Sousa, Sara Rodrigues de. 2020. “Referencias judaicas en las ‘cosas de amores’ del Cancionero General de Hernando del Castillo”. Revista de Cancioneros Impresos y Manuscritos, 9, 134-153.
• Sousa, Sara Rodrigues de. 2019. “Mutilación y (re)creación poética: las ‘letras’ y ‘cimeiras’ del Cancioneiro Geral, de Garcia de Resende (1516)”. In Isabella Tomassetti (coord.). Avatares y perspectivas del medievalismo ibérico. San Millán de la Cogolla: Cilengua. II, 1227-1237.
• Sousa, Sara Rodrigues de. 2019. “‘Que venga toda fortuna’: Dom Diogo Pereira y Diogo de Mendoça, a partir de las justas reales de 1490”. In Josep Lluís Martos y Natalia A. Mangas (eds.). Pragmática y metodologías para el estudio de la poesía medieval. Alacant: Universitat d’Alacant. 359-370.