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  • La época del Cancionero de Baena: Los Trastámara y sus poetas
  • Linde M. Brocato
Óscar Perea Rodríguez. La época del Cancionero de Baena: Los Trastámara y sus poetas. Baena: Fundación Pública Municipal Centro de Estudios “Juan Alfonso de Baena”, 2009. Colección Biblioteca Baenense 6. 329 pp. ISBN: 978-84-606-4850-5

With this volume, winner of the Premio Internacional de Investigación Juan Alfonso de Baena, Óscar Perea Rodríguez continues the biographical and historical work he has published in various articles and his 2007 Estudio biográfico sobre los poetas del “Cancionero general”. La época del Cancionero de Baena: Los Trastámara y sus poetas presents a historical and biographical study of the context and the poets of the Cancionero de Baena, also mapping the state of scholarship on the figures who appear in the work. The study is essentially structured in alternating chapters, presenting the historical and political profile of the reigns of the Trastámara monarchs framing the poetry (Enrique II, Juan I; Enrique III; Juan II) followed by a chapter containing biographical information on the poets themselves, bringing to the fore their socially and politically relevant poetry (all the poems mentioned or reproduced in the text are identified by Brian Dutton’s abbreviations). In addition, Perea Rodríguez provides a good overview of the literature, signaling classic and recent sources ranging from medieval and Golden Age historiography up to very recent studies. At the same time, he clearly outlines areas in need of further research and suggests archival sources that might be explored to fill the lacunae. As [End Page 365] he notes, the scope of such a project calls for an international team effort, certainly a desideratum for the vigorous field of cancionero studies – one might envision some kind of collaborative wiki to accompany the Cancionero virtual Web site.

The book would be a splendid text for teaching the late fourteenth century and the first third of the fifteenth century in general (not just cancionero poetry), but would have to be supplemented with analyses problematizing both text and history, as well as their relationship. The author states that formal literary analysis is beyond his competence or purpose (18), and attends to historical and political detail with thoroughness and erudition, but this is almost emblematic of the tension between a literary approach (or even a literary-historical one) and a historiographical approach to such texts. Indeed, Perea Rodríguez takes the various texts (rubrics, poems) at face value, and as literal and fehaciente sources of direct and unmediated facts about the times in which they took shape. Certainly, as is often asserted, the Cancionero de Baena is a unique source of data of various sorts –historical, social, political, linguistic– as indeed is any work of literature in one way or another. Yet literature (which includes the writing of history, even now) is not simply a faithful and unproblematic mirror, directly reflecting realities, but is situated, rhetorical, figurative, ideological, and mediated, not to be taken as simply a map of the world represented in its words – nor can things be divided up into “puramente literario/textual” and “puramente histórico/historiográfico”.

After the foreword by José J. Labrador Herraiz, Perea Rodríguez’s introduction begins by contrasting the creation of the Cancionero general, with its artistic goals as well as its profit motive, to that of the Cancionero de Baena, more “feudal” in its motivation and candid in its inscription, and signaling a point of transition in the poetics and politics of Baena’s time. He then turns, as he must, to Dutton’s work, in particular his seminal analysis of Alfonso XI’s “En un tiempo cogí flores” (ca. 1339) as the origin of the cancionero tradition in Castilian (7: vii–viii). Dutton suggests that this poem marks the beginnings of what would become cancionero poetry, initiated by the king whose unexpected death in 1350 also defined the beginning of the conflicts that would end with Pedro I’s death in 1369 at the hands of his half-brother, thereafter the first of the Trastámara kings, Enrique II.

Perea Rodríguez then surveys general work...

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