Form and Subject in Iberian Literature, 854–1492

Abstract

This dissertation argues that poetic form in medieval Iberia was not inherited but made — that is, socially precipitated, and with material antecedents. Against accounts that treat form as a vehicle for transmitting learned influence across elites, it proposes a non-modern sound studies attuned to the lived history of verse forms across axes of class, ethnorace, and ecological change. Closely reading Galician-Portuguese, Old Spanish, Mozarabic, and Hebrew lyric alongside legislation, inquisitorial records, sediment analyses, and other non-literary sources, the dissertation reconstructs the social–sonic spaces of medieval Iberia. Three case studies develop this argument. The first chapter examines the ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese cantiga de amigo tradition alongside the non-literary archive and palaeobotanical record to argue that the recursive formal structures of medieval pine songs are entangled with the ecological and economic transformations that took place in the medieval Iberian forests. The second turns to early attestations of race in the cantigas’ satirical tradition, arguing that the racialized reception of Andalusi forms among Christian courtiers gave rise to a corpus of race-conscious contrafacta that I call the cantigas negras. These songs encoded protoracial and ethnoreligious difference in general, while attesting to a specifically Black poetic presence in medieval Iberian courtly circles and underscoring the multiracial nature of the Mediterranean trade in luxury goods. The third chapter explores the financialization of language itself, reading the Hebrew and Old Castilian poetry of Shem Tov Ardutiel alongside inquisitorial proceedings and literary correspondence to theorize the commodification of language work within the Ibero-Jewish courtier class. Across these case studies, the dissertation advances a non-modern sound studies that treats literary form as an inherently meaningful index of Iberian social history in deep time, registering the pressures of a pluralistic society in ways that genealogical and reception-based approaches have largely missed. Ultimately, it seeks to reconcile non-modern literary formalism with the socially attuned critical tradition of historical materialism.