The Golden Age of the Romancero: Echoes of traditional ballads in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature

One of the strongest branches of European Balladry is the Romancero.

Romances are traditional ballads that originated in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages and have been transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation for centuries in five European languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and Judeo-Spanish). Its heyday was the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, when romances were sung daily in all social spheres.

The Romancero left a deep mark on literature: Gil Vicente, Camões, Góngora, Quevedo, Lope de Vega or Cervantes, among others, took inspiration from romances to create their stories and frequently alluded to them in their works.

The study of the influence of the Romancero on Portuguese literature is very advanced since at the beginning of the 20th century, Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos published a catalogue with 300 quotations and allusions to romances.

However, the same cannot be said for Spanish literature: although the philologist María Goyri managed to gather around 2,000 echoes of romances in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish literature, this valuable inventory still remains unpublished and needs to be revised, completed and updated as to be used by scientific community.

In order to fill this significant gap in philology, this project aims 1) to catalogue in an online database each of the echoes of romances in Spanish literature identified by Goyri and later researchers, 2) to analyse the use of quotes and allusions to romances by Spanish writers of the Golden Age and 3) to study the differences and similarities in the use of echoes by Portuguese and Spanish writers by comparing Goyri and Vasconcelos’ inventories.

The Instituto de Estudos de Literatura e Tradição of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa is the ideal host for this project as it is one of the few centres in the world dedicated to researching the Romancero. In addition, this project will be supervised by Dr. Teresa Araújo, one of the greatest specialists in the field.