The first manifestations of literary production in Portuguese correspond to texts in verse, generally composed by educated poets – troubadours – who lived in various royal and lordly courts of the Iberian Peninsula, particularly in the Northwest. The songbook compositions – cantigas -, which certainly circulated in loose form, were preserved through poetry books – chansonniers -, something between a collection and an anthology as happened in the Romanesque environment (chansonniers, cançoners, canzonieri, song books).

Critical Studies on the manuscript tradition of Galician-Portuguese production are based on the studies of C. Michaëlis (1904), who first commented on the textual transmission of the songs and on the sociocultural profile of each of the authors. The relationships of kinship between the testimonies as regards the Galician-Portuguese lyrical tradition, allowed G. Tavani (1967) to establish a new stemma, which has been reproduced and successively substantiated by his various subsequent studies. Thus, a framework was assumed for the construction of a ‘great collective collection’, a librum magnum, perhaps made in the courtly environment of Pedro (1287-1354), Count of Barcelos, which might later have favoured the (re)transcription of the various known songbooks (Ajuda, Colocci-Brancuti and Vaticana).

Technical and textual analysis of the cantigas has, to some extent, allowed for the reconstitution of the medieval poetic corpus and the recognition of various troubadours and the social contexts in which they moved, thus establishing a more robust historical framework and better understanding about the leading actors in this literary movement, which had already achieved success in the Gallo-Romanesque courtly environments.

Taking into account the examination of the material conjuncture of the Galician-Portuguese songbooks, here I seek to reflect on some of the emblematic cases, resulting from the placement of texts in collective collections in keeping with the prestige the compilers attributed to the lineage of the composers. Who composed and wrote them? How were they written, how were they transcribed, how were they read.

About the author
Maria Ana Ramos graduated from the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon (Undergraduate degree and PhD), where she then lectured mainly History of the Portuguese Language for several years. After specialist study in Romance Philology at the University of Rome, La Sapienza (three years), she is currently working at the Romanisches Seminar at the University of Zurich, where she has been teaching Portuguese Language, Linguistics, Literature and Philology since 1986 and where she also obtained her tenure (senior) in Romance Philology and the Carlos de Oliveira Chair (Camões IP).

The main areas of her research focus on the history of Galician-Portuguese lyrics, the textual variations of their production, the processes of transmission and the medieval and four-century reception of collective poetic collections, particularly regarding the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, a codex on which she has developed thorough work, having published, in addition to the essay, which accompanies the facsimile edition of this Chansonnier (1994) and the reprint of the diplomatic edition (2007), a study that apprehends the eloquence of the blank spaces in this last 13th century manuscript (1986), which allowed for significant reflection on the specificity of the musical prediction for fiindas in Galician-Portuguese lyrics (1984) and on the meaning of the syllabic and inter-vocabulary separation of some terms depending on the neume notation provided in the manuscript (1995). In 2008, she published an extensive study based on the codicological, palaeographic and graphematic examination of the manuscript (Chansonnier of Ajuda. Manufacture and Writing).

Besides this essential domain, she also holds interests in several other domains of medieval literature, including among which, the brief narrative forms, the linguistic aspects of Gil Vicente’s theatre, examination of an artificial language proposed during the 16th century, the language of gypsies (2003), and she has also sought to study the literary period in France of Prince Afonso, le Boulonnais, future Afonso III of Portugal, responsible for the cultural dynamics of the Portuguese court (2003, 2005, 2011, 2013).