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Henry T. Drummond, "The Cantigas de Santa Maria: Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsine Court" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
welcome to the New Books Network.
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Anya Palmer
Hello. This is Anya Palmer, a host on the New Books Network, and today I'm talking to Dr. Henry T. Jomond about his book, the Cantigas de Santa Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsin Court. Henry is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven and the Alamira foundation and is currently a visiting professor at Sapienza University, Rome. Welcome to the show, Henry, and thank you so much for taking the time to chat today.
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Thank you so much for having me.
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Anya Palmer
It's an absolute pleasure. And can you start us off by telling our listeners a little bit about the song tradition that is the topic of your study? So what exactly are the Cantigas de Santa Maria? When were they written and what is special about them?
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Well, the Cantigas Cantiga in its name refers to a song, so it is a collection of songs. And the latter part of the name de Santa Maria refers to Holy Mary, so they are songs about Mary. And they were written in the latter years of the reign of one king of the crown of Castile, Alfonso the 10th. They were written probably around the 1270s to 1280s before his death in 1284. And they're a massive collection of songs written in Galician Portuguese, which was a language that had been spoken for some generations before, in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, by the time of Alfonso's reign, it was primarily a lyric language. So this is a massive collection of vernacular song. Let me just try and think. Yeah, it's a massive collection of vernacular song. The primary subject is the Virgin Mary. They're divided into two main genres, the first of which are praise songs known as Cantigas de Lor. The focus of my book is on the miracle cantigas, which comprise the large majority of the collection known as Cantigas de Maragra. And these songs, There are approximately 420 song texts, some 414 melodies. Scholars have different counts of how many songs there are, because there are some that are duplicates, some that are contrafacted, but they're preserved in four main manuscripts, which we can talk about in a second. And this was part of a massive program of what I argue is Cordy propaganda initiated by Alfonso X.
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Anya Palmer
This is great. Thank you so much. So could you tell us a little bit more about this kind of Alfonso X in general and what is happening in the Iberian peninsula in the 13th century? Just, I guess, in terms of what different state powers are going on and how does Alfonso relate to other rulers at the time?
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah. So the Iberian Peninsula is obviously quite different in the 13th century from how it is now. The modern day concept of Spain didn't quite exist in the 13th century. Alfonso was the ruler of what is commonly called the Crown of Castile, which is actually a number of realms that are rule under Alfonso's control, but have varying degrees of autonomy. This does not include the Crown of Aragon, which has a separate realm. And these were eventually unified in the 15th century. So during this time it was a much smaller part of the Iberian Peninsula. The Kingdom of Portugal is separate to the west. And then of course, there's a very substantial part still of the south of Iberia, under the rulership of the Emirates of Granada. So Alfonso is just one king on the Iberian Peninsula. At the time he ruled the Crown of Castile, which is kind of an agglomeration of various realms that had varying degrees of autonomy, but all under our font of the 10th's rule. Also within the Iberian Peninsula there was the Crown of Aragon, which was eventually to unify with the Crown of Castile in the late 15th century Kingdom of Portugal to the west, and then in the south, the much reduced territory of the former Emirate of Granada. And then in the north there is Navarre. So this was the situation in the Iberian Peninsula at this time, slightly different from modern day conceptions of Spain. Spain didn't really exist in the way we think of it now at this time. So it's a slightly different picture.
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Anya Palmer
It's super interesting. So one of the things that you mention in the book and that I think that your book really interestingly grapples with, is this idea of Alfonso X of having a reputation as being a kind of wise king. Could you talk a little bit more about how he has typically been remembered in the history books and maybe how your book grapples with that portrait or changes it and what you think the contiguas can kind of tell us that will either complicate or tell us more about this kind of historiography.
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah. So, I mean, Alfonso was described as wise during his reign. He had other epithets, like the astrologer. We refer to him in English as the wise or the learned, because you can translate el sabio in various ways. And this reputation largely came about through the massive production of works during his reign. So he was responsible for the compilation of really important texts like the Seven Partidas. These were the foundation for Spanish law that would inevitably become influential globally through the Spanish colonial empire. And they still hold importance today in Spanish law. Also things like the Astoria de Espana, which was a massive 13th century chronicle. Very important because it was one of the first that was actually in the vernacular, so in Castilian rather than Latin. This was a kind of totalitizing history that looked at Spain from legendary origins, allegedly from the time of Hercules right up to the time of Alfonso's father, Ferdinand iii. And then he also compiled treatises on astrology, on the playing of board games of precious stones. He also had a whole kind of network of translators within Toledo. This is known historiographically as the Toledo School of translators, which wasn't actually a institution, but had existed from around the 12th century that were really influential in disseminating and translating a lot of Greek knowledge that had only survived in Arabic. So Alfonso kind of sits inside this context of the creation and dissemination of a huge amount of knowledge. And that's kind of why he's earned this epithet of the wise.
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Anya Palmer
This is super interesting, and we're gonna come back to a lot of this because I think this is such an interesting and important backdrop to the work that you're doing with the songs. But before we. I wonder if I could just ask you about one more piece of context that felt very important in the book, which is the kind of religious backdrop that's informing this. One of the interesting things about the Iberian Peninsula at this time is that there does seem to be the presence of Muslim subjects, Jewish subjects and Christian subjects all in the same peninsula seems to be even more important than I would say, in other parts of medieval Europe. Is that kind of characterisation correct on my part. And could you talk a little bit about why that is, maybe?
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Absolutely. Well, Spain had been under Muslim rule for several centuries by this time. Alfonso in the 13th century is situated in a period where there had been in the previous generations a drive amongst the Christian peninsula rulers to rechristianize the Iberian peninsula. And they referred to it repeatedly as a type of crusade. But a significant part, a much reduced part, but a significant part nevertheless of the south of Spain was under the rulership of the Emirate of Granada, which operated in a somewhat complex situation with the crown of Castile. And there were also a significant population of Muslims who had remained in the crown of Castile and also in parts of the crown of Aragon, referred to historiographically as the murakas. So Alfonso kind of sits in this situation where he is ruling quite a cosmopolitan realm. There's also a very significant Jewish community. Jews held very significant positions within the royal court. There was a long tradition of Jewish court members holding positions in the treasury, for instance. So we have this kind of very, very complex religious backdrop. Some historians have referred to this idea of convivencia, which is maybe somewhat problematic. It's a historiographical idea introduced by scholars like Americo Castro, which are maybe not particularly accurate. I would see this as a context where religious minorities were to some extent tolerated, but the position vacillated depending on. On who was in charge at any given time. And I think it's fair to say that Alfonso did have varying degrees of tolerance for religious minorities, but he became increasingly tyrannical towards the latter part of his reign. And some of that is represented in many of the songs in the Cantigas.
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Anya Palmer
Okay. Because. So just about this kind of latter part of his reign. And before we zoom in on the songs. Cause you talk a little bit about what is going on with Alfonso's life, his power and his health in this kind of period in the 12. Am I right? The 1270s and 80s, when the songs are kind of being brought together.
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah.
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Anya Palmer
So what is happening with Alfonso? He's an aging king. Correct. His health is not very well. There seems to be all sorts of kind of interesting quasi archaeological work that's being done on this, which I thought was super fascinating too. But you really kind of into portrait in the Book of a Crown. That is kind of decaying, in a sense, yeah.
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Alfonso had quite a checkered life. He started off well. He ascended to the throne in 1252. He had the enormous legacy of his father, Ferdinand III, who is viewed by historians generally quite favourably as someone, at least from the Spanish Christian perspective, managed to conquer large parts, reconquer large parts of Spain from the Emirate of Granada and other Muslim realms. And Alfonso saw it as kind of part of his legacy that he had to continue that and re Christianize the rest of the south of Spain. So he led a huge number of military campaigns. He also got involved in wider European politics. He won. No, sorry, I just need to really phrase that. Let me just pause for a second. He also was very involved in European politics. There was an election for the King of the Romans, which would be the ultimate Holy Roman Emperor. And Alfonso was one of the candidates for one of these elections. And historians probably think that he bribed some of the electors so that he would win this election. But the election was ultimately disputed. But this was another one of his kind of quests within his realm to be elected King of the Romans and to be appointed Holy Roman Emperor. So he was clearly a king who had very kind of grand pretensions for himself. But as you say, he was plagued by a large number of health problems, and scholars think that he was probably suffering from some form of cancer or he maybe had been kicked in the head by a horse and, you know, had eye problems as a result. In terms of his personality and his character, he seems, yeah, quite a prickly character. He fell out of favor. Sorry, I need to rephrase that. In terms of his personality and his character, Alfonso was also quite problematic. He got involved in a quite serious dispute over his successor. So his eldest son died during the last years of his reign, and there was a succession crisis over who should succeed him, whether it should be the son of his eldest son or the next eldest son. And Alfonso was kind of stuck in the middle between factions who wanted his grandson to succeed him or his next eldest son. And ultimately that led to a rebellion. And Alfonso was king up until his death in 1284. But for the last two years of his life, he led a much kind of reduced existence in a very small court around Seville. And this was the environment in which, you know, this Cantigas project was continuing. And for all of their kind of lavish presentation and, you know, the grand claims professed in them, they kind of run counter to the very likely reality that Alfonso lived a very kind of sad final years of his life in this kind of tiny court.
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Anya Palmer
So this actually brings us really neatly into one of the things I thought was really interesting that you raised in your book, which is the fact that these songs are presented in a really lavish way, but likely had a very small audience. And as I kind of read it, you pull out this kind of really interesting argument about how this kind of works as propaganda. And there's a lot of intention here that we can learn about how the kind of court is working, even if not that many people were reading and listening and singing these songs. Could you talk a little bit more about that, maybe about the manuscripts that we find them in, how they're presented and how you think that compares to their actual kind of circulation?
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah. So in terms of the sources, there are four sources that survive. There probably were more sources that once existed. And certainly scholars think that cantigas originally circulated on roles that haven't survived because they were probably disseminated on paper. But the four main sources are known by their common sigla. There is Codex to, Codex T, Codex F, and Codex E. And Codex TO is a relatively small source that is probably the earliest. It contains a core codex of. Sorry, I need to pause because I almost said something wrong. So there are four sources. There's Codex to, Codex T, Codex F, and Codex E. The first of these is Codex to. This is probably the earliest surviving source, and it contains a core group of 100 songs divided into groups of 10. So this ordering system is something that is repeated throughout all of the other manuscripts. You have nine songs, and then the 10th song is a praise song. And these nine songs that preceded are all miracle songs. So there's this kind of ordering that is established fairly early on in this project. So this manuscript to has 100 songs in its core grouping. It also has a few other appendices at the end. But this is kind of the pattern that is set up. And sometime later, scholars think the project was expanded and they decided to create larger manuscripts that contained more miracles. So these early miracles in the TO Codex were kind of very, very similar to large miracle collections that were circulating throughout Europe at the time, that were very cosmopolitan, that had miracles from all around Europe and North Africa and the Middle East. And Alfonso wanted to expand this. And two manuscripts, T and F, kind of bear witness to this kind of strategic shift. Scholars think that each of them was designed to contain 200 miracles. So a total of 400 miracles, which is a massive expansion. And these manuscripts are not only grander in terms of their contents, but also in Terms of their appearance, they are physically pretty massive books. They also contain parallel visual narratives, so illustrations on a series of six miniatures per page that tell the story in visual terms. And this is obviously a really, really lavish project, and it would have required a huge number of craftspeople to be able to compile them. And what we think happened is that towards the latter years of his reign, when Alfonso was living in Seville in his much diminished court, the project eventually petered out because there weren't enough people to sustain it. And probably soon after Alfonso's death, the project was abandoned entirely. And this is why we see in these manuscripts. So T is fairly complete, but there are a few kind of omissions so that the 200 songs are not made up. But Codex F really is. You know, I don't quite remember the number of songs in it, but I think it's just short of 100. And it doesn't contain any musical notation, whereas T does. The visual narratives started, but they're quite repetitive. They kind of peter out towards the end as well. So what we kind of see here is a project that kind of had very grand ambitions, but kind of ran out of energy and ran out of steam. The final manuscript, E, is viewed by many scholars as an attempt to kind of collate all of the manuscripts into one or all of the songs into one big manuscript. And so this contains over 400 songs. It's viewed traditionally by Cantiga scholars as kind of the most complete because it contains most of the songs that exist within the repertory. But what we see towards the latter period of Alfonso's reign and in the latter stages of this book, is a greater reliance upon local miracles, some that are kind of newly made up, that feature Alfonso very heavily in the narrative as someone who kind of participates in these miraculous events. And we see quite a lot of duplication as well, reliance upon regular poetic and musical forms. And so again, scholars have kind of argued that this bears witness to a project that was very grand initially, but then gradually kind of petered out. And eventually people just tried to kind of complete this collection of 400 songs, but did lots of kind of duplication and rushing throughout the process.
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Where is Daredevil a miner?
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Anya Palmer
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
I feel liberated.
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Anya Palmer
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah, so we can look at musical structure, for instance, and poetic structure to identify perhaps some common trends. I might talk about the musical structure later, but scholars have kind of argued that the musical form of many of the Cantigas bears resemblance to the Virelet, for instance.
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Anya Palmer
And just to kind of glass is. Could you describe what the Virelet is really quickly? We don't have to get into kind of the nitty gritty of the form, but just for listeners who might not be familiar with the term.
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah, it's a refrain based form that has a repetition of some of the refrains musical poetic elements towards the end of the strophe. And this is something that we see in the Cantiga, one of the main kind of musical poetic structures within the miracle cantigas. The Cantigas also sit within a broader context of vernacular poetry and miracle collections within Europe. So for instance, there are kind of earlier collections that survive in Latin that circulated widely throughout Europe. And the cantigas, particularly the earlier songs that exist in codex, to have a lot of miracles in common with these Latin collections. There are also collections in vernacular tongues. So Gautier de Coincy has one in Old French. There's Gonzalo de Bosseo, who was also active in the Iberian Peninsula, who wrote one in Latin. And so the cantigas kind of also relate to these types of collections as well.
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Anya Palmer
That's really interesting. And so this kind of Marian devotion question, specifically, could you speak a little bit about how this is being used in service of kind of propaganda at Alfonso's court? What is specific about the Virgin Mary that makes her so important and kind of projecting an image of the court at this time?
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah, so the devotion towards Mary is kind of an essential part of Alfonso's personal branding. He describes himself repeatedly in the collection as the Virgin's troubadour. So this is kind of a part of giving himself approval from on high. Not just him, by the way, but also his family, because he features in quite a lot of the songs, particularly the latter songs in codexes E and T and F. And so this is kind of a way of forming a direct relationship with Mary, cementing his political authority and that of his family, and also providing justification for a lot of his military campaigns, particularly the conquest of the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula. So he provides kind of a religious analogue to the type of sung poetry of the secular lyrics seen by, as you mentioned, the Troubadours and the Trouvaires and also the Troubadours of Iberia, where he refers to Mary as the object of his desire. But as I argue in this book, within the cantigas of Santa Maria, it's kind of a very, very particular type of association that is kind of key to the collection with Alfonso.
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Anya Palmer
Yeah, this is fantastic. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the role that music and song specifically plays in kind of articulating this propaganda. That strikes me as one of the most interesting things about your project, that you really show how kind of musical and poetic form are doing a specific kind of work.
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah. So one of the kind of the central arguments of the book is that the Cantiga narratives in the miracle songs, there's a bit of a dichotomy between them. So the Cantiga miracle narratives tend to be linear. So normally, and I'll explain the miracle structure later, but often there's a particular situation that starts at one point in time, often a bad situation, which eventually gets resolved when people ask the Virgin Mary for help. And it ends at a latter point in time. So the miracle narrative is something that is intrinsically kind of linear in conception, starts at one point and finishes later. Alongside that, there is this kind of refrained text, which is moralistic, provides kind of a general maxim that is relevant to the story but not intrinsically part of it. And this kind of sits, perhaps somewhat awkwardly alongside a musical structure that is intrinsically repetition based. So it's reliant upon this musical refrain, musical poetic refrain that comes back and back and back. Not only that, but we also have repetition within the strophe itself. So we have an earlier part of the strophe that provides different sounds, whether that's through meter, rhyme, and also melody. And then we have a point midway through each strophe where the refrain, melody comes back and the meter comes back, and then we have the eventual return of the refrained rhyme. So the kind of central tenets of the book, or the kind of key problem, is that we have this linear narrative where we have something that starts at one point and then finishes later. And this is kind of sitting awkwardly alongside a musical poetic structure that kind of goes round and round and round. And the consequences of that, scholars have kind of talked about, they've kind of problematised it and said that it means that there's kind of a disruption of logic. It means that sometimes this repertory is quite difficult to understand. One important Cantiga scholar From the early 20th century, Julian Ribera, he describes the cantigas as having a kind of factitious quality about them, where there's a lack of homogeneity between the subject and the poetic form. Another scholar, Anna Chishman, back in the 70s, she argued that there is an extreme lack of concern that a line be coterminous with a complete grammatical construction. So people have kind of argued that this is kind of a bit of a problematic combination between the linear and the cyclical. And so I look at text, music relations and kind of argue that in some ways the cantigas do manage to navigate through this, particularly through the use of rhetoric.
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Anya Palmer
I thought it was super interesting, as I was looking over the text, that it does seem like sometimes the refrain actually just interrupts the narrative. But you really bring this together in your analysis in a lovely way.
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
So, I mean, there are, yeah, as you say, there are actually many instances where the musical poetic structure means that there is a direct interruption of narrative trains of thought. So you have a story, and between every single strophe you have the refrain. So each time the refrain comes, you have the interruption of this kind of general maxim that is somehow related to the story. But doesn't actually have anything directly to do with it. A lot of the time that interrupts trains of thought. There are a few occasions, they're admittedly quite rare. Where you have words that are interrupted as well. So there is this kind of interruption that is integral to the form. Some scholars have argued that that means that maybe the collection was, you know, crafted in a rush by scholars who were by. Sorry, I need to rephrase that. Some have argued that this is evidence of the fact that the collection was rushed towards its final stages. That poets were perhaps less skilled in compiling it. But, yeah, I'm kind of interested in looking a bit beyond that and seeing how this collection might have been interpreted.
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Anya Palmer
I could kind of read it. And I say this as someone who's not so at all deep in the kind of Cantigas world. But it felt like you're making a really convincing argument against what I think is a kind of reasonable. And please forgive me if I gloss the scholarship that you're most familiar with in a kind of crude way. But this sense that maybe these songs are actually a bit illogical. And, you know, do a really good job of kind of pulling in together all of these rhetorical arguments and kind of contextual arguments. Showing how this is actually all kind of being put into service as this kind of bigger propagandistic project. So maybe a good place to start here would be talking about the kind of structure of the book itself. Because I think you walk your reader really neatly through this kind of argument. So as I kind of perceive it, it's a tripartite structure. You have six chapters, each of which are kind of doing. Settled in pairs that are doing specific works. Could you talk about that a little bit and describe the kind of book as that works?
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah. So I just want to say, first of all, very openly, that this book is, to some extent based upon my doctoral thesis, which had a structure which, to some extent, regulates how the book itself is structured. My thesis was divided into two parts. So it had, if I remember correctly, three chapters which describe the kind of. The theory behind how we might interpret the Cantigas. And then three case studies that form the second part. And I adopted some of that structuring for the book as well. Although there are many new chapters. And some of the chapters from the original thesis have become journal articles. But broadly, you're right, it could be divided into three parts. So there are six chapters in total. Chapters one and two do provide the theory at how I look at the songs through a kind of a rhetorical lens, which has been done by textual critics, but not really by musicologists before. So I start in chapter one by looking at the context of rhetorical understanding within the Alphonsine courtly environment. And then in chapter two, I pin this onto the cantigas, and I look at how they were written within this kind of rhetorical method. And then chapter three turns to look quite specifically at the place of rhyme within the cantigas. It links it with ideas from vernacular song in the troubadours, the trouvers, and the Galician Portuguese poetry from the 13th century. And then provides a case study. Chapter four kind of builds up, builds on from that. It provides a case study of 3D songs that use these ideas to look at propagandistic ideals in songs that address conversion of the Jewish community within Siberia in the 13th century. And then chapters five and six, they turn more to the figure of Alfonso and this kind of embodiment of this crusader king. And so it looks at Crusades as well as Alfonso's own political struggles in the latter decades of his life. So I turn to focus on how the cantigas were made, almost to compensate for many of his shortcomings throughout his reign. So I look at how the cantigas refashioned narratives, and I also think about how we can conceive of them as kind of playful devices that audiences within the courtly environment were expected to accept, even if they were fully aware that they were kind of part of a refashioning of events in a propagandistic light.
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Anya Palmer
And the kind of context of rhetoric which you go into in such kind of wonderful detail, it feels really important. But also, I think rhetoric kind of can mean so many different things, but it means something very specific in medieval context. Could you talk a little bit about how rhetorical texts are both influencing the Alphonsine core and also how you kind of locate them within it and what rhetoric means in the kind of 13th century?
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah. So what I show in the first parts of the book, in particularly chapter one, but also chapter two, is that even though there's rarely kind of an explicitly stated rhetorical structure at play, we can attempt to identify one or several of them by showing how important rhetoric was to 13th century society, and particularly to Afonso's court. So in chapter one, I kind of trace the history of rhetorical ideas and awareness of rhetoric through ecclesiastical, monastic, and courtly institutions, particularly within Iberia, but also within Europe more generally. So I look at things like the ownership of rhetorical treatises and then the kind of appearance of rhetorical ideals within texts in Alfonso and courtly literature. What we see during Alfonso's reign is the creation of texts that rely a lot upon kind of rhetorical ideas and also explicitly quote rhetorical kind of authorities, people like Cicero and Aristotle, the latter of whom was probably acquired through translations from Arabic texts. And so what we kind of see here is a kind of an intellectual prestige that Castile was trying to claim for itself over other places in the Middle Ages, because they were the ones that had access through the translation of texts from Arabic, as having, you know, access to the newest type of rhetorical knowledge that others didn't have.
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Anya Palmer
And this is so important, it strikes me. So how does music kind of work in conjunction with these rhetorical ideas? You kind of mentioned already that this is maybe an area that textual scholars have thought about a little bit more, but it really seems to me that sounds and musicality and melody actually play really important roles in the songs in your analyses.
- [33:58]
Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah, it's certainly true that rhetoric has been looked. Sorry, I'll just start that again. Yeah, it's certainly true that the cantigas have been looked at from a rhetorical lens by text scholars. One of the most important authorities here is Elvira Fedoro Francesco, who I refer to a lot in the book. And these scholars have kind of generally broken the songs into a predetermined structure that is inspired by classical rhetoric that was adapted for various audiences within the Christian Middle Ages. So this is kind of a very flexible structure, but there are kind of three main sections. There's kind of an exordium that kind of readies the listener for the narrative that is about to take place. It makes sure that people are listening. It kind of draws their attention. We then have a middle structure, the neurazio, which is where the central main narrative appears. And then we have the peroratio, which is kind of the closing or summing up. And this doesn't exactly tie towards some of the models that are promoted by people like Cicero. But I argue that that's not necessarily important because these structures were already being adapted for various functions within the Middle Aged ages. And there are kind of three main arts, the arts of letter writing, the arts of poetry, composition, and the arts of preaching, all of which had kind of adapted this rhetorical model of structuring texts for their own practical uses. And I argue that rhetorical principles, particularly from People like Cicero and Quintilian and Aristotle had a huge emphasis on the idea of rhetoric. Sorry, I need to change that. And I argue that some of the classical authors on rhetoric, Cicero, Quintilian and Aristotle, place a huge emphasis on the importance of repetition. And this is something that kind of helps stir the memory. Classical authors are always kind of saying that repetition is important because if you repeat things, then the person who's listening to your speech is better able to memorise it, and it's also pleasurable. And this pleasure kind of aids the memory as well. And I argue that this principle of repetition is also current in the music itself, because as I mentioned already, the cantigas, their musical poetic structures are pretty much entirely reliant upon the principle of repetition. You have this refrain melody that comes back all the time. You have the refrain melody that also comes back with a new section of text in each strophe. And then you also have this moment in the latter half of each strophe where you have the emergence of the refrain melody with the poetic structure and the text that is unique to each strophe. But then you have this expectation that you're going to have the return of the refrain's rhyme. And all of this is something that I argue kind of stirs the listener's memory and generates pleasure in a very similar way. Now at McDonald's, a McDouble is 250. So you can get your gym gains on or just get lunch for only 2.50.
- [37:11]
Anya Palmer
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Dr. Henry T. Jomond
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Anya Palmer
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- [37:20]
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- [38:33]
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- [39:23]
Anya Palmer
And the other kind of two parts that seem to be at the heart of your other two sections. I mean, I wonder before we get into the songs in a little bit more detail, if you could talk really quickly about the rhyme and the role of rhyme and that as a kind of sonic process, but also the role of play. And you bring a lot of really interesting literature about game and gaming in the Middle Ages into your analysis. And I think you do a really successful job of kind of setting up how these songs are both rhetorical sites of propaganda, but also places of kind of play and fun and how that is also serving the propaganda. Could you talk a little bit more about both of those really briefly?
- [40:00]
Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah. So in terms of the rhyme, so the miracle cantikas at least tend to have broadly quite a similar poetic structure throughout. This is something that scholars have referred to as a zajal, which has some links with traditional Arabic poetry. It's a poetic structure which has a reframe with one set of rhymes and line lengths. So for instance, for instance, AA for two lines and then a four line reframe that might have a poetic structure of B B B A. So we have the A that comes back at the end. And yeah, this kind of has a lot of inheritance from traditional Arabic poetry. I'm just trying to think about how I relate that back to the idea of play. I'm so sorry.
- [40:47]
Anya Palmer
No, no pressure at all. You also don't have to fully answer the question. I mean, I can speak a little bit more about what I found interesting. As I said to you read this recently, but you Just do a really good job of kind of setting up how all of these poetic constraints and I think things that, especially in our kind of very contemporary post romantic world, you might think of as being rules that are actually made broken, but you kind of show how they become a space of play and how that's kind of important. You set it up alongside other examples of kind of medieval play, I should say a lot of literature, which I think kind of turns up quite widely. So I'm thinking about Homo ludens. And you also talk about Mary Carthagros. Yeah. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how. Yeah, how you see any of that being important to the songs and their kind of main objectives.
- [41:33]
Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah. So in chapters five and six, I refer to various ideas of play, theorizations of play from Heidegger, and then also Mary Carruthers. And Carruthers in particular looks at Heitiga from a medieval poetry perspective and argues that within a lot of poetry you have kind of predetermined sets of rules which create an interior kind of logic into which people can willingly participate. And I argue that this kind of creates the ideal kind of place for propagandistic narratives to be fashioned and reinforced. And this is something that is intrinsic to the whole kind of poetic structure of the cantigas. You have a very regularized, almost ritualistic type of poetic structure. This is something that is referred to most commonly as the zajjal, which has some inheritance from traditional Arabic poetic forms, where you have a refrain and then you have a strophe with a return of the refrain rhymes at the end. So if we have a two line refrain, it might have the rhyme structure of aa. And then a four line strophe, you would have bbba. So you have return of the A rhymes. And this is something that is seen pretty regularly throughout the cantigas. And the large majority of miracle cantigas have them, particularly towards the end of the later codices, T, F and E. And some have argued that this kind of reliance upon a very regular poetic structure kind of means that the cantigas become a kind of a playful mechanism that people come to expect and kind of operate within a very predictable way, which provides the ideal receptacle for these kind of propagandistic narratives that I talk about.
- [43:19]
Anya Palmer
That's great. And maybe now is a good time to kind of get a little bit more into talking about the songs in more detail. So maybe to start off, you could. You've alluded to it at various different points, and I think You've done a really good job of glossing as you go, but maybe you could talk a little bit about how these songs are set up as miracle songs, even with an example of a specific miracle, if you'd like. I really enjoyed reading them. Some of them are kind of wonderfully. A little bit strange and bizarre. But, yeah, please continue as you see fit, of course.
- [43:49]
Dr. Henry T. Jomond
So one song that I look at in quite a bit of detail appears in chapter four. So, as I mentioned, Chapter four provides a series of three case studies of songs that kind of promote propagandistic ideals of conversion of Jewish people within Spain. And they sit amongst a much broader context of miracles that circulated throughout Europe that contain standard antisemitic tropes. But the Cantigas really kind of adapt this and incorporate them kind of alongside music. So they're pretty unique. And one of these songs, Cantiga Number four, according to the traditional numbering, is a very, very old tale that circulates widely amongst miracle collections. So some of the earliest collections that I mentioned circulated in Latin. And this is a very old tale of a Jewish boy who goes to school with his Christian peers. And at Easter, on the way home, he sees pupils, the pupils being given communion. And according to the perspective of this Jewish boy, the virgin statue seems to be giving them the host. And she gestures to him and asks him to come, and then she gives him the communion herself. And this boy goes home, tells his father what happened. His father, who is a glassmaker, is furious and throws him into the furnace. His mother screams and runs out into the street begging for help. And then the people come to help. And when they all come into the house, they see the Virgin protecting the son in the flames. And the son is then taken out. He's baptized, the mother converts, and the father is thrown into the furnace as punishment. And this is a very, very common narrative. It circulates widely. But what's interesting here is that we have a unique adaptation of the narrative. What I argue in the Cantiga's repertory is that in this musical structure that I've mentioned, where you have the refrain and then you have the strophe, the latter part of which repeats the melody and poetic structure of the refrain. It kind of generates this structure that means that important parts of the narrative can be highlighted in the latter parts of the strophe. And this is what we have consistently throughout this song. So all of the parts that further the narrative tend to be focused in this latter part of the strophe. And some of the most important kind of maxims that relate to this idea that, you know, it's a good thing to convert, that it's a good thing that these people are converting to Christianity. As cited in this latter part. Not only that, but this is the only song, this only account of the miracle, where the characters are given names. In all of the other accounts that circulated in the centuries before in these Latin collections, and even in the versions that existed in vernacular collections by people like Gonzalo de Baseo, they just mention a boy, a mother, a father. But in the cantigas, the poets for the cantigas decided to give them names. So the boy is referred to as Abel, the father is referred to as Samuel, and the mother is referred to as Rachel. So they all have the L rhyme at the end, and that means that they can be cited at the very end of each trophy in this absolutely kind of sonically prominent place where you have the return of the refrain rhymes. And not only that, but in the narrative, they also create a comparison to three figures from the Book of Daniel. So Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, known in a cantigas by their traditional names as Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, who are thrown into the furnace for refusing to worship the. The golden idol of Nebuchadnezzar. And then they're protected by God. And so what we see here is a very kind of skillful use of this traditional story that has been adapted towards music, where you have named characters who identify very strongly with Old Testament history, in particular, Jewish identities used as a way to kind of promote these ideals that converting from the Jewish faith to Christianity is seen as a moral virtue and a moral imperative as well.
- [47:58]
Anya Palmer
It's really fantastic. And I really can't emphasize how much stuff appears to be in all of these narrative songs. And it's really interesting how you kind of point to how they still work as music and as kind of entertainment. I'm conscious that we're kind of coming up near to the end of our time, but before we start to wrap up, I was wondering, where does one listen to this music? Are there any good recordings? Do they get performed often? How do you see them kind of being engaged with in contemporary society outside of scholarship? Or do you think it's largely a scholarly pursuit?
- [48:28]
Dr. Henry T. Jomond
They do get performed quite a lot. People are very intrigued by the visual appearance of musicians in some of the manuscripts. So one of the manuscripts, Codex E that I mentioned is known colloquially as a codice de los musicos. So the musician's codex and that's because this structuring that I mentioned, where you have each 10th song being a praise song, this is demarcated visually in the manuscript by a picture of a musician for each of these 10 songs. And so scholars and musicians have become very, very interested in the potential kind of performance implications of this. I would tend to argue that this is more just a navigational device for the manuscript. So that doesn't necessarily imply much about the musical performance of these songs. But nevertheless, that's meant that the Cantigas have become incredibly popular. And of course, there are more than 400 songs. So, you know, it's a repertory that deserves to be performed. Some of the most important groups that I enjoy listening to are Jordi Savar's group with the Hesperion 21, also the Clementine Consort. I think they released four CDs of the Cantigas. Another interesting one is the Boston Camera, directed by Joel Cohen. They collaborated with the Andalusian Orchestra affairs, including traditional Northern African music as well. There was. Yeah, there's a whole host of recordings. I think that it's very difficult to recreate the exact performance circumstances of the Cantigas. We don't really know how they sounded. There are endless debates on the interpretation of rhythm, for instance, and no one seems to have, you know. Sorry. There seems to be a huge number of debates on the interpretation of rhythm in the Cantigas, and no one seems to have a satisfying answer as to how this music sounded. And so in terms of authentic performance of the Cantigas, well, there isn't really one that exists. But I think that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to enjoy this repertory and listen to, you know, varying interpretations of the music. And so, yeah, I would recommend maybe the Geordi Safal Recordings, the Renee Clemenjake Recordings, and also the Boston Camera.
- [50:42]
Anya Palmer
I'll make sure to get the full names of those so I can link them in the show notes as well. But that's fantastic. Before I let you go, Henry, what are you working on at the moment? Can you tell us a little bit about your current research project? Any upcoming publications? Anything exciting going on?
- [50:56]
Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Yeah, so I am working on something slightly later now. For the past few years, I've been working on music in the Early Modern period. I was on a postdoctoral project looking at plain chants in the Early Modern period in the Low Countries. That's led to quite a lot of publications on music and the Reformation monastic communities, particularly the Prima Stratensians in Flanders and the southern part of the modern day Netherlands. I'm now looking at Jesuits not just within the Low Countries, but also their kind of broader missionary literature as well. So this has also led to a global music conference that looked at not just the Jesuits, but also religious orders and the ways in which they use music as part of a propagandistic tool in the early modern period across the world.
- [51:47]
Anya Palmer
That's fantastic. Really excited to see the book. I know that it is kind of on the way at some point in the future, and it's just really exciting to get to engage with your work and hear more about it. Thank you so much again for taking the time, and it's been lovely, absolutely lovely talking to you.
- [52:02]
Dr. Henry T. Jomond
Thank you so much.