Category: Alfonso X el sabio

Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts

The Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts (DOSL) is a repository of more than 300 medieval Spanish texts (more than 20 million words) with access to full texts, indexes and concordances.

In the early-70s the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS), led by Lloyd A. Kasten and John J. Nitti, then professors of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, began using computers as an important tool for the compilation of dictionaries and the analysis of texts. Their main project, the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language (DOSL), that had rejected the use of editions of medieval texts as the source material, demanded that the primary sources were as free from editorial bias as possible, and making thus necessary the creation of a data bank with the machine-readable transcriptions of all the texts that could eventually be incorporated into the dictionary.

In 1978 the HSMS published on microfiche The Concordances and Texts of the Royal Scriptorium Manuscripts of Alfonso X, the first of the Texts and Concordances series which, throughout the years, has added to the DOSL archives a large number of additional texts-close to 500 at last count. Almost two decades later, in 1997, the Texts and Concordances began to be published in CD-ROM, and although the new physical support allowed for easier access to the transcriptions—dedicated microfiche readers were no longer needed-the texts and concordances were still non—interactive flat files that didn’t allow scholars to take full advantage of their possibilities.

In 2005, the HSMS began exploring the possibility of offering all of its textual archives in an online format that, while preserving the original structure, allowed for a truly interactive access to the texts, indexes and concordances. The result of all this, is the Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts, launched in 2011 with the publication of the Prose Works of Alfonso X el Sabio.

Since 2005 ten additional corpora have been added to the Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts:

For more information about medieval Spanish texts:

Cantigas de Santa Maria

The following text is from the Introduction to the book The Notation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Diplomatic Edition, Manuel Pedro Ferreira (Dir.).

Online: http://cesem.fcsh.unl.pt/en/a-notacao-das-cantigas-de-santa-maria-edicao-diplomatica/

The Notation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Diplomatic Edition, dir. Manuel Pedro Ferreira, musicography by Rui Araújo, collaboration of Ana Gaunt and Mariana Lima. Lisboa: CESEM, 2017 [e-book], 3 volumes (2 tomes each):

The Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM) is one of the major monuments of European medieval culture. It consists of a vast, carefully organized collection of devotional songs in Galician-Portuguese (419 songs), in praise of the Virgin Mary or narrating miracles attributed to her. The poetry was written and the music composed or transcribed at the royal court of Castile and León, centered in Seville, under the direction of King Alfonso X, called el Sabio (the Learned). Staves with musical notation, provided for hundreds of songs written in three books between approximately 1270 and 1285, offer an enormous amount of information on musical practice, in a well-defined spatial and temporal context.

The repertoire of the Cantigas de Santa Maria is impressive not only on account of the sheer number—more melodies survive for them than for all the lyrics of the southern troubadours — but also because of their variety and vitality. Musicologists, however, have paid surprisingly little attention to this repertoire (Higinio Anglés in the second quarter of the 20th century, and Gerardo Huseby and David Wulstan two generations later, were notable exceptions). Late and inadequate access to the sources, the language used, and the fact that this repertoire does not easily fit French theoretical models (the current yardstick for 13th-century music), among other reasons, caused a certain estrangement.

Higinio Anglés published the first complete musical edition in 1943, with an introduction of more than one hundred pages, followed in 1958 by two substantial commentary volumes. This was not only a formidable, but also an original and enduring musicological achievement (Higinio ANGLÉS, La Música de las Cantigas de Santa María del Rey Alfonso El Sabio, Barcelona, Biblioteca Central, vols. II-III, 1943-1958.). The monumental presentation of the edition certainly led many to believe that most musicological issues had been satisfactorily confronted and resolved. Nowadays, however, many of these issues deserve a fresh look, amongst them being the examination and evaluation of the manuscript sources.

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