Chapter 5

As personagens femininas do Pergaminho Vindel

Until nowadays, traditional scholarship on the 13th-century cantigas de amigo from the Vindel Parchment has been based exclusively on two 16th-century cancioneiros and on the epistemological biases of 19th-century historiography of literature, with its scriptocentrism, viricentrism and nationalism.

An immense gap separates the reader’s close-reading experience of the 7 cantigas, with their sexually active young women, setting out for a rendezvous with their lover, and the official discourse which makes students ‘read’ them as simple, silly young girls waiting passively and suffering for absent lovers.

A new approach, combining postmodern insights and the radical decision to take the 13th-century Vindel Parchment as the basis of the historiography of 13th-century cantigas, opens new ways of reading them and rediscovering their female singers, composers and poets.