The End of Galician-Portuguese Troubadourism in the Context of Romanic Lyric: A Comparative Analysis and Some Issues of Literary Historiography

Abstract

The study of the medieval literature is often based on the methodological principles of the historiographic literature. The reason for this is the literature’s historical condition, but also its use in the identitary discourses used in the construction, from the XVIIIth, of the contemporary nations. However, this principles are extremely difficult to apply to a prenational reality, as the medieval is. The end of the Galician-Portuguese lyric is a good example of this methodological disfunctions, especially if its historiographical ordenation is made by the Galician literature, that is to say, a minorized literary system. In this type of systems, the symbolic functionality of literary history is broader than it is in those other systems with full institutional development. One of the narrative resource used by the Galician historiography for explaining the end of the trobadorism is the key date concept, which in this case will be constructed on the Pedro, count of Barcelos’s death, at 1354. When this narrative design is compared with those of other Romanic lyrical traditions, the weakness of this sort of explanations are revealed. The conclusions so drawn warn against acritical assumptions of the literary historiographic methods.