| Commentary: |
Snow 2007: "Alfonso, well-acquainted with troubadour style and even with some of the later troubadours, wrote no poetry in a truly popular vein. It was court poetry with a court audience, and he was both its patron and a practitioner. The statement that because they were too learnèd the CSM were not performed in church or plaza seems too strong, though proof one way or the other (other than the request found in Alfonso's will) is not easy to come by. The latter part of the study takes up the prosifications of the first 24 compositions in MS B.I.2: the idea is that these Castilian renderings were efforts to amplify the sources the king used, and that Alfonso most likely commisioned them (a plausible suggestion, given the value he personally must have placed on the MS). The king's death meant the end of the prosification project, whose purpose may have been to prepare the public for the content of Galician texts which, when sung, might sound unfamiliar. Gier does not consider that the prosifications might have been a later additional (also plausible)." |
