| Commentary: |
Snow 1977, no. 25: "This item led to much misunderstanding in its day. Noting that the musical variants between the Toledo MS and the two Escurial MSS are significant, S. F. gives dubious transcriptions of the music of cantigas 221, 256, 2, 17, 6 and 28. He attributes the first two to the hand of Fernando III, but a reading of the texts shows this to be absurd. He concedes that Alfonso was not the sole author but posits that many poems were leftovers from an earlier era, collected later. We learn that some of these poems are in Castilian, that MS Tj 1. has 290 poems (it only contains 193), and that Alfonso wrote an equal number of profane poems (this deduced from the allusion in Prol. B). This is simply careless scholarship." |
