A Holy Alliance: Alfonso X’s Use of Marian Poetry, by Connie L. Scarborough (University of Cincinnati).
Scarborough explores the political themes and messages embedded in the king’s collection of miracles attributed to the Virgin—Las Cantigas de Santa Maria. While this study does not reject the religious sincerity of this great Alfonsine project, it shows that the political implications for these songs were also principle concerns in the monarch’s text. Special attention is paid to those songs which are narrated in the first-person. Even though the use of a narrative “I” is not proof of Alfonso’s personal authorship of any of the songs, this narrative device is frequent in those tales that relate the many challenges the king faced or events for which he claims to be an eye-witness.
The author takes a fresh look at the propagandistic potential in songs related to historical events, especially the conversion of the Moorish city of Alcanate into the Christian town of El Puerto de Santa María. Scarborough also deals with select cantigas in which Jews and Moors play a prominent role and investigates how these texts reflect the complex nature of the relationship between the king and the ethnic/religious minorities in his realms. The use of Galician as the linguistic vehicle for religious/political verse is also addressed. Significant attention is paid to the ways in which Alfonso chose to portray his recurring bouts of serious illness and addresses the issue of why a monarch concerned with presenting himself as a strong ruler would so openly admit to frequent physical limitation. The Cantigas de Santa Maria are also seen as a vehicle for Alfonso to record his own family’s history and its privileged position as a royal family blessed with special favor by the Queen of Heaven.
A Holy Alliance also moves beyond the poetic texts to examine how Alfonso incorporated visual images of himself in the illustrated manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, showing the king's concern with his physical portrayal as well as the importance he placed on the display of symbols of royal power. This study sheds light on the complicated political preoccupations that beset Alfonso. As a monarch, scholar, and devotee of the Virgin, the king reveals important clues about his own political ideology and strategies in his songs about the Virgin’s miracles. The political and the religious are intertwined in the Cantigas de Santa Maria which often contain subtle, and not-so-subtle, subtexts within a framework of a collection ostensibly designed to promote Marian devotion.
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Series: Estudios de literatura medieval, 6
ISBN: 978-1-58871-148-9 (HB, 206 pp.) $40