The Cantigas, the Court, and Bourdieu

Abstract

In September 2017, the contemporary Galician poet Chus Pato described trobar in terms of the following synonyms: “Trobar, atopar, xirar, rodear, dar a volta a algo, ir derredor, rodar a palabra, darlle voltas”. Inspired by this, my article studies, from a social angle, why and how medieval troubadours using Galician-Portuguese “located”, “surrounded”, “spun around”, “returned upon”, “circled behind”, “encircled” and “returned” to specific words or conventions within the space of the court. In the first half of my discussion, I explore the “why” by applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on linguistic exchanges to the Iberian court communities in which these songs were composed and I present the “how” via case studies taken from a subset of cantigas labelled as being of “género incerto” by one of the main online databases of medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric. In the second, I demonstrate how we can use Bourdieu’s definitions of “field”, “habitus” and “cultural capital” to uncover how troubadours proved their “profit of distinction” by giving one of the main conventions of the cantigas, coita, their own meaning.