The cantigas de amigo constitute, together with the cantigas de amor and the cantigas d'escarnio e maldizer , one of the canonical genres of Galician-Portuguese lyric poetry. Their textual corpus amounts to more than five hundred pieces, transmitted, mainly, in the manuscripts B (Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal – Colocci Brancuti, code 10991) and V (Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Vaticana, code 4803), ordered to be copied in Rome by the humanist Angelo Colocci around 1525 from a lost codex. From the time of production of the texts, only the famous Vindel Scroll (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, ms. M.979) has survived to the present day, dated to the end of the 13th century and which, as is known, preserved the seven cantigas of the xograr Martin Codax (six of them accompanied by the corresponding musical notation). In terms of the number of preserved texts, the cantigas de amigo are the largest corpus of lyric poetry for the female voice in medieval Europe.
According to the biographical data of the troubadours present in the songbooks, the genre began to be cultivated towards the end of the twelfth century (cf. Airas Carpancho and Fernan Rodriguez de Calheiros), and its textual chain continued uninterrupted until the final period of the movement troubadour (ca. 1350, cf., for example, the names of Estevan Coelho and Estevan da Guarda).
Most of the friend songs are presented in the form of a monologue and, to a lesser extent, a dialogue with the mother, the confidante or the friend himself. The compositions have as their dominant thematic axis the girl's love for not being able to go on the date with her friend or because of his departure or distance, whose prolonged absence sometimes raises the suspicion of lying or betrayal. However, a limited number of texts express female joy, which mainly obeys the return of the beloved. In addition to these usual themes, the transmitted poetic repertoire offers isolated examples of semantic innovation and others that account for the connections with the love song, by showing a woman who displays her power in the relationship and who is revealed to be energetic and even indifferent to the sadness of the lover
From the formal point of view, the genre privileges the structure of the refrain song , since the so-called meestria songs ( ie , those that lack retrouse due to the influence of Provençal models) offer an insignificant frequency index. On the other hand, it is in the cantigas de amigo where parallelism – sometimes linked to the leixapren technique – presents a more common cultivation. Thus, the cantiga de amigo manifests itself as a varied poetic experience, as it converges traditional elements that deepen their roots in pagan culture and others marked by the prestigious courtly aesthetics of the Occitan troubadours. Undoubtedly, the female voice is the 'sign of identity' of the genre, the discursive mechanism that allows a whole series of themes and motifs to be embedded in the texts that make the poetic statement unique.
Songs of friends and songs of pilgrimage / sanctuary
Within the cantigas de amigo, there is a group of texts composed by twenty-one poets who endowed their verses with a unique stamp by placing them in a hermitage, sanctuary or church. In most cases, each troubadour or xograr mentions a hagiotoponym of their own, which becomes a sign of authorship that does not go unnoticed by experts in the field or by the readers of the pieces themselves. As reported in the 'About' section, the maps that appear below show georeferenced sanctuaries cited or evoked in these texts, while including — whenever possible — current images of those geographical settings that established an intrinsic link between an author and a territory distinguished by the existence of a peculiar sacred space. In those cases in which the toponym raises doubts due to the existence of another homonym(s), the point that, according to specialized criticism, is most likely to be the one referred to in the texts is offered first. Likewise, users are provided with essential bibliography for the study of pilgrimage songs and links are provided that link each author to their biography and their corpus in MedDb ( www.cip.gal/meddb ), the Database of Galician-Portuguese Profane Poetry of the Ramón Piñeiro Center for Humanities Research.