8 - The Misa de amor in the Spanish Cancioneros and the Sentimental Romance

Summary

Alan Deyermond's contribution to the study of the sentimental romance is so essential that, before he wrote his seminal essay on the genre in the medieval volume of his Literary History of Spain (1971), we used to call it the sentimental novel. To him I owe the inspiration for my book on the genre (2005), and this additional footnote to that book. When I categorized religious parody in the sentimental romance in that book, I did not include the category of the Misa de amor, although I made a passing reference to it. A rereading of the key texts of the sentimental romance genre in the late fifteenth century shows that the Mass is more important than it would seem on first reading, although the references to the Mass are more veiled than the other topics I examined there.

To place this in its context, my book examines parodies of the Fall, the Sermon, the Life and Passion of Christ, the Joys and Lamentations of the Virgin, the Tomb Cult, and the Inferno of Lovers. To quote myself on this topic:

I would like to suggest that we stand back from the trees in order to study a genre which might be defined by one overarching concept – parody of the religion of love. One could argue as some have that the whole notion of the religion of love is already a parody of Christianity, but one which was taken seriously at the time. [...]