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One Swallow Does Make a Summer: Assonance in Galician-Portuguese Cantigas

Medieval Galician-Portuguese poets worked in a period when the literary norm demanded rime suffisante = rhyme that echoes vowels and any intervening and/or final consonants of the corresponding syllable(s) (schematically: 1 1). It is equally well known that, above all in cantigas de amigo, poets sometimes preferred the more popular ‘inclusive assonance’ found in early French and Hispanic verse = rhyme that echoes vowels of the corresponding syllable(s) but with intervening and/or final consonants unregulated (schematically: 1 x).1 Predictably, in the event many rhyme words of cantigas in inclusive assonance (hereafter ‘assonance’) were in rime suffisante (hereafter ‘rhyme’). But, clearly, such ‘mixed’ cantigas are none the less in assonance. In the literary historiography, however, this last proposition does not seem to have been universally accepted. The present article will suggest ways in which the role of assonance in Galician-Portuguese cantigas has as a result been somewhat distorted. In cantigas de amor, assonance is rare. As a preliminary, I point none the less to two cases in which close metrical reading suggests that failure to accord reality to assonances in cantigas in which rhyme predominates can have limiting effects.