Medieval Spanish literature

By the end of the 10th century, the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula had developed far from their Latin origins, and can assuredly be called Romance.

The earliest recorded examples of a vernacular Romance-based literature date from the same time and location, the rich mix of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures in al-Andalus, in which Maimonides, Averroes, and others worked.

Typically spoken in the voice of a woman, the kharjas express the anxieties of love, particularly of its loss, as in the following example: This combination of Iberian Romance expression with Arabic script, only discovered in 1948, locates the rise of a Spanish literary tradition in the cultural heterogeneity that characterized Medieval Spanish society and politics.

While the relatively recent discovery of the kharjas challenges the pride of chronological place that belonged for so long to El Cantar de mio Cid (1140 C.E.)

What the discovery of the kharjas makes clear instead is that from its origins, the literature of Spain has arisen out of and born witness to a rich, heterogeneous mix of cultures and languages.

The anonymous poet wrote it in about 1140 and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar ("el Cid") supposedly died forty years before in 1099.

Medieval Spanish poets recognized the Mester de Juglaría as a literary form written by the minstrels (juglares) and composed of varying line length and use of assonance instead of rhyme.

Spanish prose gained popularity in the mid-thirteenth century when Alfonso X of Castile gave support and recognition to the writing form.

He, with the help of his groups of intellectuals, directed the composition of many prose works including Las siete partidas, the first modern book of laws of the land written in the people's language.

Another work was Estoria de España, which accounted for the history of Spain from the Creation until the end of the reign of his father, San Fernando.

This form is demonstrated by Pulgar's work Claros varones de Castilla in which he represents the detailed lives of twenty-four distinguished contemporaries.

Alfonso X el Sabio fits into the third group with his series of three hundred poems, written in Galician: Las cantigas de Santa María.

The Auto de los Reyes Magos is the oldest extant liturgical drama (12th century) written in Spanish language.