Scenes of Adultery & Racism Set Visually to Music

THE ROOT
By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Story of the Adulterous Moor, from Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, 13th century. Cantiga CLXXXV. Escorial, Real Monasterio.

SPAIN---Among the most revealing insights into the devotional culture of medieval Spain are the cantigas, a type of monophonic music. A large corpus of this distinctive song form was composed during the 13th century at the court of Alfonso X, called the Wise, ruler of the Spanish kingdom of Castile. A visual dimension is added to these works in the form of illustrated narrative pages facing the text of the song. The stories are, as in this example, usually divided into six scenes, each headed by a short descriptive text based on the lyrics of the songs. The event illustrated here relates the predicament of a woman falsely accused of adultery by her mother-in-law. The unwilling agent of the fraud is the mouro, or Moor, a servant of the mother-in-law. [link]