"The Golden Age of the Romancero: Echoes of Traditional Ballads in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature" (acronym GOLDEN-Rom, No. 101029346) is a research project conducted at the Instituto de Estudos de Literatura e Tradição (IELT) of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa from 1 June 2021 to 31 May 2023. The project aimed to recover, catalogue, edit and study a collection of almost 1,500 references to romances in Spanish literature from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, compiled by one of the first European philologists, María Goyri.
Romances are traditional ballads born in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, which have been transmitted orally from generation to generation to the present day in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and Judeo-Spanish. This transnational and translinguistic heritage reached its peak of popularity during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, a period in which romances were sung daily in a wide variety of contexts. For this reason, late Medieval and Early Modern Iberian literatures are deeply influenced by the romancero and quotes and allusions to romances are frequently spread in literary works.
The study of these echoes is important to understand until what extent the romancero influenced Spanish literature, but also to document verses and versions of ballads different from those preserved in manuscripts and books from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Furthermore, the study of these references enables a profound analysis of the romancero in the society of that era, determining the extent to which it was part of everyday life, identifying the most popular themes and uncovering the contexts in which ballads were sung.
The importance of this project for society lies in the fact that nowadays we are witnesses of the extinction of the romancero from the collective memory, as the last generations of transmitters are disappearing. One way to preserve and revitalize this endangered heritage is studying its golden age and making it accessible to society, thereby raising awareness of the significant impact that the romancero has left on European literature over its more than six centuries of life.
Therefore, the objectives of this project were: 1) To develop an online database in which the echoes to romances collected by María Goyri and subsequent researchers are catalogued, 2) To conduct a comprehensive study on the influence of the romancero in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish literature, considering, for the first time, a corpus of almost 1,500 literary echoes, 3) To perform a comparative analysis of the use of the romancero by Spanish and Portuguese writers from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, contrasting María Goyri's inventory with the catalogue of Portuguese references to romances compiled by Carolina Michaëlis.
