La poésie orale féminine : des analogies entre la lyrique française du Moyen Âge et la tradition orale espagnole

Abstract

The “chanson de femme” (woman's song) is a literary genre developed in the North of France for the medieval period. Through the many variations in topics and rhythms, these poetical forms always present woman in the first person and often appear associated with dances and women's tasks. Written tradition modified or put aside these popular songs, concealing, this way, day-to-day millions of women reality whereas courteous codes were spread from Southern France by the prestigious troubadour poetry.

Based on André Mary and Pierre Bec medieval French poetry anthologies, folk songs collected by ethnography lovers and some of the indispensable bibliographical references, having compared and analysed the different types of French female songs in the popular medieval period with popular poetry from the Northwest of Spain, we can see that besides structural similarities, topics and motifs typical of French “chanson de femme” remain in Spanish folklore.

From lack of enough transcriptions, inmaterial patrimony transmited in collective memory make us feel the “chanson de femme” as a complaint against submission to impositions and ideological pressures and an expression of relief and joy of being freed, without any feeling of guilt so deeply imposed or even self assumed. The oral poems analysed at this paper attempt to visibilize numerous sociocultural factors from quotidian women's life in the past and trace their continuity up to the present, which will allow us a full analysis of nowadays reality.