The main objective of the project started in 2021 is to study the interpolation of romances in Spanish literature of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. It is articulated with the IELT’s Literary revisions: the creative application of ancient ballads (15th-18th centuries) project which pursues the same purpose within Portuguese literature.
The final goal of the association of the GOLDEN-Rom and RELIT-Rom projects is to constitute a critical archive of testimonies of the convergence of romances in Peninsular literature between the 15th and 17th centuries, and of the complex and multifaceted effects produced by interpolations of the romances in new literary contexts. In this sense, it will contribute to the knowledge of the ancient scholarly circulation of romances in the Peninsula and to a renewed reading of the works that integrated the ballad verses.
GOLDEN-Rom takes as its starting point the collection of 2,000 quotations and allusions to romances assembled by the Spanish philologist María Goyri, which is kept in the Ramón Menéndez Pidal Foundation. María Goyri was inspired by the work done by Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos in Romances velhos em Portugal (initially published between 1907 and 1909), where several hundred references to romances in Portuguese literature are collected. Goyri’s inventory remains unpublished and needs the revision, amplification and updating that Vasconcelos’ prompted the RELIT-Rom project (the latter is currently in a later research phase). To this end, GOLDEN-Rom proposes to:
1. to catalogue into a digital structure every reference to romances identified in Spanish literature by Goyri and later specialists;
2. analyse the creative use of quotations and allusions to romances by Spanish writers and musicians of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries;
3. to study the differences and similarities in the use of these poetic materials by Portuguese and Spanish writers, comparing the inventories of Goyri, Vasconcelos and the contributions of later scholars.
