Portuguese poetry  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump
to: navigation, search   Middle Age[edit]  Portuguese
troubadours  The beginnings of Portuguese poetry go back to the
early 12th century, around the time when the County of Portugal
separated from the medieval Kingdom of Galicia in the northwest
of the Iberian Peninsula. It was in this region that the
ancestral language of both modern Portuguese and modern
Galician, known today as Galician-Portuguese, was the common
language of the people. Like the troubadour culture in the
Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, Galician-Portuguese
poets sang the love for a woman, which often turned into
personal insults, as she had hurt her lover's pride. However,
this region produced a specific type of song, known as cantigas
de amigo (songs of a friend). In these, the lyrical subject is
always a woman (though the singer was male) talking about his
friend (lover) from whom she has been separated - by war or
other activities - as shown in the Reconquista. They