posted on 2021-04-17, 14:46authored byYuri Leonardo Rosa Stelmach
This research aims to analyze how the Jews are represented in the illustrations of the
Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM), a set of medieval poems written, illustrated and musical in the
court of the King Afonso X of Castile and Leon in the second half of the XIII century. In this
context, although tolerated, those individuals lived under stigma and social marginalization, as
well as they were targets of accusations based on anti-Jewish myths and stereotypes. The
methodology used in this research consists of na interpretative analysis of the images presented
in the CSM and which constitute the corpus of study, to which the following authors and their
respective contributions are adopted: (a) Montenegro (1998), with his study on the
representation of Jews in medieval Spain and the theological, political, cultural and social
arguments that configured the anti-Jewish repertoire of the period; (b) Barral (2007), with his
study on the representation of Jews in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, centered on the dialectical
relationship between text and iconography; (c) Disalvo (2009), author who discusses
typological and figurative elements in the representation of the Jewish individual. For the
interpretation of those images, this research approaches the postulates of Schmitt (2007),
according to which the pictorial image cannot be considered mere illustration of the text, but a
support that has its own resources of representation, which amplify or compress textual aspects.
In addition, image analysis must take into account the socio-cultural context in which those
productions are inserted. Therefore, from the analyzes carried out, it is assumed the importance
of illustrations in the CSM, since it is by means of it that someone can identify a stereotypical
iconographic lexicon of the Jews, which made use and reinforced anti-Jewish accusations in
the XIII century.