| Sumario: | This study approaches medieval lyric poetry through the lens of gender and performance theory by situating these songs in the context of live, embodied performances, this study demonstrates how comic-obscene and comic-erotic songs put identity into play, including sex/sexuality, gender, rank, and social status. The author draws on modern ethnographic and performance studies to fill in gaps in the medieval written record this approach enables her to reconstruct lyric performances and explores how women performed themselves as poetic characters ventriloquized by male poets, and how men impersonated female characters. The author includes English translations of Galician-Portuguese and Castilian poems, making this book accessible to non-Hispanists many of these peoms had not previously been available in English. This study also explores the cultural context of these songs, including the sites within which they were sung/set (the court, the marketplace, the mountain range) and the underlying erotic associations that inform these comic-obscene and comic-erotic songs. To this end the author discusses the cultural uses of bread (raning from the sacred Host to the taboo sex organs) and the construction of mountain ranges as female bodies (both welcoming sexual playgrounds and threatening, engulfing dark caves).
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