The tornadas in the songs from 12th to 16th century, from the troubadours to Camões

Abstract

Th earticle discusses the Song (cansó, canzone, canción, canção) as a genre within a historical framework. This task demands an approach from Rhetorics, as well as from Theory and History of written media, and Literary History. Through the comparison of tornadas or commiati in a chronological order, we can see how this structure progressively acquires the role of stabilizing a moral content rhetorically suitable to the genre, and how this orientation towards ‘textual semantics’ is later displaced and leads to the undermining of that moral purport, thus making the tornada a specific index to the historical pragmatics of poetry writing. In the last part, this article focus mainly on Luís de Camões’ tornadas, especially the way how his Songs enact this displacement.