El Juego trobado de Pinar: la memoria cultural colectiva de las damas de la corte de la reina Isabel de Castilla en el año 1496

TL;DR

Roger Boase reads Jerónimo de Pinar's *Juego trobado* (1496) as a window onto the collective cultural memory of the noblewomen serving Queen Isabel of Castile, decoding its emblems, songs and proverbs to identify individual court ladies and their marriages. He argues the game presupposes a shared oral repertoire of sentimental fiction, courtly songs, proverbs and tournament *invenciones* that the *Cancionero general* (1511) largely left out.

Key findings

• The court ladies were demonstrably familiar with Juan Rodríguez del Padrón's *Siervo libre de amor* (c. 1440), since four stanzas of the *Juego* allude to it: the myrtle/arrayán (st. 14, first way of love), the *árbol de paraíso* (st. 33, unrequited love), the olive (st. 6, neither loving nor loved, given to the ten-year-old Catalina de Aragón), and the proverb "Quien no asegura, no prende" (st. 31).
• They also knew the anonymous alphabetic card game *En Ávila por la A* (ID 2304), dated by Vega Vázquez to winter 1461–summer 1462 and surviving only in the *Cancionero d'Herberay des Essarts*; its nine symbolic elements (town, man, woman, bird, animal, fruit, tree, song, proverb) explain proverbs reused in the *Juego* (e.g. "Porfía mata venado" for the infanta Isabel, st. 3; the walnut tree for Francisca Enríquez de Velasco, st. 24).
• The *Juego* also encodes knowledge of tournament *invenciones* from the start of Isabel's reign, mostly preserved in the *Cancionero general* and the *Cancionero de la British Library*: the broom (retama) for Leonor de Sotomayor (st. 18) tied to Diego López de Haro's invention after his brother Gutierre de Sotomayor, third count of Belalcázar, was killed by a poisoned Moorish arrow near Casarabonela on 21 June 1484; the vulture for María Osorio y Bazán (st. 29) linked to the Ponferrada dispute of 1483; the crane for Isabel de Ribera (st. 41) reassigning an invention from Beltrán de la Cueva to his son Francisco de la Cueva.
• The article proposes that Florencia Pinar, the only woman known to have composed courtly verse in the fifteenth century, may have collaborated with her brother Jerónimo, and that three stanzas illuminate her song "D'estas aves su nación," read as an indirect critique of male sexual aggression.
• Contextual figures given: the ladies had an annual wardrobe allowance of 27,000 maravedíes; Brian Dutton identifies 569 *canciones* for 1380–1511, of which only about 90 Castilian songs survive complete with music; Keith Whinnom's statistical study of the 220 *canciones* in the *Cancionero general* found the "perfect" song to be octosyllabic redondillas rhyming *abba cddcabba*, a scheme followed exactly by more than a quarter of them, with only eleven combining that rhyme scheme and verbatim repetition of the estribillo's last two lines in the *vuelta*.

Methods

• Philological and archival close reading of the *Juego trobado*'s stanzas, treating each emblem (tree, bird, song, proverb) as a clue to a named court lady and her marital prospects.
• Evidence drawn, as the author states, from "poemas citados, rúbricas, motes, divisas de justadores, crónicas, cuentas financieras y obras genealógicas," plus prior scholarship (Dutton, Whinnom, Whetnall, Vega Vázquez, Perea Rodríguez) and the author's own monograph *Secrets of Pinar's Game* (2017).
• No quantitative or experimental design; the argument is interpretive, with individual identifications supported by cross-references among poems, genealogies and tournament records.

Limitations

• The paper itself concedes that it is uncertain whether all the court ladies could read and write, and judges it "más probable" that most heard sentimental romances recited rather than read them; it also notes that whether Hernando del Castillo deliberately excluded musical texts from the *Cancionero general* or simply lacked the sheets "es todavía incierto."
• Several identifications are explicitly conjectural: the unnamed *justador* is only "tal vez" Margarita de Lemos's husband Sancho de Rojas de Córdoba, and the author himself raises the objection that a husband would hardly damage his wife's reputation that way; the claim that Florencia Pinar collaborated with her brother is framed as "no es improbable."
• Evident from the text: the argument depends heavily on the author's own prior book for the supporting evidence ("La evidencia de estas afirmaciones se encontrará en la introducción de mi libro"), and the surviving corpus is fragmentary — only about 90 Castilian songs survive complete with music, and key sources such as *En Ávila por la A* survive in a single manuscript.