Representations of the Devil and the Monstrous in the Cantigas de Santa Maria of D. Alfonso X the Wise

Abstract

In the Middle Age, monsters and demons occupied a prominent place in the European social imaginary, representing the different, the grotesque and often the evil. Many attest to their existence on the real plane, as characters of flesh and blood, reporting physical, psychic and even moral characteristics and that came to us through documents of the most diverse typologies. Currently, we observe such characters as the result of a period in which society was moved by a social structure to which it instilled such images. In any case, the concept of monster as well as demon is very broad undergoing changes depending on each epoch and locality. In view of the above, the objective of this work is an analysis of the representation (CHARTIER, 1990) of the devil and what the men and women of the Iberian Middle Age considered monstrous, from the image made of the Jews, making use of the literature of the period, noddedly the Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM) of D. Alfonso X the Wise, King of Castile and Leon. For this, we will analyze two songs, that is: CSM no. 47, which deals with the representation of the devil in literature and consequently in the medieval imaginary and CSM no. 4, which considers jews as monsters, due to their actions and differences in relation to religiosity.