Representação das atividades e profissões femininas na lírica galego-portuguesa

Given the contextual and formal constraints on representation of women’s activities and professions in Galician-Portuguese lyric, we offer a picture of the participation of women as agents in the various structures of social and economic power in the society of that period, through its corresponding representation in the literary genres of troubadour production. Thus, within the scope of royal and seigneurial power, political and administrative activities stand out, through references to queens and women of high nobility, presented as administrators of the house and promoters of artistic circles; at the same noble level, the abbesses, administrators of monasteries, are mentioned in satirical songs. The representation of domestic and professional activities, though, is strongly conditioned by the poetic genre: in the cantigas de amor (love songs), the noble woman hovers over the needs of practical life, in an idealized portrait of the perfect and unattainable woman; in the cantigas de amigo, there is special emphasis on maternal activity, carried out by the young protagonist’s mother, as an actor in her relationship with her daughter’s «friend»; the satirical songs, in turn, include a more numerous list of domestic and professional activities, treated in a blunt and pejorative way, including those carried out by sex workers, such as prostitutes, concubines and barregãs. Peripherally, rural work is portrayed, in an idealized way, in the pastorelas.