(b 1261; ruled 1279–1325; d 1325). Portuguese ruler and troubadour. He was the grandson of Alfonso X of Castile and León, by whom he was knighted. He married Isabel of Aragon. His court was the last refuge of the Galician-Portuguese lyric tradition. Dom Dinis's extant literary output includes 137 compositions: 73 cantigas de amor, 51 cantigas de amigo, 10 satirical songs and 3 pastorelas. His poetry, written in Galician-Portuguese, was highly regarded in his own time and beyond; although rooted in the indigenous lyric tradition, it betrays direct influence from such troubadours as Bernart de Ventadorn and Jaufre Rudel. The music survives only for the seven cantigas de amor in a fragmentary folio detached from a lost songbook written about 1300, found by Harvey Sharrer at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, in 1990. The melodies, whose range is close to an octave, are unusually dense: at the very beginning they tend to be syllabic, but neumatic articulation then becomes the norm; the songs have, on average, three notes per syllable. Some of them follow an inverted-arch contour rarely encountered in troubadour or trouvère sources, in spite of musical influence from both traditions. Influence from ecclesiastical chant seems to have been minimal. Conjunct progression and melodic unisons are predominant, but 3rds are given an important structural role. Most songs include some repetition of musical phrases; the musical forms seem to vacillate between the troubadour oda continua, the Iberian solo refrain forms and the northern French repetitive forms. The notation in the surviving source (derived from pre-Franconian notation, with Iberian traits) allows characterization of Dinis's rhythmic style as generally slow, florid and isosyllabic; this, together with the exalted status of their author and poetic genre, makes these songs unambiguous examples of cantus coronatus as it was adopted in Iberian troubadour circles.
M.P. Ferreira: ‘Relatório preliminar sobre o conteúdo musical do fragmento Sharrer’, IV Congresso da Associação hispânica de literatura medieval, i (Lisbon, 1991), 35–42
H.L. Sharrer: ‘Fragmentos de sete Cantigas d'amor de D. Dinis, musicadas: uma descoberta’, ibid, 13–29 [incl. illustration]
E. Gonçalves: ‘Denis, Dom’, Dicionário da literatura medieval galega e portuguesa, ed. G. Lanciani and G. Tavani (Lisbon, 1993)
M.P. Ferreira and H.L. Sharrer, eds.: Cantus coronatus (forthcoming) [bilingual edn of MS from P-Lant, with facs.]
MANUEL PEDRO FERREIRA