15th century court rebel
In reading about early women writers in print—of which there are so many—I’ve been unable to forget the poem that was included in a brief entry I came across of Florencia Pinar.
Pinar is one of the few recorded Castilian women writers of the 15th century. Her work survives because it was included in a Spanish poetic songbook, the Cancionero general, composed for the express purpose of making the works of renowned poets more widely accessible. Only two of the poets represented are women—the Marquesa de Cotrón and Florencia del Pinar.
Writing in the Castillian dialect, a characteristic of the upper class, only four works of Pinar’s are known to have been published, yet there are a number of additional poems of the same period that also reference the name Pinar. While these additional works have historically been attributed to her brother, Geronimo de Pinar, there is speculation today that many of these works may also have been composed by Florencia Pinar.
There is no portrait of Pinar, no biography, only the verses that allow us a glimpse into her life. But the poems are powerful and notable in diverging from the courtly love of lyrics that were popular at the time. Pinar’s verses play with language and symbol, creating conceits that reflect the dual and sometimes violent forces at work in love—of pleasure but also of pain.
In the poem translated below, the concrete imagery that Pinar invokes is powerful. Pinar uses the image of caged partridges, contrasting her own feelings of entrapment and the forced role of the caged bird. That the birds she writes of are partridges, specifically in the Castillian, suggests an allusion to alleged female promiscuity, as partridges were described in bestiaries of the time, which included a moral lesson for the description of each animal. The work also specifically speaks in the first person as a woman, in a voice that is startling in its clarity and yet is woven throughout with figurative language—claiming her own voice as subject, rather than following the tropes of court poetry where women are merely object:
These birds were born to sing
with joy in flying free.
for them encaged
I ache with rage
but no one mourns for me.
They cry to find themselves enslaved
to masters whom they used to scorn.
The very men they hated most
can purchase them and take them home.
In their names I write their life,
which goes on losing liberty.
For them encaged
I ache with rage
but no one mourns for me.
Florencia Pinar's poetry is recognized by scholars today as innovative, having a distinct anomalous style to that of her peers—leading some to question whether she was, in fact, working to forge a new voice for women’s poetry and language. There is a very prominent theme in the surviving verses of Pinar's work that reflect feelings of entrapment within her poems, often through love. In times where women were married to create alliances and combine or augment fortunes, love would always be a fraught danger, a complication, and a source of potential shame or disgrace. Lines of virtue for a woman were very boldly drawn.
It’s striking to consider that the first-person experience of poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, writing centuries after Pinar, would be labeled “confessional.” I’d argue that women writers have been writing first-person narratives and works of all types, in new distinct styles (e.g., Emily Dickinson) much more than has ever been truly recognized. We don’t need to label poems with a first-person experience as confined to the hierarchical structure of a church cabinet, involving the oversight of a priest. Women have been writing for centuries, in their own voices, so that we can hear their experiences, full-throated, clear-eyed, claiming their space.