In its display of a certain decadence (and a sign of how art and politics do not go hand in hand), the assertion of the “strong vitality of the [Portuguese] nation” was, to his mind, accompanied by a weakening of the literary genius (Lições…, 1981, 321). A century and a half of linguistic unity in Peninsular lyricism would bring about a reaction to Castilian used as a vehicle for the poetic expression of love resulting in a “half-Portuguese, half-Castilian improvisation” (Lições…,1981, 327), a tool to ensure the prolonged survival of the ancient troubadour lyric poetry, characterised during this period by rhetorical excesses camouflaging a lack of inspiration.

Moreover, in this confused period Lapa saw the strength of a Peninsular style that persisted despite the lack of talent of its followers and which, when well established, would be reluctant to adopt foreign metric schemes of versification, finding in Camões’s redondilha its ultimate form (Lições…, 1981, 341).

The Portuguese society of the time responded to the mere publication of the monumental edition of cantigas de escárnio² with unease, due to its salacious language. The difficulty involved in the compilation of this edition is even more apparent when considering that other editions of the same genre (cantigas de amigo³ and cantigas de amor⁴ had been compiled several decades earlier and, until Lapa had accepted the challenge, no one else had ever dared to do so.  Monographs, undoubtedly a source of precious aid for an edition by genre, did not abound in 1965 (and had not yet become a usual form of work in the studies of Galician-Portuguese poetry). Lapa handled the enormous difficulties of understanding them (due to a less formulaic vocabular than that used in the cantigas de amigo and cantigas de amor, and to the historical contingency of many hard-to-grasp references) with a remarkable use of editorial interventions, at times to a less than moderate degree, as noted by Ivo Castro.

In this regard, Lapa stood out as an accomplished cultivator of the kind of imagination “that consists in bringing to life what is dead in documents, which is part and parcel of historical work insofar as it unveils and accounts for men’s actions”, a laudable imagination since it makes the past tangible (Le Goff, “História”, 1984, 173). These difficulties in comprehension were surely what led him to include a summary of the contents of each cantiga in the individual edition prior to the annotation,  which was typical of diploma edition, using the summary to provide a synthesis of what previous editors had said about the text. Even in matters of layout, such as this one, the structure of the questionable edition of Graça Videira Lopes (Cantigas de Escárnio e Maldizer dos trovadores e jograis galego-portugueses⁵, Lisboa, Estampa, 2002) may indeed be perceived as the work of Rodrigues Lapa.

²songs of mockery
³female-voiced love songs
⁴male-voiced love songs
⁵Mocking and Slanderous Songs of Galician-Portuguese Troubadours and Jesters

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