Dr Jane Whetnall, MA (St Andrews) PhD (Cambridge)

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My principal research field is the mass of love poetry contained in manuscript books of the Spanish fifteenth century known as cancioneros.

In my doctoral thesis (1986) I aimed to establish and explain the relative popularity of specific love poems that were copied repeatedly into different manuscript collections. This led to work on the codicology of individual MSS and the links between them; on scribal practice; on signs of influence between poets and poems that are intrinsically undatable; on the authorship of unattributed poems. Textual criticism has been an essential tool in exposing the specious quality of a manuscript long assumed to have been overseen by its author, the most famous poet of the period, the Marqués de Santillana. I am also interested in the role of women in the production and dissemination of these manuscripts: although rarely present as authors they could be instrumental in the preservation of texts.  

My current focus is on identifying those lyrics which were better known as songs across the spectrum of five major collections, three MSS and two printed. In the absence of musical notation in regular cancioneros (as opposed to the so-called cancioneros musicales which appear only at the end of the fifteenth century), the identity of a canción-song can be deduced from a variety of paratextual and extratextual indicators: as the subject of quotations, glosses, or contrafacta, as ‘flyleaf lyrics’ in these and other sources, or, in the most fragmentary cases, where the incipit of a cancionero poem is cited as the tune (‘al tono / a la tonada de’) to which a later composition has been set (for example, hymns in some Hebrew MSS).

Research

Research Interests:

Recent conference papers

‘Canciones cuatrocentistas en post-incunables poéticos’, V Col.loqui Internacional CIM: Incunables i post-incunables poètics iberoromànics, Konstanz, 24-26 April 2024.

‘Jordi de Sant Jordi y los poetas castellanos del siglo XV’, en ‘Tots jorns aprench e desaprench ensemps’: 600 anys de Jordi de Sant Jordi, Universitat de València, 20-21 June 2024  

‘Operación rescate: a propósito del codex optimus del marqués de Santillana, SA8 (BUS Ms. 2655)’, II Congreso Internacional, ‘Literatura & Corte: Cancioneros’, 13-IEMYRhd, Universidad de Salamanca, 14 March 2025

‘Hugo de Urriés y el Cancionero de Herberay: una propuesta para aumentar la nómina de sus intervenciones en la colectánea’, Convivio IX, Lirica e canzonieri: metodi, paradigmi, prospettive, Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza & Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, 16-19 June 2025.

Publications

Edited books

Catherine Davies & Jane Whetnall, ed., Hers Ancient and Modern: Women's Writing in Spain and Brazil, Manchester Spanish & Portuguese Studies, 6 (Manchester: University of Manchester, 1997).

Alan Deyermond & Jane Whetnall, ed., Proceedings of the Eleventh Colloquium, PMHRS, 34 (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, 2002).

Alan Deyermond & Jane Whetnall, ed., Proceedings of the Twelfth Colloquium, PMHRS, 35 (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, 2003).

John Gornall, The ‘Invenciones’ of the British Library ‘Cancionero’, ed. Jane Whetnall, PMHRS, 41 (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, 2003).

Alan Deyermond & Jane Whetnall, ed., Proceedings of the Thirteenth Colloquium, PMHRS, 51 (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, 2006).

David Barnett, Carlos Conde Solares, Consuelo Sanmateu & Jane Whetnall, ed., Proceedings of the Seventeenth Colloquium, PMHRS, 71 (London: Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, 2013).

Barry Taylor, Geoffrey West & Jane Whetnall, ed., Text, Manuscript, and Print in Medieval and Modern Iberia: Studies in Honour of David Hook (New York: HSMS, 2013).

Articles and book chapters

‘Lírica Femenina in the Early Manuscript Cancioneros’, in What's Past is Prologue: A Collection of Essays in Honour of L. J. Woodward (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1984), pp. 138-50, 171-175.

‘Songs and Canciones in the Cancionero general of 1511’, in The Age of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474-1516: Literary Studies in Memory of Keith Whinnom (Liverpool University Press, 1989), pp. 197-207

‘Isabel González of the Cancionero de Baena, and Other Lost Voices’, La Corónica, 21.1 (Fall, 1992): 59-82.

‘El Cancionero general de 1511: textos únicos y textos omitidos’, in Medioevo y Literatura: Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, Granada 1993, ed. Juan Paredes (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1995), IV, pp. 505-515. 

‘A Question of Genre: Roncesvalles and the Siete Infantes Connection’, in Al que en buen hora naçio: Essays on the Hispanic Epic and Ballad in Honour of Colin Smith, ed. Brian Powell & Geoffrey West, Textual Research and Criticism, 12 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press & MHRA, 1996), pp. 153-169.

‘Unmasking the Devout Lover: Hugo de Urriés in the Cancionero de Herberay’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), 74 (1997): 275-298.

‘Mayor Arias's Poem and the Early Spanish Contrafactum’, in The Medieval Mind: Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, ed. Ian Macpherson & Ralph Penny, Colección Támesis, Serie A: Monografías, 170 (London: Tamesis, 1997), pp. 535-552.

‘Adiciones y enmiendas al Cancionero del siglo XV’, in ‘Cancionero’ Studies in Honour of Ian Macpherson, ed. Alan Deyermond, PMHRS, 11 (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1998), pp. 195-218.

‘Editing Santillana's Early Sonnets: Some Doubts about the Authority of SA8’, in Santillana: A Symposium, ed. Alan Deyermond, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Seminar, 28 (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 2000), pp. 53-80.

‘Mayor Arias’ and ‘Poetry, Vernacular, Popular, and Learned: Cancioneros of Spain’, in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed. E. Michael Gerli (New York & London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 110a, 666a-669b.

& Barry Taylor, ‘John Gornall (1932-2003)’, La Corónica, 32.1 (2003): 344-355.

‘Cancioneros’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Medieval Spanish Literature, vol. 286, Castilian Writers, 1400-1500, ed. George Greenia & Frank A. Domínguez (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2003), pp. 288-323.  

‘Veteris vestigia flammae: a la caza de la cita cancioneril’, in I canzonieri di Lucrezia / Los cancioneros de Lucrecia: Atti del Convegno Internazionale sulle Raccolte Poetiche Iberiche dei Secoli XV-XVII, Ferrara, 7-9 ottobre 2002 (Padova: Unipress, 2005), pp. 179-192. 

 ‘Las transformaciones de Petrarca en cuatro poetas de cancionero: Santillana, Carvajales, Cartagena y Florencia Pinar’, Cancionero General, 4 (2006 [2007]): 81-108.

‘Mayor Arias: “¡Ay, mar brava, esquiva!”’, in Seis siglos de poesía española escrita por mujeres, ed. Dolores Romero López et al. (Berne: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 11-25.

‘An Errant Leaf and a Divided Poem: The Lay of Juan de Torres in SA7’, in Late Medieval Spanish Studies in Honour of Dorothy Sherman Severin, ed. Joseph T. Snow & Roger Wright (Liverpool, BHS, 2009), pp. 55-73 [Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 86.1].

‘Hipólita de Narváez and the Leander Sonnet Tradition’, in Ars Eloquentiae: Studies on Early Modern Poetry and Art in Honour of Terence O’Reilly, ed. Barry Taylor & Isabel Torres (Liverpool: BHS, 2009), pp. 893-909 [Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 86.6]

‘Keith Whinnom and Cancioneros’, in Keith Whinnom after Twenty Years, ed. Alan Deyermond, PMHRS, 53 (London: Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, 2011 [2012]), pp. 95-119.

‘The Usus Scribendi of the Copyist of the Cancionero de Herberay’, in Taylor, West & Whetnall 2013, pp. 141-175.

‘The Auto de la huida a Egipto: Italian and Other Connections', in The Reinvention of Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Traditions, Texts and Performance, ed. T. F. Earle & Caterina Fouto (London: Legenda, MHRA, Maney, 2015), pp. 41-71.

‘Secular Song in Fifteenth-Century Spain', in Companion to Music in the Age of the Catholic Monarchs, ed. Tess Knighton (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 60-96.

‘Snakes and Sirens in a Sonnet by Hipólita de Narváez’, in Essays in Honour of Ángel García Gómez, ed. Stephen M. Hart, Jonathan Thacker & Alexander Samson, Centre for César Vallejo Studies Monograph Series, 8 (London: University College London, 2023), pp. 32-42.

‘El desatendido manuscrito parisino PN12 (BnF esp. 313) y su ubicación en el «stemma» de los cancioneros napolitanos de la tradición «a» de Varvaro’, in «¿Qué se fizo aquel trovar?»: la poesía de cancionero ayer y hoy, ed. Cleofé Tato (A Coruña: Universidade, 2023), pp. 111-138.