l. 17. With the epithets here applied to Mary compare those addressed to the Spouse in the Song of Songs, with whom she has been often identified by the exegetists.
[LA DANZA DE LA MUERTE]. This anonymous poem of seventy-nine octaves belongs to the general category of poetical and pictorial works, which in the Occident, and especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, celebrated the triumph of Death over all earthly creatures. The original form may have been that of a pantomime. The Spanish poem (published in full in the Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 57) is probably a version of an earlier French poem. Its date has been variously estimated. Baist (Gröber’s Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, II, p. 428, note) would place it in the middle of the fifteenth century. Cf. W. Seelmann, Die Totentänze des Mittelalters, Leipzig, 1893.
[Page 16].—l. 24. en ... durante, i.e., in the world throughout its duration.
[Page 17].—l. 2. quando ... traspasante, i.e., when I discharge this cruel, piercing arrow of mine.
l. 27. de ... forçado, must perforce die.
[Page 19].—l. 29. a tan syn pauor, so fearlessly.
[REVELACIÓN DE UN ERMITAÑO]. This anonymous vision in twenty-five octaves (published in the Biblioteca, vol. 57) is of the class of Debates between the Body and the Soul, common in the Middle Ages. Cf. the Visión de Filiberto, published by Toledo in the Zeitschrift f. romanische Philologie, II, 40, and for a Middle-English 348 version see Mätzner, Altenglische Sprachproben, I, 90. See also C. Fritzsche, Die lateinischen Visionen des Mittelalters, in Romanische Forschungen, II, 279 ff., III, 337 ff.
çiençia gaya, art of poetry; a term of Provençal origin.
[Page 21].—l. 9. prima, the canonical hour prime.
l. 11. hera: the era española began thirty-eight years before the Christian era.