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Similar Cancioneiro da Biblioteca, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Cancionero de Baena, Amadís de Gaula, Bem cavalgar | ||
The Cancioneiro da Ajuda ([kɐ̃sjuˈnɐjɾu ðaˈʒuðɐ], [kaŋθjoˈnejɾo ð(a) aˈʃuða], "Ajuda Songbook") is a collection of Galician-Portuguese lyric poems probably dating from the last quarter of the 13th century. It is the oldest of the Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros with secular music.
The Cancioneiro is kept in the library of the Ajuda National Palace, a former royal residence located in Lisbon. It consists of a parchment codex written in Gothic script by three hands and containing illuminated miniatures. Both the text and the miniatures remained unfinished and not a note of music was written in the space left for it. The whole codex contains 310 poems, nearly all of them cantigas de amor (male-voiced love songs, though a few are satiric and there are a few male/female dialogs).
The first (crude) edition dates from 1823, but a monumental critical edition, still a standard work, was published by the German-born Romance philologist Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in 1904. An important paleographic transcription was published by American scholar Henry H. Carter in 1941.