SOURCE: Bass, Laura R. “Crossing Borders: Gender, Geography and Class Relations in Three Serranillas of the Marqués de Santillana.” La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature 25, no. 1 (fall 1996): 69-84.

In the following essay, Bass investigates the “symbolic significance of geography in three serranillas, arguing that “Santillana places his male persona within the landscapes of the poems to metaphorically configure the boundaries of aristocratic masculine authority.”

One of the most salient and innovative features of the serranillas of Íñigo López de Mendoza, the Marqués de Santillana, is their geographic specificity. More than any of his literary predecessors, the poet-narrator locates his encounters with peasant women in a wide variety of settings such as the mountainous border separating Castile from Aragon and Navarre (serranillas 1 and 2), a pastoral landscape in Santander (serranilla 4), and the Christian-Moorish border in southern Spain (serranilla 6).¹ Such geographic specificity, as...