Juião Bolseiro

Galician troubadour, he exercised his poetic activity in the courts of Castile and Portugal in the third quarter of the 13th century. It is thought that he remained for some time at the court of D. Afonso III. He cultivated the three genres of Galician-Portuguese lyrical poetry, and although thirty texts are attributed to him in the songbooks, only eighteen poems are recognized as being his own: fifteen cantigas de amigo, two tenções (with the nobles João Soares Coelho and Mem Rodrigues Tenoiro), and one cantiga de amor. Among his cantigas, one stands out, titled «Mal me tragedes, ay filha», the story of a mother who, instead of being her daughter's confidante, is her own rival. Some of his cantigas de amigo are also notable, both for their originality and for the vividness with which the usual themes of the genre (jealousy and spite) are treated.