Spanish Ballads - Colin Smith @mazon. The Spanish ballad is well documented from the 16th to the 20th century in substantial, though declining, oral sources, chiefly in Castilian but also in Judeo-Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. The 70 ballads in this volume are taken from 16th-century printed sources, from the period when the ballad of tradition, sung and orally transmitted, was polished for printing by poets, musicians and editors to meet the taste of the times.
There is a general introduction, notes prefacing each group, and others about origins, background, variants, modern oral version, English translations, following each ballad, a bibliography and a glossary of difficult terms. The Literature of Al-Andalus Cambridge Histories Online.