ABSTRACT
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries contain the complete flowering of medieval poetry, culminating in the one multi-foliate rose, the Divina Commedia in which all the age's themes, of carnal love, of ideal love, and of social criticism. The birth of medieval Christian mysticism took place, in all probability in the convent of St Victor, near Paris, at the beginning of the twelfth century. The medieval tradition struggled on into the sixteenth century, still challenging the new ideas from Italy, and finally succeeded in acclimatizing some of its forms to the new Latinate manner and language. Side by side with the court and the troubadours' poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there was in Spain a great flowering of folk-songs and ballads. By the fifteenth century, the villancicos had been partially replaced in the popular favour by the romances or ballads. In Spain the transition from medievalism to the Renaissance proceeded more smoothly than in the rest of Western Europe.
