Spanish

"Few Spanish ballads survive today in medieval manuscripts, but at the courts of Castile and Aragon the genre received respectability by the 1450s, and it achieved great aesthetic height during the sixteenth century, when a large corpus of traditional ballads was printed in songbooks (cancioneros or romanceros) and in broadsides or chapbooks (pliegos sueltos). Across the centuries learned Hispanic poets would gloss and imitate the content and form of the ancient texts. But many of the old ballads also survive down to the present day in oral tradition, not only in Spanish but also in Catalan and Portuguese, with variant versions still being sung in remote parts of Spain and Portugal, in the Americas, and among Sephardic Jews (expelled from Spain in 1492) in North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and the New World."

— Two Lancelot Ballads by Harvey L. Sharrer