{
  "id": "zarabanda-y-chacona",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Zarabanda and chacona — two Spanish dances as Covarrubias recorded them in 1611",
  "summary": "The two dances European art music kept as the sarabande and the chaconne are described in Spain's first monolingual dictionary while they were still street repertoire. Covarrubias's Tesoro of 1611 gives the zarabanda a full entry, records that the chacona had already displaced it, traces both to the dancing women of Gades and to Martial's Rome, and derives the name from Hebrew. Its two entries disagree about how the chacona is related to the zarabanda.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "music",
    "dance",
    "language",
    "spanish-language",
    "literature",
    "siglo-de-oro",
    "seventeenth-century",
    "books"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "covarrubias-tesoro-1611"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "siglo-de-oro"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "spanish-language"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "lope-de-vega"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "miguel-de-cervantes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tomas-luis-de-victoria"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is the earliest Spanish dictionary entry for the zarabanda?",
    "What did Covarrubias say the zarabanda and the chacona were?",
    "Where did Covarrubias think the sarabande came from?",
    "Was the chacona more popular than the zarabanda in 1611?",
    "Why were the zarabanda and the chacona thought scandalous?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid 1611, carries a headword ÇARABANDA on the leaf numbered 264, read here as a page scan. It opens by dating the dance's fortunes rather than its origin: \"bayle bien conocido en estos tiempos, sino le huuiera despriuado su prima la chacona\". The first lexicographic notice of the zarabanda in Spanish is therefore also the first notice that the chacona had overtaken it, and both statements are in the same clause.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The entry then says what the dance was and how it was danced. It is \"alegre y lasciuo, porque se haze có meneos del cuerpo descompuestos\" — the moral verdict and the choreographic description are the same sentence. Lower down the entry returns to the body: although the dancer moves with every part of the body, \"los braços hazen los mas ademanes, sonando las castañetas\", which Covarrubias offers as the sense of Martial's word crusmata on the authority of \"Domicio, cométador de Marcial\". Castanets in the hands and the arms carrying the gesture is a specific piece of performance evidence, printed in 1611 by a man describing what he could see danced.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Covarrubias gives the dance a classical pedigree and an anecdote to carry it. It was used \"en Roma, en tiempo de Marcial\", its authors were \"los de Caliz\", and women danced it publicly in the theatres; he then retells a Roman who, having got rid of a slave woman called Thelesina, saw her some days later dancing the çarabanda, fell so much in love that he bought her back at whatever price was asked, \"libro. 6. Epig. 7\", and prints the Latin lines under the heading \"De Thelesina\" together with a passage of Ovid. The name itself he takes from Hebrew, from a verb he transliterates çara, \"que vale esparzir, o cerner, ventilar, andar a la redonda, todo lo qual tiene la que bayla la çarabanda\". Confidence is held at 0.8 for the etymology because Covarrubias himself warns his readers that the Tesoro prints derivations he does not vouch for.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "A second entry, ENCORVADA on the leaf numbered 349, sets all three dances in a line of descent. The encorvada is \"vna dança descompuesta, que se haze torciédo el cuerpo, y los miembros, ab incuruando, a esta sucedio la çarauanda, y parece ser nieta suya la chacona.\" The women of Cádiz invented it and carried it to Rome, for which he cites Martial \"libro 5. epigrama 79\" and prints the lines about the girls of Gades. The same entry then leaves the dance floor entirely for a plant also called encorvada, whose seed comes in little pods curved like a sickle, called securicada by the Latins.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The two entries do not agree, and the disagreement is worth having on the record because every later account tidies it away. On leaf 264 the chacona is the zarabanda's \"prima\", its cousin; on leaf 349 the zarabanda succeeds the encorvada and the chacona is the encorvada's \"nieta\", its granddaughter — which would make the chacona the zarabanda's descendant rather than her cousin. Covarrubias was writing a genealogy for dances he could watch but whose history he did not have, and the two pages of his own book give two different answers within one alphabet.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "What the Tesoro does not say matters as much as what it does, and it is recorded here as a limit rather than smuggled in as an argument. Covarrubias offers no American origin for either dance: he sends both back to Gades and to Martial's Rome and the name to Hebrew, and no page read here mentions the Indies in connection with them. The question of whether the chacona reached Spain from the Spanish Atlantic — which is where much later writing places it — is not settled by anything opened for this object, and no claim is made about it either way.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The cost side is inside the source too. Every word the dictionary spends on these dances is disapproving: the zarabanda is \"lasciuo\" and made with \"meneos del cuerpo descompuestos\", the encorvada is a \"dança descompuesta\", and the authority summoned for both is a Latin epigrammatist writing about the lewdness of Gaditan dancing girls. The earliest lexicographic record of two dances that European composers would later set in suites is a record written by someone who thought them indecent, and the vocabulary he chose is the reason the entries are as detailed as they are.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "industry_observation"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Writing about the sarabande and the chaconne begins with Bach and works backwards through a sentence about Spanish dances banned for lewdness, usually without a single quotation from a source written while the dances were alive. This object opens the 1611 Madrid sheets and prints the two entries: the zarabanda already displaced by the chacona in the very clause that first defines it, the castanets and the arms carrying the gesture, the Thelesina anecdote with the epigram Covarrubias printed under it, the Hebrew etymology he offers and the warning he attached to his own etymologies, and the three-generation descent from the encorvada. It also reports something no secondary account of these dances mentions — that the Tesoro's two entries put the chacona in two different places on the family tree — and it states plainly that the sheets say nothing about an American origin rather than borrowing a claim they do not support.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-17",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/zarabanda-y-chacona",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/zarabanda-y-chacona.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Zarabanda and chacona — two Spanish dances as Covarrubias recorded them in 1611",
    "description": "The two dances European art music kept as the sarabande and the chaconne are described in Spain's first monolingual dictionary while they were still street repertoire. Covarrubias's Tesoro of 1611 gives the zarabanda a full entry, records that the chacona had already displaced it, traces both to the dancing women of Gades and to Martial's Rome, and derives the name from Hebrew. Its two entries disagree about how the chacona is related to the zarabanda.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/zarabanda-y-chacona",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-17",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española, compuesto por el Licenciado Don Sebastian de Cobarruuias Orozco, Capellan de su Magestad, Mastrescuela y Canonigo de la santa Yglesia de Cuenca, y Consultor del santo Oficio de la Inquisicion",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=YsRKAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP5"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Zarabanda and chacona — two Spanish dances as Covarrubias recorded them in 1611"
  }
}