The year 1492 famously saw the conclusion, with the fall of Granada, of centuries of Spanish effort to reconquer their peninsula from the Moslems. Yet the Reconquista was not only a military effort; Ferdinand and Isabella also fostered a new national ethos in the Spanish arts. Starting in 1474, they only hired Spanish musicians to serve their court, and their patronage allowed a new flowering of Spanish letters and music. Juan de Anchieta, a relative of Ignatius Loyola and a probable music student at Salamanca University with Juan del Encina's brother, made the obvious career move and joined Isabella's royal chapel in 1489. For decades he served various members of the royal household of Castille. Comparatively little of his music survives, though this may be more a function of the survival of musical sources themselves. He has a few known sacred works in a huge manuscript compilation from Segovia Cathedral, and a small number of secular songs in the anthology known as the Cancionero Musical de Palacio, among them the villancico Con amores, la mi madre.

As a villancico, Anchieta's Con amores, la mi madre follows a particular musical and poetic structure, the Spanish equivalent of the Italian ballata. A refrain links several verses that consist of both new text to the refrain and pairs of brief "feet" at the end of the form. His text is a reasonably conventional love song, which prays for nighttime relief from the pain of unrequited yet faithful love. Following both the popularly "rustic" roots of the genre and the general predilection of the Spanish court toward folk music, he adopts a somewhat unusual yet lively metric scheme of triple and duple alternations. His melody is quite facile, and it wends its way around a couple of distinct modal centers. The other voices support it not by "foreign" styles of imitation but rather in strict homophony, freely enlivened by short bursts of melodic activity.

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