Park, Simon. Poets, Patronage, and Print in Sixteenth-Century Portugal: From Paper to Gold

Abstract

In this fascinating, detailed and engagingly written study on poets and their milieux in early modern Portugal, Simon Park investigates the sociability of poetry and the networks around which writers of verse moved in a crucial age – politically and literarily – which saw the emergence of distinctively Portuguese poetic voices. For both canonical and neglected authors such as Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, Luís de Camões, Jerónimo Corte-Real, Pêro de Andrade Caminha, Diogo Bernardes, André Falcão de Resende and Duarte Dias, all of whom receive an illuminating and sensitive treatment from Park, the composition of poetry was very rarely an end in itself, but rather, in manuscript and then increasingly in printed form, served myriad shifting functions: from reputation-building to opinion-forming, from gaining remuneration to negotiating patronage, from establishing and strengthening friendships to theorising and enacting precepts, and more besides. Park blends sociological approaches with deft analysis of individual works across four long chapters, which address a series of linked questions: ‘What is a poet?’, ‘What do poets want to write?’, ‘What else do poets want? And how do they get it?’ and ‘Why print poetry?’. In the first of these, Park gets to grips with the slippery term ‘poeta’, an unofficial designation that barely exists outside of the writings of the poets themselves and which could carry differing connotations in its usage by individual writers, from the notion of poets as vessels of truth and wisdom divinely inspired, to an occupational category equal to that of more recognized and socially acknowledged specialisms, such as doctors and jurists, a view expounded most emphatically by Ferreira, to the disillusioned commentary of Falcão de Resende, for whom the term often denoted unmerited disdain and marginalization. Widespread within these various attitudes, however, is the idea of an ambitious community striving and innovating in a shared environment. In the book’s second section, Park treats the motives – social, financial, personal – of his band of poets and how these inform genre selection in particular, with authors such as Sá de Miranda and Ferreira turning to Italianate forms and metres and seeking also to renew classical styles in the Portuguese vernacular. The desire to compose heroic verse and to compete with antiquity in a modern context is common in the sample of poets explored by Park, and accounts for the ascendance of epic verse in Portugal in the period. The third chapter of the monograph examines in depth the pragmatic reasons which spurred these poets to compose particular types of works, including the acquisition of stipends and emoluments from the royal court, and similar rewards from local administrations, the Church and noble households, as well as the possibility of obtaining knighthoods in the military orders and protection from influential patrons. Benefit did not flow in a single direction, however, and noblemen in particular were well aware of the burnishing of their public reputations that could derive from their association with, and celebration by, notable poets. In the final part of his study, Park considers the spike in printed poetry – especially lyric verse – which took place in Portugal in the last years of the sixteenth century, involving for instance Sá de Miranda, Camões, Ferreira, Bernardes and Dias, posthumously in the first three of these cases. The inclusion of devotional verse in such volumes could ease these collections’ passage through inquisitorial censorship, while motives such as the vindication of the excellence of the Portuguese language, the promotion of authors’ public images and a wish to fix poetic texts and remove them from the vagaries of manuscript copying, combine to produce a glut of printed poetry quite unlike anything seen in the preceding century.