The rhetoric of prophecy in Portuguese Renaissance literature.

Publication: Portuguese Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association

I shall be dealing with a cultural period falling between two dynastic crises, in 1383 and in 1580, which threatened Portugal's independence. The different outcomes of these crises elicited two opposing perceptions of history. The first is conveyed through a metaphor, used by the chronicler, Fernao Lopes, in the mid-fifteenth century: he sees history as prophecy fulfilled. The second perception is that of the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Father Antonio Vieira: it is a vision of prophecy as history-to-be-fulfilled, the history of the future. Viera's work falls outside my period, and I shall not be considering it in any detail. But I want to call attention to the antithetical symmetry between the two perceptions, like mirror images of one another, since it suggests that the precedence between plausibility and credibility had been reversed in the course of the intervening years, which broadly coincide with the Portuguese Renaissance. The process was not, of course, a linear one, since each of the opposing poles presupposes its opposite. This diagrammatic formulation does not, however, belie its complexity.

Fernao Lopes wrote his chronicles at the behest of the king, D. Duarte, whose father, D. Joao I, had founded the dynasty of Aviz by acceding to the throne after a revolution in which master craftsmen, merchants, lower nobility, minor clergy and the common people had united against the interests of the aristocrats and the technically legitimate claims of the king of Castile to the Portuguese throne. The implicit purpose of D. Duarte's commission, which Fernao Lopes fulfilled with superb literary skill, was to transform the factual sequence of Portugal's history up to the time of King Joao into a demonstration of the historical legitimacy of the new political order.

The semantic centre of Fernao Lopes's monumental work, Part One of Cronica de D. Joao I, is the history of a kingdom without a king: the chronicle of the revolution of 1383-85, during which, as in a tumultuous cocoon, the old feudal order disintegrated and was metamorphosed into a new national order. The dynastic crisis that led to the election of D. Joao in Portugal coincides chronologically with the events in England that led to the deposing of Richard II by D. Duarte's first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke. But it would have been more like the communal revolts in Italy, given the opposing social forces involved, if these rebellions had also had a wider national character. Portugal entered a new era and was soon to be in the technological vanguard of Renaissance Europe, beginning the process of overseas expansion that would determine the shape of the modern world. A new intellectual class of 'Letrados' (men of letters or scholars)--corresponding to the Humanists in Italy--transformed the emerging national awareness into the consciousness of a new universal order initiated by Portugal. The visionary element inherent in this concept was, however, rooted in the concrete, linking thought and action. In other words, it was an historic projection rather than a prophetic speculation.

The social composition of the intellectual elite of the 'Letrados' reflected, in its diversity, the hierarchical reorganization set in motion by the revolution. At the top of the social scale we find the Aviz princes themselves: D. Duarte, the philosopher-king; his favourite brother (and future regent) D. Pedro--the legendary 'Principe das Sete Partidas', still celebrated by Guillaume Apollinaire as 'roaming the world on his dromedary'--an original thinker in the tradition of Seneca and Cicero and, possibly, the true initiator of the policy of maritime expansion and trade; and, of course, D. Henrique, known to British history as 'Prince Henry the Navigator' in recognition of his enormous contribution to the success of that policy. But this elite also included Fernao Lopes, a literary genius who came from the opposite side of the social scale, the 'Letrado' of low birth who was to bring a new dimension to the medieval chronicle, making it into a pioneering example of the Renaissance epic that anticipated not only the chivalrous epic of Boiardo and Ariosto, but also the Camonian concept of epic as an expression of collective national identity.

The chronicles of Fernao Lopes are...

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