Poets, Patronage, and Print in Sixteenth-Century Portugal

Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. Many of their works considered what poetry could do and what its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Camões, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, and Diogo Bernardes offered to these questions ranged from lofty ideals to more practical concerns of making ends meet. This book articulates a ‘pragmatics of poetry’ that combines literary analysis and book history with methods from sociology to explore how poets thought about themselves and negotiated the value of their verse. Poets compared their work to that of lawyers and doctors and tried to set themselves apart as a special group of professionals. They threatened their patrons as well as flattered them and tried to turn their poetry from a gift into something like a commodity or service that had to be paid for. While poets set out to write in the most ambitious genres, they sometimes refused to spend months composing an epic without the prospect of reward. Their books of verse, when printed, were framed as linguistic propaganda as well as objects of material and aesthetic worth at a time when many said that non-devotional poetry was a sinful waste of time. This is therefore a book about how poets, metaphorically and more literally, tried to turn poetry and the paper it was written on into gold.