Uma Arcádia Sacra : as obras de D. Manuel de Portugal (1605)

Abstract

D. Manuel of Portugal (c.1520-1606) published his Works a year before his death, in 1605, a thick volume gathering a broad set of poems whose theme was exclusively religious. The poems in which for decades he exalted human love have no place here. This attitude can only be understood as his way of clearly renouncing poetry whose object was «human affection», surpassed in the meantime by his involvement with the celebration of divine love. This gesture does not mean, however, that the poet had set aside the models which contributed to moulding his literary style. The Arcadia by Jacopo Sannazaro comprises in fact an essential element within the overall architecture of 1605 Works. In Books Two and Three of the sixteen that make up the volume, it is apparent that the Arcadian matrix has been reformulated and presents clear dimensions of deliberate intertextuality. This dependency on a landmark text of bucolic literature in the 16th and 17th centuries aims to surpass that literature built around the development of profane love, through a process of poetic transfiguration in which it is incorporated within a religious and tendentiously mystical context. In compliance with this project, the entry of the shepherd Amôncio in the Holy Land – a space here identified as an Arcadian space converted «to the divine»- accordingly follows each incident described in the departure of the shepherd Sincero from Sannazaro’s Arcadia, in his «Prosa XII». The lesson seems clear: the path that leads to the knowledge of the mysteries of divine love is that by which man abandons the domain which he had sought to perfect, the knowledge of human love.