Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Text editions : Portuguese

  • Text editionsPortuguese
  • Cultural Field
    Texts and stories
    Author
    Melo, Daniel
    Text

    Text editions in 19th-century Portugal increased sharply from the previous period (when Muratori-style source editions had come into vogue, a prominent editor being José Correia da Serra, 1750–1823) and were invested with the new nation-building function of establishing the corpus of a national-collective literary canon. Many genres were covered, mainly (though not exclusively) with an emphasis on the Middle Ages and the period of the early modern “voyages of discovery”. Among the editors of literary texts, Teófilo Braga and Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos stand out.

    Among medieval texts, the rediscovery of balladry has great significance. A first edition of a recently rediscovered cancioneiro (later known as the Cancioneiro da Ajuda) was privately printed in Paris in 1823 (for the British ambassador there; a critical edition by Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos appeared in 1904 in Halle); a selection from it (the verse of King Dinis) was edited in Paris, 1847. The Codex Vaticanus 4803 was brought to light with the help of Jernej Kopitar (who was in Rome at the time) and given a diplomatic edition by Ernesto Monaci (Il canzoniere portoghese della biblioteca Vaticana, 1875); a critical edition by Teófilo Braga followed soon after (Cancioneiro portuguez da Vaticana, 1877). The Colocci-Brancuti songbook (nowadays known as the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca nacional) was edited in Halle in 1880. This balladry, appearing in cities across Europe, established the riches of the earliest Iberian lyrical heritage and gave it a specifically Portuguese dimension. A later songbook deserves mention: Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro geral (originally printed in 1516, edited in Stuttgart 1846-52, and analysed in Hermão de Campos’s New York facsimile edition of 1904 and José Gonçalves Guimarães’s 5-volume Coimbra edition of 1910-17).

    Camões’s epic poem Os Lusíadas (“The Lusiads”) had long enjoyed hypercanonicity as the country’s foundational epic, and continued to be printed throughout the century. Critical editions with variant readings were put forward by Wilhelm Storck and Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos. Other noteworthy editions are the poetry of Sá de Miranda (1885) and Cristóvão Falcão’s Obras (“Works”, 1871; including the famous eclogue Crisfal). António Ferreira’s Obras completas appeared in Rio de Janeiro and Paris (1865) and included his tragedy on Ines de Castro, beloved of King Peter I.

    These editions appeared either as private initiatives or under institutional sponsorship. Important publishing institutions were the University Press of Coimbra, the Royal or (from 1833 onwards) “National” printing house, and the Lisbon Academy, which from 1790 onwards brought out a Collecçaõ de livros ineditos da historia portugueza. Private companies included the Casa Literária do Arco do Cego (“Literary House of Arco do Cego”, established in 1799 and merged into the Royal printing house in 1802), the Typografia Rollandiana, the Sociedade Propagadora dos Conhecimentos Úteis (“Society for the Propagation of Useful Knowledge”) with its Collecção de Inéditos Publicados, and late in the century the Escriptorio publishing house with its Bibliotheca de clássicos portugueses. Some material was printed in periodicals.

    Many annalistic sources and chronicles were brought to light and into circulation by historial and archival researchers, the prime example being Alexandre Herculano. Besides humanists (Fernão Lopes, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Rui de Pina, and the abovementioned Garcia de Resende), much of this work concerned the colonial expansion during the time of the “voyages of discovery”, e.g. Frei Fortunato de S. Boaventura’s Colecção de ineditos portuguezes dos séculos XIV e XV (1829, which, as the title indicates, was in the older mode of Correia da Serra’s source editions). Portuguese national pride often hinged on the vindication of Portuguese primacy in the science of navigation (against the German claims of Alexander von Humboldt) and the country’s leading role in the European voyages of colonial exploration: Joaquim Bensaúde’s L’astronomie nautique au Portugal à l’époque des grandes découvertes (1912) is a key example of the drive to document Portuguese leadership by furnishing studies in historical cartography and diplomatic editions of Portuguese travel accounts. Bensaúde himself was given a government commission in 1914 to collect a monumental corpus of sources documenting the history of navigation and its role in Portugal’s overseas expansion (Histoire de la science nautique portugaise à l’époque des grandes découvertes, 1914-22). This collection highlighted the mathematical work of Pedro Nunes, already celebrated in Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira’s edition of the Tratado sobre certas duvidas da navegação  (1911-13). This celebratory inventory had been initiated in 1817 by the reprint of the earliest reports on the discovery of Brazil (Carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha, as reprinted in Manuel Aires de Casal’s Corografia brazilica), but by 1900 had become an overtly political issue.

    The canon that emerged from this editing of literary, annalistic, and scientific texts added up to a national self-image in which the modern Portuguese nation was prefigured in its initial outlines in the Middle Ages and found its consolidated expression and its place on the world scene in the Renaissance context of the colonial explorations.

    Word Count: 829

    Article version
    1.1.2.3/b
  • Bernardes, José Augusto Cardoso; “A construção da história da literatura e a dinâmica do cânone escolar: O caso de Bernardim Ribeiro”, Península, 1 (2004), 131-148.

    Dionísio, João; “After the Lisbon earthquake: Reassembling history”, in Van Hulle, Dirk; Leerssen, Joep (eds.); Editing the nation’s memory: Textual scholarship and nation-building in 19th-century Europe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 151-168.

    Osthus, Dietmar; “L’histoire sociale et la constitution de la norme linguistique – les modèles français, espagnol et portugais”, in Iliescu, Maria; Siller-Runggaldier, Heidi; Danler, Paul (eds.); Actes du XXVe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes (Innsbruck 3-8 septembre 2007) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 629-642.

    Picchio, Luciana Stegagno; “À margem da edição de textos antigos portugueses”, in Picchio, Luciana Stegagno (ed.); A lição do texto: Filologia e literatura (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1979), 1: “Idade média”: 237-257.

    Protásio, Daniel Estudante; “O 2º Visconde de Santarém e a tradição documental portuguesa, 1817-1846”, in Campos Matos, Sérgio; João, Maria Isabel (eds.); Historiografia e memórias: séculos XIX-XXI (Lisbon: Centro de história da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, 2012), 251-262.

    Silva, Xosé Manuel da; “Carolina Michaëlis e a inauguração da modernidade nos estudos camonianos”, Revista da Faculdade de Letras: Línguas e literaturas, 18 (2001), 93-106.


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    © the author and SPIN. Cite as follows (or as adapted to your stylesheet of choice): Melo, Daniel, 2022. "Text editions : Portuguese", Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, ed. Joep Leerssen (electronic version; Amsterdam: Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms, https://ernie.uva.nl/), article version 1.1.2.3/b, last changed 08-05-2022, consulted 29-03-2024.