Bernardim Ribeiro

• 1. Introduction

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  Bernardim Ribeiro was born in 1482 in Torrão, a small town in the Alentejo region of Portugal, and his life was shadowed by exile and heartbreak from almost its very beginning. Before he was two years old, his father Damião Ribeiro was implicated in a conspiracy against King John II and forced to flee the country to Castile. Young Bernardim and his mother took shelter with relatives at Quinta dos Lobos, near Sintra, living in retreat while the political climate remained dangerous. How does a boy who begins life in hiding and disgrace become one of the celebrated voices of the Portuguese Renaissance? What drives a man educated at royal expense to lose everything over a forbidden love? And how does a single pastoral romance, written in anguish during a self-imposed Italian exile, outlast its author by centuries and still carry the weight of a real family tragedy?

• 2. A King's Favor

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  When Manuel I came to the Portuguese throne in 1495, one of his first acts was to rehabilitate the families that his predecessor had persecuted. For Ribeiro, this meant he could finally leave the refuge at Quinta dos Lobos and go back to his hometown of Torrão. The change in fortune did not stop there. His mother, Dona Inês, had remarried a rich landowner in Estremoz, and in 1503 she was summoned to the royal court and appointed as one of the attendants to the Infanta Beatriz. Ribeiro came with her, and through her standing the king took a personal interest in him. Manuel sent Ribeiro to the University of Lisbon, where he studied from 1506 to 1512. After completing his law degree, the king rewarded him again, appointing him to the post of Escrivão da Câmara, a role that translates roughly as royal secretary. The king later went further still, bestowing on Ribeiro the habit of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword. It was at court, amid this run of royal patronage, that Ribeiro first came into contact with the literary circle that would shape his writing life.

• 3. The Palace Evenings

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  Ribeiro's earliest verses appeared in the Cancioneiro Geral of Garcia de Resende, the great anthology that gathered the court poetry of the era. He was also a participant in the Serões do Paço, the palace evening entertainments where poets would improvise verse in front of gathered audiences. Those sessions brought him into friendship with two of the most important Portuguese writers of his generation: Sá de Miranda and Cristóvão Falcão. Both became not only his literary comrades but also confidants who knew the full story of his romantic entanglement. The five eclogues Ribeiro produced are the earliest examples of that form in Portuguese literature. He wrote them in the popular octosyllabic verse, and they carry the emotional weight of someone who knew his situation was already slipping beyond rescue. The friendship with Sá de Miranda and Falcão sustained him even as the personal catastrophe that would define his reputation was building toward its crisis.

• 4. Dona Joana and Disgrace

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  Ribeiro had conceived a powerful passion for his cousin, Dona Joana Zagalo, the daughter of Dona Inês, the woman who had once sheltered him as a child. Her family refused to countenance a match with a poet of modest means and uncertain prospects. They compelled her instead to marry a rich man named Pero Gato. When Pero Gato died not long after the wedding, Joana withdrew to a house in the country, and rumor held that Ribeiro visited her there. In 1521 she retreated into the convent of St Clare at Estremoz, where she died some years later. The precise nature of whatever passed between Ribeiro and Joana during that period was alleged to have caused a scandal serious enough for the king to strip Ribeiro of his secretarial post and send him into exile. From a position of royal favor, decorated with a military order and employed at court, Ribeiro was left without office or standing.

• 5. Italy and the Saudades

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  Early in 1522, Ribeiro set out for Italy, a destination he appears to have chosen deliberately. For a Portuguese poet of the Renaissance, Italy represented something close to a spiritual homeland for literature. He traveled widely across the peninsula during his stay, and it was there that he wrote the romance that would eventually overshadow everything else he had done. Livro das saudades, known by the first words of its text as Menina e moça, translates roughly as Maiden and Modest. The book is a knightly and pastoral romance in which Ribeiro disguised his own story through allegory. He named his own character "Bimnarder," an anagram of his name, and placed Dona Inês into the narrative as "Aonia." The romance is regarded as one of the finest examples of pastoral romance in Renaissance literature. He poured into it, as the source records, a spirit broken by hopelessness. That sense of sorrow without resolution runs through the Portuguese word saudade, a feeling of longing for something lost, and it gives the book both its original title and its emotional core.

• 6. Return, Madness, and Pension

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  Ribeiro returned from Italy in 1524, and the new king, John III, restored him to his former post. The reunion with Dona Joana, if the account is accurate, was devastating. He paid what would be a final visit to the convent of St Clare and reportedly found her in a fit of madness. From that point, his own mental powers began to deteriorate. Around 1534 he suffered a prolonged illness, and he never fully recovered. By 1549 he was unable to perform his official duties, and John III granted him a pension for his support. Ribeiro died in 1552 at All Saints Hospital in Lisbon, having barely had the chance to live on the pension the king had arranged. Menina e moça was not published until after his death, with its first printing in Ferrara in 1554, two years after he died.

• 7. The Book That Was Banned

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  When Menina e moça appeared in print in Ferrara in 1554, the reaction was immediate and extraordinary. The book made such a sensation that its reading was forbidden, because the allegory was not opaque enough to hide the real family tragedy it contained. The story of the Zagalo family, of the forced marriage, the convent, the scandal, and the broken relationship, was recognizable to contemporaries despite the fictional names. The romance is divided into two parts, and the first is accepted without dispute as Ribeiro's own work. The authorship of the second part has divided opinion ever since. Dr José Pessanha produced an edition of the first part in Oporto in 1891, and a more recent edition followed in 2012. Ribeiro's verse, including the five eclogues, was reprinted in a limited edition by Dr Xavier da Cunha in Lisbon in 1886. Those eclogues, the earliest of their form in Portuguese, carry their distinction not just as literary firsts but as the private record of a man still capable of hope before the worst of what awaited him had arrived.