The Portuguese Renaissance, heretofore a darkness pierced only by occasional shafts of scholarly light, has been brought into full view in this rich and spacious study by José Sebastião da Silva Dias. In scope and importance it can only be compared to the recent work of Antonio Alberto de Andrade on Luis Vernei (1966) which deals with another period of culture-crisis in Lusitanian history.
The work is divided into two parts. The first deals with the various figures, great and small, who carried the new currents of humanist thought to Portugal, and consists of a series of intellectual biographies that sum up most of what we know of their lives and work. The second volume shifts from men and minds to the institutions that they staffed and shaped. Particular attention is paid to the university which was finally moved from Lisbon to Coimbra in 1535, and whose reorganization is minutely detailed by Silva Dias with great awareness of the ideological implications of the reforms. Particularly fetching is his suggestion that the “removal” of the university from Lisbon was a clever device employed by the Crown to renew the teaching staff without unduly offending sensibilities. Most of the older instructors were kept on in Lisbon as government advisors, while the new “Coimbra faculty” was brought in from outside Portugal and packed with devotees of the new humanism.
It is, however, the last two chapters of the second volume that constitute the most interesting, though perhaps the least successful, part of the book: one attempts to put the humanist movement into its social and economic context; and the other sums up the significance of the movement for Portuguese cultural history, and tries to explain how the reaction it provoked led on into the Baroque thought and learning of the next century. But however stimulating these chapters may be, it is unfortunate that the author's wide knowledge of the literature, where he is completely at home, does not always carry over into his discussions of the economy or society. Thus his economic explanations for the rapid acceptance of humanist thought by the nobility are far too simplistic to satisfy those acquainted with the situation; and, indeed, at times quite incorrect.
Better is his discussion of the growing “intellectualization” of the ruling class, and the clash of values between the generation of João II, which scorned “book learning,” and the new lettered nobility of João III's reign, which began to see that its position could be insured and protected only by the acquisition of the new forms of power that university degrees and literary skills represented. His suggestion that the Crown gave positive encouragement to the new learning by opening the royal service to the humanist elite in order to prevent the growth of heretical tendencies among an “alienated” intelligensia is clever, but without any solid evidence adduced in its support. Until such evidence is produced, we shall have to content ourselves with the more prosaic idea that the Crown found the letrados useful because of the new power their skills represented, and its zeal to employ them merely a case of enlightened self-interest. These seminal chapters point the way to a field of research little cultivated, but rich in promise. Let us hope the hypotheses of Silva Dias, however premature, lead to deeper investigations of the subject.
Aside from the inadequate treatment of the economy and society of the period, the other criticism that could fairly be levied against the work is that many of the author’s literary analyses appear to derive from a wish to give the subject more contemporary relevance than it has. Indeed, Silva Dias seems to be saying throughout the book that the humanism of the reign of João III was the first of several instances in Portugal when “advanced” ideas from abroad came into contact with a conservative society, a society that at first welcomed them, then offered various forms of resistance, and finally ended up by rejecting them. It is clear that the author finds this tendency towards impermeability annoying; and it is easy to feel, for example, that he is speaking more to the present than to his subject when he says of Garcia de Resende: “All that resounds there [in the mentality of Resende] is the vision of Portugal as a political oasis, the pioneer of the civilization that ought to be envied and imitated by those responsible for our Continent.” Similar passages are common. Such contemporary attunements in a sense enrich the book, but they also run the risk of distorting it seriously as a piece of scholarship. For, while his prejudices allow him to give a subtle and masterful exposition of João de Barros’ difficult Rópica Pnefma, it is equally clear that the author never accords as much effort on any of his conservative “integrists.” In short, the author wholeheartedly approves of the “new” ideas and sees in their progressive defeat after about 1550 the victory of “mediocrity and passion.” In a way these obvious prejudices have served him well here, by permitting him to treat most of his figures with unusual insight and sympathy. But, since he indicates that he intends to continue his investigations into the next century, whether his distaste for their successors will permit him to treat the Baroque age as fairly is open to considerable doubt.
