Lavanha historiador e a cronica inacabada de D. Sebastiao
Item
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Title
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Lavanha historiador e a cronica inacabada de D. Sebastiao
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:106d686f3758:11153
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identifier
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11453
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Creator
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Castro McGowan, Regina,
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Contributor
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Jose Miguel Martinez Torrejon
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Date
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2012
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Language
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Portuguese
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Romance literature | European history | King Sebastian | Lavanha | Portugal
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Abstract
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In 1618, during the Iberian Union, Joao Baptista Lavanha was appointed by Phillip II of Portugal as Royal Chronicler for that kingdom. Along with this prestigious position came the rather uncomfortable task of writing the first official chronicle of King Sebastian, the young monarch whose disastrous invasion of Morocco forty years earlier had cost him his own life, the lives of almost all of the country's nobility and, ultimately, Portugal's independence.;Over the course of the next six years (1618--1624), Lavanha diligently collected and transcribed primary sources from the last quarter of the 16 th century documenting King Sebastian's controversial life. Some of these transcriptions made by Lavanha are the only known copies of important lost originals. Many of the documents he used were original letters exchanged between the king, his grand-mother Queen Catherine, his great-uncle Cardinal Henry, Pope Pius V, Pope Gregory XIII, his uncle King Phillip II of Spain, and a network of Castilian, Portuguese and Papal ambassadors. He also gathered polemical testimonial accounts by some of the men who survived the battle of Ksar-el-Kebir, where King Sebastian was killed. Along with collecting documents, Lavanha began writing his own narrative, detailing events that led up to the king's demise.;His anticipated chronicle, however, was never finished, for reasons still unknown. With Lavanha's death in 1624, the documents he organized into two codices should have been sent to the king for the next chronicler in charge of the writing of King Sebastian's life. Instead, the more valuable of the two codices (for its original letters) ended up in private hands, while the second eventually found its way to the Portuguese monastery of Alcobaca. Both codices are preserved today in the National Library of Portugal, although only the first one bears Lavanha's name. A copy, with variants, of the Alcobaca codex, equally anonymous and of unknown provenience was acquired by the French Royal Library in the 19th century.;Unfortunately, without the literary achievement of having completed the first official chronicle of King Sebastian, the memory of Lavanha as a cronista-mor working on such an important project gradually faded. Today, there is very little in the literary historiography of the Peninsula regarding Lavanha's works as a humanist---much less that he worked on a cronica sebastica---whereas his earlier works in nautical engineering continue to generate interest within academia.;The documents collected by Lavanha have been studied by many scholars for their individual value. Yet, heretofore there has never been a study relating the three codices and tracing them back to the chronicler. Nor has there been a contextualization of Lavanha's work on King Sebastian, amidst the intellectual and political circumstances that resulted from Spain's control over its neighbor.;Along with information on Lavanha's life and work as a privileged courtier in Madrid, this study proposes a philological analysis of his codices and a comparative examination with some of the late 16th and early 17th century writings on King Sebastian's bellicose mindset, Phillip II's maneuvers, and the political annexation of Portugal. It also studies the inclusion of elements from these codices in the works of Portuguese authors writing in the mid-18th century. Finally, this study includes an analysis of the pertinent affairs of the day, as documented by Lavanha in his codices.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Hispanic & Luso Brazilian Literatures & Languages
