24 July 2015
What European Studies owe to J. M. Cohen (1903-1989)
We’re always hearing how the UK publishes a shamefully small number of translations compared with other nations: 3 per cent?
This is probably true of new bestsellers, but is it true of long-sellers? In my formative years, and possibly yours, the sole locus of European literature on the high street was the Penguin Classics, much more visible than the World’s Classics or Everyman. There’s a good history of the collection in the 1987 festschrift for Betty Radice. Founded in 1946, its first authors included Homer, Voltaire and Maupassant. The introductions were non-academic – Aubrey De Sélincourt’s prologue to Herodotus is four pages – and the translations middle-brow (W.C. Atkinson translating Camões: “Venus is now Cytherea, now Erycina, now Dione, now the Cyprian goddess, now the Paphian. It is in short a mark of erudition [...]. For such learning the modern term is pedantry, and it becomes a service to the reader of today [...] to call things by their names and ask of each divinity that he or she be content with one.”) The translators were rarely university lecturers (unlike today): in fact they seemed to me mostly to be schoolteachers.
The series was edited by people with names whose pronunciation a London teenager could only guess at: Betty Radice I now assume is pronounced like Giles Radice MP; but what of E. V. Rieu: ‘REE-oo’ or ‘ ree-YERR’?
One of my school-leaving prizes was J. M. Cohen’s translation of Don Quixote (in print 1950-1999, my well-read copy shown above). The biographical (as opposed to bibliographical) information on the half-title was meager: ‘J. M. Cohen was born in 1903 and has been writing and translating since 1946.’ As I read more Romance literature, again and again these works were translated by Cohen: Rousseau (in print 1953-), Rabelais (1955-1987), Montaigne (1958-1993), Teresa of Avila, The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, Bernal Diaz’s Conquest of New Spain, Columbus, Rojas.
These were reprinted again and again.
Whenever I was faced with the question from the man in the street, “Oh, is there any Spanish literature?”, my rock and refuge were the Penguin Classics, and Cohen the prophet.
But of Cohen’s translations, only Rousseau, St Teresa and Columbus, I believe are in print any more. It’s a maxim of the translation industry that each generation needs its own Cervantes et al. This may or not be true (it isn’t true, but I want to appear broad-minded) but that’s no reason to consign earlier translators of the callibre of Cohen to a damnatio memoriae: M.A. Screech never refers to Cohen in his Rabelais or Montaigne.
A project is now underway to catalogue Cohen’s papers, which are in Queens’ College Cambridge. But his true legacy is in the minds of people like you and me.
Barry Taylor, Curator Romance Collections
Penguin classics editions translated by J.M. Cohen:
Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote (1950) W.P.513/10a.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (1953) W.P.513/33.
François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1955) W.P.513/47.
St Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila (1957) W.P.513/73.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1958) W.P.513/83.
Blaise Pascal, The Pensées (1961) W.P.513/110.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain (1963) W.P.513/123.
Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish Bawd. La Celestina (1964) W.P.513/142.
Benito Pérez Galdós, Miau (1966) W.P.513/181.
Agustín de Zárate, Discovery and Conquest of Peru (1968) X.708/3888.
The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1969) X.808/6013.
References:
‘J. M. Cohen, Gifted translator of foreign prose classics’ (Obituary), The Times (London), 22 July 1989
‘Obituary of JM Cohen: An opener of closed books’, Guardian, 20 July 1989
The Translator’s Art : Essays in Honour of Betty Radice, edited by William Radice and Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth, 1987). YC.1988.a.329
Vladimir Alexander Smith-Mesa, ‘Making Our America Visible. J. M. Cohen (1903-1989): El Transculturador’, Aclaiir Newsletter, 23 (2014), 14-17. P.525/398; a version of the article as a blog post can be read here
19 June 2015
Lisbon, 20 June 1647: assassination of king of Portugal foiled by miracle
John, Duke of Bragança, came to the throne of Portugal in 1640, putting an end to sixty years of Spanish rule under Philips II through IV, the ‘dominação filipina’. Alongside his political life, he was also a composer and musicologist.
Luso-Hispanic relations remained tense for a good while, and when an attempt was made on the King’s life in 1647, Father Francisco Brandão had no doubt who the culprits were: Castile.
The opportunity was the King’s attendance at the Corpus Christi procession at Lisbon cathedral on 20 June 1647. The culprit, Domingos Leite Pereira, “unworthy of having been born in the noble and loyal town of Guimarães”, set out for the capital armed with a musket (“espingarda”) with twelve bullets and two phials of poison to make the shots even more deadly. He set himself up in a good position to fire, and had two horses ready for his escape. But at the sight of the pious monarch, he was overcome with “a happy stupor”, threw down his weapon and escaped.
The potential murder weapon, from Cesar Fiosconi and Jordam Guserio, Espingarda perfeyta e regras para a sua operaçam (Lisbon, 1718). British Library 1420.c.3.
Brandão’s account has been digitised by the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
The British Library has just acquired another pamphlet on the assassination attempt, a self-styled Mercurius gratulatorius (celebratory newsheet):
Lucas Velloso, Pro Ioanne IV rege serenissimo Portucalensium: quem proditor auro corruptus occidendum suscepit in communi pompa celebritatis Eucharisticae … (Lisbon, 1647). RB.23.a.36385.
Velloso is not narrative but elegiac: though he gives the detail that the traitor was corrupted by gold (“proditor auro corruptus”) he does not name him or give the date of his attempted crime. He describes the criminal as being not happily stupefied but terrified, either by the majesty of God apparent in the king, or by the king’s majesty itself. Brandão in contrast describes in great detail the route of the Corpus procession through the streets of Lisbon. If challenged, Velloso would doubtless have quoted Aristotle: “poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history, since poetry states more universal things whereas history states particular things” (Poetics IX).
This is a rather modern concept of the miraculous: a sudden change of heart is a more subtle miracle than the speaking babies and reattached limbs of medieval tradition.
Stop press: while working on this post I discovered that the BL has another pamphlet on this topic:
Antonio de Sousa de Macedo. Panegyrico sobre o milagroso sucesso, con que Deos livrou a el Rey nosso senhor da sacrilega treiçaõ dos Castelhanos ([Lisbon?, 1647]) 1444.g.4.(3.)
Previously wrongly dated to 1642 in our catalogue, it has now been corrected to 1647.
Macedo is light on facts but knows his Scripture: he ranks the miracle of the king’s deliverance with the sacrifice of Isaac, David’s victory over Goliath and the conversion of Saul to St Paul.
Barry Taylor, Curator Romance Collections
27 March 2015
The Growth of the Beard
All the media assure us we are living in a new age of the beard.
A landmark in pogonology is the pioneer study A Barba em Portugal. Estudo de etnografia comparativa [The Beard in Portugal. A Study in Comparative Ethnography] (Lisbon, 1925; British Library 10009.t.29) by José Leite de Vasconcellos (1858-1941).
José Leite de Vasconcellos (with beard). Image from Wikimedia Commons
Title-page of Leite’s A barba em Portugal.
Leite (1858-1941) was a distinguished professor of Latin and Medieval French at the University of Lisbon and editor of the journal Revista Lusitana, but the bulk of his publications are ethnographic studies of topics such as the “figa” gesture: in this respect his work prefigured much 20th and 21st-century research on the body. The figa’s opposite number in British culture is the V-sign, now sadly depleted to the single finger.
José Leite de Vasconcellos, A Figa : estudo de etnografia comparativa, precedido de algumas palavras a respeito do ”sobrenatural” na medicina popular portuguesa. (Porto, 1925). Ac.3709.d.
Like many Portuguese men of letters (Júlio Dinis and Trindade Coelho among them), Leite studied medicine although he practised for only a year on account of his own ill health.
The chapters of A Barba em Portugal cover: The beard anthropologically, the making of the beard, beard forms and cuts, the beard through the centuries, the symbolism of the beard, and the beard in vocabulary and literature; in an appendix Leite edits the ordenances of the guild of barbers from the 16th century.
A selection of historical Portuguese beards from A Barba em Portugal
A habit which 21st-century hipsters seem not to have adopted is swearing on the beard. The Cid did it, and Leite was told by an old man of A Beira that he had heard in his youth that in olden times the oath was “Juro por estas minhas barbas” [I swear by these my beards], accompanied by the appropiate gesture.
Perhaps its time has come again, by my beard!
Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies
Ancient beard ideas for the hipsters of today? King Herod (left) and an Bronze Age figurine (right) from A barba em Portugal
09 January 2015
European rivals in South Asia
As is fairly well known, the British Library has inherited the surviving archives of the British East India Company, and this vast resource provides researchers with a rich and unique mine of information about all aspects of Britain’s relations with South Asia in the early modern period through to 1858. What is almost certainly less well known is that the archive includes one series bringing together documentation from and about the other European powers that were the Company’s rivals in the 17th and 18th centuries.
View of the former French colony of Chandernagore (modern-day Chandannagar). Watercolour by Stanley Leighton, 1868. British Library WD 269
The ‘I’ series includes more than 200 volumes, arranged in three sub-series, of memoranda and correspondence between Europe and Asia. The first 17 of these (ref. I/1/1-17) are concerned with the Company’s relations with the French in India between 1664 and 1820, and I/2/1-32 is similar, dealing with the Dutch in India and Southeast Asia from 1596 to 1824. The subjects broached within are alas only hinted at by the frequent use in the relevant handlist of that tantalising word ‘Miscellaneous’, although there are four volumes identified as being about ‘Disputes with the French, 1773-1786’ (ref. I/1/7-10), and as a testament to the difficulties in mid-eighteenth century Anglo-Dutch relations there are no fewer than seven volumes of ‘Disputes with the Dutch’ from 1750 to 1764 (ref. I/2/14-20).
View of Batavia (modern-day Jakarta), the capital of the Dutch East Indies. Aquatint by JohnWells, 1800. P494
These are dwarfed, however, by the size of the third sub-series, which consists in all of 165 volumes. Its existence is due entirely to Frederick Charles Danvers (1833-1906). A man of wide-ranging interests, Danvers joined the East India Company as a writer in 1853, and five years later transferred to the India Office after the Company’s abolition. After spells in the Revenue, Statistics & Commerce and Public Works Departments, he was appointed Registrar and Superintendent of the India Office Records in 1884, a post he held until 1898. In what must rank as a major feat of international archival co-operation, between 1891 and 1895 he oversaw the transcription of volumes of documents from repositories in Lisbon, Evora and The Hague; besides this, he enhanced their long-term value to scholars and researchers by supervising the translation of 35 of these volumes into English. The Dutch records cover the whole of the 17th century, whereas those from Portugal date from as early as 1475 and extend into the early 19th century. The series thus contains a range of primary sources on many aspects of the European engagement with South and Southeast Asia both before and during the colonial era.
Map of the City of Goa in Portuguese India, from Denis L. Cottineau de Kloguen, An historical sketch of Goa, the metropolis of the Portuguese settlements in India ...( Madras, 1831.) 1434.e.2
All these volumes are located at St. Pancras, and can be delivered to the third floor Asian & African Studies Reading Room for consultation within seventy minutes of ordering.
Hedley Sutton, Asian & African Studies Reference Team Leader
References:
F.C. Danvers Report to the Secretary of State for India in Council on the Portuguese records relating to the East Indies contained in the Archivo da Torre do Tombo, and the public libraries in Lisbon and Evora (1892), OIR354.54
F.C. Danvers, Report on the records relating to the East in the state archives in The Hague (1945), OIB325.349.
30 June 2014
Early Photography in Spain
The Spanish National Library in Madrid (Biblioteca Nacional de España; BNE) has mounted a small, but representative exhibition drawn from its photographic collections, entitled ‘Fotografía en España (1850-1870)’. In that period, demand for photography grew rapidly as a means of documenting events and of capturing images of landscape, famous buildings, city landmarks, and art works. Photography also became a new medium for portraits of leading contemporary figures and of the family. It was also important for recording infrastructure projects.
Several of the photographers who worked in Spain were foreign. One of them was a Welshman, Charles Clifford (1819-1863), who set up business in Madrid in late 1850. He produced a considerable body of material over a short period of time, including the album Voyages en Espagne (1856), consisting of some 400 images of famous civil and ecclesiastical buildings and monuments.
Charles Clifford. Palacio de la Reina, Barcelona (1860). BNE.
Clifford’s success brought him the patronage of the Queen Isabel II. He recorded some of the construction projects being undertaken in her reign, notably that of the canal which brought a secure supply of fresh water to Madrid and which bears her name. In fact ‘Canal de Isabel II’ is still the name of the water utility of the Madrid region. He also accompanied the Queen on her royal journeys around Spain.
Another leading photographer, the Frenchman Jean Laurent (1816-1886), began his career in Madrid before Clifford. He too specialised in city views, buildings and monuments, and also in photographing works of art. The BNE exhibition includes his photograph of the Congreso de los Diputados and also of Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
Jean Laurent. Congreso de los Diputados, Madrid (1855-60). BNE.
Both Laurent and Clifford produced images of the Alhambra, considered probably the most picturesque (in the literal sense) site in Spain and an undoubted draw for the growing number of travellers in the second half of the 19th century. Another favourite destination was Santiago de Compostela, and the exhibition includes a photograph of the Pórtico de la Gloria by another British photographer, Charles Thurston Thompson (1816-1868).
The exhibition includes a number of other subjects. There are portraits, e.g. of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (author of The Three-Cornered Hat), the actress Adelaida Fernández Zapatero and the painter José María Castellanos; a female nude; and various ethnographic scenes.
The British Library does not systematically collect photographs. However, a number of special collections are held. Among these is a relatively little-known collection of photographs of Spain by British photographers. There are 230 photographs by Clifford, gathered in three albums, two of topographical and architectural views and the other of images of armour from the Real Armería in the Royal Palace in Madrid. It is probable however that some of the photographs contained in this last album were the work of his wife, Jane, although they are generally attributed to Charles Clifford. Jane Clifford was an accomplished photographer in her own right and maintained the studio after Charles’s death. One of the albums of views (1785.c.1) was part of the bequest to the British Museum in 1900 of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the noted collector of works both of Miguel de Cervantes and of erotica.
Charles Clifford. Calle de Alcalá, Madrid , with the Cibeles fountain (ca. 1857) 1785.c.1, no. 57.
Charles Clifford. West door of Salamanca Cathedral (ca. 1858). 1704.d.9, no. 65.
The Library also holds 39 photographs by Charles Thurston Thompson, some of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the rest of the monastery church of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha, in Portugal. These are held in two albums. Thompson held a post as photographer of art works at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). In 1866 he travelled to France, Spain and Portugal on a photographic expedition on behalf of the Department of Science and Art.
Charles Thurston Thompson. Pórtico de la Gloria, Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, with the statue of the Saint (1866). 1811.a.18, no. 4.
Geoff West, Lead Curator Hispanic Studies
Bibliography
Lee Fontanella, La historia de la fotografía en España (Madrid, 1981). LB.31.b.6876
Lee Fontanella, Clifford en España. Un fotógrafo en la Corte de Isabel II (Madrid, 1999). LF.31.b.5746
See also the British Library’s historic photographs feature: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/photographicproject/index.html and the online catalogue of photographs: https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/photographyinbooks/welcome.htm
13 June 2014
St Anthony of Padua, alias Fernando of Lisbon
13 June is the feast day of St Anthony of Padua.
This charismatic saint, born circa 1195 in Lisbon, where you can still see his house, first joined the Canons Regular of St Augustine at the age of 15; in 1220 he took a level transfer to the newish Ordo Fratrum Minorum (Franciscans to you and me), taking his name from the house of St Anthony Abbot.
The Franciscans, like the Dominicans, were primarily preachers, and although Anthony performed a portfolio of healing miracles – he re-attached the foot of a man who had cut off it off in remorse at kicking his mother – perhaps his most memorable act was to preach to the fishes.
Anthony’s attempt to preach in Rimini to two-legged heathens having resulted in rejection, he addressed a school of fishes. Many traditions merge here. We all know that St Francis, founder of the Order, preached to the birds, and Anthony was doubtless inspired to follow his lead. The Portuguese are a maritime people, and perhaps Anthony was recalling his childhood on the strand at Lisbon. Perhaps too he was invoking Christ’s recruitment of Peter and his fishermen to be fishers of men. Another element is the idea that when a mixed audience hears a charismatic preacher each person is convinced that he spoke to them in their own language: Anthony’s sermons are preserved in Latin; he might not have spoken fish, but that was surely what the fishes heard.
St Anthony preaching to the fish.
Some four hundred years later, Portugal’s most famous preacher of the early modern period paid homage to the Saint. Father Antonio Vieira, SJ (1608-97) divided his long life between metropole and periphery, as missionary to the Indians (with the formidable linguistic skills instilled by the Society, he learned Tupi for the purpose of preaching) and as counsellor to King John IV. As much a courtier as a voice in the wilderness, he preached to Queen Christina of Sweden in her Roman retirement.
On the saint’s day in June 1654, three days before he left Maranhão for Portugal, he spoke to the people of Brazil. Addressing his human audience as ‘fishes’, his is partly a political message: the big fishes eat up the little ones. By praising the virtues of fishes (they were spared by the Lord from the ravages of the Flood), he castigates the vices of men. And in true baroque style he draws some somewhat whimsical analogies between land- and sealife. A splendid new edition of his works is in preparation.
Most of St Anthony’s life was spent in Padua, and in the Basilica del Santo (which outshines the cathedral there) you can view from a respectful distance his chin, his larynx and – what could be more medieval and simultaneously baroque? – the charismatic preacher’s tongue.
Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies
References:
António Vieira, Obra completa; direção, José Eduardo Franco, Pedro Calafate ([Lisbon, 2013- ]) YF.2014.a.2754 (and passim)
Michel Zink, La prédication en langue romane avant 1300 (Paris, 1982). X.200/42780
Anthony, of Padua, Saint, Obras completas: sermões dominicais e festivos; introduçao, traduçao e notas por Henrique Pinto Rema; prefácio de Jorge Borges de Macedo. (Porto, 1987)
YA.1999.b.2282
20 January 2014
Portuguese revolutionaries in Plymouth: politics and the classics
José Bento Said, Remedio d’amor, e queixumes de Dido contra Eneas: traducções livres das obras de Ovidio. Trez sonetos, e garantias dos direitos civiz e politicos dos cidadaõs portuguezes, outorgados na Carta Constitucional de 1826. (Angra: Imprensa do Governo, 1831). British Library RB.23.a.17999(1).
The year 1826 saw political turmoil in Portugal, when the decades-long struggles of liberals and reactionaries opened up a new front in the Azores, the island group in the Atlantic which had been part of the empire since the fourteenth century.
This small publication prints the Carta Constitucional which established a new liberal regime in Portugal. It also has some to-the-minute political odes: unsurprisingly, as in the romantic period verse was still thought a fitting medium for current affairs.
But what I find striking is that even at moments of high politics authors did not forget their Classics: the volume begins with translations of Ovid’s Remedia amoris and Dido’s complaint against the perfidious Aeneas (Heroides, VII) rendered in five odes. Poetry by a poet dead 1800 years, and on the theme of love (albeit concentrating on its downside).
The tenacity of classical culture as a point of reference for political writing is paralleled by one of the first books printed in Brazil:
Monumento á elevação da colonia do Brazil a reino, e o estabelecimento do Triplice Imperio Luso. As obras de Publio Virgilio Maro, traduzidas em verso portuguez, e annotadas por Antonio José de Lima Leitão … (Rio de Janeiro : na Typographia Real, 1818-1819). RB.23.a.18324.
The Portuguese, unlike the Spanish, had repressed the printing press in their American colonies, so early Brazilian books were never common. As Borba de Moraes shows, Brazilian authors published in the old country. It was the flight of the Portuguese court to Rio before the advance of Bonaparte which transferred the power base to the new Empire of Brazil.
But again, the Brazilian patriots were so immersed in Graeco-Roman culture that they celebrated their new status with an edition in the original Latin and facing Portuguese of the founding of an earlier Empire: Virgil’s account of the birth of Rome in the Aeneid.
The first of our two publications includes what at first sight seems a cuckoo in the nest:
“Ajunta-se a esta obra a Descripção das tres magnificas Cidades Plymouth, Ston-House, e Devonporth, a qual o Auctor offerece gratuita aos Illms. Snrs. Academicos, Officiaes Militares, Ecclesiasticos, e mais Snrs. que subscrevêrão” (p. 76)
Why should the good people of the Azores wish to read a description, in verse indeed, of ‘the three magnificent cities of Plymouth, Stonehouse and Devonport?’
The reason is that a group of Portuguese liberal exiles took refuge in Devon in 1829. They managed to get printed a small number of pamphlets and, true as ever to the classics, put on a performance in Portuguese of Joesph Addison’s Cato.
Wherever these political activists went, they took their classical education with them. And in modern Britain still some of our most gifted politicians make proud display of their knowledge of Greek and Latin.
Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies
References:
Rubens Borba de Moraes, Bibliographia Brasiliana: rare books about Brazil published from 1504 to 1900 and works by Brazilian authors of the Colonial period (Los Angeles, 1983). RAR 090.981
Barry Taylor, ‘Un-Spanish practices: Spanish and Portuguese protestants, Jews and liberals, 1500-1900’, Foreign-language printing in London 1500-1900, ed. Barry Taylor (London, 2003), pp. 183-202 (p. 190). 2708.h.1059
18 September 2013
A Lisbon earthquake pamphlet of 1757: but not the Lisbon earthquake; and the last gasp of heliocentrism
Every day we learn new names for ever-more finely honed genres. ‘Biography’ has given way to ‘life-writing’, but what about Pestschriften (accounts of plagues), or the genre-defining Historia tragico-maritima (a collection of accounts of shipwrecks, published in Lisbon, 1735-37), ethopoeia (character delineation), epyllion (a miniature epic), psychomachia (battles of the virtues and vices), epithalamia (wedding-songs), or topothesia (the description of an imaginary place)?
As yet there seems to be no name for writings on earthquakes, but the genre definitely exists. For example:
Noticia certa de hum fatal successo, acontecido na cidade de Constantinopla, e o espantoso fenomeno, que nella se vio no dia vinte e seis de Novembro proximo de 1756. (Lisbon:, 1757) RB.23.a.18023
This eight-page pamphlet describes tremors which struck the Ottoman capital in November 1756.
The Phenomena website lists 131 weird weather events from 1741 to 1760 (two in Constantinople, 1752 and 1754), but hasn’t caught this one.
The Portuguese, still traumatised by their own earthquake of 21 December 1755, were naturally hungry for news of similar phenomena.
An image of an earlier Constantinopolitan disaster from 1556: the comet being the harbinger of the quake (illlustration from a German broadside, image from Wikimedia Commons)
The anonymous author starts by saying that these exceptional movements of the earth should not be taken as proof of the theories of Copernicus, “in whose system can be seen equally the wit of that great mathematician, and the intrinsic incredibility of what he claims to demonstrate”. “We have the certainty that the earth does not move, as Scripture so often teaches us”.
In this, he was simply following Catholic doctrine, but this doctrine was on its last legs: “In 1758 the Catholic Church dropped the general prohibition of books advocating heliocentrism from the Index of Forbidden Books” (Heilbron).
He recognises that we might experience partial movements of the earth: the causes can be either “merely natural, or the instruments of Divine Omnipotence, for the punishment of our faults”.
The pamphlet related two consecutive events.
Most harm was done by fires, which destroyed over 25,000 households, and almost all the Seraglio; over 1000 people perished. One victim was the fire-starter herself, one of the wives in the Seraglio who wished to avenge herself on another who had replaced her in the Sultan’s affections.
The earthquake began around 11.45 a.m. on 26 November and lasted seven minutes and forty seconds. People were to be seen bathed in blood and tears and covered in dust. The fires made Constantinople like Troy. By the time the inhabitants managed to halt the fire, 8000 had died. Water only started to flow into the fountains again after 24 hours, but its colour and smell showed it was undrinkable.
At 10 p.m. a fiery stag with a sword in its antlers was seen in the sky, over forty palms in size. It emerged that it had been sighted on the 20th, an omen. (Incidentally, the author does not find omens unChristian.)
The author is not an eyewitness: he acknowledges that he has extracted this information from “a letter”. This I imagine was a printed newsbook, and probably written in Italian, the lingua franca of the Ottoman Empire.
Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies
References
John L.Heilbron, 'Censorship of Astronomy in Italy after Galileo', in McMullin, Ernan ed., The Church and Galileo, (Notre Dame, 2005), p. 307. YC.2007.a.1076; m05/.25311
John Laidlar, Lisbon, World Bibliographical Series (Oxford, 1997), items 135-59. 9352.949100 vol 199
22 July 2013
Multiculturalism in 18th-century Portuguese India?
A Portuguese pamphlet in the British Library reports the Feliz noticia da conversam de hum jogue, que na Caza Professa do Bom Jesus de Goa recebeo o santo bautismo em 8. de Setembro de 1735 ... [The happy news of the conversion of a yogi, who in the religious house of Bom Jesus in Goa received holy baptism on 8 September 1735]
The yogi lived ‘like an anchorite’ in a cave in Anjediva and kept silent as a penance. The text explains that there are two types of yogi (or sannyasi): ‘those who shave their heads and are contemplatives, and others who let their hair grow down to their knees and wear it tied around the head like a mane and do extraordinary penances’.
This particular yogi was a figure of great gravity; he was naked, with his hair covered in ashes, and in his right hand he held a bundle of peacock feathers and held his left hand closed and raised behind his head in an act of penance he had performed since childhood.
‘The true portrait of the yogi’ in a typical posture, from Feliz noticia da conversam de hum jogue ... (Lisbon, 1737) RB.23.a.21030
The sympathetic treatment of the yogi is notable, and must be due in part to the fact that the Portuguese saw in him a parallel with the classical philosophers Socrates and Seneca, with whom he is explicitly compared. His contempt for worldly things and his analogy to a desert father chimed with a Christian culture imbued with contemptus mundi and populated by flagellants.
But the yogi’s greatest act of wisdom, in the eyes of the Portuguese, was surely that he converted to Catholicism.
He was taken before a Jesuit in the viceregal palace and entered into discussion, with the aid of an interpreter. After many debates he was won over and was baptised with the name of Pedro, in honour of the Viceroy, Dom Pedro Mascarenhas, his godfather, who marked the occasion with a banquet.
We must not deduce from this account that Portuguese India in the 18th century was a forerunner of multiculturalism. After all, the author sets out to prove that the Gospel is superior to 'Paganism'. But when we bear in mind that the Inquisition was not to be brought under state control until the era of the Marquês de Pombal in 1774, and that the Portuguese language bequeathed us the term auto da fe, this pamphlet is a reminder of a moment of kindlier interfaith dialogue.
Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanc Studies
European studies blog recent posts
- An Emblem Book without Emblems
- New light on the earliest ‘professor’ of Spanish in the UK?
- Vicente Salgado: a new acquisition
- Poets and pen-pushers
- Portuguese liberal exiles in Plymouth
- Frederick Cosens, a forgotten Hispanist
- Inheritance Books: Barry Taylor, Curator Romance Collections
- English Recusants in Portugal, 1638
- You can’t go out dressed like that! A crack-down on extravagance in 17th-century Lisbon
- The Portuguese Hobson-Jobson
Archives
Tags
- Acquisitions
- Africa
- Albania
- Alexander exhibition
- Americas
- Andorra
- Anglo-German
- Animal Tales
- Animals
- Austria
- Banned books
- Banned books week
- Basque
- Belarus
- Belgium
- Bosnia and Hercegovina
- British Library Treasures
- Bulgaria
- Captain Cook
- Central Asia
- Classics
- Comics-unmasked
- Contemporary Britain
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Decolonising
- Denmark
- Digital scholarship
- Digitisation
- East Asia
- Elizabeth and Mary exhibition
- Endangered languages
- eResources
- Esperanto
- Estonia
- European Literature Night
- Exhibitions
- Fashion
- Film
- Finland
- France
- Georgia
- Georgians-revealed
- Germanic
- Germany
- Gothic
- Greece
- Harry Potter
- History
- Humanities
- Hungary
- Iceland
- International
- Italy
- Language
- Latvia
- Law
- LGBTQ+
- Literature
- Lithuania
- Macedonia
- Manuscripts
- Maps
- Medieval history
- Middle East
- Modern history
- Moldova
- Montenegro
- Music
- Netherlands
- Newsroom
- Norway
- Philatelic
- Poland
- Politics
- Popular culture
- Portugal
- Printed books
- Propaganda
- Publishing and printing
- Rare books
- Research collaboration
- Romance languages
- Romania
- Russia
- Russian Revolution
- Science
- Serbia
- Shakespeare
- Slavonic
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Social sciences
- Sound and vision
- South Asia
- South East Asia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Theatre
- Translation
- Ukraine
- Unfinished Business
- Visual arts
- West Africa
- Women's histories
- World War One
- Writing