Diogo Bernardes’s Brandura

Abstract

Readers of Diogo Bernardes’s (ca. 1530–ca. 1595) poetry have long praised the brandura (gentleness) of his work. But what brandura meant and how favorably it was viewed depended on context. Brandura was associated with the middle style, with mastery of elocutio, and, by extension, with poetry’s ability to move those who listened to or read it. Therefore it could at one moment provoke moral anxiety and at another signal the height of poetic accomplishment. In quarrels over the relative merits of the European vernaculars, apologists for the Portuguese language invested in Bernardes’s reputation as brando (gentle), as he was said to demonstrate the brandura of their mother tongue. Yet later in the seventeenth century his fortunes sank. Though he is little esteemed today, his association with the multiple meanings of brando and brandura implicated him in important political, moral, and aesthetic disputes throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By paying renewed attention to style and affect in the context of cultural history, this essay aims to revive interest in Bernardes’s work.

Authorship and Originality in Seventeenth‐Century Iberia: Faria e Sousa’s Rimas Várias de Luís de Camoens

“…Indeed, Bernardes's eclogues were usually seen as the best of his work and might challenge Camões's in terms of quality. 24 Moreover, the need to dismiss Bernardes intensified when he came to edit Camões's work, where the question of authorship was much more fundamental to his undertaking. His criticism of Bernardes only relents in the Rimas when he discusses the sonnet Bernardes wrote in praise of Camões for the first edition of the Rhythmas from 1595.…”