“La décima musa portuguesa” and Her Soledades de Buçaco: Gendered Landscape Poetry Dedicated to the Nuns of Santo Alberto

Abstract

In 1634, Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda, known as “la décima musa portuguesa,” published Soledades de Buçaco to celebrate the Carmelite “desert” of Bussaco, an enclosed forest inhabited by monks and located in central Portugal. Although a papal order excluded women from entering Bussaco, through her poems, Lacerda reveals the forbidden space to the nuns of Lisbon's Convento de Santo Alberto, to whom she dedicates her book. Her poems gender the landscape of Bussaco as feminine by invoking the founding mother of the order, cataloging the flora and fauna and thereby emphasizing the fertility of the place, personifying the hillside as female, and alluding to the Song of Songs, thus making Bussaco both the Soul and the setting of the mystical union.