17th Century Holographs in a Personal Miscellany of D. Francisco Manuel de Melo

Elsa Pereira

Artigo

Received: 15 May 2022

Accepted: 30 June 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/1517-106X/202224309

Abstract: Not many documents qualify as material evidence of 17^th century holographs in Portugal. However, personal miscellanies can provide valuable insight into textual composition and transmission in the literary scene of the time. One of the examples worth exploring is a miscellaneous volume of papers collected by D. Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608-1666), which includes several manuscripts either written by the owner himself or by the hand of fellow contemporary poets. These are clean copies with few or no layers of revision, but still relevant to a certain kind of genetic criticism without drafts (GRÉSILLON, 1993), focused on the interstices of scribal activity and distributed authorship in the early modern period. The article examines little-explored documentation from the national archive Torre do Tombo, thus broadening the scope of genetic studies into the realm of Portuguese baroque literature.

Keywords: Holographs, Portuguese literature, commonplace books, genetic criticism, exogenetics.

Resumo: Em Portugal, existem poucos documentos que se possam classificar como hológrafos seiscentistas. No entanto, as miscelâneas podem fornecer material valioso para o estudo da composição e transmissão textual da cena literária da época. Um dos exemplos merecedores de atenção é um volume de papéis colecionados por D. Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608-1666), onde podemos encontrar vários manuscritos, escritos pelo punho quer do seu proprietário, quer de outros autores contemporâneos. Embora se trate de cópias limpas, maioritariamente sem correções intradocumentais, estes manuscritos podem ser relevantes para uma espécie de crítica genética sem rascunhos (GRÉSILLON, 1993), que esteja atenta ao fecundo intercâmbio entre a atividade copista e as diferentes manifestações autorais durante a idade moderna. O artigo analisa documentação do Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, até agora pouco explorada, procurando alargar os estudos genéticos ao âmbito da literatura barroca portuguesa.

Palavras-chave: Hológrafos, literatura portuguesa, miscelâneas, crítica genética, exogénese.

Résumé: Au Portugal, il y a peu de documents holographes du XVIIe siècle. Pourtant, certains mélanges fournissent des témoignages précieux qui servent à étudier la composition et la transmission textuelle sur la scène littéraire. Un des exemples à explorer ce sont les mélanges de D. Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608-1666) qui comprennent plusieurs manuscrits de la main soit de son propriétaire, soit d’autres poètes contemporains. Bien qu’il s’agisse de copies sans corrections intradocumentaires, ces manuscrits peuvent être utiles à une « génétique sans brouillons » (GRESILLON, 1993) centrée sur les interstices de l’activité des scribes et sur différentes manifestations « auctoriales » à l’époque moderne. Cet essai examine une documentation jusqu’alors peu exploré aux archives nationales Torre do Tombo, tout en contribuant à l’élargissement des études génétiques sur le domaine de la littérature baroque portugaise.

Mots clés : Holographes, littérature portugaise, mélanges, critique génétique, exogenèse.

A comparative history of composition and writing practices, informed by the study of manuscripts, is yet to be published.¹ However, in the last decades, several research projects focusing on specific European traditions (e.g. MOTOLESE; RUSSO, 2009-2013; JAURALDE, 2008-2015) have demonstrated that, in Italy, foundations of the modern concept of authorship date back to as far as the second half of the 14^th century, while in other countries authors started to preserve their manuscripts and develop strategies to control their texts only towards the end of the 17^th century (DEL VENTO; MUSITELLI, 2019, p. 8). Some drafts preserved in Spain and Portugal - such as Lope de Vega’s ca. 1631 Códice Daza (BNE, RES/284) or António Vieira’s pre-1697 manuscript of Clavis Prophetarum (APUG, cód. 1165/1)² - suggest that a modern author function³ (FOUCAULT, 1977) also developed in the Iberian tradition over that period. Yet, not many documents qualify as material evidence of 17^th century holographs - i.e., manuscripts “written wholly by the person in whose name it appears” (LITTLE et al., 1964, I, p. 912).

This article focuses on one of the examples worth studying in Portugal: a personal miscellany of D. Francisco Manuel de Melo, containing favourite texts and a series of manuscripts written in the hand of their authors. The paper will start with general considerations about writing and publication habits in 17^th century Portugal, followed by a characterisation of some classes of manuscript books (1); then, it will analyse D. Francisco Manuel’s personal miscellany and the holographs bound in it (2); finally, it will briefly conclude with the contribution of these materials to a certain kind of genetic criticism without drafts (GRÉSILLON, 1993), aimed at the study of pre-modern literary composition (3).

In their introduction to Écrire aux XVII^eet XVIII^eSiècles, Jean-Louis Lebrave and Almuth Grésillon observed that, throughout the 1600s, manuscripts served a dual role: as private documents employed in literary composition and as social vehicles for the dissemination of texts (LEBRAVE; GRÉSILLON, 2000, p. 6-7). Long after the invention of the press, autograph copies were an effective way for authors to exchange poems in their inner circle and remained a preferred forum for those who could not print their works for some reason. In Portugal, besides the severity of the Inquisition and other forms of censorship that reflected political, religious, and social circumstances of the moment, there were intricate bureaucratic procedures that delayed print licenses for many years and strongly discouraged publication. Consequently, most Baroque poets, especially those with a satirical, clandestine, or scatological vein, never printed any work and opted to distribute their poems through manuscript copies.

While few working drafts from that period survive today, we may assume authors were responsible for many of the distributed manuscripts in our archives and libraries, which have circulated “from a private realm of creativity to a public realm of consumption” (LOVE, 1993, p. 36). However, these differed substantially from the documents used during textualisation, for only with the early Romantics and the so-called Geniezeit would writers start offering drafts as a memento or gift of friendship to be cherished by others (BOIE, 1993, p. 42-43). Because those copies corresponded only to the clean final stages of composition and were usually circulated without the author’s signature, most subsisting manuscripts from that period do not provide material evidence of the holographic activity that genetic scholars consider to assess the writing process.⁴ Still, personal miscellanies can be a valuable resource for the comprehensive study of exogenetics,⁵ providing insight into the intersection of “scribal user publication” (LOVE, 1993, p. 79-81) and authorial writing in 17^th century literature.

Jean Croizat-Viallet already noted how the nurturing relationship between reading and writing was crucial to all intellectual activity that preceded our modern culture. He argues that, in the Baroque period, almost every literate engaged in three forms of intimate and fruitful dialogue with his readings: the marginalia were notes scribbled on the margin of books as an immediate free response to the text while reading; the annotationes were explanatory notes, duly numbered and compiled into notebooks, following the reading pari passu; while the excerpta were lists of quotations from different works (CROIZAT-VIALLET, 2002, p. 104), which people organised for future reference and employment “when a suitable occasion presented itself” (LOVE, 1997, p. 113). They would transcribe and insert everything worth noting in their readings into a commonplace file, indexed according to general topics, to find the citation more quickly when necessary.⁶ All these manuscript compilations, involving some form of engagement with reading materials, were used to feed the practices of imitation and invention dictated by the canons of classical rhetoric, making them an essential resource for genetic studies dedicated to pre-modern literary composition.⁷

Similarly, to the excerpta, personal miscellanies were another “class of manuscript books into which the compiler” copied favourite texts by multiple writers, typically obtained through “the networks of transmission to which he or she had access” (LOVE, 1997, p. 112). Unlike commonplace files, though, a personal miscellany would assemble complete texts or substantial excerpts from different works and “grew by accretion”. “[I]t would often mingle current material entered in order of receipt with older material entered opportunistically” (LOVE, 1997, p. 112),⁸ while some compilers thoughtfully organised the texts with a specific purpose in mind, assigning cohesive new meanings to the individual works assembled. Among the Portuguese examples worth mentioning, in this last case, is Miguel Leitão de Andrada’s Miscelânea (eventually published in 1629) and also a curious 1661 chapbook dedicated to Princess D. Catarina de Bragança on her wedding to King Charles II of England (BNP, COD. 589).⁹

Some personal miscellanies are of yet a different nature. Instead of the usual compilation of texts copied into an album by an individual scribe - or even passed “through the hands of a number of owners, each entering materials of interest to themselves” (LOVE, 1997, p. 112) - what we have is a series of separate documents of varying provenance, which a single person has collected before binding them in a volume. At the Portuguese national archive, Torre do Tombo, there is one specimen of this kind, which deserves particular consideration by genetic scholars.

Miscellany TT/MSLIV, 2121 is an in quarto codex of uneven appearance and variable page sizes, whose label on the spine reads: “Francisco Manoel de Mello” and “Papeis Varios de D. Fran.^co M.^el Nº 10” [Various Papers of D. Francisco Manuel, nr. 10]. It is not certain when these documents were bound, but the same sequence number 10 appears on the inside of the front cover, below which an 18^th century hand added that it was part of a series of 11 volumes at Convent of Carmo’s library,¹⁰ largely destroyed in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Later, an officer of the national archive added another label, dated October 1908, identifying the gaps in the original numbered sequence of folios and the already missing pages.¹¹

Inside, we find an assortment of papers collected by D.Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608-1666), a prominent figure in the literary scene of the time who was incarcerated on a false charge of assassination from 1644 to 1650, released on his own recognisance in 1650 and sailed into exile in 1655 (VERDELHO, 2020, p. 674-678). Most documents assembled in the miscellany date from that troubled period of his life, but the volume mixes print and manuscript materials from decades apart,¹² written in different hands, using multiple languages,¹³ and serving various purposes. It comprises such diverse contents as practical accounts of rents (ff. 272-274), records of mass intentions (ff. 192-193), drawings (f. 164), letters (ff. 130-157, 168-171, 229, 252-255, 278-285) - some of which written by women (ff. 278-281) - and all sorts of prose texts, from historical and philosophical notes (ff. 11-17) to speeches (ff. 189-190), sermons (ff. 238-291), history works (ff. 1-10), and musical studies (ff. 25-56). All these materials give us a glimpse at the author’s readings and provide evidence of the exogenetic sources behind some of his works.

On ff. 25-56, for instance, there is a copy of Defensa de la Musica Moderna, which King João IV anonymously published in 1649, refuting Cirilo Franco’s argument that modern tunes were inferior to ancient classical music.¹⁴ This finding seems to indicate the influence of such discussions on D. Francisco Manuel’s Metric Works (MELO, 1665), where the Greek muses are associated with both classical and modern instruments (PICADO, 2012, p. 148-155) and several poems come preceded by the statements “for singing” or “for music”. Some compositions in the 1665 edition are even followed by the name of contemporary composers, such as João Soares Rebelo, to whom Defensa de la Musica Moderna was dedicated (JOSA; LAMBEA, 2001).

Likewise, on ff. 168-170, we find an exogenetic source of a biography our author wrote in prison and remained unpublished.¹⁵ Having been commissioned by King João IV to write about the late Duke of Bragança, D. Teodósio (1568-1630), the polygraph addressed some research questions to a monk at the convent of São Vicente de Fora, who answered on the same sheet and returned it to the sender with extensive annotations on the margin (Figure 1). Dating from February 5^th 1649, the undersigned letter was then kept among D. Francisco Manuel’s belongings and eventually incorporated into his writing project.

Figure 1 -
ANTT / MSLIV, 2121, f. 170r (Courtesy of Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo).

Bibliographic and documentary pieces such as these abound in the volume and are crucial to understanding the writer’s creative process, both in verse and in prose. As expected, though, there is an apparent prevalence of poetry in these assorted papers, written by either D. Francisco Manuel or other fellow poets.

The owner of the miscellany explicitly authors only a few poems,¹⁶ and those mentioned in the index seem to coincide with missing pages.¹⁷ However, from f. 165 onward, we find several separate manuscripts with praise compositions addressed to him. Within that album of literary sociability are poems by such names as Rodrigo de Meneses (ff. 165, 174-178, 182, 257-258), Francisco Luís de Vasconcelos (f. 166), Manuel de Galhegos (f. 172), António Gomes de Oliveira (f. 173), António de Almeida de Sousa (ff. 179-180), António Álvares da Cunha (ff. 181, 188-189), João da Fonseca (ff. 183, 191), Jorge da Câmara (ff. 194-195), and António Luís de Azevedo (f. 226), identified by marginal notes added by D. Francisco Manuel de Melo.¹⁸ Sometimes, a further remark clarifies that the poems were written in the authors’ own hands,¹⁹ while other manuscripts are marked with an authoritative signature (placed either immediately below the verse lines or in the accompanying letter and envelope, addressed to the prison of Torre Velha - Figure 2).²⁰

Figure 2 -
ANTT / MSLIV, 2121, ff. 182v, 167v, 195r (Courtesy of Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo).

As demonstrated in a previous article about one such poem (PEREIRA; MOREIRA, 2021), these are clean copies with few or no layers of revision, corresponding to the version that the authors considered worthy of being sent to D. Francisco Manuel. In this sense, the holographs included in this miscellany would fit into the general characterisation of pre-modern manuscripts, which tend to be more relevant to textual transmission than to genetics (SACQUIN, 2012, p. 160). Still, as textual scholars of genetic orientation expand their scope of interest to compositions developed between the late Middle Ages and the 18^th century, new possibilities emerge for the critical analysis of these materials.

In the last decades, genetic scholars have identified the premises of a certain kind of genetic criticism without drafts (GRÉSILLON, 1993), focused on the scribal activity and distributed authorship characteristic of the early modern period. Accordingly, scholars working in 17^th century literature should pursue a different kind of genetics, devised from the interstices of the creative process, rather than the examination of writing traces left on draft manuscripts (BEUGNOT, 2000). Some of D. Francisco Manuel’s papers collected in this volume will undoubtedly allow for a more encompassing analysis of his Oeuvre while also illuminating the author’s network of relationships and the contributions that have influenced his elocutio.

On the other hand, it seems reasonable to say that, throughout the 17^th century, every copy made for distribution resulted in new acts of revision that narrowed the gap between the spheres of production and transmission. As Béatrice Didier (2000) observes, texts constantly evolved from the manuscript exchange without it being clear who was responsible for the new variants: the author or the scribes. For that reason, some of the holographs addressed to D. Francisco Manuel in the miscellany will likely contribute to filling in the gaps between the existing textual witnesses of those works. Our case study has recently demonstrated, for example, that Jorge da Câmara’s poem on ff. 194r-195r has circulated in a shorter apograph version, which might have corresponded to an amputation of the authorial text or constituted an alternate version, revised by the poet for distribution and not necessarily containing his final text (PEREIRA; MOREIRA, 2021). If this were the case, the textual transmission of one such poem would benefit from a critical and editorial approach informed by the tools of genetic criticism and the sociology of texts (McKENZIE, 1999), where both the apograph and the holograph versions should be considered.²¹

For all that was said, the personal miscellany addressed in this article provides some rare and interesting documents for manuscript genetics, as such kind of materials preserve "acts of poetic creation and exchange that are fully embedded in the broader literary culture of the period” (SCHELLENBERG, 2016, p. 224).

REFERENCES - Manuscripts

APUG - Archivio Storico della Pontificia Università Gregoriana, cod. 1165/1. António Vieira, Clavis Prophetarum.

BML - British Museum Library. Add. MS 36354, ca. 1630-1650. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/john-miltons-commonplace-book

BNE - Biblioteca Nacional de España, RES/284. Lope de Vega, Códice Daza.

BNP - Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, COD. 589. Caderno de Diversas Curiosidades.

BPMP - Biblioteca Pública Municipal do Porto, Ms. 626. Moraes, Cristovão Alão de. Miscellanea.

BPMP - Biblioteca Pública Municipal do Porto, Ms. 645. Moraes, Cristovão Alão de. Miscellanea.

BPMP - Biblioteca Pública Municipal do Porto, Ms. 704. Moraes, Cristovão Alão de. Miscellanea.

BPMP - Biblioteca Pública Municipal do Porto, Ms. 816. Moraes, Cristovão Alão de. Grinalda d’Apollo, composta de varias flores poeticas no Jardim das Musas. Anno 1664.

ECC - Emmanuel College, Cambridge. MS I.3.2. https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-EMMANUEL-I-00003-00002/3

FSL - Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. MS V.a.160. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/glxi6k

TT - Torre do Tombo. MSLIV - Manuscritos da Livraria, n.º 2121. Papeis Varios de D. Franscis Manuel, n.º 10.

YUBL - Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection. A commonplace book, mid. 17th c. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brbl/albums/72157604694705731

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Notes

1 The observation has been intermittently pointed out by several geneticists: “Une histoire de la création littéraire et intellectuelle à partir des manuscrits reste à écrire” (HAY, 1993, p. 11); “Il n’existe pas à l’heure actuelle d’histoire globale des pratiques d’écriture et de composition” (LEBRAVE; GRESILLON, 2000, p. 4); “l’histoire de la notion d’«auctorialité» soit encore en grande partie à écrire” (DEL VENTO, 2019, p. 21). The book edited by Luc Fraisse (1998) and a new upcoming volume developed by the ICLA/CHLEL project Towards a Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe (BELOBORODOVA; VAN HULLE, 2021) have partly contributed to filling this gap in the literature.

2 Regarding this recent discovery see e.g. ARTILHEIRO, 2022.

3 “Fonction-auteur” in the French original. Throughout this article, the use of italics usually indicates a translated quotation from French, Spanish, or Portuguese sources.

4 Genetic Criticism emerged in France during the 1960s and became the most programmatic school responsible for emancipating the analysis of draft manuscripts as a discipline and distinguishing itself from traditional textual criticism. Rather than focusing on a stable reading text, the geneticist’s perspective centres on the compositional development of a literary work and all the transformations that result from the author’s writing or rewriting activity over time. For that reason, other existing theories with the same focus on writing processes and “the actions of invention” are labelled as leading towards a “genetic orientation” in the study of literature (VAN HULLE; SHILLINGSBURG, 2015, p. 36).

5 “Exogenetics designates any writing process devoted to research, selection, and incorporation, focused on information stemming from a source exterior to the writing” (BIASI, 1996, p. 43). In contrast to endogenetics (centred on the writing traces involved during textualization), the term exogenetics refers to documentary or bibliographic sources that an author has used to compose his work.

6 Fray Luis de Granada, Silva Locorum, 1585, “Dedicatoria al inquisidor de Toledo, Antonio Zapata Mendoza”, apudCROIZAT-VIALLET, 2002, p. 105. See examples of 17^th century commonplace books in the volumes collected by John Milton, 1608-1674 (BML, Add. MS 36354) and Matthew Day, 1574-1661 (FSL, MS V.a.160), as well as some early to mid-century commonplace books by unidentified compilers (YUBL; ECC, MS I.3.2). In Portugal, mention could be made of an extant volume collected by Cristóvão Alão de Moraes, 1632-1693, which is housed at the public library of Porto (BPMP, Ms. 645).

7 “Ancient rhetoricians imagined commonplaces as mental locations that store argumentative templates fit for a variety of cases. Aristotle’s koinos topos - a general topic - influenced Cicero, who translated the term into locus communis - from which we get our word ‘commonplace’ - which featured in his discussion of legal forms or argument. Cicero also added content to some of these ‘places’ and suggested that orators should use quotations from great thinkers to build authority (auctoritates)” (HESS, 2020, p. 12).

8 In Portugal, see e.g. several miscellanies collected by Cristóvão Alão de Moraes, 1632-1693, at the public library of Porto (BPMP, Ms. 626, 704, 816).

9 Referring to this miscellany at the Portuguese National Library, José Martinez (2018) notes that “by been [sic] juxtaposed, all […the disparate texts] engage in a dialogue that allow[s] readings different from the meanings each entry has separately”.

10 “Pertenceu ao Convento do Carmo de Lisboa, Cfr 11v”.

11 See a more complete description of the codex in PEREIRA; MOREIRA, 2021.

12 The oldest document in the miscellany is as a letter dated from my study on May 11^th, 1624 (ff. 99-100).

13 The languages in the volume include Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

14 The controversial opinions were expressed in a 1549 letter to Ugolino Gualteruzzi, published by Aldo Manucio in 1567.

15 Landed in prison by order of the new king, D. Francisco Manuel found himself in a delicate position with this commission. However, the unfinished memoir is far from being a harmless panegyric. It is an unorthodox biography of the man who could have been a candidate for the throne of Portugal, but instead decided to support the Spanish domination during the Iberian Union (1580-1640). There are three manuscript copies of this work, which D. Francisco Manuel wrote in Spanish to reach a vaster audience (MELO, 1944, p. 44): one at Biblioteca de Évora, one at Biblioteca da Academia das Ciências, and another at Biblioteca da Ajuda. The copy at Biblioteca da Ajuda (BA, cód. 51-III-30) was translated into Portuguese by Augusto Casimiro and published in 1944 (MELO, 1944).

16 On ff. 166-167, the poem “Nada llevó, si tu atención me deja” is written on the back of a sonnet that Francisco Luis de Vasconcelos addressed to D. Francisco Manuel de Melo at the prison of Torre Velha, leading us to believe that it must have been written to the addressee as an answer. On ff. 160-161, there is also a sonnet by Gonçalo de Medeiros de Sousa, replying to the poem “Dulce el papel, dulce el regalo; admiro” of D. Francisco Manuel, but both compositions are written in an apograph hand. To this, we should add that, based on the content order listed on the index, Edgar Prestage (1914: 605-606) inferred that a letter dating from my study on May 11th, 1624 (ff. 99-100), and the following 100-stanza poem on ff. 101-129 also might be among the compositions written by D. Francisco Manuel. However, no material evidence confirms this assertion since the manuscript does not have any signature and the handwriting differs from the only manuscript signed by D. Francisco, on f. 170.

17 The index page refers to several letters in his hand and works in verse dedicated to Rodrigo de Meneses: “Franc.^co Manoel de Mello, obras em verso á D. Rodrigo de Menezes | Cartas do mesmo Fran.^co M.^el de seu proprio punho”. These apparently correspond to the missing ff. 57-98.

18 See Evelina Verdelho’s well-documented “Prosografia” for a brief presentation of some of these authors, embedded within the network of literary relationships at the time (VERDELHO, 2020, p. 671-727).

19 “De Jorge da Camara sua propria letra” (f. 195r); “De Antonio Luis de Azevedo sua propria letra” (f. 226v), “Do proprio” (f. 258).

20 Cf. signatures of Rodrigo de Meneses (f. 182v), Francisco Luís de Vasconcelos (f. 169v), and Jorge da Câmara (f. 195r).

21 Similar propositions have been made to medieval works whose apograph and autograph versions were preserved (e.g. BELTRÁN, 2015). A genetic orientation also predominates in Maurizio Perugi’s recent edition of Luís de Camões’ sonnets, which assumes that different versions in a manuscript tradition may correspond to distinct authorial versions, revised by the poet over time (PERUGI, 2020).

Parecer Final dos Editores Ana Maria Lisboa de Mello, Elena Cristina Palmero González, Rafael Gutiérrez Giraldo e Rodrigo Labriola, aprovamos a versão final deste texto para sua publicação.

Author notes

Elsa Pereira - Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, CLUL. Investigadora contratada (FCT - DL57/2016/CP1443/CT0033). Licenciada, Mestre e Doutora em Literaturas e Culturas Românicas pela Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto. A sua investigação, atualmente acolhida pelo Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (FCT - UIDB/00214/2020), privilegia os estudos textuais e de edição, nos paradigmas analógico e digital.

Declaração de Autoria Elsa Pereira, declarada autora, confirma sua participação em todas as etapas de elaboração do trabalho: 1. Concepção, projeto, pesquisa bibliográfica, análise e interpretação dos dados; 2. Redação e revisão do manuscrito; 3. Aprovação da versão final do manuscrito para publicação; 4. Responsabilidade por todos os aspectos do trabalho e garantia pela exatidão e integridade de qualquer parte da obra. Este trabalho é financiado por fundos nacionais de Portugal, através da FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., no âmbito da Norma Transitória (DL57/2016/CP1443/CT0033) e do Projeto Estratégico UIDB/00214/2020.

E-mail:elsa.pereira@campus.ul.pt