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

Hológrafos do século XVII numa miscelânea pessoal de D. Francisco Manuel de Melo

Elsa Pereira elsa.pereira@campus.ul.pt

Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

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).