Writing the strings of time, i.e., creating a narrative nexus to make sense of a given era, is always a delicate act. When this historiographical gesture is interested in understanding the imaginary of a given society, it is useful to search for artifacts that contain a certain roughness – not necessarily the erudite texts printed for the consumption of the learned people, a minority, but maybe the texts that are rough around the edges, with little inclination for being canonical, but that a big number of learned and unlearned people were familiar with.
Artifacts that provide a lens into the historical and cultural fabric of their time and are essential for understanding the broader social context and historical developments, because widely-known texts portray the cultural values, beliefs, and norms of their time; artifacts that impact the public thought and social trends of their time, while revealing how ideas, ideologies, or information were disseminated and how they shaped public opinion and behaviour; artifacts that resonate with broad audiences, thus offering insights into their sentiments and attitudes.
Artifacts such as texts from literatura de cordel (Port. and Span.), or chapbook literature (Eng.), a collection of small booklets or pamphlets, hung by a string, inexpensive and widely accessible, sold by street vendors, that contain a variety of content, including poetry, theatre plays, and folk tales. Artifacts that transmit the narratives read or listened to by illiterate or semi-literate people, apart from scholars, clergy, and the elite. Artifacts like the theatre play Auto do Nascimento, written by Baltazar Dias (16th century), a blind Portuguese poet of great success, thought to be his own publisher and bookseller at Rua Nova dos Mercadores, Lisbon, whose works travelled through all the corners of Early Modern Portugal and to the Americas and Western Africa, having a great impact in the literatures of these territories.
When historians of science start to unravel such an historical artifact, thread by thread, reference to the Portuguese Maritime Expansion by reference, they may be surprised by an unexpected and surrealistic image about an oceanic voyage to India:
Zaú: And listen, say no more,
Because now I will win.
I saw the tower of Cascais
Sail to India by sea
And then return and anchor at the dock.
Auto do Nascimento (c. 1520-1530), Baltasar Dias
Being one of two characters who play a game of who creates the most dreamlike and unreal images and actions, Zaú wins the game with the image above, which consists of Torre de Santo António de Cascais, a fifteenth-century tower fortress near Lisbon, unexpectedly departing the Portuguese shores into the Atlantic Ocean, sailing on to India, and then returning home safe and sound. From this sequential and intriguing image – a monument on the move across the oceans –, History of Science learns that for early modern Portuguese imagination the notion of planetary distance and safety were combined. On the one hand, conceiving an oceanic route made of enormous spatial extension (Portugal-India-Portugal), the author summarizes the voyage and roundabout voyage in merely three lines, minimizing the great distances sailed, and giving this surrealistic voyage in a tower an unprecedented notion of speed, echoing the notion of the Portuguese ships being very fast that can be found in other literature of that time. On the other hand, the author conveys a notion of safety, security and success to this voyage, echoing the same notions that were then associated with real sixteenth-century Portuguese oceanic voyages in which Baltazar Dias’ readers and listeners participated at some level, either directly or indirectly. By connecting these hands and these lines of ideas, by grabbing other artifacts as this, a narrative nexus starts to appear. A string of booklets writing the strings of time – an occasion to think about how the Early Modern oceanic voyages produced new perceptions about planetary space and human movement in it.
[Joana Lima]
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