Since the dawn of Portuguese literature at the end of the 13th century with medieval songs, the sea and navigation have occupied a prominent place in Portugal's literary and historical imagination. Over the centuries up to the 16th century, a century that witnessed an incessant practice of Portuguese nautical travel on the world's seas, oceanic travel exerted a formidable power over writers, cosmographers, cartographers, and scholars in their worldviews and ways of conceiving content. of their own work. Although we can consider, on the one hand, The Lusíadas as a culminating expression of the Portuguese maritime imaginary, on the other hand we have to recognize that Camões lived and worked within a cultural context strongly focused on the sea and the empirical reality of overseas travel.
In this communication, philology, a field of humanistic study par excellence, will be studied as a way and metaphor of understanding what could be called “the knowledge of the sea.” Through an analysis of texts – mostly Portuguese literary and historical texts – in which a concern with the maritime domain is evident, an outline of a grammar of the sea will be proposed, that is, a way of constructing discourses textual as reflections of a forma lies oceanic.
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Josiah Blackmore
Josiah Blackmore holds the Nancy Clark Smith Professorship of the Language and Literature of Portugal at Harvard University. His publications focus mostly on Portuguese medieval and Renaissance literature, and in particular texts on Portuguese maritime expansion, but he has also published studies on Eça de Queiroz and António Botto. His books analyze Portuguese shipwreck literature (The Tragic History of the Sea, 2001, and Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire, 2002), Portuguese texts about Africa (Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa, 2009), and maritime literary culture (The Inner Sea: Maritime Literary Culture in Early Modern Portugal, 2022). In 1981-82 he was a scholarship holder at the University of Lisbon where he studied philology under the guidance of Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra and Ivo de Castro.