An Appropriate Past for Renaissance Portugal: André de Resende and the City of Évora

Abstract

From the mid-fifteenth century, in the period that we call the Renaissance, various Portuguese literati, artists, and thinkers-at-large began to ponder their country’s past. The predominant lens through which most of us have been taught to look at the Renaissance shows that such historical roots were sought in Roman times. However, as the present volume makes clear, the relationship between the past and the men at the dawn of the early modern age was a more nuanced and complex one. In this chapter, I shall look at this relationship through the case of Évora, a former Roman city and the seat of a palaeo-Christian bishopric (dating back at least to the early fourth century), which had perished during the times of the Muslim domain over the Iberian Peninsula (from 711 AD onwards) but had been revived during the Reconquista, after which point the city (conquered by Christian troops in 1165) became one of the crown’s favourites, and therefore a favourite of the aristocracy as well.1 The combination of all of these factors granted Évora a very central place in the Renaissance construction of a past for Portugal. Of paramount importance in such an endeavour was the work of Évoraborn humanist André de Resende (ca. 1500–1573), which provides a fine example of the intricacies involved.2 Resende was educated in Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca, and he spent most of the first three decades of his life