Portuguese literatureBell, Aubrey F. G. (Aubrey Fitz Gerald)
History
Portuguese literature
Bell, Aubrey F. G. (Aubrey Fitz Gerald)
Portuguese literature -- History and criticism
It was, perhaps, inevitable that he should have incurred suspicion,
nor is it necessary to explain his trial by the enmity of certain
persons at Court due to passages in his works. His life had been out
of keeping with the _gravedades de Hespanha_, and the charges against
him were numerous and varied. He had eaten and drunken with heretics,
he had read strange books, the sound of songs not understanded of the
people and organ music had issued from his house at Lisbon, he had
omitted to observe fasts, he had called the Pope a tyrant, he set no
store by papal indulgences or auricular confession. Even the testimony
of his grand-niece is recorded, to the effect that her mother had
said of Goes, her husband’s uncle, that he had no more belief in God
than in a stone wall (she seems to have had Berkeleian tendencies).
As usual it is less the proceedings of the Inquisition than the bad
faith of the witnesses that arouse disgust. The poet Andrade Caminha,
who apparently came forward of his own accord--we are not told that
he was _chamado_--admitted that certain words of Goes which he now
denounced had not seemed so serious to him before he knew that Goes
was in the prison of the Inquisition. Goes had already been denounced
to the Inquisition in 1545 and 1550, and his book _Fides, Religio
Moresque Aethiopum_ (Lovanii, 1540) had been condemned in Portugal in
1541. He was examined frequently in 1571 and 1572, was left for three
months without news of his family, and complained of being old, weak,
and ill, and that his body had become covered with a kind of leprosy
(July 14, 1572). His sentence (October 16, 1572) pronounced him to
have incurred, as a Lutheran heretic, excommunication, confiscation of
all his property, and the life-long confinement of his person. He was
transferred to the famous monastery of Batalha in December, but his
death (January 30, 1574) occurred in his own house. His return and his
death probably explain one another. He was growing very old in 1565 and
we must suppose that his recent experiences had not made him younger.
His last request--to die among his family--was apparently granted,
and the further explanations (that he fell forward into the fire,
that he died of an apoplexy, was killed by order of the Inquisition,
was beaten to death by the lackeys of the Conde da Castanheira, or
murdered and robbed by his own servants) are superfluous. His works
consist of several brief Latin treatises crowded with interesting
facts (especially his _Hispania_); and in Portuguese the _Cronica do
Principe Dom Ioam_ (1567) and _Cronica do Felicissimo Rey Dom Emanvel_,
4 pt. (1566, 1567). He also found time to translate Cicero’s _De
Senectute_: _Livro ... da Velhice_, (Veneza, 1534). He had not the
imagination of an historian, and unless events have passed before his
eyes, or happen to interest him personally, he can be bald and meagre
as an annalist. But in any matter which touches him closely, as the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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