Publications

Scouring Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Proverbios morales for its insights into caste, class, and poetic practice in the fourteenth century, I argue that his wisdom poem attests to an emerging cognitive economy and the politicization of the Romance vernacular from...

In a brief overview of major works of medieval and early modern Portuguese literature, I posit that white Portuguese writers’ ethnoracial self-concept was inextricably tied to seafaring, with maritime narrative forms and the oceanic imaginary playing an...

This article examines the twentieth-century Macau-based Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha’s singular contribution to the Portuguese tradition of maritime literature. I argue that Pessanha seized on fluid citational practices, already latent in  iconic works...

This article examines a Galician-Portuguese satirical song by the troubadour Lopo Lias (ca. 1190–1260) that contains a charged reference to the som de negrada, or "blackened-up music." Leading scholars of the cantigas have taken the term as a reference to...

Denis of Portugal’s “Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino” [Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green pine] is the medieval monarch’s most famous cantiga de amigo and one of the best-known songs of the Galician-Portuguese tradition. Many have read Denis’s “pine...

The Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha’s long stint in Macau has been the subject of much scholarly debate and biographical intrigue. Critics have tended either to deny the city’s poetic import altogether, erroneously claiming that Pessanha wrote virtually...

Critics have long evaluated the anonymous treatise on versification nestled in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional — often called the Arte de trovar — against the roughly contemporaneous artes poeticae composed in langue d'oc. While our understanding...