Agustina Bessa-Luís’s Reinvention of St. António: A Loving Saint without an Altar

Summary

In Portugal, the study of medievalism is still in its infancy, making it premature to construct an overview or, as so often in literary studies, to weigh opinions. But by considering the works that most clearly conform to Francis G. Gentry’s and Ulrich Müller’s creative-reception model – a productive reception of the medieval, resulting in the creative reformulation of medieval subjects, works, themes in the form of new works – it seems possible to distinguish between works which take the form of a historical hypertext, where characters and events reported in chronicles or other medieval narratives are reinvented, and literary rewriting which limits itself to adding stylistic intertextuality to the reworking of the theme in question. In this essay, I would like to examine an example of the former: the 1973 biography of St. António (?1195–1231) by Agustina Bessa-Luís (1922–2019), a Portuguese novelist whose writing often echoes that of authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann. By employing several established approaches to medievalism, I will examine the different ways in which the medieval is present in this biography, concentrating on what Michèle Gally and Vincent Ferré have called “remnants,” that is, the form and meaning of references to the medieval past that particularly challenge our present.

In order to understand how these remnants are constructed in Bessa-Luís’s biography of St. António, I will begin by clarifying the context of this response to the Middle Ages, focusing on the way in which the author connects with her subject and with history and medievalism. Following this epistemological exercise, I will explore Bessa-Luís’s methods, specifically how she deals with written sources, and the way in which she reveals her interpretation through techniques such as interrogation, analogy, hypothesis (and other forms of rationalization), as well as aphorism. Finally, I will examine the outcome of these methods, namely her view of the saint’s physical and psychological profiles, of his studies, and of his preaching, as well as the image she presents of the medieval world in which he lived.

The Medievalist Context

Like other forms of literary medievalism, biographical works rewrite the medieval by poetically recreating the past and filtering the different texts that form part of this rewriting in a “dialectic of permanence and change.”