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Moving the Monarch: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in Camões's Lusíadas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

John De Oliveira E Silva
John De Oliveira E Silva*
Affiliation:
City University of New York, Laguardia College
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Abstract

Like many other medieval and Renaissance works, the Lusíadas by Luis de Camões can be profitably interpreted as a work of rhetorical persuasion. Although rhetoric was a primary feature of the educational curriculum of the time, this line of reasoning has been missing from the critical studies of the poem, most of which are committed instead to historical, biographical, and ideological approaches. In each narrative surface of the Lusíadas, a royal audience is cajoled, admonished, guided, or taught by an eloquent petitioner who may lack the credentials of power but manifestly possesses those of experience, wisdom, virtue, and love. Finally, this petitioner, whether in the form of a historical or mythological personage, Vasco da Gama the protagonist, or some projection of the inspired poet-orator, accesses a wide range of rhetorical strategies, among them the popular and efficacious Aristotelian categories of ethos, pathos, and logos, in order more effectively to move and persuade.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2000 , pp. 735 - 768
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2000

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