Satira de Infelice e Felice Vida — Peter of Portugal

Manuscripts

Issue 01 — Fall 2019 — Session 05 — Microliteratures: In the Margins of the Law
By Jesús R. Velasco | Published on October 7, 2019

Pedro of Avis was born around 1429 in Portugal, and died 37 years later, in 1466, in the Catalan city of Granollers, probably murdered. Since he also belonged to the house of Urgell (his mother was was Isabel of Urgell, the consort Duchess of Coimbra), he had rights to the kingdom of Aragon, and he was elected Count of Barcelona and King of Aragon between 1463 and 1466. He spoke and wrote in Portuguese, Castilian, and Catalan, but he was well versed in other languages, including, with certainty, French or Latin. His literary works (mostly the "Sátira," the "Coplas del contempto del mundo", and the "Tragedia de la insigne reina Isabel") were composed in his youth, and each of them is both a literary project and an experiment in manuscript culture.

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Pedro de Portugal’s Sátira de Infelice e felice Vida has also another title –Argos. This second name, one has to look for it in the glosses. Maybe one could say they are two different works: one, the text we find at the center of the page, could well be the Sátira de Infelice e Felice Vida, while the 100 glosses (at least, the intended number of 100 glosses) are Argos. Two works that need each other in ways that we need to explore in depth, because the links are difficult to find: what do the eyes of Argos look at, in constant surveillance, day and night?

The Sátira and Argos serve a similar purpose: they both constitute epistemological devices to talk about a suffering I who manifests itself as a passionate self. While the Sátira writes (escribe) the passionate self, Argos interprets it (declara) giving the reader the chance to understand the multifaceted processes of autography for those who not only dominate the text and its glosses, but also the very surface of the manuscript –itself an epistemological device.

There are three extant manuscripts of the Sátira de Infelice e Felice Vida:

Madrid, BNM, Mss/4023

Lisbon (Belém): Museu Nacional de Arqueologia Dr. Leite de Vasconcelos, sem cota.

Barcelona, Private Collection.

Along with the manuscripts from Madrid and Lisbon, I am including Guillermo Serés edition:

Pedro de Portugal. Sátira de Infelice e Felice Vida. Ed. Guillermo Serés. Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2008.

Satira de Infelice e Felice Vida — Peter of Portugal

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