Ribeiro and his Book

The main thing is to read Menina e Moça as it has come down to us.

The facts are less important, and there aren't very many of them. There are, however, various questions about its authorship, history, genre, etc. which deserve some attention, though all the answers are inconclusive.

Almost nothing is known about the author, the Portuguese courtier Bernardim Ribeiro. His dates (1482-1552) are estimates at best, and most of the traditional biography can be shown to be false. In 1516, some of Ribeiro’s lyrics appeared in Garcia de Resende’s  Cancioneiro Geral, and it was Ribeiro’s five eclogues which first brought the Italianate pastoral, rather belatedly, to Portugal. In the eclogues Ribeiro shows his mastery of the new style while still retaining his own voice, unlike many of the later imitators of Italian models.

The intense feminism of Menina e Moça has led to speculation that the author was a woman who merely used Ribeiro’s name as a cover. It has further been speculated that the female author may have built the story around already-existing lyrics by Ribeiro. The book tells of several kinds of events from the woman's world to which males seldom had access: a woman dying in childbirth, women spinning and weaving during the long winter nights, and a young girl conspiring with a serving-lady to arrange a meeting with her lover.

The book has been called a chivalric romance, a pastoral novel, and a sentimental romance. It has aspects of all three, but it is best to describe it as sui generis. Like Don Quixote. Menina e Moça uses the conventions of the chivalric romance while rejecting the basic premises of the genre. There is no such attack on the pastoral novel, but the extraordinarily dark tone of this book  is inimical to the pastoral. As for the "sentimental romance", except for Boccaccio’s much earlier and not very similar Fiammetta, the other examples of this genre are almost entirely unknown. (Menina e Moça had elements of realism, as did the  sentimental romances and Don Quixote, but I don’t think that’s enough to justify calling them realistic.)

The three stories in the book are quite different in kind, and the most reasonable theory is that many more stories were planned, on the model of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but that circumstances prevented completion. Some parts of Aonia's story are comic and seem out of character in the book as it stands, but the work  as planned may have included stories of various different kinds.

The book as it exists today is evidently unfinished (with a spurious continuation which also breaks off without ending neatly). This gives the book a post-modern feel (as do the book’s story-within-a-story-within-a-story form and its several Cervantesque loose ends), but I don’t think this was deliberate. The traditional speculation was that the author went insane, which is not really unlikely given the pessimistic tone of the book, but he may equally well simply have died or have been forced to flee.

Menina e Moça was first published in Ferrara, Italy, by a Sephardic-exile publishing house whose other titles were mostly on Jewish subjects. (The second publication was in Évora, Portugal, and the third was in Cologne). This has led to speculation that Ribeiro was of Jewish background and had been forced into exile by the Inquisition; it has also been suggested that aspects of the book show the influence of the Kabbalah, neo-Platonism, or Manichaeanism. Given the strangeness of the book and what we know about the times, none of these speculations can be dismissed.

Why has this book been neglected? First, because it is written in Portuguese, which is not a difficult language to learn but which has lacked economic and military significance for several centuries. Second, because it is unfinished. Third, because it seems like a pastoral or romance, but really isn't either of these. Thus, people who like those two genres avoid Menina e Moça  for one reason, while those who dislike them avoid the book for the opposite reason.

Finally, for a long time the feminism, pessimism, strangeness, and darkness of the story probably drove readers away. But nowadays people are better able to appreciate that kind of thing -- or so I hope.

My appreciation / interpretation of "Menina e Moca"

The "Menina e Moca" Project: sources and links

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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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