A Young Girl’s Story & Selected Poems

The central concept of Bernardim Ribeiro's prose and his poetry is the divided self. A Young Girl's Story is written from a woman's point of view as a nostalgic transposition of lived experience, and incorporates dreams, visions, prophecies and bodiless voices which today would be regarded as the unconscious. In the historical and cultural context of the sixteenth century it is perhaps the supreme literary manifestation of what has been called 'Jewish melancholia' in the culture of the European Renaissance following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal. All this through a narrative structure profoundly innovative for its time and strikingly modern even today. Ler mais…