The Tragedy of Inés de Castro (review)

144 Reviews examples, but in none of them does he give precise references to the relevant court rolls, preferring instread to refer the reader to the Regional Data Bank at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. As for the audience to which this tome is directed, it is difficult to be certain. There is far too litde guidance for the amateur or the undergraduate, whilst the professional historian would undoubtedly prefer to have at his or her disposal the full Latin text and all the formulae with their minimal variations that DeWindt considers superfluous and unnecessary. Changes in diplomatic over a period of sixty years or so may be quite significant to the nonquantitatively minded historian. History can and should be more than the endproduct of the collection and analysis of summaries of data, all of which in this case have been admirably indexed in the final 76 pages. John Walmsley Department of History Macquarie University Ferriera, A., The Tragedy oflnes de Castro, trans. J. R. C. Martyn, Coimbra, Universidad de Coimbra, 1987; pp. 382; R.R.P. £12.00 John Martyn's translation with introductory essays of Antonio Ferriera's Tragedy oflnes de Castro is a valuable addition to the critical literature on this affecting drama of personal sacrifice for the nation's good. More importandy, perhaps, it provides a detailed source in English of the significant literary and historical work on the theme. For the many scholars w h o do not read Portuguese, this book offers an important corrective to the pre-eminent place of Camoens' treatment of the story in his more widely available Os Lusiadas published some years after Ferriera's play. Added to this is the fact of Ferriera's Castro being thefirstserious drama written in Portuguese, performed in the Royal College at Coimbra in about 1555. Martyn's introductory essays and appendices account for more than half the volume and provide a detailed and wide-ranging presentation of general history, biography and critical analysis. This has led to a rather uneven coverage of the very different topics treated. Following the preface which argues the importance of Ferriera's work is a lengthy and often speculative literary biography. Martyn has apparendy brought together every available shred of documentation which may cast light on the different periods of Ferriera's life and persuasively interprets evidence that has been the source of some disagreement among previous biographers. In addition, he postulates episodes and influences which at least serve to vivify the historical period. The very detailed sections on Ferriera's connection with the University and Royal College at Coimbra would certainly be of interest to anyone working on the history of education in Europe. In places, the focus on Ferriera's teachers Reviews 145 and other literary influences seem to lead the reader well into the area of general literary history. This is less true of Chapter three which deals specifically with the relationship between Ferriera and Camoens and displays some very interesting detective work on the debt of the latter to Ferriera's Castro . Chapter four is a well-focussed study of the Ines de Castro theme and contains lengthy discussion of the valuable version of the theme expressed in a Latin poem by Lucio Andre de Resende, discovered by Martyn and brought to notice here for thefirsttime. The six pages devoted to the Resende poem are clearly the reward of the outstanding manuscript scholarship displayed by Martyn. Chapter five sketches the political, social and religious background not to the setting of the play, but to the period in which it was written. It overlaps somewhat the lengthy biographical chapter and provides a very general summary of a complex era. Chapters six and seven of the Introduction are the best, containing a very good analysis of the play, first dealing with the staging, structure, and characters and then extending the analysis to a valuable comparative study of the Ferriera play with the most relevant works of Buchanan and Teive, especially a comparison of the dream sequence in the Castro and Buchanan's Jephtes. The translation is of a high standard, managing to express the formal elements of the original's language without sounding too stilted...