Geraldo Augusto FERNANDES

Original title: As figuras de linguagem no Cancioneiro Geral de Garcia de Resende (1470-1536)

Published in Returning to Eden

Keywords: Figurae, Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral, Humanism, Poems of mixed forms, Rhetoric.

The studies of Rhetoric and the use of its resources began to emerge during Humanism in Portugal. These were made or found in the libraries of monarchs and princes, as well as in monasteries. But Rhetoric also becomes a discipline that will be key for the nation to commune with humanistic precepts which is spreading throughout Europe with the aim of forming the human person, physically, intellectually, and morally. This advent, which took place from the fifteenth century onwards, also focuses on the literature developed in the palace evenings. In this study, the use of rhetorical devices shows how it interferes in poetics, especially the one developed in Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral, from which I extracted the many examples of these embellishing means (of oratory and poetics, as Quintiliano says), all of which are apparent in the poems of mixed forms. What I propose is to present the examples taken from the Resende’s songbook, listing the resources, and showing them in the poems of the compilation. Quintilian and the anonymous of the Rhetorica ad Herennium will be collated with the studies of Juan Casas Rigall, Heinrich Lausberg, Baltasar Gracián, Nair Nazaré Castro Soares, Maria Isabel Moran Cabanas, Antonio de Nebrija, among others.