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iographic narratives written by nuns in the same period, with their dazzling
visions and their intensely erotic language. The exercise of full, detached
abandonment that characterised these texts, the sense of openness to the other,
echoed in my remote memory. And from there a personal project emerged.
That of creating a feminine genealogy, a heritage of the affections and of the
imaginary that would allow me to establish an unlikely connection between
my own history, my mother’s history and the histories of those nuns.
By resorting to a literary production that has been successively ignored
throughout the years, I intend to exercise a resistant memory against the
relentless forces of oblivion. By giving voice back to these forgotten texts,
re-reading them and re-evaluating them in a new light, I seek for an auto nomous
imaginary, knowing that, by ransoming and reinventing such memory, it is the
heritage of humankind in its multiple dimensions that will be enriched. This
work of re-reading, of re-signification, becomes a possible narrative, a possible
fiction, an alternative to the hegemonic categories of thought.
The convent as a place for the development of female authorship in Portugal
The authoritarian, misogynous Portugal of the 1600s, witnessed developments
in the literary production by female authors. In spite of a tradition that had
excluded women from knowledge and the written word, the number of female
writers who published and were publicly acknowledged multiplied. Despite
the literary richness, the works of these female authors remains invisible even
today in the Portuguese contemporary historiographic discourse, thanks to the
subtle mechanisms of female production stigmatisation, including the mechanisms
of the production of literary canons.
It is curious to see that the women who wrote in this period in Portugal lived
in convents, turning these places into a privileged space for the creation of a
specifically feminine culture. 2 This was a movement that is too powerful to be
ignored. It is worth considering the specific set of circumstances that turned
convents into a kind of reservoir of female talents during the Baroque period.
2
For further developments on the theme of convents as privileged space for the development of a specifically feminine
culture in Portugal you may refer, amongst other studies, to: Anabela Galhardo Couto, “Escritoras de finais do
século XVII e inícios do século XVIII: seu contributo para a definição de uma cultura barroca em Portugal”, in Em
Torno da História das Mulheres, (Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 2002), 183-205. Gli Abiti Neri: Letteratura Feminile
del Barroco Portoghese,( Roma: Il Filo, 2007). Isabel Morujão, “Por trás da grade: Literatura Conventual feminina em
Portugal: séculos XVII e XVIII” PhD Diss. (Porto: Faculdade de Letras, 2005).
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