Revisiting Baroque Poetics in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s <em>Peregrinação</em>: The Hermeneutics of Worldview

Abstract

This paper explores the Baroque poetics of Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação. Drawing from Roland Greene’s Five Words, it argues that the shift in worldview that occurred between the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century played a crucial role in the development of Baroque poetics, style and commonplaces, and, crucially, that these should be seen as powerful hermeneutic tools. Whilst addressing the critical debate surrounding certain features of the Peregrinação, this paper focuses on questions of generic hybridity, encoded polyphony, and spectacle from a multidisciplinary approach. Through a close reading of certain episodes of the Peregrinação, this paper highlights the discursive power of this text in problematizing and disrupting stable views of the world and the moral and cultural superiority of the Portuguese and their imperial aspirations.