The Emblem-Sonnet: A Novel Concept in Vasco Mousinho de Quevedo Castelo Branco

In 1974 Marion Ehrhardt made clear what many scholars of Camões had long known, but were not openly articulating: that Luís de Camões was well read in Alciato (1), and that emblems were, by extension, linguistic components of meaning used by poets and, crucially, understood by their readers. Using the work of the late sixteenth-century poet Vasco Mousinho de Quevedo Castelo Branco, we will explore the intricacy of this intersection of emblems in other literary genres, especially the reworking of the recently arrived sonnet format into emblems proper. The concept of an emblem-sonnet has been in use by scholars of this period, but it is still to be fully understood and applied to the study of the development of sonnet production in Portuguese literature. We hope to contribute to rectifying this with examples from Camões to Quevedo, promoting a better understanding of the reception of emblems in Portugal (through familiarity with its tenets), as well as to an awareness of the journey of the sonnet itself. (1) 'Repercussões Emblemáticas na Obra de Camões', Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português (Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1974), 8, pp. 553-566