The "Comedieta" of the Satira : Dom Pedro de Portugal's Monkeys in the Margins

Abstract

The little-studied Sátira de infelice e felice vida, by Dom Pedro, Constable of Portugal (c. 1429-1466), unjustly neglected by Hispanomedievalists, offers its readers an ideal opportunity to consider the ambiguous status of the margins of a late medieval text. 1 Originally composed in Portuguese at mid-century (a version now lost) and translated soon thereafter into Spanish by Dom Pedro himself while exiled in Castile, the Sátira presents an amusingly ironic view of the process of authoring, staged most strikingly in the voluminous glosses [End Page 298] which fill the folios of the surviving manuscripts. 2 Julian Weiss has discussed cogently the auto-exegetical vogue among vernacular authors in fifteenth-century Castile, who sought to confer auctoritas on their works by appending erudite glosses to them, a trend popularized by Florentine writers of the previous century (The Poet's Art 117-29). 3 The Sátira falls within this general tendency, certainly, but the way in which the Constable authorizes his text involves a process fraught with contradiction.

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