Poets, Patronage, and Print in Sixteenth-Century Portugal: From Paper to Gold

This book looks at how poets articulated the value of poetry in sixteenth-century Portugal in moral, financial, practical, political, and aesthetic terms. The book combines methods from sociology (network analysis, sociology of professions, valuation studies) with literary analysis and book history to offer a new perspective on long-overlooked writers from the period, showing that poets were as inventive in their complaints and in negotiating practicalities through poetry as in articulating eternal truths.