The Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha’s long stint in Macau has been the subject of much scholarly debate and biographical intrigue. Prior scholars have either denied the city’s poetic import altogether, erroneously claiming that Pessanha wrote virtually no poetry in Macau, or else presented a highly romanticised portrait of the poet’s time there, focussing on his opium addiction and heralding the city’s exoticism. In this article I seek to problematise both portrayals, examining Pessanha’s poetry in light of his critical writings on Macau.  My analysis shows that Macau’s heady cultural life interacted powerfully with Pessanha’s unique notions of pastoral poetics and theory of race.

Dinis of Portugal’s “Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino” (Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green pine) is the medieval monarch’s most famous cantiga de amigo and one of the best-known songs of the Galician-Portuguese tradition. Many have read Dinis’s “pine song” as an allusion to the Pinhal de Leiria, the pine forest that he planted—or so the story went. Though Portuguese historians and paleobotanists have debunked the Leiria forest’s origin story, a preponderance of documentary evidence from Dinis’s reign suggests that the monarch recognized the forest as a poetically generative site of political and social tension. In this article, I chart ecocritical and new materialist paths through the “pine songs” of Dom Dinis and other Galician-Portuguese troubadours. Examining the medieval forest in its cultural, commercial, and poetic dimensions, I argue that Dom Dinis understood the pine and his poems as affectively and acoustically co-constituted—and that the Galician-Portuguese troubadour tradition, particularly in its woman’s-voice compositions, encodes important ecological knowledge.

Critics have long evaluated the anonymous treatise on versification nestled in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional — often called the Arte de trovar — against the roughly contemporaneous artes poeticae composed in langue d'oc. While our understanding of the treatise undoubtedly benefits from comparative readings, I argue that its perceived deficiencies, including its sui generis approach to poetic genres, may reflect specific late medieval literary-critical considerations. By emplacing generically or socially aberrant compositions within practices of performance, reading, and anthologization, the treatise helps legitimate the cancioneiro in which it appears and perhaps the cancioneril enterprise more generally. In the appendix, I provide the first-ever full-length translation of the Arte de trovar into English.