On the Dissemination of Carolingian Literature and Drama in the Former Portuguese Empire: A Comparative Analysis of African, Asian, and Latin American Variants of the Matter of France

Abstract Traces of Carolingian literature and drama can be found in several parts of the world with a Portuguese colonial history. Due to a paucity of sources, little is known about their history, the agents who introduced them, and the reasons why European chivalric stories were so passionately embraced by Indigenous communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This article breaks with a tradition to study this phenomenon from a perspective that maintains a unilateral connection between the former colony and the metropole. It shows how ingrained assumptions can be questioned by adopting a comparative perspective that extends its focus to intercultural agents of Portugal’s “shadow empire,” where communities developed a cultural and religious identity based on a Portuguese model that was modified and reinterpreted from a local perspective. The article begins with an overview of the known examples of Carolingian drama in the former Portuguese Empire and then focuses on the principal agents behind the transmission of this literature, while shifting the focus from the Europeans who introduced these tales to the Indigenous populations who adopted them.