SOURCE: “The Age of Camões,” in The Texas Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter 1972, pp. 7-18.

In the following essay, Parker outlines the historical events narrated in The Lusiads, providing the cultural and political contexts of the poem while suggesting that the epic transcends those particular events to reflect the spirit of the Renaissance.

Camões was born in 1524 and died in 1580: his age is therefore the sixteenth century in transition from the High Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It would be pointless to attempt a survey of European history and culture in this period, for much. indeed most, of this would not be relevant to the poem we commemorate. No poem is so fully of its age as The Lusiads, not only in its artistic structure and poetic form, but also in its content. It is, in fact, a poem about its age, about the first voyage of Europeans...