Medievalism in José Saramago’s A Segunda Vida de Francisco de Assis

Diffuse Images of Franciscan Memory

Abstract

Drawing on medievalism studies and taking the Middle Ages as a heuristic instrument, this article analyses the fictional mechanisms that underpin the possible world created in José Saramago’s drama Francisco de Assis; the meaning that the writing’s present tense imposes upon the past; and the ways in which that past communicated with the present. Particular attention is paid to the transformation undergone by the figures who inhabited the life of Francis of Assisi, as part of a process of updating – from a materialist and, at times, instrumentalised perspective – the conflicts they faced. The protagonist’s confrontation with medieval history and hagiography makes it possible to clarify the intentional and ideologically motivated deviations that underlie the reduction of the character to a fanatical advocate of poverty, while neglecting the compensatory fraternity that had bound him to those excluded, whose situation had deteriorated and symptomatically prompted the return to evangelical simplicity.