Quem te conhece, Fernão Lopes?

Quem saberá que nesta sala, entre códices antigos, nasce neste momento talvez o maior livro da literatura portuguesa?

José Saramago

For the most celebrated of contemporary Portuguese novelists, the chronicle of King João I by Fernão Lopes stands as perhaps the greatest work of Portuguese literature ever penned. José Saramago revered the first great Portuguese prose writer for his unobtrusive, almost imperceptible brilliance. The lack of perception of Fernão Lopes's ‘neglected genius’ (génio desprezado), as expressed by Saramago, may help explain his relative anonymity, even in his country of birth, until comparatively recent times. Indeed, the chronicles were not published in Portugal until 1644 and, although since then several good editions of the separate chronicles have been published, a comprehensive edition is still called for. Nearly a century ago, such an edition had been the hope of William J. Entwistle, one of Lopes's early scholars in any language. Not only Entwistle – whose edition in the original Portuguese of the Crónica de D. João I, Part 2, forms the basis of the translation in hand – but also his contemporary and fellow Oxonian, Aubrey F. G. Bell, advocated for the unrestricted dissemination of Lopes's works regardless of language. As if Entwistle's eulogy of Lopes as ‘the greatest master of Portuguese prose’ were not enough, for Aubrey Bell Lopes ranked among the world's greatest writers. He is the finest chronicler of all, ‘the Middle Ages at their best’. And yet, even if Lusophone scholarship has since caught up with Lopes, the chronicler and his work remain largely beyond non-Portuguese speakers’ notice, conspicuously that of medieval historians. Despite the existence of a bilingual English/Portuguese anthology – Lomax and Oakley's invaluable The English in Portugal – the fact remains that social, political, and even military and political scholars have taken little notice of such material, notwithstanding its considerable usefulness for matters such as the Hundred Years War and its context, to mention just one.

As explained in the general introduction to the present edition, Fernão Lopes was probably of relatively humble extraction and became a notary by training. Slowly but steadily, he worked his way up Portugal's royal administration under the first three monarchs of the Avis dynasty.