Paper short abstract:

Departing from Kristina Soric’s analysis of Lope de Vega’s El Brasil restituido (1625), and José María Viqueira Barrero’s edition of the text (1950), my paper focuses on opposing views of Iberian interimperial cooperation related to the Dutch invasion of Bahia in 1624, and their expulsion in 1625.

Paper long abstract:

Based on analysis of Bartolomeu Guerreiro's Jornada dos vassalos de Portugal pera se recuperar a Cidade de Salvador, na Bahia de Todos os Santos (1625), and of Antonio Vieira's Carta Annua (1625), two major texts by Portuguese writers of the 17th-century, this paper shows that, unlike the Spanish propagandistic efforts by writers such as Lope de Vega and Viqueira Barrero to portray the expulsion of the Dutch from Bahia in 1625 as an interimperial cooperation of Spaniards and Portuguese subjects, the primary texts by and Vieira contradict the views and motives behind the imperial conflcts involving Iberian and Dutch subjects in the 17th-century Atlantic World. One of the major differences in the interpretation of the Spanish and Portuguese writers has to do with the role of New Christians and Sephardic Jews in the imperial conflict. To substantiate my analysis, I take advantage of critical historical interpretations by Charles Boxer, Stuart Schwartz, and other twentieth-century scholars whose views of the motives behind the Dutch invasion of Bahia in 1624, and their subsequent expulsion from northern Brazil in 1625, and how they differ substantially from those depicted in Lope de Vega's El Brasil restituido (1625), and in Viqueira Barreiro's El lusitanismo de Lope de Vega…(1950).