Authorship and Originality in Seventeenth‐Century Iberia: Faria e Sousa’s Rimas Várias de Luís de Camoens

Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s Rimas Varias de Luis de Camoens (1685–88) continues to be the most influential edition of and scholarly work on Camões’s lyric oeuvre. While his attributions have been widely debated (and many disproved), the reasons Faria e Sousa puts forward for them have received only cursory attention. The commentator’s strikingly psychological explanations for ascribing texts to Camões suggest unexpected ways in which lyric authorship could be conceptualised in the seventeenth century. How he deals with the proliferation of texts in manuscript miscellanies illuminates where the line lay between variants, poorly concealed plagiarism, and entirely new poems – in other words, what makes a poem original. Faria e Sousa’s edition points to a prehistory of claims to author’s rights and authorial originality before the introduction of copyright legislation and highlights the role that editors played in the construction of modern authorship, suggesting they might be as possessive of texts, if not more so, than writers themselves.