Stories of Torture and Suffering: the Example of Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação (1614)

This article focuses on the notation system of the traveller’s body in Peregrinação by Fernão Mendes Pinto, published in 1614. Thanks to a deliberate staging of bodily suffering, a sort of new ontology is developed. Despite durable exposure to bodily pain, the journey is always the experience of a decentralisation of the self, mainly visible through the near absence of narrative markers, allowing a heuristic openness. Through their multiple meanings, such statements demonstrate the reorganisation of 16th-century travel narratives.