Baltasar Estaço

Brother of Gaspar Estaço. Canon of the Cathedral of Viseu and poet, he also dedicated himself to studies of Latin, Arts, Theology, and Philosophy at the Universities of Évora and Coimbra. Accused of telling «women he confessed [...] that when he holds them in his arms he thinks he holds Our Lady and that they should think the same [...]» and of inviting them «to his house and bed, for this communication which he calls holy [...]», the argument he repeatedly used in his statements was not enough to move the inquisitors, concerning an «illness of coldness» that was allegedly the sole reason he had actually hosted women and maidens for several nights who lay with him: «naked between the sheets [...], while he wore a doublet that reached his knee [...], and that with none of these women had he engaged in any lewd act [...] nor were any words of love spoken, [...] always conducting himself with all due regard for his purity, notwithstanding that they embraced and drew close to one another to warm him [...]», «always without lustful» or «disorderly intent» (cf. António Baião, Episódios Dramáticos da Inquisição Portuguesa)». Baltasar Estaço was thus tried by the Inquisition, imprisoned, tortured, and stripped of his holy orders. After seven years in prison (1614 1621), he was released, but on the condition that he not enter Viseu or its bishopric. He left several manuscript works, cited by Barbosa Machado in Biblioteca Lusitana, and published a collection titled Sonetos, Canções, Éclogas e Outras Rimas (1604). Imbued with mysticism, glorifying the saints or singing of the flow of time and the vanities of the world, if, on the one hand, the cult of antitheses and parallelisms offers passages reminiscent of Camões in Baltasar Estaço's poetry, on the other, it already reveals the adoption of stylistic techniques common to a certain formalism characteristic of literary Baroque. «He has brilliant and pathetic thoughts, falling at times, however, into affectation [...]», says Inocêncio F. da Silva in Dicionário Bibliográfico Português.