O Cavaleiro Lascivo -

The chivalric genre traditionally celebrates amor cortês (courtly love) as a sublimated, ennobling force. The knight’s quest is directed towards spiritual or patriotic ends, with desire for a lady serving as a distant, platonic engine. O Cavaleiro Lascivo inverts this paradigm. The manuscript, attributed speculatively to an anonymous author possibly associated with the Portuguese Segunda Escolástica , presents Dom Fernando de Montemor, a knight whose journeys across the Alentejo and into Castile are catalyzed not by honor or faith, but by an insatiable, often comically disastrous, lust.

The title “lascivious” carries theological weight. In Catholic moral theology, lust ( luxuria ) is a capital sin, a disordered desire. Dom Fernando embodies this disorder. In a key scene, he interrupts a Corpus Christi procession to pursue a widow, causing the consecrated host to be dropped. The narrative punishes him with a case of venereal disease, described in crude medical detail. O Cavaleiro Lascivo

The text unfolds over twelve aventuras . In the first three, Dom Fernando attempts to rescue a “damsel in distress” (Dona Leonor), only to discover that she has engineered her own abduction to escape a loveless marriage. His lascivious advance is met with a public whipping by her maidservants. Dom Fernando embodies this disorder

Transgression and Desire in the Iberian Baroque: An Analysis of O Cavaleiro Lascivo described in crude medical detail.