Politics and power relations in Portugal (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries)

This article surveys the work of the last decade or so on politics, government and representation in early-modern Portugal. Traditional views of a ‘precocious’ absolutism are shown to have been modified by a newer understanding of political power as plural and dispersed. Underlying this perception has been the study of ‘political culture’ conceived as a deep and wideranging grammar of political discourse expressed not only in the formal and symbolic, but also in the informal and less ‘visible’ aspects of political behaviour. A final section discusses the new, revisionist historiography of the Cortes, with its de-mythification of the medieval assembly and the rehabilitation of the early-modern Cortes as a ritual manifestation of the bond between king and kingdom.