The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth

This study describes and analyzes cultural and literary mythology surrounding the figure of the seventeenth-century nun Mariana Alcoforado as the presumed author of the celebrated collection of love letters that originally appeared in 1669 in French under the title of Lettres portugaises. Ostensibly written by a nun cloistered in a provincial Portuguese convent to her departed lover, an officer in the French army, they are now generally reputed to have been a literary, fake authored by a seventeenth-century French writer.