Biography (read more)
Damião de Góis (1502–1574) was a Portuguese humanist, diplomat, historian and musician, born at Alenquer into a noble family with Flemish mercantile ancestry. At the age of nine he entered the household of King Manuel I as a page, where the court’s musical culture led him to learn the clavichord and other keyboard and plucked instruments. From 1523 he served as secretary of the Portuguese factory in Antwerp under John III, and travelled on diplomatic missions to England, Poland, Denmark, Lübeck and Russia. He later abandoned diplomacy for scholarship, studying at Louvain and living for several months with Erasmus at Freiburg in 1534. Returning to Portugal as royal chronicler, he was denounced to the Inquisition in 1571 for his Erasmian sympathies and died in 1574 after a period of confinement.
Góis is remembered chiefly as one of the leading intellectuals of the Portuguese Renaissance, the author of the Crónica do Felicíssimo Rei Dom Emanuel and of Fides, religio, moresque Aethiopum (1540), one of the earliest European accounts of Ethiopian Christianity. His musical output is small but genuine: a handful of Latin motets that circulated in the international printed anthologies of the mid-sixteenth century. The three-voice motet In die tribulationis appeared in the Libro secondo de li motetti a tre voce (Venice, 1549) and again in Berg & Neuber’s Variarum linguarum tricinia (Nuremberg, 1560), an unusually wide dissemination for an amateur composer. His music is written in a compact, imitative Franco-Flemish idiom that reflects the years he spent in Antwerp and Louvain, and it is now performed mainly by early-music specialists.
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