Abstract

To the contemporary critic, the question of whether Raphael Hythloday really existed is no doubt preposterous. We all know that he never existed and that his name indicates the tension Thomas More wanted to create between a messenger of God, and thus the conveyer of truth, and a nonsensical storyteller. However, the Portuguese historian Luís de Matos published widely, in the 1960s and the 1970s, on the topic. And his monumental work L’Expansion Portugaise dans la Littérature Latine de La Renaissance testifies to a life of academic research partly devoted to trying to prove...