Second in its fame only to the Lusiads within Cam?es's large body of poetry, S?bolos rios ( Babylon and Zion ) in redondilhas is a philosophically ambitious masterwork of Christian humanism that draws from the psalm Super flumina Babylonis both a general theory of poetry and an intensely focused meditation upon the shape of an individual poet's career. Bringing to bear upon the poem the several learned traditions the poet demands, Fleming's study relates the poem to the traditions of allegorical scriptural exegesis characteristic of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Specific subjects include the centrality of the psalms and the image of David to European poets, the relation of pagan myth to biblical truth, the complexity and purposefulness of Camoes's intertextual strategies, the underappreciated influence on Cam?es of Juan Bosc?n, the exegetical control of the poem's elaborate numerological schemes, and the concept of palinode as literary genre and personal moral statement. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University.Fleming masterfully demonstrates Cam?es's debt to, and participation in, the long and continuing traditions of spiritual or allegorical scriptural exegesis in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance.Preface and AcknowledgementsPoetry as ExegesisThe PsalmThe Eclogue of TheodulusThe Conversion of Juan BoscanBoscan and Some PredecessorsNumbersPalinodeAppendicesBibliography