Marianna Alcoforado

Soror Mariana Alcoforado (Santa Maria da Feira, Beja, 22 April 1640 – Beja, 28 July 1723) was a Portuguese nun living in the convent of the Poor Clares (Convento de Nossa Senhora da Conceição) in Beja, Portugal.

Debate continues as to whether Mariana was the real Portuguese author of the Letters of a Portuguese Nun (comprising five letters). Her purported love affair with the French officer Noël Bouton, Marquis de Chamilly and later Marshal of France, has made Beja famous in literary circles, mainly in Portugal and France.

Some literary scholars consider the letters a fictional work and their authorship is ascribed to Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, comte de Guilleragues (1628–1685), although a real nun named Mariana Alcoforado did exist. In her recent book Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a Seventeenth-Century Forbidden Love (2006), the author Myriam Cyr has attempted to reassert the attribution of the letters to the real Marianna Alcoforado.

For information about authorship and publication of the letters, see "Letters of a Portuguese Nun".

Mariana Alcoforado was born in Beja, daughter of landed proprietor of Alentejo Francisco da Cunha Alcoforado, born at Cortiços, Macedo de Cavaleiros, and first wife Leonor Mendes. She had three brothers: Baltasar Vaz Alcoforado, Miguel da Cunha Alcoforado and Francisco da Cunha Alcoforado, and two sisters: Anna Maria da Cunha Alcoforado, wife of Rui de Mello Lobo Freire, and Maria Peregrina Alcoforado. Beja was the chief garrison town of the province and the principal theatre of the twenty-eight years' war with Spain that followed the Portuguese Revolution of 1640. Mariana's widowed father, occupied with administrative and military commissions, placed her in the wealthy convent of the Conception for security and education. He later remarried and had two more daughters, Maria da Conceição Alcoforado and Catarina Alcoforado, and was also made a Knight of the Order of Christ on December 15, 1647.

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