Eliane Cristina Deckmann Fleck

Almas em busca da salvação: sensibilidade barroca no discurso jesuítico (século XVII)

An in-depth reading of the Cartas Ânuas of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, concerning the period from 1609 to 1675, was carried out to come to a deeper understanding of Jesuit-Guarani mission settlements within the framework of a history of sensibility. The Jesuit discourse, mostly through its gaps, allowed for the acknowledgement of the Mission Settlements as a space for the reinvention of meanings, in which it is possible to construct a unique religious sensibility that results from the creative accommodation of Guarani spirituality and of Tridentine devotion and piety.

A Vossa graça nos nossos sentimentos: a devoção à Virgem como garantia da salvação das almas em um manual de devoção do século XVIII

This article analyses the manual Mestre da Vida que ensina a viver e morrer santamente, written by Joao de Castro and published in Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is known that the work was translated and republished many times during the nineteenth century, and that some of these copies circulated in Brazil. In addition to the identification and analysis of the representations of the Virgin present in the work, we are concerned with the orientations that believers should follow in devotional practices to Mary, suggesting an evaluation of the acceptance and diffusion of these orientations in the Luso-Brazilian world. This analysis takes into account recent discussions regarding reading practices, including the many forms of appropriation and reception of texts, inserted in their contexts of production and circulation.

Circulação e produção de saberes e práticas científicas na América meridional no século XVIII: uma análise do manuscrito Materia medica misionera de Pedro Montenegro (1710)

The article analyzes a 1790 manuscript copy of Materia medica misionera, a book written in 1710 by a Jesuit, Pedro Montenegro. Alongside knowledge of a magical or religious nature, and exotic ingredients for the recipes, this work also contains the unmistakable presence of Hippocratic and Galenic conceptions and a growing empiricism, characteristic of the scientific transformations seen in the eighteenth century. The analysis of this work also prompts reflections about the diffusion, circulation and production of pharmacological and medical knowledge in the first half of the eighteenth century within the missions and colleges installed in the area that was the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, southern America.

“Esto es lo que yo buscaba (…) el conocimiento de las yerbas, y su aplicación”: sistematização e difusão dos conhecimentos sobre virtudes de plantas medicinais (América meridional, séculos XVII e XVIII).

This article presents the significant process of cultural exchanges that took place between Indians and Jesuit missionaries in South America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with emphasis on the knowledge regarding medicinal plants and healing practices. The analysis of the Annual Letters of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay and the Materia Medica Misionera work, written by Jesuit brother Pedro de Montenegro in 1710, revealed the important role played by informants, nurses and indigenous scribes, in the identification, collection, and experimentation with native plants, as well in the diffusion and circulation of medical knowledge systematized by the missionaries of the Society of Jesus.

De mancebas auxiliares do demônio a devotas congregantes: mulheres e condutas em transformação (reduções jesuítico-guaranis, séc. XVII)

This article proposes the analysis of the representations of the Guarani Indian women, considering the chronicles by missionaries who, informed by their cultural and social condition and by the colonization and converting projects, defined particular stereotypes and valorized an evolutionary standard of conduct of the Indian women. From devils servants and inciters of lasciviousness and lust, women passed to be represented as those who divulged, in the Jesuit-Guarani reductions, the Christian life values through their exemplary conducts.

Sobre martírios e curas: medicina e edificação nas reduções jesuítico-guaranis (século XVII)

This article broaches the involvement of the Jesuit missionaries with the atten- dance of ill Indians, understood as practice that confers sense and relevance to aposto- late and through which they can reach their edification by salvation of the Indian souls. The effort to cure the illnesses, that compromised the reach of this objective, stays evinced in the use of the American pharmacopeia and therapeutic practices, in spite of the denial of their traditional ceremonial effectiveness.

A morte no centro da vida: reflexões sobre a cura e a não cura nas reduções jesuítico-guaranis (1609-75)

The article investigates the impact of Western Christian concepts of disease and death on indigenous Guarani sensibility and their translation into social representations and practices in the Jesuit-Guarani missions of Paraguays Jesuit Province during the seventeenth century. This research is based on a re-reading of the Cartas Ânuas da Provincia Jesuitica do Paraguai, which encompass the 1609-75 period. The study seeks to ascertain how expressions of Guarani sensibility were appropriated by Jesuit discourse as part of the process of conversion to Christianity. It also assesses observable changes in Guarani sensibility as a result of this new mission reality.

“Morta de amor por Deus”: a vida exemplar de Dona Thomázia, uma mulher letrada e devota que morreu em Lisboa no ano do terremoto (1755)

In this article, we analyze the work Vida portentosa da serva de Deus D. Thomazia de Jesus, written by Dominican Joao Franco and published in 1757. Belonging to the biographical genre, the work describes the physical and psychological characteristics, the chaste life and the extreme devotion of a religious and literate portuguese woman, presenting her as a model of virtue and sanctity. The work written by the Dominican becomes even more singular, not only because the woman who was the subject of the biography died in the same year in which Lisbon would be hit by an earthquake, but also because its author – and also her confessor and spiritual director – found himself forced to rewrite a large part of the text, due to, precisely, the loss of the originals as a consequence of the cataclysm.

A série Black Sails e as contribuições das adaptações cinematográficas de A Ilha do Tesouro na construção do estereótipo do pirata Caribenho

Black Sails series depicts events that occurred prior to the story told in the famous book of Robert Louis Stevenson, The Treasure Island, and like the original work and its various film adaptations, contributes to the construction of the pirate stereotype. This stereotype is generalized from the characteristics marked by several fictional works that end up perpetuating the features of pirates in general as only coming from the Caribbean pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A abordagem historiográfica dos séculos XIX e XX sobre a atuação de médicos e boticários jesuítas na América platina no século XVIII

The positions of Pedro Arata, Moises Santiago Bertoni, Carlos Leonhardt and Guillermo Furlong in the debate about the role of the Society of Jesus in the introduction and development of science in the La Plata region are investigated. Written between 1890 and the late 1950s, these authors’ works not only analyze the medical, pharmaceutical and botanical knowledge of the Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s, but also evaluate their contribution to scientific thinking in the countries colonized by Spain and Portugal. Their positions foretaste the historiographical debate about the reactionary nature of the Jesuit order and reflections about the contribution made by indigenous knowledge of American pharmacopeia to the knowledge the missionaries took to the continents where they were active.