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Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500–1822

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3424012

1527-1900

Bárbara Sommer,

Early Modern Women Writers

This study provides a useful synthesis of scholarship on Roman Catholic Church institutions, policies, and values in relation to women in colonial Brazil. Ambitious in scope, it considers the ways in which church authorities, over the course of three centuries, promoted ideal Christian virtues and education for women, enforced expectations for their marriage or seclusion, and insisted on their religious conformity. Each of the six topical chapters investigates the Iberian origins of church practices related to a particular aspect of women's lives and traces the transferral of those practices to, and their transformation in, Brazil.Although the author hopes to “contribute to writing women back into their own history” (p. 238), the study reveals more about churchmen's attitudes and aims than it does about women's lived experience. The Eurocentric notions that sixteenth-century explorers and missionaries projected onto indigenous women are surveyed in the first chapter. Myscofski's analysis of foundational published primary accounts reiterates historians' findings that Europeans attributed both Edenic innocence and hellish savagery to native women. Such attributes contrast sharply with the ideal chaste and submissive Christian woman and her proper education, described in the second and third chapters. The fourth chapter explores the institution of marriage and the model roles of wife and mother.These first four chapters rely heavily on secondary literature, but in chapter 5, “Freiras and Recolhidas: The Reclusive Life for Brazilian Women,” Myscofski analyzes archival documents to expand our understanding of religious seclusion as an alternative to marriage. The author investigates women's motives for joining a convent or a recolhimento, a less formal house of seclusion, claiming to challenge both social historians and historians of religion by arguing that women “demanded entry into the sacred enclosures so that they might pursue the devotional life and . . . escape the burdens of the secular world” (p. 144). While scholars have advanced our understanding of Brazilian colonial convents in recent decades, Myscofski sheds new light on recolhimentos as shelters for converted sixteenth-century indigenous women prior to marriage, as refuges for white women of Portuguese descent, and as schools for poor eighteenth-century orphan girls.At times untethered from historical context, Myscofski's evidence reveals less about the past than it might. She classifies women's motives for choosing seclusion by type—religious, social, or “mixed”—rather than analyzing them in relation to place, period, institution, or individual. Then she outlines the history of women's convents and recolhimentos, ending the chapter with a sketch of each colonial Brazilian convent. These sections could be better integrated; most readers would benefit from knowing the historical background of these institutions before reading about motives for joining them. Historians will find chronological leaps disconcerting. The author states, for example, that “the expectations for women in Brazilian recolhimentos may best be seen in the statutes written in 1798 for the Recolhimento de Nossa Senhora da Glória in Pernambuco” (p. 165). Yet this evidence reflects Enlightenment concerns with education and societal progress, values that were unlikely to have been embraced in earlier centuries. Indeed, historians will miss temporal and spatial definition throughout the book, as periods and regions are too often blended in a generalized “colonial Brazil.”Myscofski insists that “women were simultaneously marginalized and misrepresented, idealized and demonized—all as a counterpoint to the dominant discourse of the Luso-Brazilian elites in the Roman Catholic Church and colonial government” (p. 238), yet she rarely explores women's quotidian experiences, actions, or attitudes as documented in archival sources. With the exception of chapter 5, which gleans evidence from archives in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, she relies almost exclusively on well-known secondary sources and published primary documents. In addition, little secondary material published in the past decade is referenced here. This is particularly true of chapter 6, “Women and Magic: Religious Dissidents in Colonial Brazil,” although Myscofski does a fine job of bringing together the European religious and civil juridical background on the subject with material from published primary and older secondary sources. Myscofski bemoans the limited number of records and Inquisition cases (p. 195), yet she apparently did not consult the files in the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon or those from eighteenth-century Grão-Pará and Maranhão available online in digitized format through the Universidade Federal do Pará, although she is aware of their existence.While historians might note these and other limitations, Myscofski has done a service to those lacking Portuguese-language skills by providing a valuable introduction to primary source–based research published by accomplished scholars in Brazil and Portugal. The individual chapters offer concise, informative overviews of women and the Catholic Church that are suitable for students and general readers.