HEALTH AND FOOD IN THE PROVÍNCIA DA IMACULADA CONCEIÇÃO DO BRASIL IN THE 18TH CENTURY

• Grant number: 23/00988-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: June 01, 2023
• End date: April 30, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Ana Carolina de Carvalho Viotti
• Grantee: Edson Tadeu Pereira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/22750-6 - SUPPLY OF FRANCISCAN CONVENTS IN SOUTH PORTUGUESE AMERICA THROUGH CONNECTIONS WITH THE KINGDOM (17TH-18TH CENTURIES), BE.EP.DR

Abstract

The Portuguese Crown encouraged the presence of regular clergy in America from the mid-16th century on. Initially, this entity assumed the costs of sending and maintaining the missionaries. However, as colonization advanced in the 17th and 18th centuries, Lisbon kept for itself the power to authorize the entry and settlement of religious overseas while delegating to the people of the land the task of offering incentives. It was on these terms that the Order of Friars Minor established itself in the captaincies of Southern Brazil from the 17th century on, forming the Franciscan Province of the Immaculada Conceição which included the present states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Espírito Santo. Due to the close observance of poverty among the friars, which hindered the ownership of root goods and the usufruct of the income derived from them, this order depended more on benefaction for its daily sustenance; although the conventual gardens produced food and medicine, for example, the recollections were not self-sufficient. The present research seeks to question the means of maintenance of the friars and the missionary structure in those places in the eighteenth century, a period that proved to be fruitful for the history of the Province of the Immaculada Conceição - due to the variety of writings written by the members themselves, but also by local and metropolitan authorities - proposing, in this sense, to deepen the knowledge about the mechanisms of daily subsistence of these religious in the eighteenth century.