"Muito obrigada criada e muito sua veneradora": a philological study, digital edition, and courtesy construction in letters of women (1703-1821)

• Grant number: 23/02778-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: April 01, 2024
• End date: February 28, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Portuguese Language
• Principal Investigator: Vanessa Martins do Monte
• Grantee: Beatriz de Freitas Cardenete
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research has as its objective edit and study, from a filological and lisguistic point of view, a group of 70 original letters that were written by women into the context of Portuguese America. It's common that epistolary studies advocate that the absence of a writer is the driving force to write the letters because it is not possible to keep other type of private conversation. Thus, it makes fundamental the creation of mechanisms that make sure the exchange between correspondents is maintained, mainly from courteous forms when talking to the addressee. Supporting this premise, our general objectives are to study how courtesy is built into the women's letters, and transcripts and make an online edition of these letters. For that, we use two perspectives: one is diplomatic which investigates the letter's typology, that foresee a politeness and respect; the other one is linguistic which describe and analyze treatment forms. As specific objectives, we will make the correspondence paleographic studies looking mainly to the letter description to all the alphabet used by the addressee; we will also describe the manuscripts using the codicology with the purpose to investigate the origin of the types of the paper used as support to the letter writing to these women. In addition, we will investigate the production and circulation of these letters, taking in consideration who were these women who wrote those letters and to whom they were sent. We believe, finally, the results gathered can bring important contributions, maily, to the philology, linguistics, Social History of Writing, Women's History. The hypothesis of this work is fundamented in one of our conclusions from our Master's Degree: the letter written by women were built in different forms, not prioritazing some common structures, as the valedictio.