Missionaries, cartographers, and astronomers: a study on the construction of collaborative cartographic genres in the Jesuit Province of Paraguay (18th century).

• Grant number: 23/17869-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: February 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: Denise Aparecida Soares de Moura
• Grantee: Lucas Alexandre Albino
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This is a research project on a cartographic genre representing the space of South America produced by Jesuits in the 18th century: the Paraquariae Provinciae model. This model had an impact on both Jesuit and non-Jesuit cartography, creating a standard of visual representation of South America. In our scientific initiation research, we found that its first formulation came from the hands of a Creole Jesuit, Juan Francisco Dávila (1663-1733). So far, we have not located the manuscript source of this map and have been working on and verifying the changes to this model in its engraving and printing context. Missionary cartography, as historiography has already shown, is a multicultural and collaborative product, blending the technical and scholarly knowledge of Jesuits with the astronomical and geographical knowledge of Indigenous peoples. Thus, this project intends to continue the research already in progress since the scientific initiation phase and also to verify how multicultural collaboration took place in the creation of maps of the Province of Paraguay, which became a missionary cartographic model. To this end, various types of historical documents produced by Jesuits will be used [annual letters, correspondence, historical-geographical reports of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay], ethno-historical bibliographic sources, and a series of printed maps. Both geographic and non-geographic contents of the maps will be collected, compared, and evaluated in a dialogical relationship with written sources, following the approach of the Social History of Cartography and, specifically, its concept of cartographic genre.