Womans Handle: a philological study on letters from women in Portuguese America (1737-1821)

Author(s)

Beatriz de Freitas Cardenete

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2023-01-27

Examining board members

Vanessa Martins do Monte; Alícia Duhá Lose; Lívia Borges Souza Magalhães

• Advisor: Vanessa Martins do Monte

Abstract

When we refer to the Brazilian colonization period, womens literacy and schooling were almost non-existent. Therefore, it is rare to find primary sources of written pieces by a handle of a woman, mainly those which survived until the present time. Based upon this premise, this thesis has as its objective to gather, edit and study 37 letters written by women from Portuguese America from 1737 to 1821. The motives of these studies were to understand who were the writers of those correspondences, their written skills, and how they wrote their manuscripts. For this purpose, this study used the codicology, the paleography, and the diplomatic. The codicology studies cared to search the kind of paper used and how it was used. The paleography had the objective to establish the senders alphabet, systematize the abbreviations used, analyze the signatures, and research the documents by the criteria defined by Maquilhas (2000) and Santiago (2019) characterized as unskilled hands. Finally, the diplomatic analyze cared to study the structure patterns used in the letters and how they got close or withdrew from the models from the consulted bibliography, mainly from Bellotto (2002) and Monte (2015). Related to the editions, two types of presentations were prepared, both followed by fac-similes editions: semidiplomatic edition, presented in this dissertation, and a virtual edition, published online. The socio-historical search regarding the writers from this research showed that most of the women were from the higher class in the colonial society. That reason justifies why they knew how to read and write at that time. This written knowledge reflects on the results achieved from the analyses done by this research: when we talk about the senders who wrote those letters, we are talking about skilled women who knew the letter structure. As a result from this research, important data was obtained to the study of the womens letter and womens history in the Portuguese America. Furthermore, there are the contributions of the manuscripts themselves and from the edition made, since the philological labor in addition to the digital humanities develops easier access to the written words from the women that were registered in folios (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 19/27719-1 - Handle of woman: a philological work on letters from and about women in Portuguese America
• Grantee: Beatriz de Freitas Cardenete
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master