Abstract
Manuel da Nóbrega's letters are the first written testimony of Portuguese religious work in Brazilian lands. The epistolography of this Jesuit priest entered and transformed the colonial archive, through which the Iberian Empires tried to control and order the discovered territory. In this article, we will analyze three “evangelization scenes” present in two of Nóbrega’s letters from the initial period of his expedition (1549-1550), which constitute narrative topics that would then be repeated in the rest of his epistolary production. These three scenes will be analyzed on the basis of their affiliation with the colonial archive in order to learn the social and political conditions that allowed their emergence. The hypothesis that guides this article maintains that, in his letters, Nóbrega went beyond the strict information that he was supposed to give to his superiors in the Order and the Kingdom, as different “scenes of evangelization” emerged that transformed the colonial archive’s ways of telling stories, giving rise to new forms of representation of the individual bodies and the community traditions of native Brazilians, which in turn influenced the planning of European practices of evangelization.
Keywords
Evangelization; Manuel da Nóbrega; Archive