The royal manuscript collection revisited by the work of the librarian Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos in the nineteenth century

Abstract:

During the establishment of the Portuguese court in Brazil, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, much crossed the Atlantic, including printed papers and manuscripts. In this text, we discuss the royal manuscript collection through the work of the librarian Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos. The main subjects examined are: a) the experience of the enlightened subject, assistant to a librarian at the Royal Library of Rio de Janeiro in the universe of letters, analyzing his dimension as a cultural mediator; and b) his daily work in the Manuscript Room, including the production of a systematic map of the manuscript collection. These propositions are situated on the basis of his letter writing practice and the production of map in question. This is ongoing research focused on privileged documentation to make considerations about the universe of written culture of the period and its developments in contemporary times.

Keywords:
Manuscripts; Letters, Johannine Period

Resumo:

Para o estabelecimento da corte portuguesa no Brasil, no início do século XIX, muitos aparatos atravessaram o Atlântico, dentre eles papéis impressos e manuscritos. Neste texto problematizaremos o acervo real de manuscritos a partir da atuação do bibliotecário Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos. As principais matérias examinadas serão: a) a experiência do súdito ilustrado, ajudante de bibliotecário da Real Biblioteca do Rio de Janeiro no universo das letras, analisando sua dimensão de mediador cultural; e b) seu trabalho cotidiano na Sala de Manuscritos, incluindo a produção de um mapa sistemático sobre o acervo real de manuscritos. As proposições estão situadas a partir de sua prática de escrita de cartas e a produção do referido mapa. Trata-se de uma pesquisa em andamento que se debruçou sobre uma documentação privilegiada para tecer considerações sobre o universo da cultura escrita do período e seus desdobramentos na contemporaneidade.

Palavras-chave:
Manuscritos; Cartas, Período Joanino.

The arrival of the Portuguese monarchy in Rio de Janeiro in 1808 resulted in many concerns. One that received special attention was the preservation of cultural heritage. “The emblematic space of Court” in Ana Cristina Araújo’s expression; the library was a place of great respectability as sign of monarchy and nobility (Araújo, 2008, p. 25) and was conceived as an important instrument of the configurations of power. In this perspective, the historian Roger Chartier reiterated that “collections of manuscripts and printed material [from royal libraries] could be used in the service of knowledge, the history of the monarchy, politics, or state propaganda” (Chartier, 2006, p. 185).

The movement of the books and manuscripts from the Real Biblioteca d’Ajuda to Brazil started in 1810 and was done in three phases. It was a history of conquests, victories, and conflicts that crossed the ocean and which symbolically sustained an idea of the political superiority of Portuguese monarchy. In this transfer of the collection, the second stage reached Rio de Janeiro in March along with Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos. In September, the latter informed his father about the arrival of the “final 87 boxes of books”¹ in Rio de Janeiro, which came under the responsibility of José Lopes Saraiva, servant of the Royal Library.² While the transfer of the royal treasures was finally made safe; the royal staff in the new institution had a Herculean task to carry out.

The Royal Library in Brazil was run by Fr. Joaquim Dâmaso, belonging to the Congregation of the Oratory of Lisbon, and Friar Gregório José Viegas, from the Third Order of San Francisco. According to Ana Cristina Araújo, “with different degrees, payments, and functions, all these individuals were paid as staff of the Paço and worked in it exclusively for the library”³ (Araújo, 2008, p. 21). With the arrival of the court and the vast amount of printed and manuscript paper that came with it, a new reality in the world of writing, reading, and the circulation and preservation of paper began to be reconfigured with the lettered elite and the universe of written culture in Brazil (Meirelles, 2017, p. 378-430). Based on these conditions, we present here the main materials examined in this text involving Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos: a) the experience of an enlightened subject, an assistant to the librarian of the Royal Library of Rio de Janeiro, also understood as an intellectual mediator in the universe of written culture; b) his daily work within the Manuscript Room, including drafting a systematic map to understand and classify the royal manuscripts. Both propositions are situated based on writing practices which involved the production, circulation, and conservation of documents, privileged documentation to discuss the universe of written culture in the nineteenth century and its developments in the contemporary era.⁴

Written culture and cultural mediations: the practices of the librarian Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos

Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1811. At the age of 30, unmarried, he left his family in Europe on an important mission: to accompany the transport of the second group of books which were part of the collection of the Portuguese crown, preserved in Ajuda Library. His ten years’ experience in Lisbon working in the Royal Library, which allowed him to access and register printed books and manuscripts, as well as royal documents of considerable importance to the monarchy, were important for his choice from among other trusted subjects of the monarchy.

In Lisbon, the Marrocos family counted on the protection of the 3^rd Marquis of Angeja and the 1^st Viscount of Santarém. In Rio de Janeiro his proximity was initially circumscribed to Francisco José Rufino de Sousa Lobato, Viscount of Vila Nova da Rainha since 1810, one of the men most trusted by the monarch who was responsible, together with the influential Tomás Antonio Vilanova Portugal, for administering the royal household. Among his many - and well paid - functions in the new Court were that of clerk of the Council and working for the Mesa de Consciência e Ordens (Table of Conscience and Orders; Malerba, 2000, p. 269). After a few months in Brazil, Luís Joaquim informed his father about his residence, paid by the Royal Treasury. This privilege was directly linked to his exercise of the new function “which will be established here with great honors and which has caused great expectation”. Despite exalting the benefits of the future, he declared that he was “obliged to keep them secret” (Letter no. 5, p. 82).

Divided between his functions in the library and working with the manuscripts, Marrocos spoke with his father about his projects. Three months later, he reported to his family about what would be one of his most important functions: being responsible for “taking account and care of the arrangement of the conservation of the Manuscripts of the Crown Library (which His Royal Highness wanted to remain together with His Person), and of other Papers, which His Royal Highness ordered for the future” (Letter no. 6, p. 84). Achieving this position of such “importance and responsibility” (Letter no. 6, p. 84) required the help and experience of his father for his project to be better designed: “I was very pleased that Your Grace sent me a Letter through the mail of a Copy of the System of Bibliographic Classification” (Letter no. 9, p. 92), referring to the catalogue implemented by António Ribeiro dos Santos for the Public Library of Lisbon.⁵ Moreover, his rise to the new and more prestigious position counted on the decisive intermediation of the Viscount of Vila Nova da Rainha, who Marrocos a little more than a year later would call “decidedly my Protector and Friend”, and who gave him public proof of friendship, coming to his defense against some of his detractors “strongly attacked me; allowing me triumph over them” (Letter no. 33, p. 161).

In addition to the Viscount of Vila Nova da Rainha being Luís Joaquim’s main supporter in the universe of political and cultural sociability during the first years of his period in Rio de Janeiro,⁶ he was also responsible for administering the manuscript room and answering for D. João’s orders related to the world of art and written culture. In January 1812, Marrocos told his father about the beginning of his new activity.

If it were not for the connection of silence and reserve, which I have in my new position, I could easily help Your Grace in your Work, which you are once again working on; since I have here with abundance great material to enrich it. I never thought I would find in this Archive such precious things, but I have the greatest regret if I do not give them the proper value: and since my entrance determined that I could not consent to the extraction [sic] of my copy, this is what leaves me awkward. Here, God be praised, there is greedy ignorance, or material greed (Letter no. 12, p. 102).

We do not know precisely what aspect of his father’s work Luís Joaquim was referring to. Despite this, Inocêncio Francisco da Silva states that in 1811 Francisco José published Mapa Alphabetico das Povoações de Portugal printed by Impressão Régia de Lisboa. Even without any indication of authorship, da Silva guarantees that “this work undoubtedly belongs him, according to what Sr. A. J. Moreira has told me, who knows this” (Silva, 1859, v. 2, p. 413). We should note that Luís Joaquim alludes to the wealth of the Crown’s manuscripts and the fact that he does not have authorization to make any copy of these. This commentary perhaps indicates that probably if the librarian were permitted to transcribe the royal documents with his pen, he would only choose those considered by him as “of great value” in the production of the work of his progenitor and had no shame about sending copies by post to be carefully accessed, read, copied, and interpreted as an inspiring source.

In relation to the archivist’s interaction with the documentary heritage with which he worked, Luciana Heymann - researching the personal archive of Filinto Müller -, calls attention to the need to read him within his responsibilities, which are intrinsic to his activities - namely, the organization and arrangement of manuscript collections. Even following the norms of this field of knowledge, he imprinted his subjectivity on the “configuration of the archive, thereby transformed into documentary heritage” (Heymann, 1997, p. 45-46). In this sense, we can highlight that Marrocos also worked as a librarian at the Royal Public Library of Rio de Janeiro and in this locus of culture was a leading character (Conceição, Meirelles, 2016). As Marc Baratin and Christian Jacob point out, the history of libraries (and we can add, of archives) - considering the intrinsic relations of the constitution which marked the institutions during the Modern period - also had to be conceived “as a dialectical space in which, in each stage of history, the limits and functions of tradition, the boundaries of what can be said, the legible, the thinkable, the continuity of genealogies and schools, the cumulative nature of the fields of knowledge or their internal fractures and their reconstructions are negotiated” (Baratin, Jacob, 2000, p. 11).

The conservation/holding of documentation, whether printed or manuscript, has a historicity before going through an archival ordering (systematization), in other words, there exists a regime of practices which constitute archival practices. An archive can emerge from two orders: one historical and the other archival - a question problematized by the researcher Adi Ophir, in proposing a dialogue between history, archive, and discourse (Ophir, 2011, p. 74). According to the latter, the historian ought to question the order of the archive before producing historical knowledge and should consider the historic order present in this (Ophir, 2011, p. 91). Therefore, in the preparation of the historical discourse it is essential that ponderations be formulated in the constitution of archives/collections as a problem. In this case, it is interesting to us to analyze how Marrocos seeks to leave his mark in the constitution of the manuscript collection of the Crown, considering his position as Royal Librarian, a privileged reader of documentation he has in his hands and seeks to master. Knowledge of documentation, due to the impetus of ordering, systematizing, and naming, makes him a distant figure of the monarch, negotiating space and criteria, defining historical and archival orders, which, without fail, have to be considered in the analysis of this documentation, for a perspective of the history of written culture.

Returning to the relationship of Luís Joaquim with his father, in regard to the exchanges of information about collections, among what now resides in Brazil, and what remains in Portugal, Marrocos placed himself in the position of an intellectual mediating knowledge which could, a posteriori, be produced by its interlocutor. The category of subjects called mediating intellectuals or cultural mediators, defended by the historians Ângela de Castro Gomes and Patrícia Hansen (2016), can be defined in a broad sense as

Men who produce knowledge and the communication of ideas, directly or indirectly linked to social policy intervention. Therefore, these subjects can and should be treat ed as strategic actors in the areas of culture and policy which are interwoven, without tensions, but with distinctions, although they historically occupied a position of variable recognition in social life (Gomes, Hansen, 2016, p. 10).

In this perspective, these authors highlight the centrality of the socio-political production of ideas, which allows a dialogue with the intellectual paradigms in force in the cultural context in which the trajectory of the investigated is inserted. Furthermore, they reiterate the valorization of the construction of languages, vocabulary, and sensitivities shared among the individuals and groups of intellectuals in order to have, as researchers, a greater dimension of the specificities of the universe of these subjects “increasingly thought of in connection with their peers and with broader society. In other words, other subjects connected among themselves, with genealogies and imagined pasts” (Gomes, Hansen, 2016, p. 12).

In dialoging with the category defended by Gomes and Hansen, we understand that Marrocos’ experience as a privileged reader of a documentation considered “strategic” by the Crown was decisive. While conquering a place in the sun within the royal spectrum was a daily dispute among courtiers, access to information was within the reach of few. Since he handled the king’s manuscripts in the Royal Cabinet, it is very possible that his activity engendered many conflicts. However, in no hypothesis did Luís Joaquim like to be removed from his place of work. Two situations described by him in the letter of 28 September 1813 - sent to this father - reveal important details to us about his work as a man of letters officially linked to the Portuguese monarchy. The first of them refers to concern with the selection of manuscripts which composed the royal collection.

I have a very effective insinuation to ask Your Grace for a favor, to inquire if possible if in the Library of the Inquisitor Bishop there exists a manuscript book with a Page with this title = Public Festivities and Functions of the Court = bound in in red Morocco leather, and very neat, and all of this with reserve and secrecy, as it is of great and superior effort. If Your Mercy can discover anything, keep an eye on it, and notify me immediately on the first occasion, so that other necessary measures can be taken (Letter no. 54, p. 223; emphasis added).

Marrocos’ request to his father appears to be of great relevance for his work within the manuscript room. Rather than just asking Francisco José for urgency and total discretion, Luís Joaquim describes in detail the material composition of the manuscript, demonstrating that he was aware of it, including in terms of the quality of the production - in relation to content - but also in relation to materiality and the respective conservation. Such knowledge and care in the investigation of where the manuscript could be located, indicates that very probably this had been a special request coming directly from the Prince Regent, who possibly knew the content of the document and how this could influence him in running public festivities in the new court of Rio de Janeiro. The theme of festivities and the public functions of the Court was of capital importance for the strengthening of absolutist monarchies in the Modern Age, since they reiterated their political representations and reaffirmed the sociability they desired to construct in dialogue with their subjects in the public space.

As in Europe, in the Americas the calendar of public festivities of the Johannine Crown was part of the daily life of royalty. The different celebrations and commemorations of monarchies “signify the political and symbolic reappropriation of urban layouts and environments [which are] privileged events for the mapping and study of the representations which mediate relations and contradictions between the state, royal power, and society”, demonstrates Emílio C. Rodrigues Lopes (2004, p. 28). This special request for his father evidence for us how strong the intellectual ties and trust were between father and son, who, as well as playing out the same activity - royal librarians in similar institutions - they had a common objective which connected them even further: the strengthening of the Marrocos family in relation to the royalty, which in practice appears in public recognition through the conquest of traditional graces.⁷ At the end of this first and confidential request, he continues:

I would like to propose another similar recommendation, asking Your Grace to send me, when possible, a copy of a pamphlet which is the translation in verse made by Fr. José Agostinho [de Macedo], of a French Poem, which is entitled = Contemplation of Nature = and its object is Natural History. This work became famous; because the translator, judging that no one knew of the French Work, published it as an original, and so abortive that it did not extend beyond the 2^nd Verse. It has a dedication to the great Fr. Veloso and has a very long prologue in which he curses the Poets (Letter no. 54, p. 223; emphasis added).

Luís Joaquim appears very different in this request. In addition to the object of his interest being a printed pamphlet, i.e., something that had broad circulation in Portuguese society (and for this reason much more connected to the public universe than to the manu script he had just referred to), here particularly the focus of his concern appears to us to be more modest: probably comments on the content and translation of the pamphlet in the lettered circuits of Court, arousing in him the curiosity to read it, for two reasons. First, the question of a French publication being translated with an attribution of authorship in Portuguese, as if the circulation of printed material did not happen effectively in the cultural circuits of Europe - a question to which Luís Joaquim even attributed an air of irony. “This Work is Famous; because the translator, judging that no one knew of the French Work, published it as an original, and so abortive that it did not extend beyond the 2^nd Verse”. In second place, his interest was certainly attracted by knowing of the dedication to Fr. José Mariano da Conceição Veloso, whom he considered an “unequalled botanist” - whose literary estate had been donated to the Royal Library two years before and contained around 2,500 books, as well as prints and original drawings of Flora Fluminensis. At the time of the donation of the collection, Marrocos told his father that D. João in person “came to his miserable Library and Manuscripts, and I then had the displeasure of seeing the great Flora Fluminensis, 3 volumes, in folio, which is worth more than 400,000 cruzados.” As well as knowing that the Prince Regent’s visit to the royal collection was a daily practice, Marrocos also reflected on the important Flora Fluminensis, if it had been finalized: according to the librarian “such a magnificent work, after being completed it will be worth a good million!” He also seemed to know of other manuscripts by Friar Veloso: “My Inoculação do Entendimento fell into hell, since it does not appear among his Manuscripts; and I now believe that he, when leaving for here, left this Paper in the Royal Press” (Letter no. 9, p. 93; original emphasis). This timely comment demonstrates how circumscribed Marrocos’ relations were with men of letters and science, who, like Veloso, worked in favor of knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge through the press. In this letter to his father, Luís Joaquim’s desire to impress him through his intellectual knowledge of the collection which he had in his hands is evident, as well as his ability to constitute sociopolitical relations of relevance in Court. In the case of this letter in particular and also of having at hand the active correspondence of Luís Joaquim to his father, it is necessary that we keep in mind the dimension of the importance of the act of preparing and writing his own trajectory. In relation to the set of correspondence, the historian Giselle Venâncio calls our attention to the fact that it is possible to apprehend “the strategies and practices of personal and professional relationship” of these subjects, thereby understanding, “in which form letter writing constituted a practice which aimed to establish and maintain a network of social, professional, and intellectual relations” (Venâncio, 2005, p. 79). In the case of Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos, these relations were reiterated and often problematized in the inter-Atlantic dialogue constituted between father and son, mediated by pen and ink writing.

When Luís Joaquim’s correspondence is analyzed, it is often displaced from an impor tant aspect of its historicity: the archival practice that characterizes it. When we access the letters of the librarian, we do not find either minutes or a copier book which could be used for the preservation of content. Luís Joaquim’s correspondence was transected by an important archival practice, the assiduous work carried out by his father over ten years which characterized the exchange of letters between the two - a protagonism which cannot be ignored if one seeks to understand the historical and archival order which constitutes the exchange of letters and the concepts of conservation/systematization and that are expressed in the constitution of the Index, which was also considered through dialogue with the father, considered by Luís Joaquim as his political and intellectual adviser (Meirelles, 2017, p. 407).

According to Luciana Heymann it is important that personal documents are not understood as the natural result of individual trajectories, but “as a product of personal and collective investments” (Heymann, 2013, p. 75) - which enriches the exploratory perspectives of these collections. According to her, “Personal investments, public image, and visions of the world are objectified in personal archives and in the uses which their holders or heirs give them and provide keys to understand the archive which go beyond traditional associations between trajectory and documents” (Heymann, 2013, p. 75). In the postmodern view of Terry Cook, the conception of “total archives” re-dimensions the understanding of the nature of personal and institutional archives, reinforcing the inter-relational perspectives in which there is “a broader vision of archives, sanctioned by society as a whole and a reflection of it, instead of an a priori shaped vision” (Cook, 1998, p. 142).

In this sense, we problematized Marrocos’ principal cultural patrimony to which we now have access - his letters - considering him through his complex trajectory, in other words, considering that the set of letters crossed the Atlantic and passed carefully through the ordering criteria of his father, who kept, organized, commented on the originals, and possibly discarded those which compromised the image of good royal officials of either of them. Moreover, his father kept the letters sent to other family members in a single place, characterizing a possible family archive, with the letters of the only Marrocos who at that moment resided at Court, in other words Rio de Janeiro. Since his father remained a royal official, taking care of the small part of the library’s collection which remained in Lisbon, the intertwining between public and private allowed a family archive to remain in that public space, which probably guaranteed the preservation of the letters to the present day. These possibilities of analysis are at an initial phase and have contributed to the studies we are carrying out, considering the theoretical perspective of written culture which puts in dialogue the production, circulation, conservation, and uses of documents.

Returning to the discussion about the scope of the publishing choices of Luís Joaquim, it should be noted that he was constructing a perception of works circulating in the Atlantic, despite depending on his position of librarian carried out within royal institutions. These choices extended beyond the doors and windows of royal buildings - they ran through the streets, the houses, the public and private meetings, in other words the networks of sociability, mainsprings of taste, and hovered over the sadness of not finding among his treasures the Inoculação do Entendimento, by Fr. Veloso, which was lost in the time of the memory of its reading and the criticism made about the lack of organization of such a distinct collection. As a qualified reader responsible for the selection of material which could become part of the Royal Library’s collection, Luís Joaquim did not appear to be in a hurry to meeting this demand, rather he circumscribed a subject he considered relevant among his reading choices.

Months later, in January 1814, Marrocos reported to his father about a task in the Manuscript Room given to him by the monarch. Let us look at this:

On this same Ship I am sending Mr. Alexandre Antonio das Neves a copy of the manuscript Treatise of Francisco de Holanda = From the Factory which closed in the city of Lisbon = made by hand at the Order of His Royal Highness, whose copy I will not send directly to Your Grace to see it, since it is large and heavy […] I was pleased that Mr. Marquis of Aguiar praised it from the beginning to the end, in which he spent a large part of Sunday afternoon, the 27 day of the past month (Letter no. 65, p. 251).

As can be noted, there was a relationship of great relevance and trust in the position he occupied. In addition to the monarch’s request to make a manuscript copy which had to reach the hands of the royal librarian Alexandre Antonio das Neves, a question which allows us to identify the need to circulate manuscript papers with specific interests and their preservation on this type of support, as well as indicating the constant circulation of printed material, manuscripts, and printed copies of manuscripts, constituting the royal collection on both sides of the Atlantic. On the other hand, this situation also indicates to us that Luís Joaquim’s work was carefully and attentively read by one of the most impor tant royal ministers in the political universe of the new Court, Marquis of Aguiar who, at this time, was acting on an interim basis for the Minister of Business, Foreign Affairs, and War. According to Lúcia Bastos, his “choice in the composition of ministry was shown to be strategic, since of all the fidalgos who accompanied the regent he was the most familiar with Brazil” (Neves, Vainfas, 2008, p. 163). In any case, unlike what he said to his father at the beginning of 1812, two years later Marrocos appears to have received royal authorization to make manuscript copies, even indicating that he had the freedom to choose whom to send them, if he wanted to. However, we do not know if the royal license for copying manuscripts occurred just in specific circumstances or if it was something Marrocos had won from the monarch. Irrespective of this, we reiterate the importance of the position occupied by both - father and son - within the logic of court society: they were men considered loyal to the Court who handled very ably a technical and strategic knowledge specifically aimed at the world of the choice, use, and preservation of fundamental papers for the construction of the memory of the Portuguese monarchy - which strengthened the position of Luís Joaquim as a cultural mediator. Without dismissing, as mentioned above, the construction of family and personal memories, as in the case of Marrocos’ letters.

In thinking about the practices of written culture in a universe in which “the close connections between manuscript writings and printed texts was not limited to objects which were explicitly organized” (Chartier, 2014, p. 106), we suggest the hypothesis that the father was focused on the perfectioning of this printed work (Da Fábrica do que falece à cidade de Lisboa) through access to the reading of other printed and/or manuscript works. In relation to the standardization of print works, Roger Chartier states:

[this] does not imply that we should ignore the many processes which limited its effects: a correction made during printing which, due to the plurality of possible associations in the pages corrected and not corrected in copies of the same edition, multiply the states of a “same” text; marginal manuscript notes which make a copy used by an individual reader unique, or a variety of printed or manuscript texts collected in an individual manner for the reader and bound in a single volume (Chartier, 2014, p. 106-107).

Studies of the history of written culture in the modern period have advanced considerably in recent decades. Investigations of books are integrated with those of reading practices, advancing the debate in the relationship between the production and different uses of writings and the possibilities of conservation. In this debate, the historian Roger Chartier highlights the need to “examine more closely the manuscript in the printing era”, since, for various reasons, “at least the first four centuries of the existence [of printing] did not cause the disappearance either of manuscript communication or of manuscript publication”, with its permanence also being an invitation “to new uses of handwriting” (Chartier, 2014, p. 104-105). Specifically in relation to these new uses of manuscript handwriting, Fernando Bouza emphasizes their insertion in other socio-cultural demands, which acts above all on two fronts: the idea of solemnity and privacy, as well as the need to maintain writing opening and not fixed - since the fixation of writing was a fundamental characteristic of printing. The circuits of manuscript communication become more specific and restricted, since while printing resulted in diffusion, on the other hand, “the manuscript mastered secrecy and deference” (Bouza, 2002, p. 135-136). We will now move on to the specificities of the production of a manuscript considered of great relevance for the historicity of written culture, which allows us to discuss themes of interest for the cultural circuits of the court.

Luís Joaquim’s Systematic Map of Classification: some questions

On 27 February 1812, Luís Joaquim enthusiastically told his father: “this is the first day of my work in the Manuscripts, in the Room where I am writing this [letter]”, concretizing what he had shared in the letter of October 1811 (no. 6), when he announced he had received the trust of the king to put into order and take care of the Crown’s Manuscripts. In assuming this function, seeing how disordered the papers were, he soon began to think about how to “give His Royal Highness an idea of the Treasure” which the manuscripts represented. The strength of the symbolic value of these papers was usually indicated by Luís Joaquim: “I never thought I would find in this archive such precious things; but I feel the greatest regret for not giving them their proper value”, as he wrote in January 1812 (Letter no. 12, p. 102). He was concerned with the possible disregard of the papers, a question he highlighted in a letter on 3 July 1812, when he stated that the musician Marcos Antonio Portugal,⁸ with royal authorization, had been in the manuscript room and in an insolent manner had said “that all of them are worth nothing, and that His Royal Highness did not do well by having them brought here, they should have been left in Torre do Tombo!” (Letter no. 26, p. 139-141), a posture which left the librarian indignant to a certain extent. This situation made Luís Joaquim reinforce his desire to imprint his mark on the organization and presentation of the royal manuscript collection, not only based on his intellectual conceptions constructed during his ten year experience in Ajuda Library, but also in the conception of an inward perspective, based on the place he occupied, running the manuscript room.

In thinking about and sharing with his father how he intended to organize the Crown’s manuscripts, he stated that he had the intention of producing a “Literary and critical memorial of this same Body of Manuscripts, since even here it is not known what exist, mainly what belongs to the Political Government” - indicating that the papers had left Lisbon without any type of ordering or classification. In relation to the Memorial, Marrocos aimed to compose a plan or chart, a classification system, similar to what he had done for the printed material - “for the arrangement of the Same Books, and I deem that I did not stray from the trail of the best Bibliographers, although it was without any help, something more than mental” (Letter no. 14, p. 107). While his intention was to make the manuscripts known, he intended, on the other hand, to please his father and his monarch, reiterating that: “If I conclude my surprise in a good way, I will deem myself happy in this sense, and I will give Your Grace a copy of everything, when possible” (Letter no. 14, p. 107-109).

Within this circuit of mediators, on 29 August 1812, Marrocos told his father about the advances of his project for the manuscript room:

For now I will continue my work: I have concluded a Systematic Map of Classification, as I have announced to Your Grace in another [letter]; I will first show this Map to Friar António de Arrábida, who asked me for this preference, and afterwards I will give it to Viscount Vila Nova da Rainha for him to present it to His Royal Highness (Letter no. 28, p. 143).

In indicating in 1813 those who had the privilege of accessing his Systematic Map, entitled General Index to the Manuscripts of the Library of the Crown displayed alphabetically, Marrocos circumscribed hierarchical questions among the men who circulated the papers of the monarchy, also evidencing the concern and care of the Crown with intellectual property. In this sense, we can ask the question: what for Luís Joaquim was a “Literary and Critical Memorial”? Was it the systematization of manuscripts? Or a minute review of each documentary set? Based on the analysis of the Map, it can be seen that each document received a brief presentation, with information about content and materiality, which indicates that, beforehand, Luís Joaquim began his intended literary memorial, we just cannot specify if it was a critical one or not. However, the composition of the Literary Memorial was accompanied by a classification system, since at the end of the Map we can find a system of ordering referring to Luís Joaquim’s unfinished intention to make a guide to layout of the collection. Unfinished considering the interventions which the document presents at different temporalities, as we briefly described above.

According to Peter Burke, a process of analysis converts relatively raw information into effective knowledge. A term much used in Modernity, above all after 1750, the “analysis” of a set of data, information, or documents achieved an interdisciplinary sense at the same time that it maintained the specificity of meanings in particular areas. Moreover, in defining the eighteenth century as “the great era of a classification” - not only as a tool, but as a model for all knowledge - puts in evidence the importance of the analysis of the archives classified a priori - or the archival organization - of a determined institution. In this sense, it always emphasizes the preeminence of values in dispute among the subjects involved with its conception and organization. He thus reiterates that archives are another domain with disputes among classifications which began to become differentiated and which disputed spaces among the institutions.⁹

In this universe, “it was inevitable that this large movement of reclassification would sooner or later include the branches of knowledge itself” (Burke, 2012, p. 72). This is what would occur in the second half of the eighteenth century when Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert used the traditional image of the “tree of knowledge” to think about the classification systems in the Encyclopedie. These subjects “did not take any branch of the tree as a natural division or as given.” To the contrary, it “could be formed in various ways”, in a more or less arbitrary manner.¹⁰ In analyzing the impact of this process, Peter Burke demonstrated how, on the other hand, the reclassification of books (and manuscripts we can add) had practical consequences, which impacted the mental image of the tree of knowledge in contemporaneity - both on the part of scholars and the public in general. In other words, Western society “has a great debt to the organization of libraries [and archives], more than any other thing” (Burke, 2012, p. 73). Burke also puts us in front of the historical scope of these transformations. According to him, “until the 1870s, each library had its own system of classification based on maps of knowledge in the style of those presented in the Encyclopedia, and at times continued to use them much after being considered obsolete” (Burke, 2012, p. 74).

We cannot identify records about the sending of a copy of the Systematic Map to Francisco José, which does not mean that this hasn’t occurred. On voyages across the Atlantic the loss of letters was usual. Moreover, we still support the hypothesis that Luís Joaquim could have sent it as an appendix to a particular letter, without mentioning it in the body of the text, as a form of maintaining secrecy, or alternatively the letter with the copy may not have been preserved by his father (whether intentionally or not). In this sense, it is not possible to state that the version presently contained in Ajuda Library would have been this copy. However, we believe that it is the version which accompanied the royal manuscripts when they returned to Lisbon, in a new maritime saga in 1821.

Based on these initial ponderations, we will now examine the Systematic Map of Classification. The document which we will now discuss is formed by 35 in-folios or bi-folios - which are pages folded once, thereby generating four pages, with paginations being marked only on the recto and never on the verso - with some exceptions, as in the last three pages. The pages are in a notebook format, in which they appear one within another, bound in a fragile form with thread and without a cover. It shows marks of adhesive tapes placed at the same time and which left and aggravated marks on the paper.¹¹

The Map, named on the first page as the General Index of Manuscripts of the Crown Library, has nine sections: Politics, Theology, Canon Law, Civil Law, Ecclesiastical History, Civil History, Literary History, Sciences and Arts, and finally Fine Letters. This classification reinforced what Luís Joaquim told his father in February 1812, when he indicated that it involved a rich collection about political government. The scale of the presentation was probably organized according to criteria of relevance established by Luís Joaquim¹² and in accordance with the interests of the period, according to private orders and in dialogue with the social practices of the cultural networks involved.¹³ Marrocos was thus part of a privileged group which allowed him to establish his own criteria to classify and order important royal manuscripts. Beginning with the Political section the Map also dialogues with what the Spanish historian Fernando Bouza emphasized, showing that during the modern period there existed a fruitful diffusion of political treatises in manuscripts involving distinct themes which went for and against established monarchies (Bouza, 2001, p. 65).

In studying the composition of libraries in the eighteenth century, Chartier (1999) highlighted the importance of the making, ownership, and uses of catalogues, already mentioned by Gabriel Naudé, an important French librarian in the seventeenth century. According to Naudé, “The transcription of all the catalogues cannot be omitted or neglected”, especially those of “states and officers which, since they are neither known nor frequented, remain buried in perpetual silence” (Naudé, 1999, p. 74.) In this sense, we can see how much Marrocos’ Systematic Map is configured as the composition of a General Index which dialogues with the tradition of the modern catalogues of a space with restricted circulation, but is of symbolic importance for the Court and those attending it.

In a general form, the documents listed contain a title, date, observations about the number of pages, the material used (often parchment), as well as the state of conservation, and information on the left which indicate the current location in Ajuda Library, data entered after Luís Joaquim and which we will briefly comment on. On the right margin, on the pages in which appear lists of documents, within each section appear references about the quarto and octavo formats, in other words, indicating the respective in-quarto and in-octavo formats, a page folded twice and sometimes three times.

The Systematic Map is composed of interventions of different times, considering the presence of the three main types of handwriting. The main form of handwriting is undoubtedly that of Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos, taking into account a comparative analysis with the letters sent to his father. In order of frequency, the second form of handwriting, which we call Librarian A, was probably made by those who handled the manuscripts after they returned to Lisbon. The third form of handwriting, Librarian B, appears occasionally on the following pages: 24 verso and 70 recto. In this classification, we do not consider contemporary interventions on the title page, which refer to the location of the document in Ajuda Library. The material and codicological aspects of the General Index still deserve a detailed study, discussing the intervention and the composition of the document, completed in Lisbon based on notes that accompanied it. We have decided to name notes the small pieces of loose paper which were preserved along with the document, with these traces on paper indicating stages of the construction of a document which was incomplete having been conceived and initiated in Rio de Janeiro and completed in Lisbon. Therefore, although Luís Joaquim stated that he had completed the Map, we do not know if it was really finalized, or if the preserved version is an unfinished one.

As a brief analysis exercise, we will present a timely and still ongoing study of the Civil History section. The indication of the title is in Luís Joaquim’s handwriting, however, the list of documents appears not to have been made with his pen, given the spelling variations. In this sense, we identified that the Civil History, Literary History, and Sciences and Arts sections were written by Librarian A, based on the notes which accompanied the Index to Lisbon. We can prove this information with the register made from the folio in which Librarian A starts to intervene, “what follows was left by Luiz Joaquim dos Santos Marrócos in notes, which I used here” (BA-PT, 49-IX-44, f 64).¹⁴

In the Civil History section the documents are not displayed in alphabetical order and amount to 35 records, dated between 1570 and 1791. Many have the indication of being parchment and the commentary “it is the original”, thereby attributing greater symbolic and material value to the documents. The third document described as “Origin of the Goths, who ruled Spain. Page 143, in parchment” there appears the comment “very ruined and corroded [sic] ink” which indicates the importance the catalogue attributes to the state of conservation, since similar registers appear throughout the Systematic Map. Many documents in this section are related to the period of the Iberian Union, as well as being composed of collections of miscellaneous reports, involving Portugal and Spain.

The oldest work in the section appears with the following description “Summary of Universal History. Parchment. This work appears to have this title on its spine. = El Apoles Gracioso = of which little is known. 1570”, indicating reference 51-II-47 on the left margin, demonstrating that at the beginning of the twentieth century it was located in Ajuda Library, considering the analysis of interventions which appear registered in the General Index. It can be seen that the classification not only registers the manuscript work, but also inserts dates and information which valorize and indicate the state of conservation, highlighting the materiality and also reinforce their symbolic value, such as the comments: “little is known” and “it is the original”. These notes express Luís Joaquim’s experience in the handling of the written culture of its period and with the cultural mediations which were involved. Moreover, it is possible to analyze the historicity which is being registered in the collection, imprinting other meanings on the papers which exceed their content, by highlighting singular aspects of the materiality and the origin of the manuscripts.

Among the works listed we can also highlight: “Faria (Manoel Severim de) = Various political speeches, with the lives of João de Barros, Luiz de Camões, and Diego do Couto. In parchment. / It is the original” one in-quarto with the reference 51-IV-48. Manoel Severim de Faria, also known as Chantre of the Sé of Évora, was an important character in the period of the Iberian Union, above all in relation to the circuits of exchange of information and knowledge about the overseas empires.¹⁵ Within the Civil History section, we can also highlight the “List of all the successes, that there were in the time of the Government of His Excellency Sr Vasco Fernandes Cezar de Menezes, Viceroy and Captain General of India. Parchment = 1712 =”, a document in in-quarto format with the register 52-VIII-43 on the right margin and 51-IV-?4 on the left, which can mark a variation in its location when it returned to Lisbon or more than one version. It is a significant document in the study of Portuguese overseas administration, considering Menezes’ important political role in India and in Brazil, where he acted as viceroy in the period 1720-1735.¹⁶

Also in the Civil History section, we can also mention the first work “Rizio (Juan Pablo Martir) = Tragic History of the life of the Duke of Biron. Printed in Barcelona by Sebastian de Cormellos. 1629. 110 pages, in-quarto, parchment”. It is an important work of seventeenth century Spanish political thought, recognized among the mirrors of privanza, a literary genre which “served as a vehicle for the construction of a sophisticated intellectual product, i.e., the idea of a perfect Christian private sphere - the model of behavior for the exercise of privanza in Spanish political thought at the time” (Oliveira, 2009, p. 657). This work was important at that time and Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo (1592-1642) was part of the Spanish lettered circles, especially in discussions about valimento.¹⁷ Returning to the analysis of the Systematic Map, we identified the register of this manuscript through printed material. What is the sense of keeping manuscript copies of already printed material? For what purpose were these copies made? What is the value that manuscript versions of printed works gave to printed content and to the relations they had with the circulation of manuscripts that was not stopped by the advent of printing presses? The continuity of the detailed research of the Systematic Map will certainly contribute to better reflections on these problematizations. However, in this brief analysis of the Civil History section, we can visualize the efforts of cultural mediators to gather and preserve documents which circulated in manuscript or printed versions, with particular reverence for the manuscript materiality in relation to the period of the Iberian Union, especially involving the different leading subjects in the Portuguese social hierarchy, including the overseas empire.

Final considerations

Understanding political sociability in the Luso-Brazilian world at the end of the eight eenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century through the study of the historicity and the content of the General Index of the Manuscripts of the Crown Library from the dialogue with the letters of Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos - conceived here as an enlightened subject, a privileged reader of the Crown and intellectual mediator - allows us to better circumscribe fundamental biases of the written culture of Portuguese monarchy at the dawn of the nineteenth century, which defied its various locus of culture and knowledge also through the perspective of the support of imperial policy on this side of the Atlantic.

Thinking about the people involved and their intellectual practices for the constitution and functioning of archival and historical orders of royal libraries and archives, such as manuscripts rooms, allows us to perceive the relations between institutions and the subjects which compose and maintain them through a complex circuit of Atlantic communication. This perspective appears as an object of investigation with strong potential for interdisciplinary dialogue. The characters presented here can give us important evidence about local and Atlantic connections in this particular historical moment, as well as help us to circumscribe with greater precision questions about the written culture of the nineteenth century and its current developments. Within this, we can ask: can the General Index of the Manuscripts of the Crown Library be thought of within a “regime of practices” like an archive of an archive - an overlapping of historical and archival orders which interrelate with correspondences, since they can only be understood as a whole? This possibility of investigation and problematization is drawn based on what is presented in this article. However, only the continuation of the research through the interdisciplinary debate proposed here, especially between History and Archival Science, can deepen the study of how the writing of Luís Joaquim and the conservation of Francisco José form a regime of practices which compose marks of nineteenth century written culture.

As the French scholar Eric Ketelaar (2006, p. 68) indicated, the gesture of archiving is a regime of practices which are modified in accordance with time and place. In considering this key to the analysis, the practice of writing letters between father and son, definitively mark the formation of collections of books and manuscript papers of the crown in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, this regime of practice gained other involvements which refined the Index, when we consider the different forms of handwriting - layers - which compose it - which involves other analytical possibilities. Therefore, written culture, between production, circulation, preservation and uses, is marked by a rich vivacity which attributes meanings to the incessant search for answers. The historicity of these documents continues not to obey just one archival order, but above all, a historic order which connects the gesture of archiving to a regime of social and cultural practices which is situated in a determined time and space. Francisco José dos Santos Marrocos and his son Luís Joaquim are fruitful bridges between the two sides of the Atlantic, whose professional trajectories and family relations - between feeling, writing, sharing, and archiving - places us before the writing of the history of the Luso-Brazilian Empire.

Referências

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• BARATIN, Marc; JACOB, Christian. O poder das bibliotecas: a memória dos livros no Ocidente Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2000.
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• BURKE, Peter. Uma história social do conhecimento II - da Enciclopédia à Wikipédia Trad. Denise Bottmann. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2012.
• CHARTIER, Roger.A ordem dos livros: leitores, autores e bibliotecas na Europa entre os séculos XIV e XVIII Brasília: Ed. Unb, 1999
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• CONCEIÇÃO, Adriana Angelita da; MEIRELLES, Juliana Gesuelli. Papéis em travessia: o bibliotecário Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos e os Manuscritos da Coroa - século XIX. Labor Histórico, v. 2, p. 44-55, 2016.
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• KETELAAR, Eric. (Dé)Construire l’archive. Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, v. 82, n. 2, p. 65-70, 2006.
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• SILVA, Antonio de Morais. Diccionario da lingua portugueza composto pelo padre D. Rafael Bluteau, reformado, e accrescentado por Antonio de Moraes Silva natural do Rio de Janeiro Lisboa: Simão Tadeu Ferreira, 1789. 2v. Disponível em: Disponível em: https://www.bbm.usp.br/ Acesso em: fev. 2022.
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• SILVA, Innocencio Francisco da. Dicionário bibliográfico português v. 2. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1858.
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• 1
  The project involves research into the correspondence of Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos through the originals kept in Ajuda Library in Lisbon (Cota: 54-VI-12), of which, after material research, we obtained a digitalized copies. However, during the text we will make citations indicating the publication of letters in 2008 by the National Library of Portugal. As we are not discussing questions of a linguistic and/or philological nature, we decided to cite it from the edition in question. In this sense, we would like to thank Fundação Nacional de Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (Fapesp) for support in the digitalization of Luís Joaquim’s manuscript letters, and also of the General Index - a document we will analyze below.
• 2
  Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos, Cartas do Rio de Janeiro (1811-1821), Lisboa, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, 2008. Letter no. 10, p. 96. From now on, in citing the correspondence of Luís Joaquim we will indicate the number of the letter and the page.
• 3
  We would like to highlight that, according to eighteenth century definitions, in the first half of the nineteenth century there did not exist a specific distinction between bookshop and library in Portuguese. In Antonio Moraes e Silva’s dictionary we can find the following entries for library (biblioteca) and bookshop (livraria), respectively: “Collection of Books put on shelves or cabinets” and “Library, house, or shelves where the books are. Collection of Books” (Silva, 1789, p. 280 and 232, respectively).
• 4
  Our research on the librarian Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos, especially the “General Index of Manuscripts of the Library of the Crown placed alphabetically”, including the analysis of manuscript letters which he sent to his father, is part of ongoing research. In relation to the specificity of the “General Index” we have already made two oral presentations in academic events and have published a text in the academic journal Labor Histórico (Conceição, Meirelles, 2016), in addition to a book chapter (Conceição, Meirelles, 2017).
• 5
  In relation to the trajectory of Antônio Ribeiro dos Santos, see Pereira (1983).
• 6
  Precisely seven years later, in January 1818, when he held the position of Secretary of Business of the Kingdom of Brazil, Marrocos told his father that he suffered from the problems caused by his old friend and protector. He stated: “Viscount of Vila Nova da Rainha is my greatest enemy, he has decided not to pay me more, and in the middle of horrible intrigue, with which he intends to upset me, he is not shy about saying to everyone who knows me that he will crucify me [sic]” (Letter no. 120, p.388). It is still necessary to deepen the studies on the intrigue in question about Luís Joaquim and the influential figures in the Johannine Court in Brazil, which will contribute to the discussion of cultural mediations in the period.
• 7
  In this sense, in a letter from November 1811 he informed Francisco José of his strategy. “I am tempted to show Your Royal Highness all the Letters which Your Mercy has been receiving; therefore, I deem that they should be written with all circumspection” (Letter no. 9, p. 94).
• 8
  In relation to the life and importance of Marcos Portugal in the scenario of European and Luso-Brazilian music, see Sarraute (1979).
• 9
  A question we can see through the examples presented by Burke: “Pierre Camille Le Moine, archivist in Toul Cathedral, and afterwards in Lyon, proposed in his Diplomatique pratique (1765) a new modality which he called “l’arrangement des archives”, defending the classification of documents by themes and not by chronological order. In his Nouvel archiviste (1775), Jean Guillaume de Chevrières, archivist of the prince of Monaco, criticized Le Moine’s “nouvelle manière” and defended traditional organization by date. In the 1850s, Francesco Bonaini, superintendent of Tuscany Archives, adopted a third criteria, the “principle of provenance”, classifying documents according to the institution which produced them” (Burke, 2012, p. 72).
• 10
  In relation to this question, this is what Burke (2012, p. 73) presents “The editors decided to return to the Francis Bacon system - modifying it here and there - and divided knowledge in accordance with the three faculties of the human intellect: memory (covering history and natural history), reason (philosophy, mathematics, and law), and imagination (the arts)”.
• 11
  Codicological information was based on studies in the area. See, for example, Costa (2014).
• 12
  According to the historian Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro (n.d.), in studying the inventories of Diogo Barbosa Machado, the catalogues and index came from the criteria of relevance of the authors who produced them.
• 13
  For more information about Luso-Brazilians catalogues in the period, see Meirelles (2013).
• 14
  References in the Indice are structured as follows: Biblioteca d’Ajuda - Portugal, cota 49-IX-44, fólio 64. From this point on: BA-PT, 49-IX-44, f 64v. The transcripts follow the original.
• 15
  For greater information on Manuel Severim de Faria, see, for example, Megiani (2005, 2007).
• 16
  “Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses was born on 16 October 1673. Like his father, he was alferes-mor of the Kingdom, before assuming in 1712 the position of Viceroy of India, where he remained until 1717. Three years later, in 1720, he was appointed the fourth viceroy of the State of Brazil, a position he held until 1735. While he was viceroy he became by royal letter dated 19 September 1729 the first Earl of Sabugosa” (p. 112). See: Santos, Gouvea, Frazao (2004).
• 17
  For further information, see Oliveira (2009).

• 36
  Translated by Eoin O’Neill

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 July 2023
• Date of issue
  May-Aug 2023

History

• Received
  19 Sept 2022
• Accepted
  16 Feb 2023