Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822

Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822

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Description

The Roman Catholic church played a dominant role in colonial Brazil, so that women's lives were shaped and constrained by the Church's ideals for pure women, as well as by parallel concepts in the Iberian honor code. Records left by Jesuit missionaries, Roman Catholic church officials, and Portuguese Inquisitors make clear that women's daily lives and their opportunities for marriage, education, and religious practice were sharply circumscribed. Yet these same documents also provide evocative glimpses of the religious beliefs and practices that were especially cherished or independently developed by women for their own use. Drawing on extensive original research in primary manuscript and printed sources from Brazilian libraries and archives, as well as secondary Brazilian historical works, Carole Myscofski proposes to write Brazilian women back into history, to understand how they lived their lives within the society created by the Portuguese imperial government and Luso-Catholic ecclesiastical institutions. Myscofski offers detailed explorations of the Catholic colonial views of the ideal woman, the patterns in women's education, the religious views on marriage and sexuality, the history of women's convents and retreat houses, and the development of magical practices among women in that era. Descriptive content provided by Syndetics™, a Bowker service.

ISBN

978-0292748538

Publication Date

Fall 11-15-2013

Publisher

University of Texas Press

City

Austin

Keywords

Brazil, women, religion, Catholic Church, history

Disciplines

History of Religion | Latin American History | Women's History

Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822
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