“Always joining the spiritual government with the temporal government": the programatic writings of the Maranhão Mission (17th century)

• Autor(a) principal: Arenz, Karl Heinz
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Esboços (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/esbocos/article/view/91210
• topic: Escritos; Jesuítas; Indígenas; Writings; Jesuits; Indigenous People

Officially founded in 1639, the Mission of the Society of Jesus in the State of Maranhão and Grão-Pará took more than half a century to consolidate. In this process, several writings with programmatic content, written or inspired by the fathers Luís Figueira, Antônio Vieira and João Felipe Bettendorff, were of fundamental importance. Although written in different contexts, the texts (a memorial, an internal regulation and a royal law) claim the “dual administration” (spiritual and temporal) of the Ignatian missionaries over the missionary villages in the Amazon region. The analysis of these writings makes it possible to understand the organization of the vast network of missions, both in terms of the cultural mediation that took place internally and in terms of its co-structuring function for the formation of the regional society and, more broadly, of the colonial project in the Portuguese Amazon in the 17th century.