Culture & History Digital Journal 5(2)
December 2016, e013
eISSN 2253-797X
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2016.013
Ascetic tropics: Franciscans, missionary knowledge
and visions of Empire in the Portuguese Atlantic
at the turn of the eighteenth century
Federico Palomo
Departamento de Historia Moderna Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Prof. Aranguren, s/n, 28006 Madrid, Spain
e-mail: fpalomo@ghis.ucm.es
ORCID iD: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4120-9938
Submitted: 3 November 2015. Accepted: 25 April 2016
ABSTRACT: This essay focuses on the study of Franciscan written and intellectual culture in Portuguese America.
Speciically, it analyzes the role the Franciscans played, through their writings, in the shaping of the PortugueseAmerican world, of the way that world was thought about, and of contemporary understandings of the place Brazil
should occupy within the Portuguese monarchy. It examines the visions of the Empire which the so-called Seraphic
Order developed in the Brazilian colonial context, the written strategies they used, and the missionary and colonial
knowledge which they employed when constructing their perceptions of the American world. To that end, it looks in
detail at the Franciscan friar António do Rosário and his text Frutas do Brasil (Lisbon, 1702), in which he used his
knowledge of the natural world to construct a complex plant-based allegory with clear political connotations about
Brazil.
KEYWORDS: Franciscans; António do Rosário; Natural knowledge; Portuguese America; Portuguese Empire;
17th-18th centuries.
Citation / Cómo citar este artículo: Palomo, Federico (2016) “Ascetic tropics: Franciscans, missionary knowledge and
visions of Empire in the Portuguese Atlantic at the turn of the eighteenth century”. Culture & History Digital Journal, 5 (2):
e013. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2016.013.
RESUMEN: Trópicos ascéticos: franciscanos, saberes misioneros y visiones de imperio en el Atlántico portugués
en torno a 1700.- El presente trabajo centra su atención en el estudio de la cultura escrita e intelectual de los franciscanos en la América portuguesa. En concreto, analiza el papel que los franciscanos, a través de sus textos, desempeñaron en la coniguración del mundo luso-americano, en el modo de pensarlo y en la forma de entender el lugar que
Brasil debía ocupar dentro de la Monarquía portuguesa. Examina las visiones de imperio que la Orden seráica construyó, las estrategias escritas que empleó a tal efecto y los saberes misioneros y coloniales que movilizó a la hora de
elaborar sus percepciones del mundo americano. Para ello, se centra en la igura de Fr. António do Rosário y su obra
Frutas do Brasil (Lisboa, 1702), en la que el autor hizo uso de su conocimiento del mundo natural para construir una
compleja alegoría hortofrutícola de claras connotaciones políticas en torno a Brasil.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Franciscanos; António do Rosário; saber natural; América portuguesa; Imperio portugués;
siglos XVII-XVIII.
Copyright: © 2016 CSIC. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License (CC BY) Spain 3.0.
2 • Federico Palomo
This essay seeks to analyze several aspects related to
Franciscan intellectual and written culture in the Portuguese-American context. Although historiography has
traditionally relegated the Franciscans to the background,
they played a central role at the heart of PortugueseAmerican colonial society right from the Order’s establishment in 1585. However, its role became even more
important during the second half of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century (Romag,
1940; Röwer, 1941; Röwer, 1947; Willeke, 1974; Willeke,
1977). The Franciscans were leading igures in the intellectual and learned sphere which was created in different
areas of the Brazilian colony, and their role in that sphere
became even more central from the end of the 1600s.
Starting at that time, the Order underwent a process of
“intellectualization”, culminating in the eighteenth century with several of its friars becoming members of the
colony’s academies and learned circles (Almeida, 2012;
Palomo, 2014; Moraes, 2014).1 The position which the
Franciscans occupied in the Portuguese-American intellectual world was reinforced by signiicant written production going as far back as the early seventeenth century. However, their output was admittedly less vast than
that of the Jesuits, and was principally circulated in manuscript form (Jaboatão, 1761: 208-229). It encompassed a
wide variety of genres, from catechisms, dictionaries and
grammar manuals in indigenous languages to natural history texts, narratives of missions, chronicles and hagiographic accounts, sermons and devotional treatises. The
Franciscans in Portuguese America, therefore, contributed —to a greater or lesser extent— to the formation and
circulation of the knowledge which tended to arise from
missionary activity (Castelnau-L’Estoile et al., 2011; Wilde, 2011). The Order promoted the introduction of certain
devotions aimed at speciic communities (such as merchants, pardos and slaves) in order to integrate them into
colonial society; they contributed to the composition of
the history of the Order, and of the Portuguese in Brazil
more generally; and they relected in their texts the political and social realities of the colony. In this sense, the following pages seek to respond to some of the questions
about the role the Franciscans played, through their writings, in the shaping of the Portuguese-American world, of
the way that world was thought about, and of contemporary understandings of the place Brazil should occupy
within the Portuguese monarchy. What visions of the Portuguese Empire and of the New World did the Franciscans succeed in building at certain moments in time? Speciically, how was Brazil perceived by those Franciscans
who wrote their texts not with a metropolitan outlook
based on accumulated knowledge, but drawing on their
own experiences of the New World —Franciscans at the
borders of the Empire itself, or rather, in one of those
many centres like Pernambuco, Bahia, Luanda and Goa
which made up the pluricontinental Portuguese monarchy? How did they construct their discourse? What writing practices and rhetorical strategies did they exploit?
What missionary and local knowledge did they employ
and how did they use that when writing texts like these?
To respond to these questions, the present analysis will
focus on Friar António do Rosário and his written output.
Friar António, a monk in the province of San Antonio de
Brasil, wrote several devotional texts around 1700 which
had not insigniicant success in his contemporary Portuguese-American environment. Speciically, this analysis
will examine the contexts of production in which one of
his most original works, entitled Frutas do Brasil, numa
Nova, e Ascetica Monarchia, consagrada à Santissima
Senhora do Rosario, was produced. Printed in Lisbon in
1702 by António Pedroso Galrão, the text is relatively
well known to scholars of colonial Brazil and its intellectual contexts. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda wrote a few
pages about it in his Visão do Paraíso (Holanda, 2010:
345-354). However, the attention paid to Rosário’s work
has tended to be more literary than historiographical, focused mainly on its rhetorical and stylistic features and attempting to frame the work within the Portuguese-American Baroque (Hatherly, 2000; Hatherly, 2002; Anastásia,
2009; Biron, 2009). Although the text may not appear to
be much more than a minor collection of sermons and
pieces of sacred oratory, it is in fact an extended vegetable-based allegory, in which the fruits of the New World
are proposed as metaphors which set out a speciic ideal of
monarchy and Christian society (Rosário, 1702). The text
in a way belongs to a genre of political-allegorical writing
which was echoed in both the Peninsular Iberian world
and Spanish America (Flor, 1999; Cañizares-Esguerra,
2001; Rubial García, 2010: 210-230). Making use of his
knowledge of nature, which took on a clear ‘moralizing’
dimension, as we shall see, Rosário ultimately poses a
whole series of questions related to the Portuguese-American colonial context to which he belonged and, more generally, to the role which, in his view, Brazil should play at
the heart of the Braganza monarchy.
FRIAR ANTÓNIO DO ROSARIO AND THE
1702 EDITION OF FRUTAS DO BRASIL
We have few biographical details about the life of this
Franciscan friar. He was born in Lisbon in around 1647,
and soon before turning 24 he joined the Discalced Augustinians in the recently-founded Convent of Monte Olivete,
in the same city, taking the name Friar António de Santa
Maria. As an Augustinian, he carried out duties as a lecturer in Arts and Philosophy, as a preacher and as General
Visitor for the Order. He also wrote a number of texts
which, as we shall see, were circulated in print. We do not
know why he made the decision to leave the Augustinian
order and join the secular clergy; what we do know, however, is that he moved to Brazil in 1686, to the city of Salvador de Bahia, as a secular cleryman. Soon afterwards,
however, he decided to enter religious life once more, this
time joining the Discalced Franciscans, also known as
capuchos in the Portuguese context. He eventually took
his vows in 1689, in the convent of Nossa Senhora das
Neves de Olinda in Pernambuco, changing his name one
inal time to António do Rosário. His presence in the region of Pernambuco, travelling between the convents of
Culture & History Digital Journal 5(2), December 2016, e013. eISSN 2253-797X, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2016.013
Ascetic tropics: Franciscans, missionary knowledge and visions of Empire in the Portuguese Atlantic at the turn… • 3
Olinda, Recife and Ipojuca, was to a large extent marked
by the activities he undertook as a apostolic missionary,
performing many of his duties among indigenous communities but also, undoubtedly, among the members of the
complex colonial society which had been established in
this area of Portuguese America (Jaboatão, 1761: 212213; Barbosa Machado, 1741-1759: I, 377-378).
Friar António, furthermore, spent part of his time writing a number of works of a spiritual and devotional nature,
thereby continuing the writing activities he had carried out
during his years as an Augustinian. At that time he had
written a short work, entitled Martirologio singular da invictissima Japonesa a Madre Maria Madalena, which was
printed in 1675 in a small-format edition (12º) in Lisbon
by João Galrão (Rosário, 1675). His Sermam das almas,
the product of his preaching, was printed, again in Lisbon,
by João da Costa in 1678 (Rosário, 1678). During the
years he spent in Portuguese America (where he remained
until his death in 1704), and after entering the Franciscan
order, another four texts of his were published, all of them
aimed principally at audiences in Pernambuco. In 1691, a
small sermon-book in 4º format entitled Feyra Mystica de
Lisboa was published, printed again by João Galrão. In
this book, Rosário brought together two sermons and few
talks [práticas] he had himself delivered at the Convent of
Olinda during the trecenario for Saint Anthony in 1688
(Rosário, 1691). This was followed by another short work,
the Carta de Marear, which was published in a smaller
format (8º) as a short guide to the mental prayer necessary
for “the settlers in the New World of Brazil” [os ultramarinos do novo mundo do Brasil].2 With possibly rhetorical
intentions —part of the modesty topos required for any
printed book— Rosário assured that the book was only
published after it had been circulating in manuscript copies, beyond his control (Lisbon: António Pedroso Galrão,
1698). He thus decided, he wrote, to “restore and add to
the said Carta, so that it may be circulated in better condition as a printed book” [restaurar, & acrescentar a dita
Carta, com tenção que pella estampa, mais bem acondicionada se pudesse espalhar] (Rosário, 1698: preliminaries, no page number).3 Soon afterwards, in 1701, a new
volume was released by the Lisbon printer Manuel Manescal da Costa, entitled Sortes de S. António, in which
Rosário brought together once again sermons which he
had delivered at another trecenario dedicated to Saint Anthony, observed at the beginning of June 1693 in the
church of the Franciscan Convent in Recife (Rosário,
1701). The Galrão family’s printing workshop in Lisbon
was used once again by Friar António to print the text
which would prove to be (as we shall see) his most unique
and complex work, Frutas do Brasil, printed, as mentioned above, in 1702.4
Despite the relatively “minor” character of some of his
texts, Rosário’s written and printed output places him at
the forefront of Franciscan Portuguese-American writers,
and undoubtedly makes him one of the most successful in
terms of printed works, only just surpassed in the eighteenth century by igures like Friar António de Santa Maria
Jaboatão, Friar Francisco Xavier de Santa Teresa, Friar
José da Conceição Gama and Friar Apolinário da Conceição (Almeida, 2012; Palomo, 2014). Like Apolinário,
Rosário successfully won over several important igures in
the colonial world as patrons for his devotional writings,
persuading them to inance the printing of some of his
texts in Lisbon. The very decision to inance the printing
of books like these must have taken on a particular signiicance in a place like Portuguese America; printed works
like Rosário’s, which were intended for the colony itself
and the reading public of Brazil, were even more valuable
because of the absence of printing presses in the region.5
We might wonder, indeed, whether people took on the patronage of these works to emphasize their piety; the colonial elites were used to performing religious acts as a way
of increasing and consolidating their reputations within
the communities they belonged to and in which, generally,
they had lourished through business and/or owning land.
In truth, the religious dimension of inancing these printed
works was only one of many factors in a more ambitious
strategy for social promotion. In a context like Pernambuco around 1700, inancing the edition of a text and thereby
becoming the object of its dedication was ultimately a
form of distinction, as a way of investing in the acquisition
of speciic social and cultural capital. In such spaces,
where the elites needed clear markers to endow them with
honor and status, inancing the printing of a devotional
text became part of a whole set of practices which naturally arose from the logic of “ennoblement” (Palomo,
2014: 126-132).
Friar António do Rosário himself expressed this impression in the dedication which he wrote to D. Francisco
de Sousa, from whom he had raised the funding to print
the Carta de Marear. A member of an old family in Pernambuco with links to the sugar industry, the owner of
several mills, and well-connected to the court, D. Francisco was also, as indicated on the book’s frontispiece, a
idalgo of the Royal Household, a Knight of the Order of
Christ and a Colonel of the Cavalry of Pernambuco. He
had played a relatively important role in the so-called
Mascate War (“War of the Peddlers”) in 1710-1711,6 and
fulilled long-held ambitions for honors some years later
when he was named maestro de campo of the Recife
corps, as his father had been previously (Mello, 2003:
381-382, 464).7 Despite the important position which D.
Francisco already held at the heart of society in Pernambuco in 1698, Friar António did made it clear that the decision to inance the edition of this new book had bestowed further prestige on him. The book, he wrote, was
no less than an “monument through which posterity will
know of His Worship as the irst son of Brazil who, with
the new patronage of this work, has immortalized his
name and honored his ancestors” [Obelisco, em que a
posteridade advertirá ser V.M. o primeiro ilho do Brasil,
que com o novo meçonado desta obra, soube V.M. immortalizar o nome, acreditar os ascendentes] (Rosário 1698:
Dedication to D. Francisco de Sousa. Preliminaries; no
page number).
The case of Francisco de Sousa —who, it seems, was
the foremost igure in this type of literary patronage with-
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4 • Federico Palomo
in Brazil— was quite different to that of Simão Ribeiro
Ribas, the general commissary of the cavalry in Pernambuco. He also took on the printing costs of some of Friar
António do Rosário’s other works, lending his patronage,
speciically, to the Lisbon edition of Frutas do Brasil.
But, in his case, the symbolic weight and the social effects which a move like this could bring were of even
greater value. Unlike D. Francisco de Sousa, Ribas was
born in Northern Portugal, from humble origins (his father was a laborer), who had made his considerable fortune as a merchant in Pernambuco. In short, he was a
mascate (“peddler”). Through marriage, he had become
part of an enriched mercantile elite which aspired to social recognition and political participation in Pernambuco
(Souza, 2012). Like others with links to these groups,
Ribas not only attempted to hold military positions, such
as that of commissary of the cavalry, which he held in
1702. That same year, he also acquired a sugar mill and,
soon afterwards, became a familiar of the Inquisition. In
1710, he became part of the irst municipal corporation in
Recife, making a name for himself, like Sousa, during the
1710-1711 war which pitted the mascates of Recife
against the nobreza da terra linked to neighboring Olinda. As part of his strategy for social ascent, Ribas joined
the Third Order of San Francisco of Recife, founded in
1695, as did his father-in-law Miguel Correia Gomes.
The Order, in truth, played a central role as a space for
social legitimation for the mercantile (mascate) community to which Ribeiro Ribas belonged (Marques, 2010).
Against this backdrop, inancing the edition of a printed
book like Frutas do Brasil undoubtedly helped to
strengthen his position at the heart of the Third Order, and
laid the way for him to become ministro of the Order in
1710-1711. More generally, it also strengthened his position within Pernambuco.
It is clear from the nature of Rosário’s writings
and printed works that they were, in the main, the product
of (and, at the same time, a mirror of) the apostolic activities which he carried out in Brazil’s northern coastal regions. Speciically, those activities —preaching, instruction for the holy life and rural missions— were aimed not
at converting gentile indigenous people but rather colonizers of Portuguese origin, and at slaves and natives who
had already been converted. As with many other contemporary missionaries’ texts —both within and beyond Europe— Friar António sought in his writings to prolong his
apostolic activity by putting at the disposal of the faithful,
as a sort of written mission, the instruments which would
allow them to properly observe holy practices and exercises. In short, printing books was a way of extending his
mission (Bouza, 2008; Palomo, 2010: 144-147). This aim
was made particularly explicit in the Carta de Marear itself, whose irst draft, Rosário conirmed, had been written while he was fully engaged in missions carried out at
the behest of the captaincy in Pernambuco. The Carta, he
wrote, had been very useful for inspiring “many people to
further devotion and beneiting their souls” [a devoção de
muytos, e experimental aproveitamento das almas]. In his
own words, the circulation of the text in manuscript form
had made it “confused, misshapen and corrupted because
of the range and ignorance of the pens [with which it was
copied]” [mareada, disforme, & viciada, pela variedade
& ignorancia das penas]. Therefore, the aim in printing
it, as discussed above, was to re-establish it in its original
form, so that it could serve the “poorest and most lost
people in these lands” [os mais pobres, & remontados
destes Paizes] as a brief set of instructions for mental
prayer (Rosário, 1698: Prologue to the reader. Preliminaries, no page number).
Compared to Friar António’s other texts, Frutas do
Brasil offers a curiously different outlook. It is certainly
his most complex work, rhetorically, intellectually and
spiritually, and was perhaps aimed also at more learned
audiences. Dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, the work
has an essentially religious and moral character, which
the Franciscans Jerónimo da Ressureição and Luís da Puriicação duly noted in their respective censuras of the
text. The irst, who noted that his fellow Franciscan’s previous texts had essentially been of a spiritual and devotional nature, emphasized the moralizing direction of
Rosário’s new work. In this text, the fruits served as no
more than a vehicle which the author ingeniously used as
allegories of “virtues and good habits” [virtudes, & bõs
costumes]. Through these allegories, he sought to encourage in all “the spirit to serve and love God well” [o espirito para bem servirem, & amarem a Deos] (Rosário,
1702: Censura. Preliminaries, no page number). The Jesuit Baltasar Duarte, on the other hand, expressed a somewhat different opinion in his censura written at the behest
of the Royal Censor. While recognizing his talent for articulating “inventions of some beneit about virtues, and
curious invectives about vice”,8 he did not hesitate —
rightly— to highlight the book’s political dimension. In
his view, the text was not only an appeal for greater recognition of Brazil’s already-central role in the context of
the Portuguese monarchy; it was also a demand for greater recognition as a result from the Crown (Rosário, 1702:
Censura. Preliminaries, no page number).
Beyond its vindicatory nature, Friar António’s work is
constructed, effectively, as a political and moral allegory,
based around three great sermons or, to use the author’s
words, three great “parables”. Each one of these corresponds to one of the three principal parts of the “new and
ascetic Monarchy” which he outlined metaphorically
throughout the text. The irst of these parables, divided in
turn into three chapters, is focused on the pineapple
(ananás). Friar António’s intention here was to symbolize
the igure of the king, whose attributes he believed to be
depicted in the pineapple’s shape; the pineapple, of
course, also perfectly summarized the American world itself. Similarly, the second parable is divided up into ive
chapters, dedicated to sugarcane. Considered the “Queen
of Brazilian fruits”, it is presented as a sort of “Queen of
Sheba” for Portugal, which arrived in the Portuguese
kingdom just as the biblical queen had entered Jerusalem,
“with golden riches and precious stones” [com muita
riqueza de ouro, & pedras preciosas] (Rosário, 1702: 5152). The third and inal parable, the longest, is elaborated
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Ascetic tropics: Franciscans, missionary knowledge and visions of Empire in the Portuguese Atlantic at the turn… • 5
over the course of three chapters, dedicated respectively
to each of the three estates which made up the social order of the Ancien Regime. It thereby turns its gaze in turn
to the clergy, the nobility and the common people, whose
respective virtues, as well as vices, are represented in
over thirty fruits (Rosario 1702: 106-157).
MORALIZING FRUIT: PUTTING NATURAL
KNOWLEDGE TO SPIRITUAL USE
Throughout the three sermons, or parables, which
make up the text, Rosário not only shows an effective
command of the tools which the art of Rhetoric offered to
those who, like him, spent much of their time in the pulpit. As other scholars have pointed out, his expert navigation of the twisting paths of oratory allowed him to construct a discourse which is marked by its invention, wit
and elaborate use of conceits. His style of writing, therefore, displays some of the characteristic trends of the Baroque period and Iberian culture of the time —trends
which were also found in the Portuguese-American literary world (Hansen and Pécora, 2004). Based on analogical thought, a principle which was intrinsic to the period,
he successively constructs a series of metaphors in which
the fruits of Brazil become the vehicles of his allegorical
discourse. Underlying this all is the traditional image, the
metaphor, of the world as a book, a universe which can be
read and interpreted just as the words of a book are read
and interpreted (Blumenberg, 2000). In this sense, Rosario is carrying out a moral and ascetic reading of the natural world. In his allegorical discourse, each of the plant
species he describes becomes identiied in moral terms
with the different elements which made up this imagined
monarchy, fulilling the same purpose as emblems but
without the visual element. What is certain is that the use
of the natural world was a relatively common artiice in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian emblematic
language (García Mahíques, 1991; Flor, 1999). In this
language, the natural world, conceived as a text to be deciphered in order to uncover the language of the Revelation itself, became a code or instrument for the depiction
of the political order. The species and animals of the Creation were no more, therefore, than elements which became associated with speciic moral meanings. Consequently, their properties came to foreshadow the vices
and virtues of each of the many elements which together
made up the Republic.
In order to construct this allegorical and emblematic
moral-political discourse, António do Rosário gathered a
wide-ranging natural knowledge, a kind of “vegetable erudition”, founded on the cumulative logic which was so
characteristic of this period (Marcaida, 2014: 45-136).
This allowed him to establish a whole catalogue of some
thirty-six fruits and species found in Portuguese America,
which are listed at the beginning of the text. Not all of the
species were native to Brazil; indeed, one example of a
foreign species was the sugarcane plant. Over the course
of the book, some of the fruits cited in metaphorical terms
include the pineapple, the papaya, the cashew, the banana,
the coconut, the passionfruit, the Surinam cherry, the managaba (Hancornia speciosa), the huito and the Brazil
plum, to name only a few. However, the use of igurative
language with clear moral undertones did not stop him
from simultaneously giving concise descriptions of some
of the characteristics which distinguished the different
fruits from one another. He often mentions, for example,
their appearance, color and taste and even their possible
uses. He points out, for example, that the papaya was not
only an excellent fruit but also had an appearance and
taste similar to melon, and could be eaten at any time since
it “soothes the humors” and “cools the liver” [compoem os
humores, refrigera o igado] (Rosário, 1702: 109-110).
The fruit of the mandacaru (cereus jamacaru), a species of
cactus native to the coast and inland of Brazil, he noted,
was the size of a small apple [maçã camoesa], with reddish skin split into segments, each of which was a “cluster
of thorns” [pinha de espinhos]; its pulp, “white like snow”
[alva como a neve], was sweet, smooth and refreshing
during warmer periods (Rosário, 1702: 136-137).
References to fruits’ characteristics and qualities follow
on from one another, used to evoke images of clerics, friars, noblemen and manual workers. In some cases, Rosário
even gives a rough outline of how they were processed.
When he writes about sugarcane, for example, he includes
several analogical references to the many stages of the production of sugar, from cutting and splitting the cane, to
grinding it, to boiling it and inally to draining it (Rosário,
1702: 71-98). This knowledge of sugar-making and of the
world of sugar-mills, which was presented as a real metaphor of Hell, culminates in the description of several types
of sugar, distinguishing white reined sugar from “unreined” [redondo], “crushed” [retumbado] and most of all
dark “muscovado” [mascabado] sugar. Muscovado sugar
acquires here a particular worth and reputation since it is
seen to evoke the igure of Saint Benedict the Moor, “the
glory of brown sugar, the fame of muscovado, and the
wonder of molasses” [gloria dos pretos, credito dos mascabados, maravilha dos retames] (Rosário, 1702: 98).
Furthermore, all of the physical qualities and characteristics which Rosário identiies in the fruits over the
course of his treatise come to take on a moral signiicance
themselves. In this sense, the attributes and uses which
both indigenous and European culture associated with
certain species could come to take on new meanings and
even blurred meanings (Lima, 2014: 351). The wellknown sweet taste of pineapple —a fruit which represented the king— is thus seen as an accurate image of mercy
and royal clemency. But, at the same time, he reinterprets
to some extent the functions of its juice, traditionally considered an effective remedy for wounds because of its
acidity. Thus, since the wounded man is representative of
the criminal man, the curative function of pineapple juice
is supplanted and it becomes representative of sovereign
justice itself (Rosário, 1702: 5). In a similar way, he
writes that the Brazil plum was used in the Sertão, where
there was no water (or so it was claimed), to relieve thirst.
This quality, however, allowed an analogy to be formulated associating the Brazil plum to the clergy’s and
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6 • Federico Palomo
monks’ daily tasks: providing food and spiritual relief to
their sheep, thirsty for doctrine and the blessed sacraments (Rosário, 1702: 110).
In the brief descriptions of the fruits mentioned,
Rosário appears not to have consulted one sole source of
information. Throughout the three parables which make
up his text, he obeys the rules of sermon-writing, and
therefore limits himself to noting in the margins the various parts of Scripture upon which he built his arguments,
adding only a handful of authors linked to the patristic
and spiritual tradition of the Church.9 In truth, some of
the thirty-six fruits included in his text were indigenous
species in northern Brazil, from the regions of Pernambuco and Maranhão. It is entirely possible, therefore, that
the knowledge he displays of Portuguese-American fruit
could partly be down to his own experience as a missionary in those areas and his direct contact with the species
he describes. However, a large chunk of his knowledge of
fruit and vegetables can only be explained through the
knowledge built up over two centuries of European colonisation, based on observation and complemented by the
wide-ranging heritage of the indigenous population, from
the names of the fruits —many of which, like the words
for ‘pineapple’ (ananás) and ‘huito’ (jenipapo), kept their
indigenous naming— to their qualities and uses.
At the end of the seventeenth century, when Friar
António do Rosário wrote his text, there was already a
relatively large body of writing on this topic. From treatises, histories and natural histories to letters, missionary
accounts and simple writings addressed to the king, they
tended to be circulated primarily in manuscript form, although there were several works which were eventually
printed in Europe. There are, of course, the writings of
authors like Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, the French
writer Jean de Léry and the Jesuit Manuel da Nóbrega,
who, in the middle of the sixteenth century, were already
collected a large body of information about the plants,
animals and indigenous peoples of Portuguese America.
Other texts besides these also contributed to a better understanding of the natural world and were relatively common throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Among these texts, there are Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s
Tratado descritivo or Noticia do Brazil, which he sent to
Cristóvão de Moura in the Madrid court (Sousa, 1851);
Tratados da Terra e Gente do Brasil, written by the Jesuit
Fernão Cardim at the end of the sixteenth century and
which, after becoming part of a booty haul, was eventually printed in English in 1625 (Cardim, 1997),10 and Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão’s Diálogos das grandezas do
Brasil, written around 1618 (Brandão, 1956). Every one
of them, among other topics, dedicated a part of their exposition to the natural world of Portuguese America.
They described, in varying degrees of detail, not just
mammals, birds and ish, but also minerals, plants and
fruits, usually considering how they could be used.
The Historia Natvralis Brasiliae (Leiden-Amsterdam,
1648), written in the context of Dutch Brazil, was more
systematic and exhaustive. Firstly, it brought together the
four books of Willem Piso’s De medicina brasilensis,
which contained references to 89 species of plants and
their medicinal uses. Secondly, it included the German
naturalist George Marcgrave’s treatise under the title Historia Rervm Naturalivm Brasiliae Libri Octo, which
brought together the material he had accumulated during
his time in Pernambuco in the service of Maurice of Nassau (Piso & Marcgrave 1648). Lavishly illustrated with
engravings produced from Marcgrave’s own drawings,
the irst three books of his treatise were devoted solely to
describing the trees, plants and fruits of Brazil, identify
some 279 species. Unlike Piso, Marcgrave did not only
point out the therapeutic functions which many of the
plants had, but also mentioned other uses and properties
(Whitehead and Boeseman, 1989; Brienen, 2001; Françozo, 2010; Medeiros and Albuquerque, 2014).
We ind something very different indeed in the Jesuit
Simão de Vasconcelos’ Noticias curiosas e necessárias
das cousas do Brasil. The text is that of the irst two
books of the Chronica da Companhia de Jesus no Estado
do Brasil (Lisbon, 1663), where it acts as a lengthy prologue, a descriptive outline of Portuguese America with
clear Edenic traits. The text was in fact censored upon
publication, because, at certain points, it went as far as to
attempt to pinpoint the exact location of Eden in Brazil.
However, it was printed again, standalone and expurgated, in 1668 under the title Noticias curiosas (Ramos,
2001; Santos, 2001). Far from offering the usual descriptions found in earlier works, Vasconcelos studied the Portuguese-American natural world through the prism of the
Book of Genesis, arguing that they were proof of the
“goodness” which God had wanted to bestow on this land
and thus contesting traditional opinions that it was a torrid and uninhabitable region. His journey through the
plants and fruits of the region was but a way of proving,
in accordance with Scripture, the abundance, excellence
and variety of a natural world which acted as an incitement to praise for the Creator. Furthermore, this natural
world made Brazil a place which surpassed all others in
beauty (Vasconcelos, 2001: 129-149).
Within this ield of writing, and particularly considering that Friar António do Rosário was a Franciscan, mention must be made of the speciic contribution of his Order to the natural knowledge in Portuguese America.11 As
far back as 1627, or thereabouts, Friar Vicente do Salvador gave an all-encompassing description of the geography, climate, mines, lora and fauna of Brazil in the seventeen chapters which make up the irst book of his
Historia do Brasil, along with the inhabitants, their languages, their hamlets, their marriages and so on (Salvador, 2008: Book I, chaps. IV-XVI). However, the text in
this case is rather generic, short on details and, above all,
intended to provide a backdrop of the region (essentially,
the region of Bahia) for potential readers of his work. The
text is in effect dedicated to constructing a narrative about
the conquest of Portuguese America. But, in fact, it was
not very different in its objectives from another, possibly
more wide-reaching and denser, text written around the
same time: Friar Cristóvão de Lisboa’s História dos animaes e arvores do Maranhão (Lisboa, 2000). A capucho
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Ascetic tropics: Franciscans, missionary knowledge and visions of Empire in the Portuguese Atlantic at the turn… • 7
friar, he was directly involved in the Franciscan mission
in Maranhão, where he spent eleven years between 1624
and 1635 engaged in evangelization and in the government of the recently-founded custodia of Saint Anthony
(Amorim, 2005). The manuscript codex which survives
today, whose contents Friar Cristóvão compiled while
living in America, brought together a total of 259 drawings. Most are accompanied by corresponding texts, each
image depicting a different species from the vegetable
and animal kingdoms: marine species (116 drawings),
animals (21 drawings), birds (77 drawings) and various
plants and fruit from Maranhão and Grão Pará (55 drawings). In reality, the manuscript which we have appears to
have been the draft for a “treatise on birds, plants, ish
and animals” which Cristóvão was in the process of writing in 1627. It is thought that this manuscript was intended to serve, furthermore, as a foundation for the text of
the chapters speciically dedicated to the natural world
within a wider project, the Historia natural, e moral do
Maranhão. This project, written in four volumes, was
meant to be printed soon before Cristóvão’s death in
1650, but never reached that stage (Walter, 2000: 50-58).
It is clear from the text that Friar Cristóvão went to
great effort to accumulate and compile a wide range of
information about the lora and fauna in Maranhão, trying
also to “preserve” it by having it depicted in the drawings
he commissioned. In reality, his undertaking was not essentially different from Piso and Marcgrave’s (probably
more systematic) work, contributing to a set of knowledge that, since Antiquity, shaped a speciic genre: the so
called ‘Natural History’. But, possibly, it neither can be
dissociated from a Franciscans’ particular taste for, or inclination towards, understanding nature —an inclination
which was rooted in the Order’s spiritual and intellectual
traditions and which, furthermore, was present in other
missionary contexts, such as in Portuguese India (Xavier
and Županov, 2014) and Spanish America (Pardo Tomás,
2013).12 In the Portuguese-Brazilian world, this inclination would later be echoed in Friar António do Rosário’s
work, but above all —now moving forward into the eighteenth century— in the output of several friars linked to
the colony’s learned circles. One of these was Friar José
Mariano da Conceição Veloso, known particularly for his
Flora Fluminensis, which was printed only posthumously
between 1827 and 1832 (Nunes and Brigola, 1999).
However, António do Rosário’s Frutas do Brasil was
essentially a moral and spiritual text. It was not, speciically speaking, a treatise on natural history, although it made a
huge use of natural knowledge. Both from the formal/rhetorical point of view and in terms of its content/aims, there
are many elements which distinguish it from texts like
those of Fernão Cardim and even Cristóvão de Lisboa.
Written in a missionary context, both of those latter authors
had essentially sought to accumulate information about the
Portuguese-American botanical and natural world. They
put forward a relatively pragmatic view of that world, focusing above all on the species’ external characteristics and
qualities, and, to a great extent, to their possible medicinal,
economic and other uses. This conception of the natural
world was a stark contrast to the Rosário’s, but also to the
conception present in many other seventeenth-century treatises and writings on natural history —writings which were
more inclined to attribute spiritual meaning to fruits, plants
and animals whose appearances were believed to enclose
hidden, limitless moral meanings.
Friar António do Rosário —we must bear it in mind—
had been lecturer in Philosophy during the time he spent
as Augustinian monk in Portugal. Indeed, he shared a conception of the natural world which was present in the work
of authors like Eugenio Petrelli, John Parkinson, Antonio
León y Pinelo and even Simão de Vasconcelos —a relatively common conception in certain intellectual contexts
at the time (Ledezma, 2005: 54). In this respect, several
recent studies have made clear the close links which existed at that time between ields which historiographers
have often considered to be inherently opposed, such as
so-called modern science and Baroque culture (Flor, 1999;
Pimentel and Marcaida 2008; Marcaida and Pimentel
2014; Marcaida, 2014). Going beyond a traditional vision
which only deines modern science in terms of rationality
and progress, research has opened up to analyze igures
such as Andrés Ferrer de Valdecebro and Juan Eusebio
Nieremberg, traditionally marginalized in the ield of the
history of science, from a different perspective. Ultimately, it has been highlighted how in some learned circles in
the 1600s there was a way of understanding natural
knowledge which turned it into a sort of preternatural
knowledge, deeply pervaded with theological thought.
This was sustained by speciic Neo-Platonic perceptions
of the world which saw it as existing on two planes —one
visible, the other invisible— which existed in harmony.
But it was simultaneously supported by the way in which
Saint Augustine had set out his understanding of nature as
an expression of divine wisdom and omnipotence. Knowing the universe, essentially, was a way of becoming closer to the Creator. The natural world, as mentioned above,
was merely a book, a text, written by God. Like the Scriptures, knowing and understanding it required a whole exercise of exegesis, through which one had to observe the
elements and species which made up the world beyond
their external appearance and attempt to decode the hidden moral and spiritual meaning contained within plants
and animals. For this purpose, similarities, analogies, metaphors —such characteristic epistemological bases of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries— were an essential
instrument for the understanding of nature and the meanings which God had given to it (R. de la Flor, 1999; Ledezma, 2005; Pimentel, 2009; Marcaida, 2014). Furthermore, that is why emblematic and allegorical language, so
distinctive of Baroque literary culture, found itself particularly comfortable in a treatise like António do Rosário’s.
THE TRUE INDIA: THINKING ABOUT THE
PORTUGUESE EMPIRE FROM ITS BOUNDARIES
Within this interpretative framework, the New World
and the natural world of America became for many of
Nieremberg, Vasconcelos and Rosário’s contemporaries a
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8 • Federico Palomo
new space to investigate the elements of the Revelation
which had remained hidden from the ancients. For many
of them, America revealed itself to be a new Eden, a
mythical world which took on providential meaning (Ledezma, 2005: 74). The way in which António do Rosário
understood natural knowledge does not only explain the
series of moral allegories which he associated with the
different fruits of Brazil as if they were emblems of his
“ascetic monarchy”. Ultimately, the nature of the New
World, interpreted in this symbolic way, allowed him to
construct his own unique vision of Portuguese America
and the place it should occupy within the Portuguese Empire. In this respect, we should not interpret a text like
Frutas do Brasil outside of the distinctive political parameters of the age and context in which it was written. It
cannot be read from a perspective more relevant to the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries —as a text in which
there are hints of future separatist and nationalist claims.13
Such thoughts were alien to a colonial political mindset
which did not contemplate —and indeed could not contemplate— the Brazilian region as something separate
from the Portuguese monarchy. However, as we shall see,
that does not mean Rosário’s text does not articulate, at
certain points, views which seem close to a form of local
(Pernambucan) nativism similar to many of the expressions of (urban) criollo patriotism which arose in Spanish
America. In any case, the treatise did indeed open the
possibility of thinking about Brazil in a different way
(Almeida, 2012: 1, 317; Curto, 1998: 421). Rosário, not
in vain, sought in his text to redeine —or at least deine
in new terms— the role which he believed fell to Portuguese America in the framework of the Braganza monarchy. He thus appeals for a central position for Brazil within an imperial structure which, at least in terms of
perceptions and symbolic value, still bestowed greater
signiicance on the Asian world, and particularly on India.
In order to support his unique understanding of the
Empire, Rosário deployed on the one hand a whole series
of discursive strategies through which he tried in part to
‘sanctify’ the Americas. For this, in fact, he turned to rhetorical features not very different from those which were
increasingly being used from the end of the sixteenth century in a range of contexts in Spanish America and even in
Portuguese India. As is well known, there were many images and lengthy reasoning constructed in colonial American contexts, through chronicles, hagiographies, natural
histories and other texts, all with the aim of sacralizing the
New World. It became, as we have just seen, a space in
which authors could claim the presence of a multitude of
signs which were understood as no less than expressions
of the divine. Furthermore, it was a space where holiness
became possible, especially for those of peninsular descent who had been born in the New World. It was, therefore, part of attempts to counter and eliminate the negative
perception —sometimes even diabolical— which, from a
metropolitan viewpoint, was often cast over the lands of
America, its climate, its nature and its inhabitants, including those who were born there and proclaimed themselves
to be the heirs of the Spanish and Portuguese (Rubial
García, 2010: 211-342; Cañizares-Esguerra, 2008). As a
result, there was no shortage of accounts, especially during the Baroque period (and sometimes written by criollos), which constructed a paradisiacal vision of the Americas and, naturally, of Brazil. As has already been noted,
the topos which located earthly paradise in America found
there one of its most explicit manifestations in the Jesuit
chronicler Simão de Vasconcelos’ censored Noticias curiosas (Holanda, 2010; Santos, 2001; Ramos, 2001). There
were also expressions which came from a less erudite
world, such as those which are found in the unique cosmogony of the colonizer Pedro de Rates Henequim, who
was condemned by the Inquisition in 1744 (Gomes, 1997).
Friar António do Rosário’s text does not explicitly
mention the image of an Eden in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia or
Pernambuco, but his Brazil, interpreted through the lens of
fruit and vegetables, does nevertheless leave the impression of a comparable understanding of the American region and its nature (Holanda, 2010: 345-354; Hatherly,
2002:14). Rosário, in fact, turned to some elements which
were well-established in the literature of the period, and
particularly in many texts on nature. These elements
worked well as signs of the favor and divine blessing
which had been bestowed on the New World. In this sense,
for example, he evokes the passionfruit and, along with it,
the passionlower (Rosário, 1702: 157-179). Many saw
this plant, thanks to its unique stem, stamens, petals and so
on, as an emblem of Christ’s Passion (whence its name):
the crown of thorns, the lance, the blood spilt by Christ,
the column to which he was nailed and the whip with
which he was logged. Noted as early as 1574 by Nicolás
Monardes, the analogy continued to interest several seventeenth-century theologians and naturalists. Some of the
most obviously symbolic depictions of the passionlower
circulated from the beginning of the seventeenth century
in printed works by authors like Antonio Possevino, Giacomo Bosio and Juan Eusebio Nieremberg himself, and
served to reinforce this spiritualized vision of the lower.
The passionlower became a sort of eucharistic emblem,
which in turn made it the clearest indication of divine
presence in the New World, and, of course, in Brazil
(Cañizares-Esguerra, 2008: 202-207; Marcaida, 2014:
195-203; Pimentel, 2014). Rosário was keen to recall that
“God had designed “directly into this mysterious lower
the deplorable tragedy of the Passion”, since it was a parable to evoke his sacriice [pintou o Creador ao vivo nesta
mysteriosa a lamentavel tragedia da sua Payxão]. For that
same reason, he added, he decided to crown his treatise on
the fruits of Brazil by reminding readers of “the lower
which this land produces for the glory of the creator” [a
lor que produz a mesma terra para Gloria do Creador]
(Rosário, 1702: 156-157). And, in fact, Rosário did not
limit himself to the episodes of the Passion represented in
the passionlower. He also argued that a providential dimension could be attributed to Brazil, thanks to its fruits.
Indeed, the colony’s original name —Santa Cruz— had
itself evoked the Passion of Christ. In reality, only the
greed and the sins which colonization had brought with it
posed a threat to the original nature of this earth illed with
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Ascetic tropics: Franciscans, missionary knowledge and visions of Empire in the Portuguese Atlantic at the turn… • 9
signs of Redemption. With those signs continuing to be
ignored, the following punishment was the only possible
result:
What land, what climate in this Brazil; what similarities
the lowers and fruits of this land have to the Passion of
the Christ. The irst name with which this part of America was baptized by its discoverers was Santa Cruz; ambition beat the name Santa Cruz out of the land, and renamed it Brazil, after the Brazilwood tree; out of interest
in wood, not remembrance of the Cross, this land is
called Brazil, and not Santa Cruz, as it was at irst
known, when there was not so much sugarcane, so much
fruit, so much Brazilwood, so much greed, so much
coldness and so much sin. Oh, how I fear that with so
many signs of the Most Holy Passion of the Christ this
new world will end up with punishments, for failing to
take heed of those signs […]: so many signs of the Cross
and of the Passion of the Christ can be seen in the lowers and fruits of this fatal land, that it would not be too
bold to suspect and foresee punishment upon punishment (Rosário, 1702: 164-166).14
Alongside the role in his discourse allocated to the topos of the passionlower and its eucharistic and providential characteristics, Rosário also made use of other igures
and allegories to invoke the sanctity which, he believed,
was attributable to Portuguese America —to show that it
was a place chosen by God. He even sought to claim primacy for America over Europe, constructing an allegory
putting two different images face to face. The irst was that
of a rosary made of lowers, drawn by the Virgin in the irst
volume of the book of the world (corresponding to the Old
World); the second was that of a rosary made of fruit,
which she had printed onto the second volume (corresponding to Brazil). In the Old European World, God and
his mother had made the rose the queen of lowers; in the
New World they had replaced it with the pineapple, “so
that the rosary of His mother, made of lowers in the Old
World, should come to be made of fruit” [para que o Rosario da sua mãy fosse em fruto, o que no mundo velho era
lor]. While Friar António does praise both, he also compares them directly and eventually inds the fruit to have
advantages which the lowers did not. Flowers, marked by
fragility and inconstancy, were merely leeting and transitory, “appearing and disappearing” [o mesmo he apparecerem, que desapparecerem], thus becoming a symbol of
the brevity of life. In contrast, fruits grew and multiplied,
lasted longer than lowers, were consequently more persevering and robust, and thus were favored by God:
fruits, which are irmer and more constant than lowers,
won God’s blessing; and lowers did not receive blessing, fragile and inconstant as they are; and if fruits are
more excellent than lowers, more blessed by God, more
favored and more useful than lowers; the rosary made
of fruit is, therefore, more excellent than the rosary
made of lowers (Rosário, 1702: 25).15
The fruits’ superiority in quality, divine favor and utility meant that the allegorical rosary which they made up, a
metaphor for the American world which created them,
was considered superior and more beneicial than a rosary
of lowers. The comparison even translated to the Asian
sphere, implicitly revealing his consciousness of the
worldly dimension of the Portuguese monarchy and of the
way in which its different parts could be balanced. For
Rosário, Asia was present in the rosary through the offerings which the Magi brought to the Christ-child (the third
joyful mystery), which themselves represented the mysteries —joyful (incense), sorrowful (myrrh) and glorious
(gold)— which made up the devotion. But that was nothing to boast about, thought Rosário: America, too, had
fruits which represented the wonders of the rosary. Furthermore, just one fruit —the pineapple, which the Virgin
had planted in Brazil— contained a representation of the
“whole Garden of the Rosary” [todo o Jardim do Rosario], because divine providence had decided to depict all
of the Rosary’s mysteries in it (Rosário, 1702: 37-38). Finally, the pineapple, the “King of Apples” [Rey dos pomos], was not just the fruit which made up for the evil bestowed on men by the apple in Eden, thanks to the Virgin’s
intervention. It was also an exact “image and portrait” [estampa, & retrato] of the rosary, which made Brazil, its
homeland, a Promised Land (Rosário, 1702: 44-46).
But, as well as underlining the holy and beatiic nature
which he attributed to the Portuguese-American world,
Rosário wanted, from a more explicitly political perspective, to deine the place which Brazil should occupy within the Portuguese Empire. When writing about sugarcane,
in which he identiies the “queen” of his text’s proposed
ascetic monarchy, Rosário evokes other places around the
Empire such as the old fortress of Mina and, especially,
India, which —despite its ever-shrinking political and
economic clout— continued to occupy, at the end of the
seventeenth century, a central place in the Portuguese imperial imagination. Aware of the imbalance which this perception of the different parts of the Portuguese Empire
implied, Rosário makes a clear reference to the decline of
India which, for its “sins and injustices”, had for many
years been a shadow of its former self. Rosário underlined
Brazil’s superiority over India, the former having become
in his view “the true India and the true Mina of the Portuguese” [a verdadeira India, & mina dos Portuguezes]. He
thus asserted Brazil’s supremacy, which contributed, economically speaking, the most to the Braganza monarchy
(and certainly more than a mythiied Asian world). And
this contribution was thanks essentially to the sugar industry —the pouches of “diamonds” (as reined sugar was
known) which left Brazil every year “in thousands of containers” [pelos bizalhos dos diamantes, que embarca em
milhares de caxas todos os annos] (Rosário, 1702: 50-51).
Rosário thus pins the riches of Portuguese America
and, therefore, of the Empire itself on sugar production,
going so far as to demand royal favor for those who cultivated and processed sugar. When “queenly sugarcane”,
like the biblical Queen of Sheba, arrived loaded with opulent gifts, it was natural to expect the King, like the wise
and grateful Solomon with his illustrious guest, to bestow
similar favor upon his “so faithful and loyal servants”
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10 • Federico Palomo
[tão ieis, & leaes Vasallos]. Essentially, it was them, he
pointed out, who had been prepared to lose their “lives
and possessions” [as vidas, & as fazendas] defending and
restoring this sugar-based empire. Rosário’s text served
as a reminder, an evocation of the role which the plantation and sugar-mill owners had played ifty years earlier
at the end of Dutch rule over Pernambuco and the northern coastal areas of Brazil, making a decisive contribution towards the restoration of Portuguese sovereignty in
the region. The issue, of course, was not trivial, and
would serve throughout the second half of the seventeenth century as an argument in attempts to determine
the relationship between the monarchy and the elites of
Pernambuco. These elites sometimes asserted loyalty to
the crown and sometimes, from a purely contractual
standpoint, proclaimed themselves to be political subjects
(rather than simply natural subjects) of the Portuguese
monarch (Mello, 2003: 160-169).
This apparent defense of the “sugarocracy” which had
dominated the Portuguese-Brazilian economy since the
end of the sixteenth century was by no means insigniicant. It was produced during a time of deep political, economic and social transformations across Portuguese
America. On the one hand, the sugar industry itself suffered from serious dificulties during the second half of
the seventeenth century. The signiicant growth in sugar
production in the British, French and Dutch Caribbean
led to a substantial increase in competition and therefore
to a sharp decrease in Brazilian exports. Furthermore, it
brought with it a signiicant reduction in sugar prices and
higher demand for slaves, whose price progressively rose
(Schwartz, 2014).16 Meanwhile, the discovery, recognition and exploitation of the gold mines in the interior regions of Brazil favored, from 1693, the development of
gold- and mineral-based activity which immediately began to acquire a relatively important role within the Brazilian economy, contributing to several wide-ranging
changes within the colonial economy. There was no
shortage of critics who, in these transition years from the
seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, spoke out to warn
about the political, social and moral risks which could
come about —or had already come about— from the exploitation of gold. The euphoria which the gold industry
had engendered, they said, attracted contemptible men to
the gold regions, awakened greed in foreigners and ruined industries like sugar and tobacco by taking away a
signiicant percentage of the slave workforce and diverting away other goods needed for the upkeep of sugarmills and plantations (Souza, 2006: 78-86). By making
sugarcane the “queen” of his monarchy and the product
which ensured the Empire’s riches, António do Rosário
appears to have sided with those critical voices, if only
implicitly. He does not directly mention gold in his text,
but —just like other political and religious igures of the
age, such as the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Antonio Andreoni
(Antonil) in his Cultura e opulência do Brazil (Lisbon,
Valentim da Costa, 1711)— he does claim that sugar was
the central element of the Portuguese-Brazilian economy
and demands royal support (Souza, 2006: 84-98).
His arguments take on further signiicance, to a certain extent, when put in the context of late-seventeenthcentury Pernambuco, where António do Rosário wrote
this, and other, texts. His presence in several of the captaincy’s convents put him in direct contact with the different faces of society in Pernambuco, making him by necessity aware of many of the problems and hopes which
had been growing there since the middle of the 1600s. We
must not forget that after the war against the Dutch, and
after the Dutch had ceded control over the region in 1654,
Pernambuco found itself embroiled in several political
and social tensions which undoubtedly marked its unique
course within Portuguese America. As pointed out by
Evaldo Cabral de Mello, whose line of argument I follow
here, the tensions led to political instability, the result of
the aforementioned complex relations established between the elites of Pernambuco and the King’s representatives. The Pernambuco elites, thanks to their role in the
sugar industry, claimed to be the architects of the restoration of Portuguese power and, therefore, deserving of the
monarch’s favor. The king, keen to strengthen his authority, was not always willing to oblige such desires (or, alternatively, he rejected them outright by supporting merchant groups, many of whom were from Portugal).
Intermittent clashes of varying degrees occurred throughout this period, but they became particularly important
during the Mascate War (Mello, 2003).
The dificulties which the sugar industry was then undergoing were also closely linked to this political situation. In the speciic context of Pernambuco, the problems
affected above all the colonial aristocracy, born in America and essentially made up of landholders and sugar-mill
owners. Impoverished and ever more ruralized, this nobreza da terra, which had formerly built its apparatus of
power through the institutions of a decadent Olinda, felt
particularly wronged by the rise and the growing political, social and economic power of the mascates of Recife.
To add to this, many factory owners were economically
dependent on them, heavily indebted and continually
obliged to turn to loans from those same merchants to inance their sugar production (Mello, 2003).
In this context, Rosário does not appear to take sides.
Not explicitly, at least. This standpoint let him highlight
to the monarch the role of his loyal vassals who had previously risked their lives and possessions in order to restore control over the sugar industry. As we have seen,
this seems to be an allusion to the nobreza da terra which
had taken part in the Dutch wars. But, at the same time,
he makes signiicant criticisms of certain attitudes which
he identiied among those who were part of, or who wanted to become part of, the colonial nobility. In his conception of the nobility, Rosário sketched out a classical model deined on the basis of each subject’s Christian virtues,
on the works which showed his good qualities and on the
merits which he gained from his actions —characteristics
which were identiied, respectively, with the sugar-apple
or “count’s fruit” [fruta do conde], the areticuapé and the
managaba. Rosário yet again attributed a moral meaning
to the irst of these fruits, pointing out that the manjar-
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Ascetic tropics: Franciscans, missionary knowledge and visions of Empire in the Portuguese Atlantic at the turn… • 11
like “rich substance” [rica massa] within it was indeed a
representation of the “good substance” [boa massa] and
the “good conscience” [boa consciencia] which should
deine the identity of a nobleman. Furthermore, it should
serve as a guide to those who proudly deined themselves
as idalgos in the New World, who claimed that they
would be the counts and marquises of Brazil if a formal,
titled nobility existed (Rosário, 1702: 124-125).
Never diverting his focus from the Portuguese-American world, he criticizes those who considered themselves
to be nobles because of what they had —land and riches— rather than what they were: those who, without illustrious blood and other markers of worth, had managed
to penetrate the nobility with the help of others; those
who were driven by passion and showed themselves to be
bloodthirsty and vengeful, demonstrating that “they are
not of pure and clean blood” [não são de sangue puro, &
limpo] but of “mixed blood” [sangues de mistura]. He denounced those who, forgetting their origins —something
which happened easily in the New World— made themselves out as idalgos. They did not only live like idalgos,
wasting their income and their inheritance, but also occupied all sorts of posts and ofices, making the land which
they inhabited a “land of foreigners and the stepmother of
natives” [patria dos forasteyros, & madrasta dos naturaes] (Rosário, 1702: 135-137). He also criticized the
proliferation of a common method used to enter the nobility within the Portuguese Empire: the granting of the habit of the Order of Christ (Stumpf, 2014; Raminelli, 2015).
Since the color of this habit was represented in the red of
the Surinam cherry [pitanga], Rosário was keen to point
out how quickly such a fruit could sate those who ate it,
thus symbolizing how weary and disgusted people were
at seeing so many “shamefully launted and much disparaged” habits [tão mal predicados, & estimados], in the
hands of those who lacked merit and service (Rosário,
1702: 138-141).
Despite the criticisms which he launched against the
colonial nobility and many of those who aspired to belong to it, Rosário adopted a generic tone in his discourse.
It would be dificult to assert that the sugar-mill owners
of Pernambuco were the ultimate and speciic target of
his invectives, although some of them probably felt as if
they were. The defense of the sugar industry in Friar
António do Rosário’s text appears to seek neither the involvement of a speciic body or concrete community
within the world of Olinda and Recife, nor confrontation
with them. It appears, rather, to be a defense of a Pernambuco in which, ultimately, both sugar-mill owners and
mascates were involved in an industry which he saw as a
base for the riches of a rapidly-changing Empire.
In reality, as we have seen, António do Rosário set
his eyes upon a wider horizon throughout Frutas do
Brasil, articulating a speciic vision far beyond Pernambuco of the Braganza monarchy and the space which the
Portuguese-American colonial world should occupy in
it. His own experience of the Empire, after several years
as a missionary in the Franciscan province of Santo
António do Brasil, allowed him to consider Portuguese
America in a new light, and to forge a different perception of Brazil in which the colony was depicted and proclaimed as the bedrock of the Portuguese Empire, a new
India. To that end, he constructed a powerful allegorical
discourse in which the nature of the New World was interpreted in a symbolic and emblematic way, allowing
him to “read” the Portuguese-American world. In this
reading, that world became a place of Edenic and providential signiicance in which everything that was
brought over from other worlds —even devotion to the
rosary— seemed to acquire a greater degree of excellence. In his rhetorical strategy, in fact, he made use of
his extensive natural knowledge, knowledge about fruits
in Portuguese America which had been accumulated
since the beginning of European colonization, including
by Franciscans. However, the explicitly moral metaphorical value taken on by the fruits he included corresponded to his speciic conception of natural knowledge
itself, a conception which was highly religious. Nature
emerged in Brazil as a great book written by the hand of
God, whose hidden spiritual meanings had to be decoded. In short, the text which António do Rosário published in 1702 is a revealing example of the intellectual
density characteristic of the Franciscans in the Portuguese-American world and of Iberian imperial experiences more widely. It is a clear display of how the Franciscans, despite their lower proile in printing and
writing than the Jesuits, did indeed develop a signiicant
role in the development of the colonial world in the regions of Asia, Africa and America.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study has been undertaken as part of the projects
Letras de frailes: textos, cultura escrita y franciscanos en
Portugal y el Imperio portugués (siglos XVI-XVIII) –
HAR2011-23523; and Imperios de papel: textos, cultura
escrita y religiosos en la coniguración del Imperio portugués en la Edad Moderna (1580-1668) – HAR201452693-P. Both are funded by the Spanish Ministry of
Economy and Competitiveness. I would like to thank Fernando Bouza, Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro, Bruno Feitler,
Evergton Sales Souza and Marcos Antônio de Almeida
for their insightful comments which have, I am sure, improved the inal version of this text. I would also like to
thank Matt Stokes for his care in translating the text into
English.
NOTES
1
2
3
On academies and learned circles in eighteenth-century Portuguese America in general, see Kantor, 2004.
The text’s composition relects how mental prayer was diffused,
from the end of the seventeenth century, among the PortugueseAmerican peoples who the missionaries targeted. It must also be
noted that Portuguese Oratorians, and especially the Franciscans
linked to the Varatojo Convent in Portugal, also made mental
prayer a central part of their missionary activity during the same
period, both in Portugal and in Cape Verde (Tavares, 2005).
The work went on to be published a second time, again in 8º,
published in Lisbon by Filipe de Sousa Villela in 1717. A copy
Culture & History Digital Journal 5(2), December 2016, e013. eISSN 2253-797X, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2016.013
12 • Federico Palomo
of this edition is kept in the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal,
Lisbon, [BNP], SA 2755 P.
4 Rosário’s work had two nineteenth-century editions (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Imperial de P. Plancher, 1828; and Rio de
Janeiro: Typ. Imperialde E. Seignot-Plancher, 1830). In both
editions, the 1702 edition’s preliminaries, as well the inal index,
were removed. A twentieth-century complete fac-simil edition is
the Ana Hatherly’s edition (Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional, 2002).
5 The printing press did not arrive in Portuguese America until
the court arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1808. Before that, there
had been just one (failed) attempt to set up a printing workshop
in Rio, between 1747 and 1749, led by António Isidoro da Fonseca (Barros, 2012). We should also bear in mind the possible
presence of presses and portable presses in missionary aldeias,
as happened in Jesuit settlements in Paraguay (Neumann, 2015:
93-97; Veríssimo, 2011).
6 The Mascate War (1710-1711) was the last episode of the conlict which, in Pernambuco, pitted the so-called nobreza da terra, linked to the sugar industry and municipal power in Olinda,
against the rising merchant classes who, having arrived from
Portugal, had settled around Recife. These merchants, known
pejoratively as “peddlers” (mascates), had their political aspirations recognized in 1710 when the Crown created municipal
institutions in Recife, autonomous of the Olinda city council.
Some of the nobreza da terra then began an uprising, which led
to them seizing Recife and expelling the Governor —the representative of the monarch. The mascates responded with a military intervention (Mello, 2003).
7 A report sent to the Conselho Ultramarino in Lisbon in 1704
into the services offered by D. Francisco de Sousa between
1661 and 1704 revealed that he wanted to be promoted to speciic military posts in Pernambuco, for which he was favored
thanks to his status as a idalgo. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino,
Lisbon, Conselho Ultramarino, Cx. 21, d. 1968. I am grateful to
Mafalda Soares da Cunha for providing me with the information contained in this document.
8 […] inventivas proveitosas nas virtudes, & invectivas curiosas
contra os vicios.
9 He cites, among others, Saint Jerome, Saint Isidore, Saint John
Chrysostom, Saint Bonaventure and Thomas à Kempis. He also
refers to the odd classical author such as Seneca.
10 Cardim’s manuscript treatises were taken from the Jesuit during
a pirate attack in the Atlantic. They were later acquired by Samuel Purchas, who included them in the fourth volume of his Pilgrimes (London, Imprinted for H. Fetherston, 1625).
11 It must be remembered that, in the structure of Equinoctial France
—that is, the colonizing efforts of the French in Maranhão between 1612 and 1616— the Capuchins Claude d’Abbeville and
Yves d’Évreux wrote, respectively, the Histoire de la mission des
pères capucins (Paris, 1614) and the Suite de l’histoire des choses
memorables (Paris, 1615). Both texts included chapters containing relatively generic descriptions of the geography, fauna and
lora of the region. On these two texts and the contexts in which
they were produced, see Daher, 2002.
12 It is well known that Francis of Assisi and, after him, Bonaventure established a singular way to interact spiritually with nature, seeing in its elements God’s image and presence, so that
knowing them —that’s to say, decoding the Creation— was understood as a way for spiritual rising and for approaching the
Creator (Vauchez, 2009: 394-426). Their teachings, based on
St. Augustine, were relected in the intellectual output of several Franciscans linked to Oxford and Paris Studia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as Robert Grosseteste, Duns
Scotus and Roger Bacon, whose writings improved the use of
an experimental —empirical— way for understanding natural
reality. Bartholomeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum
largely circulated in Latin and French manuscript versions during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and had 32 editions
between 1474 and 1536 (Lenhart, 1924). In the early sixteenth
century, a spiritual text as Bernardino de Laredo’s Subida al
Monte Sion (Seville, 1522) relected, through the body of Christ
and the sufferings of his Passion, the physiological and pharma-
13
14
15
16
cological knowledge of its author, who also wrote —from a
similar perspective— the Metaphora Medicine et Cirurgie (Seville, 1522) and Modus cum ordine faciendi medicandi (Seville,
1527) (Buffon, 2013: 361-367; Boon, 2012: 85-107).
In Eduardo França Paiva’s view, this interpretation of Rosário’s
text as “the irst separatist and nationalist manifesto”, was implicit in Fernando Cristóvão’s analysis of Frutas do Brasil. Cf.
Paiva, 2006: 110. See also Cristóvão, 2001.
Notavel terra, notavel clima tem este Brasil; notaveis simpatias
tem as lores, & frutas desta terra cõ a Paixão de Christo. O
primeiro nome com que esta América foy bautizada dos seus
descobridores, foy de Santa Cruz; a páos lançou a ambição o
nome de Santa Cruz, chamandolhe Brasil, pelo pao Brasil; mais
pelo interesse do lenho, que pela memoria da Cruz, se chama
esta terra Brasil, & não Santa Cruz, como se chamava no principio, em que ainda não havia como hoje tanta cana, tanto
sumo, & tanto pao Brasil, tanta cobiça, tanta frieza, & tanto
peccado; oh como temo que com tantos sinaes da Sacratissima
Payxão de Christo acabe este novo mundo com castigos, por se
não aproveitar dos sinaes […]: tantos sinaes da Cruz, & da
Payxão de Christo, se estao vendo nas lores, & frutas desta fatal tierra, que não será temeridade de juizo suspeitar, & recear
castigos, & mais castigos […].
[…] os frutos que são mais irmes, & constantes que as lores,
he que levárão a benção; &as lores icárão sem benção pela
fragilidade, & inconstancia da sua natureza; & se os frutos são
mais excellentes que as lores, mais abençoados de Deus, mais
ditosos, & uteis que as lores; mais excellente he logo o Rosario
em fruto, do que em lor.
The slave system —as it is well known— was at the basis of the
Portuguese-American sugar industry. The religious orders were
not outside the establishment of a slave society in Brazil, since
they made use on slave labor in their plantations and sugar mills,
and often were even directly involved in the slave trade. Concerning the position of the religious orders (especially, the Jesuits’ position) regarding slavery, see, among others, Zeron, 2009.
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Culture & History Digital Journal 5(2), December 2016, e013. eISSN 2253-797X, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2016.013