Project PTDC/HAR-HIS/28719/2017

The question is to determine how and on what scale the implantation of Catholicism across the empire was supported by the bishops and its diocesan network and secular clergy, assuming they were an essential element in the process of expansion of the Christian faith, with a major impact on the life of the populations.

This is a decisive and particularly interesting question because it challenges the thesis that has prevailed since Boxer (1978), which defends that the process of expansion of faith across the empire was mainly supported by the regular clergy missionary action. On the contrary, bishops had a fragile presence and were under the domain of the Crown’s patronage.

At the same time, the research will generate a large body of knowledge on a field that, partly due to Boxer’s thesis, has been practically abandoned, namely, the episcopate and its administrative and judicial structures, dynamics and relation with other powers and with the populations.

The research will adopt the perspectives offered by the confessionalization, disciplining and crossed history categories. The fact that the research team comprises African, American and European historians is an added value.

The proposed interpretations offered by connected history will also be considered. Several bishops lived interesting experiences. Examples include the first bishop of Brazil, Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, who studied in Paris, was a courtier in Lisbon, served as vicar general in Goa and ended his life heading a diocese in America; or João Franco de Oliveira who, at the turn of the 18th century, began his career as a judge of the episcopal court of Coimbra, became bishop of Angola, went on to be archbishop of Bahia and finally returned to Portugal as bishop of Miranda.

The methodologies of comparative history will be adopted. The added benefit is that analysis takes the initial problem, which covers all territories under consideration, as its starting point, rather than studying closed geographical areas.

The model of the diocese of Viseu will be used to establish to what extent it determined a similar configuration across the empire. The kingdom´s pattern will also be used to fill some knowledge gaps that may result from the lack of documentary sources on the empire.

The prosopographic method will guide the study of the episcopate and of the regular clerics with major roles in the dioceses and allow for a better knowledge of individual and collective careers, and patronage networks. A database enriched with information gathered by team members will be created.

The final target is a global interpretation of the impact of the episcopate on the empire. The accuracy of the proposed results will be ensured by analyses on varying scales, which may range from the individual to the collective and from the parish to the diocese or to the dioceses of the same continent.

The achieved results will deepen existing knowledge by offering new information that will be particularly relevant to the study of some underexamined dioceses, such as Malacca, Kochi or Congo/Angola.

The reanalysis of Boxer’s thesis will make it possible to go beyond his legacy, generating a more accurate understanding of the expansion of Catholicism, reducing the excessive importance of established historiographical routines that, while analysing evangelization in the non-European world, focus too much on the regular clergy, neglecting the key effects of disciplining that stem from the exercise of an episcopal and inquisitorial ecclesiastical justice, usually entangled.

This new knowledge will allow for a re-examination of a historiographical debate still open in colonial history and which concerns the status of the territorial occupation of the overseas territories by the Portuguese Crown, determining whether they formed an empire or not. Following SUBRAHMANYAM, 2001, and assuming that an empire was a state with a considerable geographical extension ruling over more than one culture or ecozone, it will be relevant to address the problem in the light of the reassessment of the importance that diocesan structures and their agents assumed in a political culture in which the State and the Church were closely entangled.

The sheer geographical and chronological scale of the Portuguese seaborne empire, along with the various religious and cultural contexts it entails, calls for the definition of the dioceses and time periods to be considered, to ensure the feasibility of the project. In the Atlantic islands were chosed Funchal (the first diocese to be founded following the papal bull that established royal patronage on overseas territories) and Cape Verde (an African example of the insular context); within Continental Africa, the unique case of the diocese of Congo/Angola was chosen; Goa, Kochi, Malacca and Macau were selected within Asia (covering strategic geographical areas of the Portuguese presence across that continent and posing different challenges to the episcopate); the dioceses of Bahia, Olinda, Rio de Janeiro, Maranhão and S. Paulo were selected within Brazil (spanning multiple areas and different dynamics).

On a chronological level, three imperatives were followed:

–The moments of the creation of each diocese;

-The cycles of major reforms in the Church of Rome, namely the years immediately following the Council of Trent (1543-1565), the creation of the Roman Propaganda Fide Congregation (1622), the reiteration of the papal condemnation of Jansenism by the bull Unigenitus (1713) and the emergence of Catholic Enlightenment;

-Periods in which the new political and/or geostrategic dynamics had an impact on the diocesan government, such as the incorporation of the Kingdom of Portugal in the Hispanic monarchy (1581), the severing and reestablishment of relations between the Crown and the papacy (1641-1668), the Dutch conquest of Pernambuco, Malacca and Kochi (1630, 1641 and 1663), and the limitation of the jurisdiction powers of the Roman nunciature (1676).

Special attention will be given to the consultation and analysis of documentation produced by bishops and the diocesan structures. This underexamined documentation is stored in ecclesiastical archives, as in Funchal, Goa, Kochi, Rio de Janeiro, or in public archives, as in Maranhão.

Concerning the documentation from the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the series of ad limina visits and the testimonies on the situation of the dioceses, found in the processos consistoriales will be summarized, transcribed and translated in full (in the case of Latin documentation). Research will be made also in the Archivio de Propaganda Fide.

In the libraries and archives of Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Angola and India special attention will be given to the study of correspondence (between the Crown and the episcopate or between bishops and inquisitors) scattered across locations such as the National Library of Portugal, the Ajuda Library (Lisbon), the Torre do Tombo or the Archivo General de Simancas; episcopal judicial proceedings in the Inquisition’s archives at the Torre do Tombo; and the documentation of the Mesa da Consciência. In the case of the documentation sent and issued by the Overseas Council, the documents scattered in geographically sorted boxes will be indexed and summarized (thanks to the RESGATE project, this task has already been completed for the Brazilian dioceses).

Attention will be given to the search for books of parish records, since this documentation is crucial to demonstrate the territorialization of the episcopal power.

The preliminary results will give rise to publications, mainly in English, by team members in international indexed and peer-reviewed journals.

Annual joint team work meetings and with the External Advisory Board, in the initial and intermediate stages of the project, will be held to assess the work in progress, adjust methodologies and set the goals and criteria to be adopted in the writing of a collective e-book that will assemble the final results of the project. The book will be published both in Portuguese and English.

The proposal is for the book to take on the following structure, which will serve as a guideline for the team’s research:

1- The episcopate: recruitment, careers, types of government;

2- Functional structures of episcopal administration: organization and territorial capillarity;

3- Law and justice: constitutions and rules, pastoral visits and episcopal courts;

4- The secular clergy: potential and limits;

5- Interrelations: relations with the Crown, the Inquisition and the regular clergy;

6 - Impacts: the faith of the believers of the empire.

All publications must observe FCT’s open access policy that is required for peer-reviewed scientific publications. Events for the dissemination of results are scheduled, facilitating the social appropriation of science (online: Facebook, YouTube for sharing videos, website of the Centre for the History of Society and Culture, and on-site: two international conferences and workshops on specialized subjects with the team members and the External Advisory Board.

The project’s activities will be held mainly at the Centre for the History of Society and Culture, thus bringing several researchers to Coimbra. This may help consolidate an internationally renowned line of research anchored at the University that contributes to the scientific development of the region and has indirect economic effects.

The creation of the External Advisory Board makes it possible to support the several institutions to which its members are affiliated. Similarly, the project team was formed with the collaboration of these institutions in mind: the Federal University of Bahia and the University of Leuven, where two of the members are teachers; and the University of Bergen, where one of the members is research fellow. These entities will provide facilities for the holding of meetings and activities of the project, as well as bibliographic resources essential to the research.