Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches : : Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822 / / Carole A. Myscofski.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Myscofski, Carole A.,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (320 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction. Amazons and Others --; Chapter one. Amazons and Cannibals: Imagining Brazilian Women in the Colonial Period --; Chapter two. The Body of Virtues: The Christian Ideal for Brazilian Women --; Chapter three. Reading, Writing, and Sewing: Education for Brazilian Women --; Chapter four. Before the Church Doors: Women as Wives and Concubines --; Chapter five. Freiras and Recolhidas: The Reclusive Life for Brazilian Women --; Chapter six. Women and Magic: Religious Dissidents in Colonial Brazil --; Conclusion. Closing the Colonial Era --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780292748545; 9783110745344
• DOI: 10.7560/748538
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Carole A. Myscofski.

The Roman Catholic church played a dominant role in colonial Brazil, so that women’s lives in the colony were shaped and constrained by the Church’s ideals for pure women, as well as by parallel concepts in the Iberian honor code for women. 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 throughout the colonial period. 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, constituting a separate world for wives, mothers, concubines, nuns, and witches. 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. One of the few wide-ranging histories of women in colonial Latin America, this book makes a crucial contribution to our knowledge of the early modern Atlantic World.