| Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822 Contributor(s): Myscofski, Carole a. (Author) |
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ISBN: 1477302190 ISBN-13: 9781477302194 Publisher: University of Texas Press OUR PRICE: $29.70 Product Type: Paperback Published: November 2013 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Gender Studies - History | Latin America - South America - Religion | Christianity - Catholic |
| Dewey: 282 |
| Series: Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture |
| Physical Information: 0.72" H x 6" W x 9" (1.04 lbs) 320 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Latin America - Religious Orientation - Catholic - Religious Orientation - Christian |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Myscofski, Carole a.: - Carole A. Myscofski is McFee Professor of Religion at Illinois Wesleyan University, where she directs the Women’s Studies program. A historian of religions, she served as the area editor for “New Religions” for the HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion and as the editor of the Academy Series, sponsored by the American Academy of Religion and published by Oxford University Press. |
