Pela pena do Santo Ofício: difusão social da escrita nas Capitanias de Pernambuco, Itamaracá e Paraíba em finais de Quinhentos.

Abstract

The thesis presented here focuses on the study of literacy in the captaincies of Pernambuco, Itamaracá and Paraíba in the sixteenth century , using as corpus three books produced during the first Visitation of the Tribunal of the Inquisition in Brazil, namely: the Third Book of Confessions (1594-1595), the Third Book of Denunciations (1594-1595) and the Fourth Book of Denunciations (1593-1595), in which were recorded the statements given to the Holy Office by the population, followed by the signatures of the interviewees able to sign. It was held, based on this corpus, a quantitative and qualitative study of signatures and other non-alphabetic signs left on the books, analyzed along a sociological profile of the interviewees, in which it took into account aspects such as gender, age, place of birth, religious condition and sociooccupational stratum. By this analysis, it was added an approach to aspects of social structures in Brazil at the end of Five Hundred, seeking to a better understanding and contextualization of social diffusion of writing at this moment in the history. It was also performed a semi-diplomatic edition of the Fourth Book of Denunciations, which aims to compensate for the lack of a conservative edition of this book, enabling linguistic studies and other studies, such as the one what was held here on the literacy levels, since the already published editions of the Inquisition books were modernized editions that, in addition to changing the primitive spelling of documents, suppressed the initial parts and the final parts of the testimony, where the signatures were left by witnesses.