A difusão social da escrita nas Ilhas dos Açores no século XVI

Abstract

There is a lack of knowledge about how the universe of writing has spread in the overseas territories dominated by the Portuguese Empire. In order to fill that gap, the History of Written Culture in Brazil Program (HISCULTE), associated to PROHPOR (Portuguese Language History Program), has used the purpose of understanding the most diverse writing penetration rate in the territories colonized by Portugal by using different sources and methods, having already obtained consistent results on more distant periods of Colonial Brazil. This work, on its turn, aims to give information about the writing social spread in other territories of Portuguese domain, namely the islands that make up the Azores Archipelago during the second half of sixteenth century. To achieve this, methodologically, the results emerged from the analysis of the set of testimonies performed and signed before the Holy Office, found in the inquisitorial sources produced in the first and second Inquisition visitations to the Atlantic Islands (15751579 and 1592-1593). Thus, in the first instance, the study focuses on the contextualization of the Azores Social History to, a posteriori, measure the population levels of literacy, applying the so-called method of computation of signatures, which has allowed approximations on literacy census aspects in societies of the Old Regime. Among the nine islands of the archipelago, in two of them the Holy Office desk had established: Sao Miguel and Terceira, with emphasis on the activities of the Inquisition in the cities of Ponta Delgada and Angra. In the analysis, the social variables that compose the sociological profile of the witnesses are sex, marital status, religious life, ethnicity, geographical origin, residence, age group, and sociooccupational stratum. Therefore, by working with general quantitative data on these signatures – understood as indicators of a certain level of literacy –, it is possible to arrange an approximate picture of the faculty of letters in Azores context, in furtherance of modestly outline the different profiles of the literate ones in this period. Hence, it aims to contribute to the study of writing spread history in the Portuguese Empire, in particular within the context of near absence of institutions dedicated to teaching reading and writing, in order to recognize the different social functions of knowing how to read and write within Azorean universe.