Echoes of Women in Early Colonial Brazil

This book project suggests that we listen for the echoes of women in the fragmented and distended colonial archive of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Brazil. I use the word echoes deliberately to reference the gendered fate of the mythical nymph Echo who, stripped of her ability to speak, “repeats the last of what is spoken and returns the words she hears.� While the women of colonial Brazil doubtless spoke, their voices, like that of Echo, only survive indirectly, repackaged through the writings of literate men. Yet, careful attention to context can help to bring women’s voices to the fore. Missionaries, chroniclers, bureaucrats, and travelers were influenced by the patriarchal models of Portugal and the Catholic Church and, as a result, the actions of the woman they observed, criticized, and praised were recorded through the lens of gender expectations for men and women. Analyzing these sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth male-authored sources with gender in mind can help historians listen for female voices in texts where their utterances were retroactively fitted within normative frameworks.