9. Translation and prolepsis: the Jesuit origins of a Tupi¹ Christian doctrine

Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Caroline Egan

When the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil, in April 1500, the prospect of taking possession of the newly found land was, from its very inception, directly bound up with the project of conversion. The fleet’s scribe, Pero Vaz de Caminha, in his famous letter to King Manuel describing the indigenous Brazilians and their land for the first time, would conclude: ‘[T]he best fruit that could be gathered hence would be, it seems to me, the salvation of these people’.² The Jesuits, who began arriving in Brazil in 1549, eagerly took up the call to proselytise. In comparative terms the arrival of the Jesuits in Brazil in 1549 is both early and late. Within the history of the Society of Jesus, Brazil constitutes the first New World Jesuit province; and it rises to prominence within the order’s organisation more quickly than comparable Spanish provinces.³ Due to their relatively recent founding, however, the Jesuits arrived in Brazil nearly fifty years after Caminha penned his letter to the king and decades after other regular orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans had made inroads elsewhere in the New World.⁴ For the Jesuits in Brazil, the project of ‘saving the heathen’ (gentio) also involved an ambitious linguistic endeavour: that of mastering local tongues. This resulted in some of the most remarkable texts in the Jesuits’ cultural legacy: linguistic and doctrinal works written in indigenous Brazilian languages. Although their earliest printed text dates from the late 16th century, with José de Anchieta’s Arte de grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil [Grammar of the Most Used Language on the Coast of Brazil] (Coimbra, 1595), doctrines and prayers tentatively translated into Tupi had circulated in manuscript form since the early 1550s. However, extant manuscripts of these early translations are few in number.

Figure 9.1. First page of ‘Doutrina Christã na Linguoa Brasilica’. (Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Bodl. 617, fol. 1r).

A significant exception to this documentary scarcity is a manuscript (fig. 9.1) held by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford which bears the title ‘Doutrina Christã na Linguoa Brasilica’ [Christian Doctrine in the Brazilian Tongue], hereafter referred to as ‘Doutrina’ or by its current shelfmark, MS. Bodl. 617. The story of how it moved from Portuguese into English hands and ended up in the Bodleian is a fascinating and little-explored episode in the history of the Jesuits in colonial Brazil. In the course of its itinerary – from the southern coast of Brazil across the Atlantic to England – the manuscript charts the encounters of indigenous Brazilians, Iberian Jesuits and English privateers in the late 16th century.

The present chapter examines this text in two parts. First, we analyse the historical context in which MS. Bodl. 617 was produced during the early decades of Jesuit missionary work in Brazil. We reconstruct the history of its relocation and the various actors involved in its appropriation by the English. We then discuss the ways in which the manuscript responds to early modern preoccupations about translation and orthodoxy through an analysis of its use of Portuguese loan words and a close reading of a peculiar passage in Portuguese which instructs the reader how to perform the sacrament of baptism in extremis.

Brazil in the late 16th century

The first Jesuit mission to arrive in Brazil in 1549 accompanied the recently appointed governor general Tomé de Sousa, who was charged with building a new central government. The Portuguese crown had decided in 1548 to establish a ‘Governo Geral’ as an attempt to counter the failing captaincy system and regain control of its new territory through a centralised administration.⁵ Sousa was tasked with building a new capital (Salvador, in Bahia), enforcing the law and appointing local officials. All this was to be done in the service of God and king, as set out in the regimento (charter) he carried. In that charter King João III emphasised that promoting indigenous conversion was ‘the principal reason I gave orders for the settling of land in Brazil’.⁶ It is unsurprising, then, that the first Jesuits in Brazil arrived with a governor who was charged with advancing the conversion of indigenous peoples.

Subsequent years saw more Jesuits arrive and by the late 1550s those in Bahia, Porto Seguro, Espírito Santo and São Vicente were working to convert Amerindian populations.⁷ Still, the number of missionaries was quite low: up until 1598 there were only 128 Jesuits in the Province of Brazil.⁸ One of the main objectives of these Jesuit missions was the conversion of local indigenous populations. An important aspect of their efforts was the creation of villages (aldeias). Proposed by the first provincial, Manuel da Nóbrega, soon after the arrival of the Jesuits in Brazil, these aldeias served as centres for catechesis.⁹ Most peoples with whom the Portuguese settlers and missionaries initially had contact belonged to the Tupi-Guarani language family.¹⁰ Far from homogeneous, this large language family comprised numerous independent groups which were sometimes allies and at other times in conflict. Local and far-flung indigenous groups alike were subjected to ‘forced acculturation’ in the aldeias, regardless of individual cultural or linguistic traits: as S. B. Schwartz notes, the inhabitants of aldeias ‘received an education in how to live a Christian life, a concept that included not only European morality but work habits as well’.¹¹

After their arrival with Sousa in Brazil, the first Jesuits fanned out in order to visit other regions and create new missions, like that at São Vicente – the site of the first Portuguese colony in Brazil (1532) – founded by Leonardo Nunes in 1551.¹² The Jesuits there knew that nearby, on the plateau beyond the Serra do Mar (a mountain ridge roughly following the coastline in south-eastern Brazil), a Portuguese outcast called João Ramalho had been living for decades among the indigenous people and had become a local leader. While Ramalho had for some time acted as what A. Metcalf calls a ‘go-between’ for Portuguese settlers and indigenous groups in the region, his relationship with the Jesuits at São Vicente was distinctly more tense.¹³ Still, by the time the Jesuits founded the mission in São Paulo de Piratininga (later the city of São Paulo) in 1553, Nóbrega mentions one of Ramalho’s sons as a potential aid in the work of conversion: ‘I am now traveling with the oldest one to the sertão in order to carry out our ministry with greater authority, for he is very well known and respected among the pagans’.¹⁴ The mission at São Paulo de Piratininga, along with the nearby São Vicente and Santos, would become a hub for efforts at converting the Tupi in the southern region. The ‘Doutrina’ is one example of manuscript doctrines that would have been kept by the Jesuits to assist them in this work.

Early Jesuit work with Tupi

MS. Bodl. 617 is a Christian doctrine written almost entirely in what it calls the ‘Brazilian tongue’, which, as M. K. Lee points out, was used broadly by colonial writers ‘to refer to the Brazilian lingua franca they learned to speak or heard spoken between linguistically dissimilar peoples’.¹⁵ While a number of studies have examined the Tupi-Guarani language family, the varieties encountered and studied by Europeans in colonial Brazil and the evolution of those languages over time,¹⁶ our aim in the present chapter is not to undertake a linguistic analysis of the ‘Brazilian tongue’ used in the manuscript, but rather to provide a study of the origins and relocation of the manuscript and an analysis of its use of Portuguese. We therefore use the terms ‘Brazilian tongue’ and the broad ‘Tupi’ to refer to the main language of the text. Although it is difficult to date the manuscript, we can say that it must have been composed between 1549 and 1591, the forty-odd year period between the arrival of the Jesuits in Brazil and the raid on the Jesuit library at Santos during which the manuscript was removed and later taken to England.

Like dating the manuscript, assigning authorship to the ‘Doutrina’ is a complicated matter. Even if the hand could be identified, this particular text belongs to a tradition of translation, circulation and practical use which in Brazil dates back to the arrival of the Jesuits. In 1550 João de Azpilcueta Navarro wrote from Bahia that he had translated articles of faith on creation and the incarnation, as well as the commandments and other prayers, ‘so that they might learn and enjoy [them] more quickly’.¹⁷ In 1553 Pero Correia wrote from São Vicente to Simão Rodrigues in Lisbon, stressing the importance of preparing catechistic materials in the indigenous language and requesting resources for this purpose: ‘I always speak to them [indigenous children] and to all the others who come together in the church in their own tongue and I teach them matters of faith; but I lack books in a tongue I can study, because I do not know Latin and cannot use the books written in Latin’.¹⁸ He goes on to list five relevant works by ‘Doctor Constantino’ (Constantino Ponce de la Fuente) and asks that they be sent to him.

In the same year that Correia made this request, Luís da Grã and José de Anchieta arrived in Brazil. These two would be instrumental in the twinned linguistic and catechistic efforts of the Jesuit missions.¹⁹ In 1555, for instance, Grã oversaw the revision of certain existing doctrinal texts and would have been assisted in this endeavour by a number of translators, Anchieta outstanding among them.²⁰ Anchieta would also compose the ‘Diálogos da Fé’ (or ‘das Coisas da Fé’), as well as a confessionary and instructions for catechumens and those in extremis.²¹ In 1566 the new Portuguese-language doctrine by Marcos Jorge seems to have arrived in Brazil, where it was translated by Leonardo do Vale.²² While catechistic texts like these flourished in the Jesuit missions, they remained unpublished in the 16th century. In 1592 the Jesuits in Brazil requested (and later received) permission to print a doctrinal work in Portugal, along with Anchieta’s Arte de grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil. However, in the end, probably due to financial constraints, only the latter of these two texts was printed, in 1595.²³

Despite the fact that the doctrinal text proposed for publication in 1592 was never printed, surviving manuscript doctrines like those prepared by Anchieta or the anonymous ‘Doutrina’ held in the Bodleian give a sense of the practical processes through which such texts were composed and revised. For instance, in the manuscript later titled Catecismo Brasílico (a copy of a copy of an autograph manuscript of Anchieta), the first item to appear is the ‘Instrução para “In Extremis”’. This protocol, according to A. Cardoso, was the first translation prepared by Anchieta, a fact that may reflect its practical use in urgent situations.²⁴ The 1592 printing request alludes to the regular use and revision of indigenous-language doctrinal texts: ‘As for the Doctrine, it was composed forty years ago and since then it has been continually taught, improved and corrected, in terms of both theology and language’.²⁵ Finally, in 1618 Antonio Araújo published a catechism in the ‘Brazilian tongue’. The title page of that doctrine, printed in Lisbon by Pedro Crasbeeck, declares that the work is a Catecismo na lingoa Brasilica and clarifies that it was ‘[c]omposed in the form of dialogues by learned fathers and good interpreters of the Company of Jesus’, which has been ‘newly arranged, ordered, and augmented by Father Antonio d’Araújo’.²⁶ The manuscript held in the Bodleian closely resembles portions of the text printed in 1618. The prayers and dialogues in Tupi which appear verbatim in both works demonstrate that these two texts derive from the same process of use, revision and emendation.

The transatlantic itinerary of the ‘Doutrina’

Although we have not established the exact date MS. Bodl. 617 was produced, its fair state of conservation suggests it was probably composed not long before it was taken from the Jesuit library in Santos, between December 1591 and February 1592. We know who was responsible for this removal due to the revealing ex-libris: ‘Ex-dono Thomas Lodge D. M. Oxoniensis. qui sua manu a Brasilia deduxit’ [Previously owned by Thomas Lodge, M.D., from Oxford University, who with his own hand removed it from Brazil]. Lodge was a playwright and poet, usually credited with having inspired Shakespeare’s As You Like It with his 1590 prose romance Rosalynd. Not long after this, in 1591, Lodge embarked on a voyage to the South Seas, possibly to escape from his creditors.

The captain of the voyage was Thomas Cavendish, who had made his name as the second Englishman to circumnavigate the world.²⁷ This period saw the climax of English maritime ventures, with several expeditions sailing the Atlantic in the hope of seizing Spanish cargo on its return from the New World. These voyages, often termed ‘privateering’ and bearing the royal seal of approval, were typically little more than corsair expeditions seeking to challenge Iberian power in the Americas. In Brazil, English incursions were mainly commercial before the 1580s. In the period following the 1580 union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, however, these incursions degenerated into hostile encounters, more often than not resulting in lengthy sieges and pillaging. The arrival of Cavendish in Brazil followed the traumatic English siege of Salvador in 1587, which, together with rumours of raids by Francis Drake on Spanish American ports, had worked to spread panic along the coastal settlements.

Cavendish’s 1591 expedition was no different. On the way to the Pacific via the Straits of Magellan the fleet of five vessels stopped at the small harbour village of Santos, which was believed to be unfortified. Cavendish’s plan was to replenish food and water supplies and, he hoped, to make some gains through plunder. The English arrived on Christmas Day and stayed for five weeks, during which time they looted the village, burned a number of neighbouring sugar mills and razed the nearby settlement of São Vicente. In the meantime, the English officers – Lodge among them – made their lodgings in the Jesuit residence, left empty by the missionaries. One of the company, Anthony Knivet, described going ‘up and downe from Cell to Cell’ looking for valuables until chancing upon a chest filled with silver coins.²⁸ For Lodge the target seems to have been the Jesuit library. There is reason to believe that, in addition to the ‘Doutrina’, he may have taken other items from the library, for in the preliminaries to his 1596 A Margarite of America he claims to have taken inspiration from a ‘historie in the Spanish tongue’ found ‘in the library of the Jesuits in Sanctum’.²⁹

It is no small feat that the Jesuit manuscript found safe passage to England, since Cavendish’s enterprise ended in disaster and only a handful of men, including Lodge, managed to return. Lodge seems to have kept the manuscript until the 1610s, when he donated it to the burgeoning collection being assembled in Oxford by Thomas Bodley. R.W. Hunt includes the donation from Lodge in A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Hunt provides ‘Tupi’ as the short title of the work and lists Lodge as its donor, dating the acquisition of the manuscript to between 1613 and 1620.³⁰ Lodge’s life had changed considerably by that time. In 1597 he had left England for France and trained as a medical doctor, but since the College of Physicians repeatedly rejected his application for a medical licence, he travelled constantly between England and the Continent from 1598 until 1610. The rejection may have been due to Lodge’s Catholicism, which his biographers suggest had been a constant source of trouble since the 1580s.³¹ Interestingly, Oxford recognised his medical degree in 1602. Might it have been as a sign of gratitude that Lodge donated to the University a manuscript he had kept throughout those turbulent years? We shall never know. It was not until 1610 that Lodge was finally granted a medical licence and in the following year, after swearing an oath of allegiance, was issued an order by the Privy Council protecting him from prosecution. Despite practising as ‘Doctor of Physike’ for the Catholic community in London, Lodge did not interrupt his literary career, though in later life he published mostly translations. His choice of texts and authors may suggest what critics have seen as ‘an increasing preoccupation with problems of spirituality inflected by Lodge’s Catholicism’.³²

The story of the genesis of the manuscript and its trajectory from Brazil to England is a mixture of the routine and the exceptional. Its creation, as described above, reflects common Jesuit concerns about the catechisation of the indigenous population and the intensive linguistic study needed in this process. It is not surprising that this manuscript was produced. In contrast, the intervention of Lodge, a literary man who removed the manuscript from Santos and preserved it – despite being unable to read it – for so many years, has something of the serendipitous about it. This particular manuscript travelled from Brazil to England because, for some reason, it happened to catch his eye.

Just as the history of the manuscript reflects both common practices and contingency, so too do some of its features. As the next section details, the decision to render certain doctrinally significant words into the ‘Brazilian tongue’ and leave others in Portuguese reflects ongoing concerns about the practice of translation in catechesis. This varying use of indigenous words and loan words connects MS. Bodl. 617 to the wider body of Jesuit catechisms in Tupi, as well as other missionary texts produced throughout colonial Latin America. At the same time, the ‘Doutrina’ importantly includes a brief passage which sets it apart from this wider tradition: an explanation, in Portuguese, of the protocol for baptism in extremis. These instructions are not only unique in the manuscript, where they constitute the only sustained use of Portuguese, but also in comparison with the contemporary tradition of Amerindian catechisms.

Translation in the ‘Doutrina’

In his 1576 História da província de Santa Cruz que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil [History of the Province of Santa Cruz, which we commonly call Brazil], Pero de Magalhães Gândavo remarks on a notable feature of the coastal language: it ‘lacks three letters, namely, f, l and r’.³³ Gândavo then elaborates on the idea that the ‘lack’ of these three consonants corresponds to a lack of ‘fé’, ‘lei’ and ‘rei’ (‘faith’, ‘law’ and ‘king’). Regarding faith, Gabriel Soares de Sousa would contend in his 1587 Tratado descriptivo do Brasil (Descriptive Treatise on Brazil): ‘The fact that they have no F is due to their lack of faith in anything that they might worship. Not even those born among Christians and catechised by the Jesuit Fathers have any faith in Our Lord God, nor have any regard for truth or any loyalty to anyone who does them a favour’.³⁴ The notion that having faith goes hand in hand with having a word for faith (indeed, only its first letter) reflects, according to J.A. Hansen, the notion that the relationship of sign, sound and signifier is material rather than arbitrary.³⁵ In other words, the Tupi language has no word for ‘faith’ because its speakers lack faith itself. This notion, in turn, makes it theoretically possible for missionaries to engender faith by providing the right vocabulary.³⁶

This perceived lack of faith, law and king, moreover, was linked to a far more pervasive trait which the missionaries identified in the indigenous culture and which would shape their evangelising strategies: that the indigenous Brazilians were irreversibly ‘inconstant’ or changeable.³⁷ Such inconstancy was, of course, mainly shown in their incapacity for lasting conversion – just as easily as they embraced Catholicism, they would fall back on the ‘vomit of old habits’ (vômito dos antigos costumes), as Anchieta so eloquently put it in a 1554 letter.³⁸ However, to the Jesuit observers impermanence seemed to permeate the indigenous Brazilian way of life: nomadism, polygamy, nakedness and orality were taken as signs of an existence built on ever-changing foundations in which boundaries were notably lacking. The Jesuits, therefore, were concerned first and foremost with imposing a stable, permanent framework onto everyday indigenous life, a framework which would create the conditions for lasting conversion. This included, for instance, the creation of villages (aldeias) and the imposition of monogamous marriages. The domestication of space and relationships was compounded by the regulation of time: the priests would enforce a strict daily routine punctuated by prayer and work at pre-determined intervals. A major feature of this attempt to impose stability on an otherwise ‘inconstant’ way of life consisted in subsuming Tupi orality into European grammatical structures, thus appropriating, domesticating and organising the language by giving it a written, apparently stable form (see also chapter 6). In other words, in the early days of their mission in Brazil the Jesuits were invested with the task of converting not only the Tupi peoples but also the Tupi language or, as Hansen puts it, ‘supplementing the lack of language in the Tupi tongue’ by infusing it with the ‘missing’ concepts.³⁹

Supplementing the tongue with language, however, would not prove a simple task. As the first provincial, Manuel da Nóbrega, would claim as early as 1549: ‘They have very few words with which to profess our faith well, but still we explain it to them as best we can, demonstrating certain points in a roundabout way’.⁴⁰ Not only in Brazil, but also in Iberian missions in the Americas more generally, clerics needed to seek out terms which would be understandable to both converts and potential converts and to ensure that these terms conveyed meaning in orthodox ways. The complexity of this balancing act generated diverse and changing views on the best way to translate particular concepts into indigenous languages. In some instances missionaries sought equivalences or created neologisms in indigenous languages; and in others they employed loanwords. Both these strategies appear in the Bodleian manuscript. Throughout the text, a number of doctrinally significant words appear in Tupi. In addition to the word ‘Tupã’, originally associated with thunder and lightning and selected by missionaries in Brazil early on as an equivalency for the Christian ‘God’,⁴¹ the first two figures of the Catholic Trinity, the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, are rendered ‘Tuba’ (father) and ‘Taigra’ (son in relation to the father).⁴² At the same time, a number of important concepts are rendered in Portuguese or in a combination of Portuguese and Tupi. Terms for concepts like grace (‘graça’), saint (‘Sam’, ‘Santa’ and ‘Santos’), earthly paradise (‘paraiso terreãl’), sin (‘pecado’) and Christians (‘Christãos’) all appear in Portuguese. The figure of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Catholic Trinity, is rendered ‘Tupã Spu Santo’ (where ‘Spu’ is a contracted form of ‘Espíritu’); and the holy cross is ‘santa ioaçaba’, combining the Portuguese word for ‘holy’ with the Tupi term used for cross. That term, ‘îoasaba’, is rooted in the act of crossing one thing with another (‘o atravessar um com o outro’).⁴³

Both kinds of translation described above impose meaning on the Tupi language. Designating Tupi terms like ‘Tupã’ as equivalencies for ‘God’ entails the appropriation of the word and its forced accommodation of an imposed idea. Likewise, the blunt introduction of words like ‘pecado’, deemed incommensurable with any term which might already have existed in the Brazilian tongue, imposes the idea and the word itself, or, rather, the idea through the word itself. A number of scholars have analysed this process and other kinds of catechistic translation which flourished in the early Jesuit missions in Brazil, with a particular focus on the works attributed to Anchieta: A. Bosi, for instance, characterises the linguistic project of Anchieta as the creation of a ‘third symbolic sphere’, a new realm of meaning which does not fully reflect either the language of the missionary or the language of the Tupi; J.-C. Laborie goes further in describing Anchieta’s use of Tupi as the creation of a completely artificial or expendable object, mutually unrecognisable for its interlocutors.⁴⁴ In his taxonomy and analysis of the different types of translation undertaken by Anchieta, C. Braga-Pinto points out the temporal implications of the form of translation he designates ‘conversion’, exemplified, for instance, in the use of the term ‘Tupã’ to mean ‘God’: ‘Conversion would hardly take place if it were purely the erasure of an old system of signification and the imposition of another, completely foreign meaning. When a new concept is added to a word, it does not destroy the memory of the word’s previous lives . . . In its newness, conversion presents itself as that which was already there’.⁴⁵ What Braga-Pinto identifies as a recasting of the past may also be understood in terms of prolepsis, that is, the present realisation of an anticipated future. In this proleptic gesture, the act of alphabetic writing is key. If, from the Jesuit perspective, the Tupi language ‘lacked’ any understanding of faith, if it ‘lacked’ any notion of ‘God’, ‘sin’ and so on, much as it ‘lacked’ alphabetic writing and other forms of cultural fixity, then inventing or imposing terms for those ideas and recording them in writing were a way of guaranteeing their present and future existence.

Baptism in extremis

What we are describing as the ‘proleptic’ impulse of the ‘Doutrina’ is evident not only in its use of loanwords, but also in a specific and unusual passage on the protocol for baptising those in extremis, that is, those on the point of death (fig. 9.2):

Figure 9.2. Protocol for baptising those on the point of death in ‘Doutrina Christã na Linguoa Brasilica’. (Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Bodl. 617, fol. 38r).

This section is notable for several reasons. It is the only substantive use of Portuguese in the entire manuscript, beyond features such as loanwords and titles. It is also unique in comparison with other known Tupi catechisms which would have circulated or were published at the time: copies of doctrinal manuscripts attributed to Anchieta do not include instructions of this kind, nor does the catechism compiled by Araújo and printed in 1618 in Lisbon. Indeed, even the fact that these clarifications were made in Portuguese is unusual in comparison to other indigenous American catechisms more generally. Instructions for administering the sacrament do appear, for instance, in the Nahuatl Confessionario mayor by Alonso de Molina (1569), but these are relatively detailed and written in Nahuatl, clearly meant to explain the process to indigenous lay assistants who might have been called on in emergencies to perform the baptism in the absence of a priest.⁴⁷ In MS. Bodl. 617, in contrast, the ‘Instrução’ assures its reader in Portuguese, indicating that this passage was probably intended for a missionary reader, or perhaps for an indigenous convert who had already been educated in Portuguese.

In addition to the rather unusual fact of this Portuguese protocol being included in the manuscript, it is also important to remark on one of its key phrases: ‘E dizendo que crê isto como as palavras soam ainda que não entenda o como, será perguntado se quer ser batizado’ [And in saying that they believe this, as the words sound, even if they do not understand, they will be asked if they want to be baptised]. This clarification reminds us of the formulaic and urgent nature of baptism in extremis. The protocol outlines only those matters of faith which are deemed indispensable for the baptism of someone on the point of death. Indeed, following this Portuguese instruction we find a few pages dedicated to the ‘Same instruction in the language of Brazil’. In dialogic fashion, a ‘Master’ asks questions and a ‘Disciple’ simply responds ‘I believe’ (‘Arobia’). It seems, moreover, that the ‘Doutrina’ anticipates a reader who may need to be reminded of the legitimacy of this simplified procedure, of its authenticity regardless of its rudimentary nature and the possibility that the recipient of the sacrament may not even understand it (‘ainda que não entenda’). The instruction reassures its reader that baptism may be performed on the basis of enunciation rather than understanding. While presented as an exception in the text (‘ainda que’), this remark appears to draw, once again, on the conviction that enunciation and faith are inseparable. However, faith need not precede utterance; instead, utterance creates faith. In extremis, words are not only the vehicle for conversion, they constitute it proleptically, anticipating and laying early claim to a hypothetical future in which the dying person really does believe the words uttered.

Conclusion

To conclude, we would like to suggest that the ‘proleptic’ quality of MS. Bodl. 617 offers a conceptual bridge connecting the Amerindian, Jesuit and English worlds which occasioned the creation and transatlantic itinerary of this text. Although the manuscript made its way to England, it was not this work that Lodge would later highlight as a spoil from the New World. Instead, in 1596 he published what he claimed to be the translation of a ‘history in the Spanish tongue’ found in the Jesuit library in Santos. That book, his romance titled A Margarite of America, tells a tale of bloodthirstiness, violence and treachery. Its alleged Spanish source has never been found and scholars tend to agree that this reference to a Spanish precursor is probably a contrivance.⁴⁸ The title could be suggestive, as D. Vitkus has pointed out, of an attempt by Lodge to offset losses from Cavendish’s disastrous journey by offering readers in England a precious commodity fresh from the New World, a ‘margarite’, or pearl.⁴⁹ Still, it is interesting to note that at the same time that Lodge claimed the existence of a fictional text as the source for his Margarite, an actual manuscript he brought home and kept for several years remained unknown until he donated it to the Bodleian. In this way, perhaps, A Margarite of America – which has nothing to do with Brazil or indigenous conversion there – is the unlikely, yet perfect, complement to MS. Bodl. 617. Whereas the ‘Doutrina’ exemplifies the Jesuit invention of an alphabetic Tupi tradition and proleptically saves souls through the enunciation – rather than the understanding – of a formula, A Margarite of America retrospectively invents a ‘Spanish history’ in order to create a work of fiction which, in all likelihood, had not existed before. Although these two texts have been drawn together only through the contingencies of history, it is tempting to see the proleptic features of the ‘Doutrina’ as fertile ground for the spurious use of the ‘found manuscript’ trope in A Margarite of America.

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‘Doutrina Christã na Linguoa Brasilica’, MS. Bodl. 617, Bodleian Libraries.

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— (2005) ‘A escrita da conversão’, in L.H. Costigan (ed.), Diálogos da conversão (Campinas: Unicamp), pp. 15–43.

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Laborie, J.-C. (2000) ‘From orality to writing: the reality of a conversion through the work of the Jesuit Father José de Anchieta (1534–1597)’, trans. by J. Vale, Diogenes, 48 (191): 56–71.

Lee, M.K. (2014) ‘Language and conquest: Tupi-Guarani expansion in the European colonization of Brazil and Amazonia’, in S.S. Mufwene (ed.), Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), pp. 143–67.

Leite, S. (ed.) (1956) Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 1 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu).

— (ed.) (1957) Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 2 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu).

Lodge, T. (2005) A Margarite of America, ed. by D. Beecher and H.D. Janzen (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies).

Magalhães Gândavo, P. (2004) A Primeira história do Brasil: história da província de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil, ed. by S. Moura Hue and R. Menegaz (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar).

— (1922) The Histories of Brazil, ed. and trans. by J.B. Stetson, Jr., vol. 2 (New York: The Cortes Society).

Martínez Serna, J.G. (2009) ‘Procurators and the making of the Jesuits’ Atlantic network’, in B. Bailyn and P.L. Denault (eds.), Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 181–209.

Medeiros Barbosa, M.F. (2006) As letras e a cruz: pedagogia da fé e estética religiosa na experiência missionária de José de Anchieta, S.I. (1534–1597) (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana).

Metcalf, A.C. (2005) Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500–1600 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).

Quinn, D.B. (1975) The Last Voyage of Thomas Cavendish 1591–1592 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

Schwartz, S.B. (1986) Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

— (ed.) (2010) Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700, trans. by S.B. Schwartz and C. Willis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Soares de Sousa, G. (1879) Tratado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587, ed. by F.A. Varnhagen (Rio de Janeiro: João Ignacio da Silva).

Vaz de Caminha, P. (2000) A Carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha, ed. by J. Cortesão (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda).

Vitkus, D. (2011) ‘Ridding the world of a monster: Lodge’s A Margarite of America and Cavendish’s last voyage’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 41: 99–112.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2002) A inconstância da alma selvagem e outros ensaios de antropologia (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify).

Zwartjes, O. (2011) Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa and Brazil, 1550–1800 (Amsterdam: Benjamins).

_____________

1 In order to retain consistency between the manuscript and text, Tupi does not have a diacritical mark in this chapter.

2 ‘o melhor fruto, que dela [a terra] se pode tirar me parece que será salvar esta gente’ (J. Cortesão (ed.), A Carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2000), p. 174); English translation in S.B. Schwartz (ed. and trans.) and C. Willis (trans.), Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 9.

3 J.G. Martínez Serna, ‘Procurators and the making of the Jesuits’ Atlantic network’, in B. Bailyn and P.L. Denault (eds.), Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 181–209, at p. 190.

4 D. Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 75.

5 H.B. Johnson, ‘Portuguese settlement, 1550–1580’, in L. Bethell (ed.), Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–38, at pp. 13–20.

6 ‘a principal coisa que me moveu a mandar povoar as ditas terras do Brasil’ (S. Leite (ed.), Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 1 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1956), p. 6); translation in Schwartz (ed.), Early Brazil, p. 45. Unless otherwise noted, translations are the authors’ own.

7 S. Leite (ed.), Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 2 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1957), p. 49.

8 Johnson, ‘Portuguese settlement’, p. 22.

9 Johnson, ‘Portuguese settlement’, p. 23.

10 M.K. Lee, ‘Language and conquest: Tupi-Guarani expansion in the European colonization of Brazil and Amazonia’, in S.S. Mufwene (ed.), Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 143–67 (p. 155).

11 S.B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 39–40.

12 A.C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500–1600 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), p. 91.

13 Metcalf, Go-Betweens, pp. 106–8.

14 ‘el mayor de ellos llevo yo ahora conmigo al sertão por más autorizar nuestro ministerio, porque es muy conocido y venerado entre los gentiles’ (Leite (ed.), Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 1, p. 524; we have occasionally modernised the spelling of citations for ease of reading).

15 Lee, ‘Language and conquest’, p. 145.

16 See, e.g., O. Zwartjes, Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa and Brazil, 1550–1800 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 143–203; Lee, ‘Language and Conquest’, pp. 144–6.

17 ‘para que más presto aprendiesen y gustasen’ (Leite (ed.), Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 1, p. 180).

18 ‘Yo siempre les hablo así a ellos como a la más gente que se ayunta en la iglesia en su lengua y les predico las cosas de la fe; mas fáltanme libros en lenguaje que puedo estudiar, porque non soy latino y no me puedo ayudar de los de latín’ (Leite (ed.), Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 1, p. 440).

19 A. Agnolin, Jesuítas e selvagens: a negociação da fé no encontro catequético-ritual americano-tupi (séculos XVI–XVII) (São Paulo: Humanitas, 2007), pp. 64–6; M.F. Medeiros Barbosa, As letras e a cruz: pedagogia da fé e estética religiosa na experiência missionária de José de Anchieta, S.I. (1534–1597) (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2006), pp. 124–8.

20 J. Anchieta, Doutrina cristã, edited and translated by A. Cardoso, vol. 1 (São Paulo: Loyola, 1992), p. 27.

21 Anchieta, Doutrina cristã, vol. 1, p. 27.

22 Anchieta, Doutrina cristã, vol. 1, p. 35.

23 Agnolin, Jesuítas e selvagens, p. 62.

24 Anchieta, Doutrina cristã, vol. 1, p. 20.

25 ‘Quanto à Doutrina, quarenta anos há que se compôs e até agora sempre se ensinou, apurando-se e emendando-se, assim no tocante à teologia, como na língua’ (Anchieta, Doutrina cristã, vol. 1, p. 36).

26 ‘Composto a modo de Diálogos por Padres Doutos, & bons línguas da Companhia de IESU’; ‘novamente concertado, ordenado, & acrescentado pelo Padre Antonio d’Araujo’ (A. Araújo (ed.), Catecismo na lingoa brasílica, no qual se contêm a summa da doctrina christã (Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1618)).

27 D.B Quinn, The Last Voyage of Thomas Cavendish 1591–1592 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975); P. Edwards (ed.), Last Voyages – Cavendish, Hudson, Raleigh: The Original Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

28 A. Knivet, The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Anthony Knivet: An English Pirate in Sixteenth-Century Brazil, edited by V. Kogut Lessa de Sá (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 48.

29 T. Lodge, A Margarite of America, edited by D. Beecher and H.D. Janzen (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), p. 75.

30 R.W. Hunt, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 102.

31 A. Halasz, ‘Lodge, Thomas (1558–1625)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16923 [accessed 31 May 2018].

32 Halasz, ‘Lodge, Thomas’.

33 ‘carece de três letras, convém a saber, não se acha nela F, nem L, nem R’ (P. Magalhães Gândavo, A Primeira História do Brasil: História da província de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil, edited by S. Moura Hue and R. Menegaz (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2004), p. 135); translation in J.B. Stetson, Jr. (ed. and trans.), The Histories of Brazil, vol. 2 (New York: The Cortes Society, 1922), p. 166.

34 ‘se não têm F, é porque não têm fé em nenhuma coisa que adorem; nem os nascidos entre os cristãos e doutrinados pelos padres da Companhia têm fé em Deus Nosso Senhor, nem têm verdade, nem lealdade a nenhuma pessoa que lhes faça bem’ (G. Soares de Sousa, Tratado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587, edited by F.A. Varnhagen (Rio de Janeiro: João Ignacio da Silva, 1879), pp. 280–81); translation in Schwartz (ed.), Early Brazil, p. 120.

35 J.A. Hansen, ‘Sem F, sem L, sem R: cronistas, jesuítas e índios no século XVI’, in E.A. Kossovitch (ed.), A conquista da América (Campinas: Cedes, 1993), pp. 45–55, at p. 53).

36 A. Daher, ‘A conversão dos Tupinambá entre oralidade e escrita nos relatos franceses dos séculos XVI e XVII’, Horizontes Antropológicos 10 (22) (2004): 67–92, at p. 81.

37 E. Viveiros de Castro, A inconstância da alma selvagem e outros ensaios de antropologia (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2002).

38 Leite (ed.), Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 2, p. 107.

39 J.A. Hansen, ‘A escrita da conversão’, in L.H. Costigan (ed.), Diálogos da conversão (Campinas: Unicamp, 2005), pp. 15–43 (p. 20).

40 ‘Tienen muy pocos vocablos para le poder bien declarar nuestra fe, mas con todo dámossela a entender lo mejor que podemos y algunas cosas le declaramos por rodeos’ (Leite (ed.), Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 1, p. 153).

41 H.H. do Couto, ‘Amerindian Language Islands in Brazil’, in S.S. Mufwene (ed.), Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 86–107 (p. 86).

42 E. Almeida Navarro, Dicionário tupi antigo: a língua indígena clássica do Brasil (São Paulo: Global, 2013), pp. 493, 75.

43 ‘Doutrina Christã na Linguoa Brasilica’, MS. Bodl. 617, fols. 1r, 41v; Almeida Navarro, Dicionário tupi antigo, p. 188.

44 A. Bosi, Dialética da colonização (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994), p. 20; J.-C. Laborie, ‘From orality to writing: the reality of a conversion through the work of the Jesuit Father José de Anchieta (1534–1597)’, translated by J. Vale, Diogenes, 48 (191) (2000): 56–71, at pp. 65–6.

45 C. Braga-Pinto, ‘Translating, meaning and the community of languages’, Studies in the Humanities, 22 (1996): 33–49, at p. 38.

46 ‘Doutrina’, fol. 38r; we have modernised the orthography of this passage. The original may be seen in fig. 9.2.

47 M.Z. Christensen, Translated Christianities: Nahuatl and Maya Religious Texts (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), pp. 64–7.

48 D. Beecher, ‘A life of Thomas Lodge’, in T. Lodge, A Margarite of America, ed. by D. Beecher and H.D. Janzen (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 51–70, at pp. 56–8.

49 D. Vitkus, ‘Ridding the world of a monster: Lodge’s A Margarite of America and Cavendish’s last voyage’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 41 (2011): 99–112, at p. 101.