Pirates, Jesuits and Indians in sixteenth-century Brazil

At a time when contemporary Brazil is making alarming headlines what can be gained by looking at its early colonial days? What can Brazil’s past teach us about its present?

This seminar will attempt to address these questions by analysing the adventurous journey of a rare sixteenth-century manuscript from Santos to Oxford. The manuscript, a Christian doctrine in Tupi prepared by Jesuit missionaries and stolen by English corsairs, is one of the earliest known texts written in a Brazilian indigenous tongue. Most importantly, the history of its production, smuggling, preservation and re-emergence points to competing interests in nascent Brazil – material, spiritual and cultural –  whose consequences may be still seen today.

Speaker biography: Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sa is Teaching Associate in Portuguese Studies at Cambridge University. Her book, The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Anthony Knivet: an English Pirate in Brazil, published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press, is the first critical edition of one of the earliest descriptions of Brazil written by an Englishman. Her translation of the same account was published in Brazil in 2007( Zahar Editores, 2007). She has published articles on early modern travel to Brazil and on Shakespearean Studies, besides three collections of poetry in Brazil and Argentina.

Vivien has recently translated and co-edited (with Sheila Moura Hue) twelve accounts of English travellers to colonial Brazil, most of which had not hitherto been translated into Portuguese. She has previously taught at the University of Essex, at the State University of Rio (UERJ) and at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio (PUC-Rio). In the last few years she has focused her research on a rare Brazilian manuscript from 1592 currently kept at the Bodleian Library.