A forgotten historiography? – Review by Magno Francisco de Jesus Santos (UFRN) of the book “Sergipe Colonial”, by Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva
Abstract: Sergipe Colonial: uma capitania esquecida (2019), by Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, aims to revive Sergipe’s colonial past and spark new research. Positively, it promotes historical overviews of the captaincy; negatively, it neglects local historiography and presents Eurocentric and inaccurate readings. Despite its limitations, it reaffirms the relevance of Sergipe’s historiography and history.
Published in 2019 by Editora Singular, Sergipe Colonial: uma capitania esquecida, by historian Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, is a book that seeks to present Sergipe’s colonial past and arouse interest in new research into a captaincy considered ‘unattractive’. Maria has dug deep into the Portuguese archives to bring us this captivating tale, which has already had a significant impact. It’s a welcome return to the practice of historical summaries of the colonial past of the former captaincies in the north of the state of Brazil. What’s more, Maria is a foreign historian who made her career at a university in the south-east of the country, with no ties to Sergipe, which makes her perspective all the more intriguing.
Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva is a Portuguese historian, born in Lisbon in 1938. She graduated in Historical and Philosophical Sciences from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon in 1961. Two years after graduating, Maria was exiled by the dictatorial government of António Salazar and moved to Brazil, where she obtained a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo in 1967. She taught as a full professor there between 1973 and 1990, and is a historian with a considerable body of work on Brazil’s colonial period and history methodology, with an emphasis on themes such as the family, women, society and culture. In this book, 26 chapters spread over 231 pages, she says, are there to add to the research of the historians who came before her.
Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva is now right up there with all the other historians who dared to systematise the narrative of Sergipe’s past. She did this in the period between the conquest in 1590 and political emancipation from the captaincy of Bahia in 1820/22. like Felisbelo Freire, with the amazing História de Sergipe (1891) and Maria Thétis Nunes, with Sergipe Colonial I (1989), Sergipe Colonial II (2006) and História da Educação em Sergipe (1984). It’s really great to see the Lusitanian historian’s efforts in this sense, as they take up the tradition of writing syntheses and the possibility of pluralising narratives about Brazil’s colonial past.
However, the book has some shortcomings and contributes to the old problem of Brazilian historiography: the invisibility of the production of historical texts by authors working outside the centre-south of the country. The experienced historian looks at Sergipe’s past, starting from the idea that there is not much written about colonial Sergipe (p.9). When it comes to writing history, Sergipe is like an untouched forest. This idea comes from complaints made by authors like Varnhagen (1854), Felisbelo Freire (1891) and Luiz Mott (1989). These complaints are based on arguments produced by historians who thought about the colonial past in different contexts: Varnhagen and Felisbelo Freire in moments of invention of a historiographical tradition and Luiz Mott, in the context of historiographical renewal.
But now, 30 years after Luiz Mott published his work, it seems this idea of a lack of research is not really true.Thanks to more postgraduate programmes all over the country, there are now lots of historians looking into the past of Sergipe. They’re studying different aspects, including the things the author mentioned, like the economy (Fernando Afonso Ferreira Júnior, 2003) and the social elite (Anderson Pereira dos Santos, in 2018), military organisation and the captains (with Luiz Siqueira, in 2017), violence (Wanderlei Oliveira, in 2015) and religious orders and written culture (Ane Mecenas, in 2011 and 2017). So, to say that Alagoas and Sergipe are ‘little studied historically’ is an argument that doesn’t really hold up.The problem with this statement by Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva is that the work on the history of Sergipe is more of a project for the future, a distant future, a chimera because it’s so small. Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva says that ‘colonial Sergipe should be the object of intensive research, despite its subordination to Bahia’ (p.9).
From the Portuguese historian’s perspective, writing Sergipe’s history was seen as something that would happen in the future, even though this future had already been achieved.Of course, writing history is a process where we constantly rethink our ideas, and the existence of a historiographical tradition does not stop us from revisiting classic themes. The questions that the author asks are really interesting because they show that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the history of colonial Sergipe. It’s like there’s a gap in the research, and it’s all because of how society has been portrayed in the past. As the author says, her love of microhistory fit perfectly with a place that was culturally undervalued in the colonial period and forgotten. There was little literary production beyond the occasional sermon, and few white people, but lots of black and brown slaves and freedmen. I’m not sure about this idea that the captaincy of Sergipe was so small, because if we compare it to other colonial places, it wasn’t that different. It’s surprising to read a historical text in the 21st century that sees the captaincy’s literature as just an ‘occasional sermon’. It’s sad to think about the silence of the chroniclers, religious figures, and intellectuals who were born or lived in Sergipe.But what’s interesting is that the dynamics experienced in the colony’s major cities, like Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Mariana, and Vila Rica, were quite different. And calling Sergipe culturally devalued just because it’s mostly black and brown people is a bit short-sighted, ignoring the fact that it was a place of resistance.If we flip the script and see things differently, we see that Sergipe was a place where black and indigenous folks fought and resisted the Portuguese.
The book also has a lot of wrong ideas in it, like when it says that ‘the Jesuits always preferred to settle in Bahia and not in the sparsely populated Sergipe, a region they were only interested in to obtain sesmarias’. There was just one exception, the Italian Jesuit Luigi Vicenzo Mamiani, who spent many years in the village of Geru spreading the word.When it came to education, the author was very clear that neither the Jesuits nor the Franciscans had made a big impact on education in Sergipe.
But, and here’s where it gets interesting, if we look at the history, we see that between the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th, it was the Ignatians and the Capuchins who published more printed materials in Brazil than anyone else. A lot of these were actually based on manuscripts by religious folks working in Sergipe. Now, this information might seem a bit surprising, but it’s not without its evidence. It’s also interesting to note that a big list of properties and investments by the Society of Jesus in Sergipe has been overlooked, as well as the contributions of other religious people who published important texts, including Sergipanos born in the small ‘forgotten’ town.Reading Colonial Sergipe: a forgotten captaincy shows that Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva prioritised the appreciation of a classical historiography as support for her narrative. She used the work of authors like Robert Southey, Francisco Adolfo Varnhagen and Capistrano de Abreu, as well as some local historians from Sergipe, such as Maria da Glória Santana de Almeida, Felisbelo Freire, Maria Thetis Nunes, Luiz Mott, Beatriz Góis Dantas and Edna Matos Antônio.
Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva says that writing the history of colonial Sergipe was really difficult because it meant going back to sources from Bahia. She says that even though historians like Feliberto Freire, Maria Thetis Nunes and Luiz Mott have tried really hard to write the history of colonial Sergipe, it is still linked to Bahia.
It’s a shame that throughout the book, Professor Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva mistakenly names the historian from Sergipe, Felisbelo Freire, despite his huge contributions to Brazilian historiography between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.But what’s really striking is the absence of authors who discuss the themes listed throughout each chapter. Even those who produced in the first half of the 20th century, publishing in periodicals such as the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de Sergipe, have been ‘forgotten’ by the author.This is surprising, considering that Professor Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva is known for her methodological rigour and for knowing that the state of the art is a basic assumption in historical research. So, it’s a bit surprising that the author’s conclusions, where she says that ‘researching colonial Sergipe has proved to be a challenging experience, not only because of the historiographical scarcity, but also because of the lack of documents to study Sergipe society in its multiple aspects’ (p.211), should be relativised.
But, you know, it’s also important to remember that historian Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva has come up with a book that’s really special. It’s like a breath of fresh air in the world of historical research, reminding us that we can look at the big picture and share the rich history of Sergipe with the world. But, and it’s a big but, the book doesn’t quite manage to bring the latest research to life, which is a shame. It kind of keeps up an old habit in Brazilian history, which is to ignore stuff that doesn’t come from the south of the country. But, and again, this is just a personal opinion, we might be able to fill in some of the gaps if we give more credit to authors who have already dug into these sources in other places and times.
The author says that her ‘objective was to remove from oblivion, in the historiography of colonial Brazil, a captaincy considered less attractive’ and that she hopes ‘to have achieved this, with the hope that with the documentation from the Sergipe archives, young historians will be able to complete what is lacking here’ (p.212). She also compared the expansion of the historiographical debate on Sergipe with the experiences of other captaincies, which is a really interesting way of looking at it. But I do worry that this investment strengthens the construction of silence about men and women who, in different periods of time, scoured the archives and produced knowledge about Sergipe’s past. I really hope that the young historians the author calls upon will not replicate this practice.
I’m sure that ‘Colonial Sergipe: a forgotten captaincy’ will become an essential read for anyone interested in the history of Sergipe because it was written by a well-known historian.But I don’t think it does a great job of explaining the colonial past of Sergipe very well. In fact, I would say that it’s full of inaccuracies that can’t be backed up by other documents or research.
It’s a great way to get people talking again about some of the classic themes in the history of Sergipe, but it doesn’t really go anywhere new with the contributions of Beatriz Góis Dantas, Luiz Mott, Maria Thetis Nunes and even the old Felisbelo Freire.
Felisbelo Freire (1858-1916) | Photo: Libânio do Amaral/Wikipédia
Reading the book helped to show how important the work of Clio’s disciples, born between the Rio Real and the Rio São Francisco, is. So, even though the author did a great job and the book did most of what it set out to do, we still think that Maria Thetis Nunes’s smart writings are the most important things to know about the history of Sergipe in the colonial times. Maybe this is the book’s best legacy: showing that the writings of Sergipe’s historians are really valuable. If, in the past, Sergipeans were only valued when they left their homeland, today we can be proud of our history and our own views.
Summary of Sergipe, uma historiografia esquecida
Introdução
1. A conquista e o povoamento do território
2. Sergipe setecentista
3. Os capitães-mores do século XVII
4. Um espaço de violência
5. A presença da Inguisição: confidentes e denunciados, familiares e comissários
6. As missões
7. A Coroa e a população indígena
8. Jesuítas e franciscanos e a educação
9. A reclusão feminina
10. A elite social
11. A elite administrativa
12. A escassez de Aulas Régias
13. Vilas e povoações
14. Dados demográficos
15. O clero secular e a criação de frequesias
16. Os párocos e seus fregueses
17. A organização militar
18. Os capitães-mores do século XVIII e início do XIX
19. Magistrados letrados
20. Juízes ordinários
21. O funcionamento da justiça
22. A contribuição de Sergipe para os donativos à Coroa
23. Sergipe no fim do período colonial
24. Ainda a submissão à Bahia
25. Os representantes de Sergipe nas Cortes de Lisboa
SILVA, Maria Beatriz Nizza da. Sergipe colonial: uma Capitania esquecida. São Paulo: Singular, 2019. 281p. Review by: SANTOS, Magno Francisco de Jesus. A forgotten historiography? Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v4, n.18, July/August, 2024. Available in <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/en/?p=8255>.
A forgotten historiography? – Review by Magno Francisco de Jesus Santos (UFRN) of the book “Sergipe Colonial”, by Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva
01 August 2024
Abstract: Sergipe Colonial: uma capitania esquecida (2019), by Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, aims to revive Sergipe’s colonial past and spark new research. Positively, it promotes historical overviews of the captaincy; negatively, it neglects local historiography and presents Eurocentric and inaccurate readings. Despite its limitations, it reaffirms the relevance of Sergipe’s historiography and history.
Published in 2019 by Editora Singular, Sergipe Colonial: uma capitania esquecida, by historian Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, is a book that seeks to present Sergipe’s colonial past and arouse interest in new research into a captaincy considered ‘unattractive’. Maria has dug deep into the Portuguese archives to bring us this captivating tale, which has already had a significant impact. It’s a welcome return to the practice of historical summaries of the colonial past of the former captaincies in the north of the state of Brazil. What’s more, Maria is a foreign historian who made her career at a university in the south-east of the country, with no ties to Sergipe, which makes her perspective all the more intriguing.
Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva is a Portuguese historian, born in Lisbon in 1938. She graduated in Historical and Philosophical Sciences from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon in 1961. Two years after graduating, Maria was exiled by the dictatorial government of António Salazar and moved to Brazil, where she obtained a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo in 1967. She taught as a full professor there between 1973 and 1990, and is a historian with a considerable body of work on Brazil’s colonial period and history methodology, with an emphasis on themes such as the family, women, society and culture. In this book, 26 chapters spread over 231 pages, she says, are there to add to the research of the historians who came before her.
Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva is now right up there with all the other historians who dared to systematise the narrative of Sergipe’s past. She did this in the period between the conquest in 1590 and political emancipation from the captaincy of Bahia in 1820/22. like Felisbelo Freire, with the amazing História de Sergipe (1891) and Maria Thétis Nunes, with Sergipe Colonial I (1989), Sergipe Colonial II (2006) and História da Educação em Sergipe (1984). It’s really great to see the Lusitanian historian’s efforts in this sense, as they take up the tradition of writing syntheses and the possibility of pluralising narratives about Brazil’s colonial past.
However, the book has some shortcomings and contributes to the old problem of Brazilian historiography: the invisibility of the production of historical texts by authors working outside the centre-south of the country. The experienced historian looks at Sergipe’s past, starting from the idea that there is not much written about colonial Sergipe (p.9). When it comes to writing history, Sergipe is like an untouched forest. This idea comes from complaints made by authors like Varnhagen (1854), Felisbelo Freire (1891) and Luiz Mott (1989). These complaints are based on arguments produced by historians who thought about the colonial past in different contexts: Varnhagen and Felisbelo Freire in moments of invention of a historiographical tradition and Luiz Mott, in the context of historiographical renewal.
But now, 30 years after Luiz Mott published his work, it seems this idea of a lack of research is not really true.Thanks to more postgraduate programmes all over the country, there are now lots of historians looking into the past of Sergipe. They’re studying different aspects, including the things the author mentioned, like the economy (Fernando Afonso Ferreira Júnior, 2003) and the social elite (Anderson Pereira dos Santos, in 2018), military organisation and the captains (with Luiz Siqueira, in 2017), violence (Wanderlei Oliveira, in 2015) and religious orders and written culture (Ane Mecenas, in 2011 and 2017). So, to say that Alagoas and Sergipe are ‘little studied historically’ is an argument that doesn’t really hold up.The problem with this statement by Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva is that the work on the history of Sergipe is more of a project for the future, a distant future, a chimera because it’s so small. Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva says that ‘colonial Sergipe should be the object of intensive research, despite its subordination to Bahia’ (p.9).
From the Portuguese historian’s perspective, writing Sergipe’s history was seen as something that would happen in the future, even though this future had already been achieved.Of course, writing history is a process where we constantly rethink our ideas, and the existence of a historiographical tradition does not stop us from revisiting classic themes. The questions that the author asks are really interesting because they show that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the history of colonial Sergipe. It’s like there’s a gap in the research, and it’s all because of how society has been portrayed in the past. As the author says, her love of microhistory fit perfectly with a place that was culturally undervalued in the colonial period and forgotten. There was little literary production beyond the occasional sermon, and few white people, but lots of black and brown slaves and freedmen. I’m not sure about this idea that the captaincy of Sergipe was so small, because if we compare it to other colonial places, it wasn’t that different. It’s surprising to read a historical text in the 21st century that sees the captaincy’s literature as just an ‘occasional sermon’. It’s sad to think about the silence of the chroniclers, religious figures, and intellectuals who were born or lived in Sergipe.But what’s interesting is that the dynamics experienced in the colony’s major cities, like Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Mariana, and Vila Rica, were quite different. And calling Sergipe culturally devalued just because it’s mostly black and brown people is a bit short-sighted, ignoring the fact that it was a place of resistance.If we flip the script and see things differently, we see that Sergipe was a place where black and indigenous folks fought and resisted the Portuguese.
The book also has a lot of wrong ideas in it, like when it says that ‘the Jesuits always preferred to settle in Bahia and not in the sparsely populated Sergipe, a region they were only interested in to obtain sesmarias’. There was just one exception, the Italian Jesuit Luigi Vicenzo Mamiani, who spent many years in the village of Geru spreading the word.When it came to education, the author was very clear that neither the Jesuits nor the Franciscans had made a big impact on education in Sergipe.
But, and here’s where it gets interesting, if we look at the history, we see that between the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th, it was the Ignatians and the Capuchins who published more printed materials in Brazil than anyone else. A lot of these were actually based on manuscripts by religious folks working in Sergipe. Now, this information might seem a bit surprising, but it’s not without its evidence. It’s also interesting to note that a big list of properties and investments by the Society of Jesus in Sergipe has been overlooked, as well as the contributions of other religious people who published important texts, including Sergipanos born in the small ‘forgotten’ town.Reading Colonial Sergipe: a forgotten captaincy shows that Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva prioritised the appreciation of a classical historiography as support for her narrative. She used the work of authors like Robert Southey, Francisco Adolfo Varnhagen and Capistrano de Abreu, as well as some local historians from Sergipe, such as Maria da Glória Santana de Almeida, Felisbelo Freire, Maria Thetis Nunes, Luiz Mott, Beatriz Góis Dantas and Edna Matos Antônio.
Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva says that writing the history of colonial Sergipe was really difficult because it meant going back to sources from Bahia. She says that even though historians like Feliberto Freire, Maria Thetis Nunes and Luiz Mott have tried really hard to write the history of colonial Sergipe, it is still linked to Bahia.
It’s a shame that throughout the book, Professor Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva mistakenly names the historian from Sergipe, Felisbelo Freire, despite his huge contributions to Brazilian historiography between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.But what’s really striking is the absence of authors who discuss the themes listed throughout each chapter. Even those who produced in the first half of the 20th century, publishing in periodicals such as the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de Sergipe, have been ‘forgotten’ by the author.This is surprising, considering that Professor Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva is known for her methodological rigour and for knowing that the state of the art is a basic assumption in historical research. So, it’s a bit surprising that the author’s conclusions, where she says that ‘researching colonial Sergipe has proved to be a challenging experience, not only because of the historiographical scarcity, but also because of the lack of documents to study Sergipe society in its multiple aspects’ (p.211), should be relativised.
But, you know, it’s also important to remember that historian Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva has come up with a book that’s really special. It’s like a breath of fresh air in the world of historical research, reminding us that we can look at the big picture and share the rich history of Sergipe with the world. But, and it’s a big but, the book doesn’t quite manage to bring the latest research to life, which is a shame. It kind of keeps up an old habit in Brazilian history, which is to ignore stuff that doesn’t come from the south of the country. But, and again, this is just a personal opinion, we might be able to fill in some of the gaps if we give more credit to authors who have already dug into these sources in other places and times.
The author says that her ‘objective was to remove from oblivion, in the historiography of colonial Brazil, a captaincy considered less attractive’ and that she hopes ‘to have achieved this, with the hope that with the documentation from the Sergipe archives, young historians will be able to complete what is lacking here’ (p.212). She also compared the expansion of the historiographical debate on Sergipe with the experiences of other captaincies, which is a really interesting way of looking at it. But I do worry that this investment strengthens the construction of silence about men and women who, in different periods of time, scoured the archives and produced knowledge about Sergipe’s past. I really hope that the young historians the author calls upon will not replicate this practice.
I’m sure that ‘Colonial Sergipe: a forgotten captaincy’ will become an essential read for anyone interested in the history of Sergipe because it was written by a well-known historian.But I don’t think it does a great job of explaining the colonial past of Sergipe very well. In fact, I would say that it’s full of inaccuracies that can’t be backed up by other documents or research.
It’s a great way to get people talking again about some of the classic themes in the history of Sergipe, but it doesn’t really go anywhere new with the contributions of Beatriz Góis Dantas, Luiz Mott, Maria Thetis Nunes and even the old Felisbelo Freire.
Felisbelo Freire (1858-1916) | Photo: Libânio do Amaral/Wikipédia
Reading the book helped to show how important the work of Clio’s disciples, born between the Rio Real and the Rio São Francisco, is. So, even though the author did a great job and the book did most of what it set out to do, we still think that Maria Thetis Nunes’s smart writings are the most important things to know about the history of Sergipe in the colonial times. Maybe this is the book’s best legacy: showing that the writings of Sergipe’s historians are really valuable. If, in the past, Sergipeans were only valued when they left their homeland, today we can be proud of our history and our own views.
Summary of Sergipe, uma historiografia esquecida
Introdução
1. A conquista e o povoamento do território
2. Sergipe setecentista
3. Os capitães-mores do século XVII
4. Um espaço de violência
5. A presença da Inguisição: confidentes e denunciados, familiares e comissários
6. As missões
7. A Coroa e a população indígena
8. Jesuítas e franciscanos e a educação
9. A reclusão feminina
10. A elite social
11. A elite administrativa
12. A escassez de Aulas Régias
13. Vilas e povoações
14. Dados demográficos
15. O clero secular e a criação de frequesias
16. Os párocos e seus fregueses
17. A organização militar
18. Os capitães-mores do século XVIII e início do XIX
19. Magistrados letrados
20. Juízes ordinários
21. O funcionamento da justiça
22. A contribuição de Sergipe para os donativos à Coroa
23. Sergipe no fim do período colonial
24. Ainda a submissão à Bahia
25. Os representantes de Sergipe nas Cortes de Lisboa
SILVA, Maria Beatriz Nizza da. Sergipe colonial: uma Capitania esquecida. São Paulo: Singular, 2019. 281p. Review by: SANTOS, Magno Francisco de Jesus. A forgotten historiography? Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v4, n.18, July/August, 2024. Available in <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/en/?p=8255>.
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Published in 2019 by Editora Singular, Sergipe Colonial: uma capitania esquecida, by historian Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, is a book that seeks to present Sergipe’s colonial past and arouse interest in new research into a captaincy considered ‘unattractive’. Maria has dug deep into the Portuguese archives to bring us this captivating tale, which has already had a significant impact. It’s a welcome return to the practice of historical summaries of the colonial past of the former captaincies in the north of the state of Brazil. What’s more, Maria is a foreign historian who made her career at a university in the south-east of the country, with no ties to Sergipe, which makes her perspective all the more intriguing.
Magno Francisco de Jesus Santos is PhD in History from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and is a CNPq Productivity Fellow. He has published, among other works, Ecos da Modernidade: a arquitetura dos grupos escolares sergipanos (2013), No sertão e na capital, salve Aparecida: peregrinações em Sergipe no tempo presente (2015) and O Prefácio dos tempos: a romaria do Senhor dos Passos em São Cristóvão (2024). ID Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/9046069221784194; ID Orcid: Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2218-7772. E-mail: magno.santos@ufrn.br.
