Entre a fé e a língua: ensino jesuítico na América Portuguesa Quinhentista

Abstract

This article analyzes the educational practices of the Society of Jesus in Portuguese America during the sixteenth century, articulating teaching, religiosity, and the mediation of knowledge. Based on the understanding that early modern European experience was structured by Christian frameworks, it examines how this environment shaped missionary activity and the organization of pedagogical practices in the New World. The analysis focuses on the casas de bê-á-bá and the systematization of the língua geral, understood as key instruments in catechesis and in the construction of forms of communication between missionaries and Indigenous populations. Drawing on Jesuit sources, especially the letters of José de Anchieta (1933), and in dialogue with the historiography, particularly John Manuel Monteiro (1994), the article investigates how teaching was linked to the production and reorganization of knowledge. It argues that these practices were not limited to the diffusion of the Christian faith but also constituted spaces of cultural mediation, dependent on interaction with Indigenous knowledge. In this context, the língua geral became an instrument for organizing colonial relations. Finally, the article argues that Jesuit education functioned as a mechanism for translating Indigenous American knowledge into a European epistemological framework. By highlighting these dynamics, the article contributes to the historiographical debate on Indigenous agency in knowledge production and on the processes of its invisibilization within the Portuguese Empire.