Banca de DEFESA: LUCIANA NOGUEIRA DA SILVA

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : LUCIANA NOGUEIRA DA SILVA
DATE: 21/11/2025
TIME: 13:30
LOCAL: videoconferência
TITLE:

"there is nothing that moves or excites the virtues more than the examples of the saints" Catholic identity, power relations, gender and the Portuguese Empire in the writings of Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria on Asia (1699-1724)

KEY WORDS:

Catholic Orientalism; Portuguese mission; Baroque spirituality; feminine mysticism; Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria; edifying writing.

PAGES: 232
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: História
SUMMARY:

This thesis examines four works by Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria through the lens of Catholic Orientalism to show how his edifying prose constructs a spiritual geography of the Christianized East. Based on close readings of História da Fundação do Real Convento de Santa Mônica de Goa (1699), Rosas do Japam (1709), Santuário Mariano, vol. VIII (1720), and Rosas do Japam e da Cochinchina (1724), the study argues that the author mobilizes devotional sources, floral metaphors, miracle narratives, and cultural description to spiritualize otherness and reaffirm the universality of Catholicism. In this process, female figures—through martyrdom, miracles, and religious vocations—assume roles of spiritual leadership and narrative prominence, turning their experiences into instruments of edification and mechanisms for the territorialization of faith.

The analysis contends that Marian devotion, accounts of female martyrdom, and sensory miracles function as mechanisms of symbolic territorialization and a pedagogy of faith, transforming bodies and spaces into instruments of salvation. Far from merely recording prodigies, the friar’s writing orders the world according to a theology of difference in which praise of the East is consistently subordinated to spiritual correction. Floral imagery attached to converted women, the dramatization of fragility as vocation, and the use of geography as a prologue to grace compose a Baroque rhetoric that catechizes through wonder and disciplines through the senses. Within this framework, female religious life emerges as a locus of spiritual agency: dramatized fragility is recast as edifying vocation, while saints and martyrs act as symbolic leaders in the making of a Christianized East.

Across four chapters, the thesis combines history, theology, and discourse analysis to demonstrate that these works by Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria exemplify a spiritual empire that redeems space through edifying language. Devotional writing is thus approached as a form of symbolic power capable of reorganizing difference and inscribing faith in the world.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Externa à Instituição - ROZELY MENEZES VIGAS OLIVEIRA - UNICAMP
Externa à Instituição - LIGIA BELLINI - UFBA
Presidente - 386989 - MARGARETH DE ALMEIDA GONCALVES
Interna - 1647918 - PATRICIA SOUZA DE FARIA CARVANO
Externo à Instituição - WILLIAM DE SOUZA MARTINS - UFRJ