Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the historical works of Fr. Apolinário da Conceição, a Franciscan brother born in the Portuguese America. It focuses on Primazia Seráfica (1733), trying to understand the context in which this work was written, and the kind of discourses it mobilized regarding the American world.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I intend to analyze the historical and hagiographical works produced by Fr. Apolinário da Conceição, a Franciscan secular brother born in the Portuguese America at the end of the XVIIth Besides his great and more popular Pequeninos na terra, grandes no Ceo (an hagiographical text published in Lisbon, in five volumes, between 1732 and 1754), he wrote and published some other writings regarding Portuguese Franciscan History and Hagiography, as Primazia Seráfica na America (Lisbon, 1733). In order to understand a work like this one, I will consider, in a first time, the contexts in which the Primazia was elaborated and published, bearing particularly in mind the status that Conceição had inside the Franciscan order and the possibilities he had to become a 'writer/author'. In a second time, I will discuss the images and discourses concerning America and, especially, the Portuguese America, that Conceição, as a person who belong to the Brazilian world, could employ in a text as Primazia, devoted to stress the role played by Franciscan friars in the American missionary enterprise.