Order and Disorder in Nova Lusitânia: the legal culture in Duarte Coelho's Letters
Order; Disorder; Corruption; Colonial Brazil; Pernambuco; Semantics; Duarte Coelho; Hereditary Captaincies; 16th century.
This dissertation aims to understand how Duarte Coelho, the first Lord-Proprietor of Pernambuco, mobilised sixteenth-century’s legal culture in order to achieve his political objectives, including the limitation of royal interference in Nova Lusitânia, through the discourse articulated in his correspondence with King João III. The primary documentary corpus consisted of the letters written between 1542 and 1550. The text was analysed taking into account three levels: (i) the structural level, apprehended by the linguistic conditions that shaped the political and legal model of the period, (ii) the individual level, which encompasses the contextual characteristics relating to the author of the letters, and (iii) the discursive level, which articulates the two previous levels. The aim was to understand how Duarte Coelho builds and mobilises semantic fields around the themes of ‘order’ and ‘government’ and ‘disorder’ and ‘misgovernment’ and how he connects them by allusion, approximation or antithesis to concepts that underpinned the very bases of the political and legal model of his time. Through this documentation, we also sought to reflect on the role of synthesis that jurisdiction played in the exercise of power in the first decades of Brazil's colonisation.