Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil

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Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil

Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil, manuscript written in 1618 and attributed to Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão. The Dialogues were well known in manuscript form to the nineteenth-century scholars Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen and João Capistrano de Abreu. Varnhagen made a copy of the manuscript in Leiden Library in 1874, and the Dialogues were printed in the Revista do Instituto Arqueológico Histórico e Geográfico Pernambucano between 1877 and 1887. Abreu tried to have them published in a volume in 1900, but the first edition did not appear until 1930 under the patronage of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

There are six Dialogues. In the first one, the two characters, Alviano and Brandônio, talk about natural products and their possible use for colonists, distinguishing between those that were the result of human efforts through agriculture and those that were a kind offering from nature. In the same Dialogue, Portuguese settlement is discussed and the northern captaincies are described. The second Dialogue is a scholarly dissertation on the torrid zone and on the human races, with special emphasis on the original inhabitants of Brazil. It ends with some considerations of diseases and of Indian and white medical practices. Social groups, sugar mills, agriculture, fishing and hunting, and Indian culture occupy the remaining Dialogues. In historiographical debates concerning the Portuguese "discovery" of Brazil, scholarship in the early twenty-first century has revisited the Dialogues and placed them within the framework of the "construction" of Brazilian national identity.

See alsoBrazil: The Colonial Era, 1500–1808; Capistrano de Abreu, João; Literature: Brazil; Varnhagen, Francisco Adolfo de.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Francisco Adolfo De Varnhagen, História geral do Brasil, 9th ed. (1975).

João Capistrano De Abreu, Ensaios e estudos: Crítica e história (1st ser., 1975).

Ambrósio Fernandes Bran-Dão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, translated and annotated by Frederick Holden Hall et al. (1987).

Additional Bibliography

Cristóvão, Fernando. "Brasil: do 'descobrimento' à 'construção.'" Camões: Revista de Letras e Culturas Lusofonas 8 (January-March 2000).

                              Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva