A New Project for Provenance Research in Brazil

Provenance research in Latin America generally, and Brazil in particular, lags well behind that of European countries. Brazil has a history of library dispersals over the past 300 years: the Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans, and Dominicans all built impressive libraries, now largely scattered, with books and manuscripts brought from the old world; cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Recife, and Maranhão were cosmopolitan entrepôts for wealthy foreigners who left their books there. Since March 2019, the Department of Librarianship of the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro) has been conducting the research project A Eloquência dos Livros: Marcas de Proveniência ('The Eloquence of Books: Provenance Marks'), co-ordinated by Professor Fabiano Cataldo de Azevedo and Professor Stefanie Cavalcanti Freire. This project is hosted by what was the first library school in Latin America, founded in 1911 at the National Library of Brazil, with a curriculum based on that of the École nationale des chartes in Paris.

The initial objective is to understand the elements of provenance marks found most commonly in Brazil and their main material characteristics, as well as their historicity. Among the various possible fields for this subject, we take into consideration the History of the Book and the History of Libraries and the methodological need for physical analysis of each copy, recording observations using the common principles of material bibliography. Chief theoretical guides are David Pearson's Provenance Research in Book History and his Books As History, as well as David McKitterick's The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840.

The project has annual action plans. In 2019 the results were discussions about the indexing and cataloguing of provenance marks, workshops given by the co-ordinators in three state capitals around the country, a conference with three sessions, and publication of an article. For 2020 we hope to organize a call for papers to map further research on this subject, deepen the debate on provenance marks, and begin cataloguing and the making of a thesaurus.

For further information, please contact:
Professor Fabiano Cataldo de Azevedo
Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Escola de Biblioteconomia
Av. Pasteur, 458, sala 418, Orca, 22290–255, Rio de Janeiro – RJ, Brazil
fabiano.azevedo@unirio.br