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{ four } Before the Church Doors WoMen as Wives and ConCuBines I n Bahia in 1591, Antonia de Bairos confessed to the visiting Tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition that she had been living in a bigamous marriage for decades following her exile from Portugal for adultery. Anrique Barbas, her second husband, had arranged false witnesses , and they had wed “before the doors of the church” with the license of the episcopal official. She had fled from Barbas, however, because of the “wounds and blows” that he dealt her and her “bad life” with him. She had sought refuge in her village church. Although she herself was nearly seventyand all witnesses had died, Bairos still offered vivid testimonyof her marriages and “begged pardon” of the Tribunal officers.1 Three years later in Pernambuco, Breatriz Martins confessed that she had asserted to friends visiting in her yard that the married state, “made and ordained by God,” was religiously superior to the orders of monks and nuns begun by mere humans. The wife of a carpenter, Martins explained that she had learned this heretical idea as a girl from a local teacher who had also instructed her in the womanly skills of cooking and washing. She was admonished by the Inquisitor Heitor Furtado de Mendoça that she should not discuss “what shedid not understand”and sent to repeat herconfession at the Jesuit monastery for her penance.2 The statements of these Portuguese immigrants indicate sharp contrasts in their experiences within marriage: while Bairos struggled with her husbands in conditions far from the idealized marriageof theera, Martins’s satisfaction with the married state led her into sin. A close review of Portuguese and Brazilian writings about marriage in the early colonial era reveals similar discord and confusion about the nature and value of marriage for women. The Jesuit missionaries sent to Brazil, for example, extolled the virtues of marriage through sermons and lectures while neglecting the { 108 } Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches marital status of their own slaves. The influential Jesuit author Manuel da Nóbrega denounced the widespread practice of cohabitation and concubinage in a 1553 letter, while later sermonist AntônioVieira recounted only thevirtues of the silent and isolated wife.Thesedifferences collectively suggest that this period in Brazilian history was not characterized by a single vision of wedded bliss to which all aspired (though few achieved), and that women’s lives in marriage rarely conformed to a single religious norm. With marriage, a bride might come close to achieving the elite and Christian ideal discussed in Chapter 2: the honor of virtuous womanhood that seemingly rested on her reputation for chastity and her removal from the public sphere. Her other attributes and accomplishments mattered so little in comparison that Feliciano Joaquim de Souza Nunes insisted honor was the core value in a woman’s “inestimable dowry,” and without it, she would “not be rich, noble, or beautiful.”3 Quoting Spanish Franciscan Antonio de Guevara, he continued, “Honor is more valuable even when life and property are lost; however, property and life have no value if [a woman] loses honor.”4 From this perspective, those who lived with men outside of the sanctified state violated the private yet public nature of the virtuous ideal. The Catholic Church and the community identified extramarital sexual relations as sinful in part because theydamaged public reputations —they were public sins.The attribution ofvirtue and honor, bycontrast , depended on personal demeanorand private behaviors that remained invisible to the public eye. An honorable matron was accordingly urged to turn to religious ideals, to be “very devoted to our Virgin Lady, . . . to preserve chastity and free [her]self from dangers.”5 This chapter focuses on the realm of marital relations in colonial Brazil , encompassing both the discourse on sexual relations, wives, concubines , and marriage that articulated the feminine behaviors deemed appropriate for women and the lived realityof women in reaction to religious expectations.6 While secularand religious authorities agreed that marriage was, in the most general terms, the consummate purpose for women’s existence , the emphases in their writings and the impact they sought on social norms were not unified; when we include the most specific advice proffered to women and men in the Brazilian colony on what were considered to be the most pressing problems, surprising differences, even contradictions , appear. Inevitably, it seems, conflicts arose in thediscourseon gender difference, and the contesting powers in the colony—missionaries, church officials, local and overseas governors, and the colonial elite—entered a...

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