AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SKETCHBOOK: THE METHODOLOGICAL ROUTINE PRIOR TO PHILOLOGICAL WORK

a rotina metodológica anterior ao labor filológico

Abstract

This work aims to present the sociohistorical, codicological, diplomatic, and paleographic analyses of "O Borrador," in which I publish all the letters I wrote, beginning in 1749 while I was in Bahia, by Antônio Gomes Ferrão Castelo Branco. The documentation is part of the collection of rare manuscripts at the Brasiliana and José Mindlin Library at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the NELP text bank, the Electronic Corpus of Historical Documents of the Sertão (CE-DOHS). During its colonial phase, it was part of the CE-DOHS Umbrella project: a corpus for a linguistic-grammatical characterization of Brazilian Portuguese - colonial and postcolonial phases. This documentation is a kind of sketchbook, in which Antônio Gomes—who identified as Portuguese, Bahian, and Brazilian—began to annotate letters and other documents from 1749 onward. Dating from the mid-18th century, the documentation is a living testimony that reveals the rites of the nobleman's private life and the sociohistorical context of Bahia at that time. Therefore, it constitutes a valuable document for research in Historical Sociolinguistics, especially on the Brazilian colonial period, which remains little explored from this perspective. Through an interdisciplinary theoretical-methodological approach as proposed by historical sociolinguistics (Romaine, 1982; Hernàndex-Campoy; Conde-Silvestre, 2012), the following questions are identified: what? Where? How? Who? For whom? And for what? (Petrucci, 2003) (Mattos E. Silva, 2004). Beyond this knowledge, the perspectives of Diplomacy, Codicology, and Paleography are brought to bear on the methodological treatment of ancient writings (Contreras, 1994) (Lose, 2022). The Borrador is representative of an important period in our history, covering the period of gestation of Brazilian Portuguese (Mattos e Silva, 2004), and contributes significantly to studies of Portuguese from the colonial period, as it will shed light on a time frame that has still been little explored, as mentioned.