Le Cartinhas di Évora: un modello per l'educazione linguistica del 16. secolo. Evoluzione di un genere all'interno dell'odeporica lusitana
Author(s)
Rossi, Maria Antonietta
Date Issued
May 22, 2015
Type
Doctoral Thesis
Abstract
Lusitanian language formation and evolution along the years has been inevitably connected with the viaticum phenomenon, which spreads within and without Portuguese boundaries, reaching overseas countries where Portuguese people land undertaking transoceanic travels.
Investigating it under a voyage perspective, the diachronic formation and expansion of the Lusitanian language during the 15th and the 16th centuries is due to explorations and the commercial occupation of territories in Africa, Asia and South America, unknown to Europe in this period. As a result, the new transoceanic routes not only imply the use and diffusion of the Portuguese language in the colonised areas but also inevitable cultural and linguistic contacts between groups of explorers, European colonisers and local people.
The success of the Portuguese language as a lingua franca in three different continents is due to two main phenomena. First, its constant use between colonisers and colonised to connote different concepts in different communicative contexts; second, its practical implication for the evangelisation brought about by missionaries who venture into newly explored territories.
In order to educate the natives to the Christian principles, the Portuguese language must be taught together with religion. So, groups of missionaries combine the two subjects using specific didactic materials which may be defined as Cartinhas or Cartilhas. They are a sort of spelling books, divided into a linguistic and a religious part. The first one is dedicated to teaching syllable formation in Portuguese, which is learnt by local people as Second Language (L2). The second part is composed of texts and prayers, describing the fundamental Christian principles, used to practice reading skills. Those pedagogic instruments represent the very first sets of rules of the Portuguese language and their wide diffusion, both in Portugal and in the colonies, is due to the recent printing press innovation. Their publication comes far before, of nearly thirty years, that one of the two fundamental grammar books attributed to Fernão de Oliveira (1536) and to João de Barros (1540).
This research wants to further investigate and analyse under different perspectives the Cartinha kind of text used as a didactic mean to teach both the Portuguese language and the Christian doctrine. My interest in this argument originated during my study career at the Università degli Studi della Tuscia, where the Portuguese language programmes, directed by professor Mariagrazia Russo and professor Simone Celani, based on the Portuguese language formation and diffusion, also focussed on the birth of the first language regulation instruments in the 16th and 17th centuries. Those included also the Cartinhas, which I also studied attending some courses at the Universidade de Lisboa.
First, I tried to collect all the existing scientific material concerning this subject matter. Unfortunately, the academic documents I analysed propose only a perfunctory investigation of the textual characteristics and pedagogic aims of those sixteenth century spelling books. As a result, several epistemological questions still remain unanswered:
• the etymological study of two different nomenclatures;
• the collection of a complete bibliographic corpus, including all the samples of the sixteenth century editions;
• a textual and paratextual analysis of those spelling books.
Consequently, given this missing information, I decided to further investigate this subject matter trying to complete the studies published so far, focussing in particular on the dual nomenclature Cartinha and Catecismo, often used in an approximate way as they were synonyms and, therefore interchangeable, due to the remarkable presence of religious texts within those spelling books.
The aims of my investigation may be summarised as follows:
• determination and contextualisation of the given spelling books conceived for didactic aims within a process of rule setting of the Portuguese language, which brought scholars and linguists to create the first metalinguistic instruments of the language, as Cartinhas, grammar books, dictionaries and orthography treatises;
• Convey a complete didactic and philological prospect of the scientific studies concerning the Cartinha kind of text under a historic point of view;
• Investigation and determination on the etymological origin of the terms Cartinha e Cartilha; this will give the possibility to verify how the two spelling and lexical variants clearly underwent a process of diachronic semantic evolution, letting demonstrate that those words derive from the Latin Chartula;
• Propose a general referring bibliographic corpus which collects all the existing samples of Cartinha;
• Collation of the existing samples of the corpus, in order to identify parts of text and paratext in common between different spelling books;
• Analyse the Cartinha and Catecismo text structure in order to show different characteristics and didactic aims;
• Propose both a textual and a paratextual analysis of three samples of Cartinhas not thoroughly studied so far, which are collected in the Reservados group at the Biblioteca Pública of Évora (sixteenth century editions, cataloguing Res. 300, Res. 300 A e Res. 300 B);
• Accomplish a typo-philological edition of the mentioned texts.
Writing this research article I based essentially on historical sources and documents, conducting a meticulous analysis and a bibliographic scrutiny in Portugal at the subsequent institutions: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Biblioteca da Ajuda, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Museu Nacional de Arqueologia e Etnologia de Lisboa, Biblioteca Pública de Évora (Évora). My researches in Italy have been conducted in Rome, at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and the Archivum Romanum Societas Iesu.
Additional information
Dottorato di ricerca in Storia e cultura del viaggio e dell'odeporica in età moderna
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