Brazil, England and Portugal: circulation of protestant prints in northeastern brazil

Abstract

This work presents the action of the British Bible Society and Foreign / BFBS in Brazil, during the 19th century, especially in the Northeast, circulating Protestant prints. The aforementioned text has the financial support of CNPq and integrates the Research Project coordinated by this researcher, entitled Brazil, Portugal and England: circulation of Protestant and others printed during the 1800s. The strategy of distributing prints preceded the organization of schools, with the purpose of implementing definitely Protestantism in Brazil. How this strategy was successful in a country that, at the time, had a mostly illiterate population? What could be seen as a problem was actually the differential. When the colporteur, a street vendor of Protestant prints, arrived in a certain place that people could not read, he proposed the organizing a group and committed to sending a teacher to teach them, who actually was also a missionary. In this way, they mapped the territory of installation of their future churches and schools in Brazil. The hypothesis I defend is that the intervention of Protestant institutions in circulation and dissemination of printed material allowed the definitive insertion of the Protestantism in the country. This work considers the Protestant prints that circulated in Brazil and Portugal from the 1800s as Libraries Protestant Pedagogical, which were used as strategies for the construction of a Protestant Christian civilization, which also had the objective of shaping a pedagogical field. The action of Protestant propagandists it was present in several provinces of the country, among them, Pará, Bahia, Maranhão, Sergipe, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Paraíba. Until the mid-30s of the 20th century, Protestant institutions distributed approximately ten million of printed material for religious and school purposes. However, the publication, editing, distribution, circulation and reading practices are areas of investigation almost untouched during for a century by educational historiography and Brazilian confessional.