In the seventeenth century, the best representative of the Baroque rhetoric among the Jesuits was Antonio Vieira. Vieira was born in Lisbon in 1608 and at the age of 6 moved with his family to Bahia. At 15 he ran away from home to live with the Jesuits. At the age of 17 he was sent to study with the Jesuits in Olinda, Pernambuco, to teach rhetoric. Vieira is considered to be one of the great preachers, writers, and missionaries of the seventeenth century. He was also “a key actor in European and Ibero-American politics of the period,” as the historian Thomas M. Cohen has shown in his book António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal. Vieira’s work differs from that produced by Nóbrega and Anchieta in quantity and style. His writings consist primarily of sermons to be given in churches in Brazil and Europe. His sermons are typical examples of Spanish baroque culture, both in content and in form. Some address questions related to the political situation that he experienced in Brazil when Portugal and its colonies were part of the Spanish Empire. In 1640, Portugal once again became independent from Spain, but there was still conflict in Brazil, this time with the Dutch. His sermons after this date deal with political questions and express a sense of what he considers Portugal’s fall from divine grace. These themes are particularly obvious in his Sermão pelo bom sucesso das armas de Portugal contra as de Holanda (1640), in which he questions God for having deserted his chosen people (the Portuguese) in favor of Protestant Dutchmen.
In 1641 Vieira was sent to Lisbon as part of a delegation of Brazilians to the court of King João IV, the new monarch who had been chosen to rule the independent Lusitanian Empire. Vieira became João IV’s adviser and one of the most powerful men in Portugal. In 1652, he gave up his role as a diplomat and advisor to the King in order to return to Brazil and work among the natives in the northern region of Maranhão. Vieira and other Jesuits strongly opposed the exploitation of the natives by Portuguese settlers and colonizers. The subsequent conflicts between Jesuits and the Portuguese colonizers resulted in the expulsion of Vieira and his fellow Jesuit missionaries from Maranhão in 1661. Marked by the contradictions of the Baroque era, many of Vieira’s sermons reveal a crisis of faith and a kind of subversive disregard for religious and social orthodoxy. His open defense of subaltern groups such as the Indians of Brazil, the poor of Portugal, New Christians and Jews brought him to the attention of the Inquisition. Prohibited from preaching, he returned to Bahia in 1681 and remained there until his death in 1697.
Other writers who produced Baroque texts are the Portuguese New Christian Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão (1555–ca. 1634) and the Creoles Frei Vicente do Salvador (1564–1636?), Sebastião da Rocha Pita (1660–1739), Gregório de Matos Guerra (1636–96) and Manuel Botelho de Oliveira (1636–1711).
Brandão’s Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil (1618) seems to have been written with the purpose of attracting European immigrants to Portuguese America. The book consists of six sets of dialogues that celebrate the greatness of Brazil. Brandao establishes a dialogue between Brandonio, a long-time resident of Brazil and Alviano, a skeptical newcomer from Portugal. Gonsalves de Mello considers Brandão’s text a significant work of Brazilian literature and one of the foundational documents in the history of the Brazilian Northeast. The discussion between Brandonio and Alviano typifies the conflict that extended over several centuries between those Europeans who saw the New World as a land of innocence or promise and those who considered it savage, dangerous, and degenerate. This controversy gave rise to a vast literature on both sides of the issue, as Frederick Holden Hall observes in the introduction to the English translation of Brandão’s Dialogos das grandezas do Brasil. The book also speculates about the possible Hebrew origin of the Indians, and describes the different social groups and customs of the region. It also suggests that the immigrants who come to Brazil should not seek fast profits and return to Portugal. Instead, Brandonio argues, they should stay in Brazil and work for the benefit of the new society. An incomplete version of the Diálogos was published in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, and a complete and definitive edition was not published until 1966. This later edition also contains a detailed analysis of all theories of authorship, an account of the known facts of Brandão’s life, and a history of the various editions by the Brazilian critic José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello.
Gregório de Matos Guerra, a major baroque poet and a contemporary of Antonio Vieira, was born in Bahia into a wealthy family of sugar planters. As a member of the colonial elite, Gregório was sent to Portugal to pursue higher education. He studied at the University of Coimbra, and upon completing his education in 1661 he married a local woman and became a judge in Portugal. As a result of personal and political problems, Gregório lost his position as judge and returned to Brazil 1682. The cultural and material changes he experienced during his lifetime make him one of the best representatives of the Brazilian baroque poets. His models included the Spanish poets Quevedo, Calderón, and Góngora. In contrast to Vieira’s elegant sermons defending the interests of the Jesuit order, the satirical verses attributed to Gregório de Matos depict the economic and social upheavals that he experienced in Portugal and in Brazil.
Gregório de Matos wrote religious and lyrical poetry, but he is best known for his satirical poetry. These satirical verses describe the contradictions of colonial Brazilian society. Gregório focuses on what he saw in Bahia upon his return from Portugal and portrays the colony as an upside-down world. Like Quevedo, Gregório de Matos sought to correct the excess of liberty that he believed was the cause of the decadence of society through satire. Many of his aggressive and pornographic verses were directed towards the governor of Bahia, Luis Alves da Câmara Coutinho, and led to Gregório’s exile in Angola. Later on, he returned to Brazil on the conditions that he give up writing satirical verses and no longer live in Bahia. He died in Recife in 1696, a year before the death of Antonio Vieira in 1697. In the last four decades, particularly with the neo-baroque and tropicalist movement, Gregório’s poems have been recycled by poets like Harold de Campos, and also by the popular singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. João Adolfo Hansen’s book, A sátira e o engenho, is one of the best critical studies of the satirical poetry attributed to Gregório de Matos. James Amado’s edition of Obras completas de Gregório de Matos (1969) is the most complete collection of the poetry attributed to the most important baroque satirist of Brazil.
Botelho de Oliveira was a contemporary of Gregório de Matos and Antonio Vieira. Although critics such as Varnhagen and Antonio Candido feel that Botelho’s baroque production does not compare in quality to the writings of Vieira and Matos, Botelho de Oliveira’s Música do Parnaso has the merit of being the first volume of poetry published in Portugal by a native-born Brazilian poet. One of the most celebrated poems found in the collection is entitled “Ilha da Maré.” The poem is a good example of the ufanista spirit that characterized writings such as the Carta by Caminha and the Prosopopéia by Bento Teixeira that glorified the Brazilian land and all its resources. Música do Parnaso praises the natural beauty and delicious foods found in Bahia, the poet’s homeland.
In the fields of history and historiography, some names stand out in colonial Brazil. Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, a Portuguese historian who lived in Brazil around 1570, is thought to be the author of História da privíncia de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil and Tratado da terra do Brasil. Gabriel Soares de Sousa, a plantation owner who lived in Bahia at about the same time, is believed to have written Tratado descritivo do Brasil, published in Rio in 1851. The work of these early historians can also be considered exemplary of ufanismo. They portray Brazil as a land of beauty and wealth.
Not all historians were so positive in tone. Frei Vicente do Salvador’s (1564–1636) Historia do Brasil details the political and military crisis that he observed in Brazil during the period that Portugal