The Captaincy of Mato Grosso and the western border of Brazil

study of an eighteenth-century manuscript

Abstract

The paper presents the result of a research carried out within the scope of philology and historical linguistics, in interface with history. Firstly, we examine the trajectory of the texts that make up the corpus of the research, and how they were written and transmitted. We then compare the testimonies of their tradition, assessing the material and linguistic changes they have undergone over time. Finally, we confirm that understanding their textual trajectory may help the reader to understand the texts better three centuries after their original versions, and show how historiography has used testimonies to establish an idea about related events. We present in the paper the partial results of a study in which we analyzed a manuscript cutting related to the territorial conquest of the Brazilian Midwest and the creation of the Captaincy of Mato Grosso. After contextualizing the historical moment, we present the transcript of the document, using a philological methodology and describing the language status of the text. The study corroborates the expansionist intentions of the Portuguese Crown as well as the fact that the 18th century was a time of major linguistic changes. This is just one of several researches that still must be carried out to characterize and reveal many aspects of the Portuguese language in the 18th century.