Seditious Books and Libertinism in the Captaincy of Minas Gerais (18th-Century Brazil): the Library of Naturalist José Vieira Couto

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the library of the naturalist José Vieira Couto, a Brazilian doctor who was appointed by the Portuguese Crown to study the captaincy of Minas Gerais, on which he wrote several reports (“Memoirs”) between 1799 and 1802. His library, a varied and eclectic collection, was of a substantial size for its time, containing at least 226 works. Many of these demonstrate his familiarity with Enlightenment thinking – also the case with learned elites in Nueva Granada in Spanish America, as will be seen in a few examples. But this is not all. The study of the books that he and many of his friends, constituting a “society of thought,” possessed in their libraries, can be used to study the ideas common to this group, accused of participating in an uprising bent on declaring the captaincy’s independence. This paper seeks to focus on the study of two books about the independence of the United States of America (which this society of thought discussed intensely while they prepared their own rebellion), in an effort to reconstitute some of their reading practices. Similarly, an understanding of their political and scientific thought will show how this was inseparable from their religious conceptions.