Daughters of the Sertão: Family and Faith in Jacobina and Minas Novas de Araçuaí, Bahia, 1720–60

Brazilian literature and historiography tend to describe the sertões, or backlands, as lawless, masculine spaces. In this paper, I will offer a different interpretation by focusing on the disparate trajectories of two women, Úrsula Luisa de Monserrate and Isabel Maria da Silva Guimarães, based in the Bahian mining towns of Jacobina and Minas Novas de Araçuaí respectively. In the mid-eighteenth century, each founded religious communities for women. Úrsula used her inheritance to found a convent dedicated to Saint Úrsula in the city of Bahia. Isabel established a recolhimento(an informal religious house) on her father’s rural estate. Úrsula’s initiative had ecclesiastical sanction; Isabel’s did not, and she was censured by the archbishop of Bahia in 1753 for founding a religious house without authorization. She was to cease operations, upon threat of excommunication.

To analyze these disparate outcomes, I compare the social, financial, and administrative standing of Úrsula’s and Isabel’s respective families. Ursula’s father, Pedro Barbosa Leal, was wealthy, a loyal Crown servant, and extremely well-connected socially to powerful elites in the city of Bahia. He played a critical role in the consolidation of Portuguese control over gold mining in Jacobina. Isabel’s father, in contrast, had migrated to Minas Novas after his father was implicated in a revolt against the Crown Governor of Minas Gerais. He exhausted his personal resources to explore for gold and engage in indigenous conquest, obtaining minor titles and privileges from the Crown in return. Over time, he increasingly spent more time with his indigenous allies than with his family. Although effectively abandoned by her father, Isabel mounted an effective defense of her actions, both in her correspondence with the archbishop and in garnering support from local authorities. The archbishop eventually dropped the case.