“O primeiro livro do mundo”: a missão abreviada entre Portugal e Juazeiro do Norte

Abstract

The research presented here consists of an investigation into the history of the book "A Missão abreviada: para despertar os descuidados, converter os pecadores e sustentar os frutos das missões," its readings, listeners, and readers. Published in Portugal in the year 1859 and written by Father Manoel José Gonçalves Couto, this breviary gained visibility in the Holy Popular Missions of the 19th century in that country and in Brazil became a guidebook for laypeople and priests, helping to shape new spiritual sensitivities and various socio-religious movements. The interest of this study lies mainly in the ways of circulation and reading of this breviary in Brazil, especially in the city of Juazeiro do Norte, in the interior of Ceará. This spatial focus is justified given the multiple ways of reading this text employed by the devotees of Father Cícero Romão Batista, both in its original context of circulation and in contemporary times. The uses of the Missão Abreviada constitute a vast puzzle whose pieces reveal complex belief systems that escape certain dogmatic impositions and reinvent the ways of believing and being in the world. The investigation of these issues was carried out through a diverse set of sources that include publications in periodicals of the time as well as literary writings and oral narratives. In a world where information seems to dissipate every minute, the experience of the uses of the Missão Abreviada may indicate other relationships with time: patched, stitched, and rewritten.