Jesuit Representations in Tupi of the ‘Virgin’ Body of Mary in Sixteenth- Century Catechetical Texts

Abstract

In this article, we study how the body of St. Mary – a cunhã ‘woman’ – is presented as a ‘virgin’ in several sixteenth-century Tupi texts produced by the Jesuits for conversion purposes. We analyse the lexical resources used to describe a ‘virginal’ body in a culture whose cosmology did not consider this a relevant characteristic. The results indicate that decisions about how to treat the topic of virginity in Tupi varied according to the catechetical genre. In the Creed and in one of the Articles of Faith, the missionaries did not translate ‘virgin’ into Tupi, but instead employed the Portuguese loanword which would not be comprehensible to the indigenous converts. However, in their sermons and poetic texts they used several lexical alternatives in Tupi to refer to St. Mary’s ‘virginal’ body before, during, and after childbirth.