Introduction -- Styles of thinking -- Neo-Platonism in the early-modern period -- The sixteenth-century corpus of the Portuguese colonizers of Brazil: ontological issues -- The sixteenth-century corpus of the Portuguese colonizers of Brazil: three methodological strategies
Summary
As it happens with other early-Modern corpora, the descriptive texts from 16th-century encounters of the Portuguese colonizers in Brazil are well-known for their strangeness. In them we find references to entities like monsters and demons, bizarre descriptions, and odd classification systems of plants and animals. For the most part, these elements are dismissed as mere eccentricities by modern scholars studying these texts. Instead, this book takes these elements seriously. They are focused on and tackled with a theoretical tool-styles of thinking-not yet used in Luso-Brazilian studies, and co