WOMEN WHO APPOINT MEN: WIDOWS, DAUGHTERS, AND THE APPOINTMENT TO OFFICES VACATED BY DEATH IN PORTUGUESE AMERICA (16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES)

Abstract

In the Documentos Históricos collection of the Digital Hemeroteca of the Brazilian National Library, several documents were found in which Portuguese monarchs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries granted royal offices to widows living in Portuguese America due to the death of their husbands who had performed those functions, not so that the widows themselves would occupy the office, but rather so that they could appoint men to contract marriage with their daughters and, then, be provided with the office. This article aims to analyze the agency of widows in the Portuguese Empire based on their role in these appointments. To this end, it seeks to examine contemporary views of women in the period, drawing primarily on philosophers foundational to the culture of the time, such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. It then analyzes the legal status of women in the Old Regime, particularly with regard to marriage, property regimes, and widowhood, and the situations in which they might have some degree of autonomy. For this purpose, the Ordenações Filipinas and contemporary scholarship on women of the period are used. Finally, the article presents the documents in which widows were granted the prerogative to appoint men to royal offices. It concludes that women possessed capacities within the social structure of the Portuguese Empire, being able, for example, to bring legal action against their husbands in cases in which the latter dissipated the assets that composed the dowry, which belonged to the wife but was administered by the husband. With widowhood, women gained greater autonomy, for instance by administering their own property. Moreover, if the deceased husband had held a royal office, the widow, after royal concession, could appoint a man to marry the couple’s daughter and be provided with the office, provided that he was approved by the governor-general of Brazil after an assessment of his capacity to perform the function, with the office potentially serving as a dowry. In addition, the grant given to widows functioned as a means of preventing the deceased official’s family from falling into destitution.