Codes of Faith, Practices of Power

The Normative Dynamics of the Society of Jesus and Its Limits of Application in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese America

Abstract

This article analyzes the Jesuit Constitutions as one of the founding and guiding texts of the religious order newly created in the sixteenth century. Using documentary analysis, it seeks to understand how this Ignatian legislation contributed to the cohesion and structuring of the Society of Jesus, whose global dispersion was one of its defining characteristics. The Constitutions are approached as a normative instrument of governance, discipline, and institutional organization, as emphasized by specialized historiography. The study delimits as its spatial and historical framework Portuguese America in the sixteenth century, with particular emphasis on colonial Brazil, problematizing the boundaries between normative prescription and institutional practice within the colonial context, especially in the spheres of missionary activity, the administration of aldeamentos, and relations with temporal power. Based on the normative organization of the Society of Jesus, the article proposes an analysis of the relationship between theory and practice through the tensions observable.