Translatio imperii: The end of the Iberian golden centuries and the gestation of the Sun King monarchy (1615-1661)

Abstract

The project has two main goals: make a meta-historical reflection about the Portuguese empire culture and its possible uses to the construction of the French-Portuguese politic action in the 17th century. Publish original sources related to the Portuguese empire.The project will be developed in the field of political cultural studies and will look, manly, for the understanding of the place of the historical knowledge to profile the diplomatic action, during a regency of Anne of Austria and the ministry of Jules Mazarin (1643-1661). We will analyse how the information that they disposed, as well their counsellors and diplomats, about the French-Iberian common past can had influenced the composition of the foreign politics with the Spanish empire and especially the Portuguese empire, understood in a wide sense, which also includes the study of the French interest for the North and North-East part of Brazil, at the time marked by the essays of formation of the Equinoctial France.To study these questions, we privileged the analysis of the ministry's library, the most extensive of France and also the first public library in this kingdom, as well one of the most important in Europe during the 17th century. This way of investigation of the cardinal's and Anne of Austria politics justifies itself because the diplomats, knowing Mazarin bibliophile, used to be offered him books - rare, precious, manuscripts and printed - with the goal to make moving forward the negotiations that they were in charge. Books were a medium of political propaganda. Simultaneously to the research, we will build the corpus of Lusophone sources at the library and we will publish some original manuscript documents related to Brazil, with the objective to forecast future studies about the French interest in Brazil, during the decades 1640's and 1650's.