Escrever, guardar, lembrar: os copiadores de cartas de Dom Joaquim Ferreira de Mello.

Abstract

Joaquim Ferreira de Mello, the Bishop of Pelotas from 1921 to 1940, copied and arranged his correspondences in books of letters for over twenty years. Thus, he constructed an epistolary collection, which is investigated in this research. More specifically, I intended to understand, through evidence in writing and filing letters, the role played by epistolary text in the clerical environment in which Dom Joaquim lived, in the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, I aimed at analyzing its relation to the appropriation of these texts as support for speeches, memorials for the individual who produced them, or as an archive, regarding the institution that preserved them as a "duty of memory". Therefore, I analyzed this collection in three distinct and complementary moments, relating to archiving processes, writing and preservation of the letters. Dom Joaquim’s letters that consist in narrative, discursive and confessional objects serve as an evidence of the use and role occupied by the epistolary writing in the clerical environment. This role went beyond the limits of distance communication and represented an administrative instrument and an area of disclosure and affirmation of Christian doctrine. In the other side, with the passage of time and by their dubious nature (document and testimony) the letters represented a place of preservation and evocation of memory.