Women, Normativities, and Scandal: The Crime of Concubinage through Conviviality Lenses in Southern Portuguese America in the Late 18th Century

This paper seeks to understand colonial women’s agencies, experiences, and convivialities through the crime of concubinage, bearing conflicts against the moral order taken to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction for trial in the late 18th century. The aim is to use the concept of convivialities to discover the normativities that permeated the cases, paying special attention to the social impacts expressed (and not expressed) in the narratives, and the institutional treatment given by the judicial administration apparatus. This paper draws on archival research to analyse several cases from 18th-century Brazil in light of the royal justice system, ecclesiastical constitutions, and canon law regarding the relation between legal and social norms and violations of them. I argue that scandal turns out to be a vital social-legal category for Portuguese America in the modern period for understanding convivialities in terms of social, legal, and moral notions about honesty