Em busca da cultura popular no Portugal Moderno: O provérbio, a oralidade e uma cultura insubordinada ao poder?

This study proposes a renewed vision of the idea of “popular culture” in early modern Portugal (XVI-XVIII), making use of oral tradition records, namely the proverb, as a primary proxy in an effort to reconstruct the “moral legislation” of the majority, the “common people”. We presuppose that the relative silence in historical sources regarding the voice of the majority does not represent an effective absence of cultural production on the part of those “below”. We begin by addressing both the chronology of “popular culture” studies, as well as establishing our understanding of this key concept, by dissecting it both as “culture” and in terms of its definition of “popular”, and finally by establishing the erudite-popular dichotomy, the guiding principle of our approach. In the same vein, we strive to clarify our focus on the proverb, presenting the historical sources that guide us and the role of mediation between the ‘”worlds” of the socio-cultural dichotomy established here and which we consider to be represented in the symbolic role of proverbial orality.
We realise our work with a contextualisation of the universe of morality in the modern Portuguese world, focusing on the universe of “rustic” law, which acts as a starting point for a broader approach to the paremiological corpus collected. This universe is the result of an effort to collect close to a thousand proverbs referring to various dimensions of power relations in modern portuguese society, based on printed and handwritten sources. Finally, we carry out a textual analysis, with the aim of identifying guidelines for a “popular” moral and behavioural code relating to power in the elected historical period.