Books from the Arco do Cego in colonial Brazil

Abstract

Between 1799 and 1801, the friar José Mariano da Conceição Veloso, a Minas Gerais native, headed Lisbon's Casa Literária do Arco do Cego, which in a brief three-year span published at least eighty works on topics that included agriculture, navigation, and medicine. This editorial project must be understood within the context of Dom Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho's enlightened government program. Meant to modernize the Empire, it included dissemination of technical and practical knowledge in lands under Portuguese dominion, especially in the Americas. As a contribution to an understanding of the Enlightenment in Brazil , this article presents elements form my research on the development of the project and how it was received.