Our PhD candidate, Sarah Limão Papa, participated in the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History, held in San Francisco, California (USA), from October 24–26, 2024. She presented in the panel “‘Love and Marriage: Strategies Adopted by European Colonizers to Overseas Territories,” which explored how love, family dynamics, and colonial legal frameworks intersected in various European colonial contexts.
Sarah’s presentation, “Fathers who are Fathers: Catholic Priests as Landlords and Pater familias in 18th-Century Portuguese America,” examined the roles of Catholic priests in colonial Brazil, highlighting how their positions as religious leaders, landlords, and paternal figures were interconnected. Through primary sources, Sarah showed how these actors shaped family relationships, land ownership, and social dynamics, with each element influencing the other in a complex, reciprocal way. The priests’ influence extended beyond religious matters to affect land tenure and familial authority, shaping not only the social structure but also emotional bonds and familial relations.
This work builds on Sarah’s master’s dissertation, which focused on the legal status of sons of priests and the legitimization procedure. In this paper, Sarah shifts her focus to land ownership, investigating how property rights intersected with familial structures and legal norms. By examining how land tenure was entangled with personal relationships, Sarah seeks to uncover the dynamics between religion, love, family, and property ownership in Portuguese America.
The panel, chaired by Victoria Barnes of Queen’s University Belfast, included a commentary by Jacinthe Plamondon of Université Laval, who provided insightful reflections on the presentations. Other presenters in the panel included Sebastiaan Vandenbogaerde (Antwerp University/Ghent University), who explored the complexities of customary and colonial marital law in the Belgian Congo between 1885 and 1960, and Julie Rocheton (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory), who examined the dynamics of separation in French colonial Louisiana, using insights from the French Superior Council Archives. Together, these presentations offered a comparative perspective on how love, family, and law were interwoven in diverse colonial societies.
The full programme of the event is available here.
