Colonial Paleography

This extension initiative offers training in the reading, deciphering, transcription, and interpretation of handwritten documents in Portuguese and Spanish, produced between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The work grew out of weekly meetings held for the past four years at UERJ, where undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students practice paleography, discuss colonial sources, and develop collective research tools.

The initiative brings together teaching, research, and extension, with particular attention to documentation concerning Indigenous people, mestizos, Africans, enslaved people, poor workers, women, and other historically subalternized subjects. In partnership with UFT and within the CNPq Research Group History, Memory, and Latin American Narratives, it includes workshops, archival visits, commented transcriptions, and the training of new researchers in colonial social history.