© Airton Ribeiro,  | doi:./_ This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc 4.0 license. chapter  The Presence of Azpilcueta’s Manual de Confessores in Portuguese America (16th to 18th Centuries) Airton Ribeiro Abstract This chapter aims to map the circulation of Martín de Azpilcueta’s Manual de Con- fessores in Brazil from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In order to undertake a general survey on the possession and circulation of the Manual in that period, a vast assortment of sources was examined. One of the earliest records of written culture produced in Brazil can be attributed to Jesuitical letters sent by Jesuit missionaries. In these epistolary documents, exchanged around the mid-sixteenth century, can be found probably the first evidence of the Manual in Brazilian soil. Confessional literat- ure had particularly utility for the missions of evangelization in colonial spaces and to the proper performance of this sacrament among Christians. This explains the posses- sion of the title by priests and by bishops, as post mortem inventories show. By the same token, its presence in conventual library collections was required, as some catalogues of Franciscan and Jesuitic libraries testify. Preliminary findings demonstrate that Azpil- cueta’s Manual indeed circulated in different regions of Portuguese America along the centuries, yet its presence in the shelves of institutional and private libraries was shared with other competing titles of the confessional literature. By the eighteenth century, the appearance of the title in the historic records decreases severely, while new confes- sional books replace it. In any case, the importance of Azpilcueta’s Manual is attested for its persistence along three centuries assisting the regulation of colonial life in Brazil. Keywords Book History – Circulation of Knowledge – Colonial Legal History – Portuguese Amer- ica – Early Modern Period Airton Ribeiro - 9789004687042 Downloaded from Brill.com 01/23/2024 01:41:47PM via Open Access. This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/