ABSTRACT
Montesquieu's novel seems to have been used in the Luso-Brazilian world by a restricted group of readers, enforcing and nourishing typically Enlightened critical thought with its methodological principles and its values. As Paulo Gomes Leite has demonstrated, Dr. Jos Pereira Ribeiro managed to bring Montesquieu's Persian Letters from Coimbra to Mariana, deceiving the customs officials and the censorial apparatus through a mechanism much used by book smugglers. Obviously, given the period under examination here, when the Luso-Brazilian world was ruled by Absolutism and Inquisition, even when discussions involved various actors and spaces, debate could not always be held in an open fashion. Publications were one of the sources of this outline of a public sphere, extant in the Luso-Brazilian world at the turn of the eighteenth century a moment when the boundaries between the public and the private were far from defined and involving individuals from different social conditions.
