ABSTRACT
Born in 1739 into a noble family, Teresa de Mello Breyner was the daughter of the Lord of Ficalho and the Court Lady Isabel Josefa de Breyner, of Austrian descent. She intellectually and socially came of age during John V's reign, and was a court lady during Joseph I's kingship. During the 1770s and 1780s she sustained an intense correspondence with Leonor de Almeida, future Countess of Oyenhausen, who was later known as Marchioness of Alorna, after inheriting the family title from her brother Pedro, the third Marquis. The relevance of religion in the career of the Countess of Vimieiro, as for many of her contemporaries in Portugal, cannot be separated from social structure as a whole. Catholic doxa permeated all aspects of a Spanish woman's life: accordingly, the Countess structured her worldview, so that core ideas of the Enlightenment could be discussed within the framework of that doxa.
