The article analyzes a number of sermons employing food metaphors, preached in Brazil during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The use of metaphors drawn from listeners' daily lives was common in sermons during the colonial period, underpinned by two theoretical considerations: 1) the Aristotelian theory of knowledge, where the senses play a primary role as an access way to comprehension of more abstract ideas and as a means for urging listeners to change their behavior patterns by affecting their emotions and their wills; 2) the Platonic doctrine, where images are important in preserving our memory of ideas. The sacred oratory of the colonial period is of major interest to cultural history, since these sermons served as an invaluable way of transmitting doctrine and of shaping behavior in a society where orality was the chief method for spreading knowledge.
history of psychology; history of psychological ideas in Brazil; preaching and psychology