Dominican Friar Research Articles

Sensorial and Sonic Aspects in the Writings of the “English-American” Thomas Gage (c. 1603–1656) on Mexico and Guatemala

Objective/Context: This article examines dimensions of sensoriality within the writings of Thomas Gage (c. 1603–1656) regarding his experiences as a Dominican friar in Mexico and Guatemala between 1625 and 1637. His 1648 travelogue, The English-American His Travail by Sea and Land, is the first detailed eyewitness report of daily life in the Spanish colonies by an English writer. Yet this work and his other writings were published after he converted to Protestantism and formed an explicit part of anti-Catholic discourse in England. Methodology: Written from a historical-musicological perspective, this study is informed by the approaches of sensory history to identify and critique the sonic episodes and metaphors in Gage’s texts. It critically analyzes his travelogue and investigates how his accounts of musical, gastronomic, and religious experiences underpinned and influenced his political and theological views. To draw out his unique perspectives on music, it also considers soundscapes and the material and cultural dimensions in his descriptions. Originality: Recent scholarship has shown how Gage’s transnational and transconfessional identities did not fit traditional frameworks of analysis and limited scholarly attention to him. Lately, however, researchers have highlighted his mention of the senses. This article focuses specifically on hearing to show that his writings contain unique viewpoints and data on music and sound. Conclusions: Assessment of Thomas Gage within the frameworks of musicology and sensory history demonstrates that he invoked the senses in seemingly unique ways, especially by conflating their physical and metaphysical dimensions when critiquing Catholic practices in colonial contexts.

The Evangelization of Indigenous People in Spanish America: Motolinía and Las Casas

The aims is to highlight two divergent conceptions regarding the evangelization of the original peoples of Spanish America. In this sense, a comparison is established between the thoughts of the spanish franciscan friar Motolinía with the thoughts of the spanish dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas on the topic. The source is the Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (conceived from 1536 to 1541) and the Carta ao Imperador Carlos V (1555) by Motolinía as also the Único mode de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religion by Las Casas (written between 1523 and 1437). As a theoretical-methodological reference, we use the notions of the russian philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin. According to this author, there is only an object of thought and research where there is text. Every text has an author and this author has an intention. There is an interrelationship between the text and the author's context. For the russian philosopher, the work is a statement, as its author is always responding to the works of his predecessors, basing himself on and agreeing with the works of the same current, criticizing and combating the works of opposing currents.

Religion Counts: Faithful Realism and Historical Representation in George Eliot’s Romola

This article explores the importance of faith in the Victorian historical novel, with a particular focus on George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863), and rethinks past secularist approaches to the genre. Romola was arguably the most meticulously researched historical novel of the nineteenth century. Set in Florence from 1492 to 1498, the novel traces the rise and fall of the Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, as he pursued the spiritual and political reform of the city, leading to his excommunication and martyrdom. Despite the religious setting of the novel, Eliot’s painstaking effort to imagine a realistic historical representation of Florentine society has often been approached in secular terms as a tour de force of the author’s humanist vision of a progressive march towards modernity. Building on recent work in postsecular studies, this essay rethinks the novel’s historical realism in terms of Christian faith. Centering on the spiritual journey of the protagonist, Romola de’ Bardi, the novel presents a faithful depiction of Renaissance Florence by imagining historical representation as an act of faith. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Faith and Knowledge”, the article analyzes how Eliot frames the significance of the novel’s historical representation as an act of faith that one’s life is bound meaningfully to those of others.

Artworks at our fingertips: A solution starting from the digital replication experience of the Annunciation in San Giovanni Valdarno

The Annunciation is a remarkable artwork painted in the early 1430s by the Dominican friar Giovanni da Fiesole, better known as Beato Angelico, and now preserved at the Museum of the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy. It is a wide tempera painting with some fine gold foil placed on a wooden support, representing many symbolic details hard to be fully appreciated at a distance by the observer. To enhance the museum's visitor experience on it, as well as providing scholars with a tool to help deep investigations, a digital high-resolution Digital Twin of the painting was developed. This paper summarizes the outcomes of the process, introducing the custom software applications and hardware solutions that were customized for the artwork's digital replication. Exploiting digital photogrammetry and photometric stereo techniques, the model was prepared to host colorimetrically corrected maps at Gigapixel resolution, reaching a high-definition measurable detail threshold and following a well-established process refined over time by the authors. The fruition of such a complex model was performed through a custom process ending in AnnunciatiOn App, a solution integrated by both graphical and physical touch interfaces, whose features grant a deep interaction with the Digital Twin on kiosks destined to exhibitions. The results feed the discussion on the production and communication of digital replicas of artworks in museum collections and how they can be upscaled to be targeted to simple visitors as well as scholars and restorers.

Guido Vernani, Averroism, and the Modernity of Dante’s Political Thought

The paper presents a reconstruction of the metaphysical core of Dante’s political thought as expressed in the Monarchy, following on the footsteps of Guido Vernani’s critique of Dante’s political ideas in his De reprobatione Monarchie composite a Dante (Bologna, 1327-1334). The paper focuses on the link between Dante’s alleged Averroism, an accusation formulated for the first time by the Dominican friar, but latter repeated by philosophical historiography, and the interpretation of the Monarchy as a sign of the beginning of modern philosophy.

Blood Libels between Trento and the Bodensee

Abstract This article examines a little-known event that took place in 1475. This year saw a well-publicized trial at which the Jews of Trento were falsely accused of kidnapping a Christian toddler named Simon and murdering him in a religious ritual. Pope Sixtus IV, abiding by the long-standing papal tradition of defending the Jews against such accusations of ritual murder (known as blood libels), sent an apostolic commissioner to Trento to investigate the legitimacy of the proceedings opened by the local prince-bishop, Johannes Hinderbach. To defend his version of the story, namely that the Jews were responsible for the crime and that the ritual killing of Christian children was a long-established Jewish practice, Hinderbach sent the Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer von Schlettstadt (later known for his role in the development of the witch hunt) on a mission to the Bodensee region to uncover reports of previous alleged Jewish ritual murders. During his journey, Kramer managed to obtain a bundle of written notarial documents that attempt to prove the thesis of the magistrates and the bishop of Trento. Kramer’s mission is analysed by comparing the documents produced for him in southern Germany with other sources concerning the same cases and within the broader context of the blood libel of Trento.

The renaissance of a twelfth-century papal manuscript fragment in Medici Florence: a new reading of Fra Angelico’s David

Of the small corpus of works on vellum and paper attributed to the Tuscan Dominican friar and artist Fra Angelico (c.1400–55) and his circle, one drawing has been repeatedly singled out as widely accepted to be by his hand: King David Playing a Psaltery (c.1430) (now British Museum, London). The vellum leaf on which Fra Angelico drew features text on its verso that has until now been misunderstood as a fragment of a fifteenth-century breviary, leading it to be positioned simply as an example of his work as an illuminator. This article demonstrates that despite this misunderstanding, there is indeed an important relationship between the text and image on this sheet. The text is a fragment of a twelfth-century choir psalter and is significant as perhaps the oldest surviving evidence of the liturgy of the Papal Curia. Through a combination of palaeographical, liturgical, and art-historical analysis, I identify the leaf as a central Italian fragment dating to c.1150–80, which Fra Angelico encountered as a result of the presence of the Papal Curia in Florence during the papacy of Eugene IV, from 1434 to 1436 and again from 1439 to 1443. Stylistic and iconographic analysis demonstrates that Fra Angelico deliberately evoked the antique mode of the prefatory miniature in response to the age of the leaf, making the drawing an early example of the Renaissance desire to emulate classical models, received through a Carolingian filter. The close relationship between the David drawing and Fra Angelico’s work for Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell in San Marco—after the latter’s return to Florence from exile in 1434, supported by Eugene IV—is identified for the first time. The date of the drawing is refined from c.1430 to c.1435, the year Fra Angelico and his community moved from Fiesole to San Marco in Florence.

Travelling in time and space: early modern variations on Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terre Sancte

Composed in the 1280s by a Dominican friar, Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terre Sancte remained an influential account of the Holy Land for centuries. The impact of this text is reflected not only by the large number of extant manuscripts, but also by its rich printing history. And yet, although the Descriptio attracted considerable scholarly attention in the last decades, its shift into the world of print has not yet been studied. The aim of this paper is to explore this transition for the first time, focusing on the three earliest printed editions of the work. Inter alia, we examine the contexts within which the Descriptio was printed, the prologues which were appended to the Descriptio, the study aids added to it, and how its editors intervened in the text. This analysis reveals the range of ways in which early modern editors who appreciated the medieval Descriptio attempted to fit it into a cultural world whose intellectual culture was undergoing significant changes.

Entrevista a Frei Betto

Frei Betto (Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo) was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1944. He is a Dominican friar and theologian, being among the most relevant and internationally recognised exponents of «liberation theology». This militant in pastoral and social movements resisted the Brazilian military dictatorship, under which he was imprisoned and endured torture: he related this experience in Baptism of Blood (Jabuti Prize, 1982) and in Letters from prison (1977). He was active in the construction of Base Ecclesial Communities and, during the first Lula Government, was adviser to the Presidency of Brazil for the Zero Hunger programme. He politically sympathized the socialist experiences in South America, and he has advised various governments, especially the Cuban government, on relations between the Catholic Church and the State. Among the dozens of works he has written, the following are worth mention (our translation): Fidel and Religion (1985), The Work of the Artist (1995), Hotel Brasil (1999), The Art of Sowing Stars (2007), A Man Called Jesus (2009), Mysticism and Spirituality (with L. Boff, 2010), Hunger for God (2014), Reinventing Life (2014), Paradise Lost (2015), A Very Human God (2015), Faith and Affection (2019), and Militant Jesus (2022).

The Choir Screen in the Dominican Church of the Holy Trinity in Cracow: Form and Function

The paper demonstrates how modern metric survey techniques and digital technologies can contribute to traditional methods of art-historical investigation. The original choir screen in the Dominican church in Cracow, spanning the width of the chancel arch, was built in the mid-13th century. An analysis of the laser scanning data of the existing church enabled a construction of a 3D model of the subsequent and larger choir screen, built in the second half of the 14th century, which extended across the nave and both aisles and encased the initial screen. A keystone decorated with a carved boss of unique iconography, interpreted as a symbol of St John the Evangelist, survives from the carved decoration of this screen. The 3D model of the choir screen helps to visualize the original location of particular altars, some tombs and surviving artworks within the screen porch. Its north bay housed the tomb of Hyacinth Odrowąż, the first Polish Dominican friar and future saint. In 1543 the north part of the screen’s loft was cut off with a grille and transformed into a chapel of St Hyacinth, accessible to lay people by stairs running from the north aisle. The most important part of the chapel was a shallow niche which accommodated a new tomb and an altar with Hyacinth’s relics. Construction from 1581 to 1583 of a new and more spacious chapel, located slightly higher than the old one, involved demolition of the choir screen.

Algunas observaciones en torno a un poema hagiográfico virreinal: El Angélico de Adrián de Alecio, 1645

Abstract The article explores a lengthy poem about the life of St. Thomas Aquinas written in Lima and published in Spain by the Dominican friar Adrián de Alecio (El Angélico, 1645). It starts by describing the author and his milieu. The following is an evaluation of the extent to which the text takes up and adapts the writing models and hagiographic sources from the centre of the Empire. Finally, the article aims to place the poem in the axis formed by the poetic figures of Lope de Vega and Luis de Góngora.

Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland. The Legacy of Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálholt

Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland. The Legacy of Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálholt

“Y se guarde con ellos las leyes y ordenanzas para su buen tratamiento”: fray Tomas Ortiz, un caso ilustrativo del oficio de protector de indios en la gobernacion de Santa Marta, 1529-1531

The office of protector of Indians was granted to the bishops of the indian dioceses between 1527 and 1560. Despite this, there were exceptions in which it fell to members of the Church of lower hierarchy, as was the case of the Dominican friar Tomás Ortiz. This article is an illustrative case study which analyze the odds that an ecclesiastic of this type had to exercise his office. To reconstruct his trajectory, the royal provisions about the office, letters from him and from the royal officials who narrated his actions and a criminal process that he initiated for the homicide of an indian have been used. The sources have been viewed in the light of the procedural law of the time and the relations established by the friar with the civil authorites and the soldiers. It has been concluded that the office could only be exercised when he aligned himself with the interests of the governor.

Asia through the Eyes of a Medieval Dominican Friar: Galvaneus Flamma’s Cumulative Reuse of Geographical Sources

The third book of Galvaneus’s Cronica universalis contains an extensive geographical digression, which makes use of three kinds of sources: encyclopedic material, rather recent travel accounts (the ones by Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, John of Pian di Carpine, John of Montecorvino and by a mysterious Dominican friar called Simon) and, most likely, oral testimonies. This article examines Galvaneus’s re-use of geographical sources, by reproducing and analyzing selected passages of the book (displayed both in Latin and in English translation). The purpose is to shed light on Galvaneus’s working method, on his knowledge of the world, and on the role he played in the survival of lesser-known or unknown texts.

The Renaissance in Italy: A History

The Renaissance in Italy: A History

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

For Domenico Cavalca Translator of the Acts of the Apostles (Between Philology and Interpretation)

The Dominican friar Domenico Cavalca, active during the first half of the 14th century, was one of the most prolific translators of religious texts from Latin to Italian of his time. One of his last works, the Atti degli Apostoli, has recently been published in a scientific edition by Attilio Cicchella. This work finally allows scholars to have access to the text and its manuscript tradition. The present paper focuses on the way the Dominican Friar approached his source-text, the Acta Apostolorum. I reflect briefly on the prologue of the Atti degli Apostoli as published by Cicchella; I present the thorough analysis of ca. 50 loci critici, in which Cavalca’s Atti diverge significantly from the Latin text of the Vulgata; I reflect on Cavalca’s translation practices and on the public to whom the volgarizzamento was addressed.

Manuscripts of Nicholas Trevet’s Annales Sex Regum Anglie and Continuatio

Nicholas Trevet’s Annales sex regum Anglie and its anonymous Continuatio are important narrative sources for England in the high to late Middle Ages. Trevet (d. 1334 x 1339), a Dominican friar of England, was born in Somerset and spent much of his career in Oxford and London. He wrote a large number of texts, notably commentaries on biblical and classical texts.1 He also wrote histories, including the Historia for Creation–Nativity, the Chronicles for Creation–1334 (in Anglo-Norman French and later translated into Middle English), and the Annales sex regum Anglie for 1135–1307.2 It is the last of these that is under discussion here. The Annales, probably written between 1320 and 1323, covers a variety of subjects.3 Its prologue begins with ‘Atheniensium Romanorumque res gestas certissimus auctor Salustius ad inuicem conferens’, and its main text begins at Stephen’s accession with ‘Ut autem comodius iuxta nostram intencionem regum...

Pierre Claverie: Decolonising Mission

In the early 1980s, the Catholic Church in Algeria was experiencing upheaval, having been depopulated almost overnight when the great majority of Catholic Christians had left the country and resettled in France or elsewhere after the Algerian proclamation of independence two decades earlier. The remaining Christians were regarded not only as a reduced minority but mostly as a reminding symbol of an era of political and religious colonization. The Church in Algeria was in need of a deep reflection to find a new reason for its presence in this totally new context. A man of faith, capable of illuminating this reflection was Pierre Lucien Claverie, a Dominican friar and bishop of Oran between 1981–1996, who tried to lead the perception of the Church in Algeria from notions such as colonisation or proselytism, to notions such as otherness and plurality in an attempt to liberate the act of mission from any aggressive tendency or colonial roots. Claverie’s writings show that he did not shape the concept of mission only on a theological or social level but responded to the needs of his Church through his spiritual experiences and monastic background.

Rewriting Maya Religion: Domingo de Vico, K'iche’ Maya Intellectuals, and the “Theologia Indorum.”

Garry Sparks's recent book examines the interreligious encounters in the highland Maya region of Guatemala during the early decades after Spanish contact. In this volume, intended as a companion to The Americas' First Theologies: Early Sources of Post-contact Indigenous Religion (2017), Sparks presents a theological and intertextual analysis of the Theologia Indorum, or the “Theology for and of the Indians,” presumably written in K'iche’ Maya by the Spanish Dominican friar Domingo de Vico. Completed in 1554 and never published, the Theologia Indorum spanned two volumes and over 800 manuscript pages, becoming the first original theology produced in the Americas. Sparks's assiduous theological and linguistic analysis of the remaining fragments from multiple Theologia Indorum copies uncovers its important role in the transmission of Catholic and Maya religions. Sparks argues that to fully understand its impact, it must be evaluated in relation with contemporaneous religious and legal highland Maya texts, especially the Popol Wuj (1554–58) and the Title of Totonicapán (1554). Sparks demonstrates how Vico, literate K'iche’ Maya intellectuals, and later mendicant priests learned and borrowed from each other to reconfigure highland Maya religious theology.Through careful evaluation of Vico's understudied work and a broader corpus of K'iche’ Maya texts, Sparks focuses on the challenges of translation and the commensurability of ideas between Hispano-Catholic and K'iche’ Maya worldviews. Sparks highlights the diversity of Catholicism in early modern Iberia, which had to be reconciled into the highly localized contexts of the Americas. While Vico's Franciscan counterparts used either Latin or Spanish to present key topics, Vico relied instead on Indigenous terms. Sparks explains Vico's use of K'iche’ Maya linguistic ideology and moral anthropology as evidence of his training in scholastic Thomism, which emphasized the importance of language and the value of analogical reasoning (chapter 2). While the Theologia Indorum was designed for Maya conversion to Catholicism, Vico did not view the two religions as incompatible, nor did he rule out a “mixture of Catholic theology and indigenous culture” in creating the manuscript (p. 162).Sparks traces how Vico and highland Maya intellectuals such as Diego Reynoso reconciled their religions and used Maya terms and images to establish analogies for Catholic concepts. To do so, the volume's first of three parts establishes the “Old World” backgrounds of the highland Maya and Iberian mendicants. Vico's life and work are carefully evaluated in part 2, which provides background on Vico (chapter 3), discusses the Theologia Indorum's structure and creation (chapter 4), and explains his theological method (chapter 5). Through impressive linguistic analysis, Sparks examines how Vico adeptly utilized both the high register (language for ritual speech and elders) and low register (quotidian speech) of K'iche’ Mayan in the Theologia Indorum. By balancing high and quotidian speech and drawing on Maya knowledge, Vico constructed a text that accommodated Maya culture and religiosity. Transcribed or translated over 18 times, the Theologia Indorum became a foundational text in the region, as it was mentioned implicitly or explicitly in many contemporaneous highland Maya writings.In the same way that Vico accommodated Maya religiosity in his work, Sparks reveals how the K'iche’ Maya authors accommodated Vico, as the Theologia Indorum often became synonymous with Christianity in their writings. Part 3 assesses the Theologia Indorum's impact via expert intertextual analysis of contemporaneous K'iche’- and other Mayan-language texts, including the Popol Wuj (chapter 6), the Title of Totonicapán (chapter 7), and other legal writings (chapter 8). Sparks defines these diverse manuscripts as theologies that reveal the various levels of engagement with and responses to the Theologia Indorum by Maya intellectuals. The Title of Totonicapán's authors, for example, took a more conciliatory approach to the Theologia Indorum while also redacting, rather than merely copying, the manuscript in their work. In contrast, the authors of the Popol Wuj presented a slight resistance to Vico by portraying the Theologia Indorum as an “incomplete and deficient” version of the creation story and Maya ancient truths offered by the Popol Wuj (p. 198). Later sixteenth-century writings, however, increasingly saw the Theologia Indorum as an authoritative text and as “truth of God” (p. 297).Sparks's latest work reflects his mastery of the K'iche’ language and offers a welcome addition to the fields of religious studies, ethnohistory, and Maya linguistics. The book contains extensive footnotes and charts comparing the intertextual analysis of the various manuscripts, including a useful “Maya and mendicant intertextual reception history” chart (p. 287). The inclusion of maps could have helped situate readers and further illustrate aspects of the argument, such as the emphasis on locality and the geographical influence of the Theologia Indorum. This is a fascinating, detailed, and insightful work that will be of particular interest to a scholarly audience, as it deepens our knowledge of understudied highland Maya writings and the early evangelization process in Guatemala.