Early Modern Atlantic Research Articles

Human Agency and Coastal Landscape Transformation in Early Modern Atlantic Europe: An Interdisciplinary Research Approach in the Urola Estuary (Basque Coast)

ABSTRACT Landscapes are the result of historical human–environment interactions whose material imprints are recorded in the local topography, hydrography, and sedimentary archives. Human influence is particularly visible in coastal and estuarine landscapes, due to the continuity and intensity of occupation since, at least, the Middle Ages. This paper analyses the historical evolution of an estuarine landscape in Atlantic Iberia, based on the combined analysis of documentary sources, land covers, and sediment cores. The observed anthropic impact relies on the superposition of different agents and processes that has been traced in detail from the Middle Ages to the present, permitting a critical and integrated reconsideration of the written and oral records and their confrontation with the materiality of the landscape. These results highlight the value of the proposed research approach for the study of human–environment interactions of a limited geographical area over the long term. More generally, it has been possible to link these agents and processes operating on the local scale to wider regional and global historical trends, contributing to better characterising and understanding the nature of the anthropogenic impact on coastal environments.

Transatlantic Friends–Exploring “Radical” Religion and Feminine Agency Through Early Modern Atlantic Regionalism

Transatlantic Friends–Exploring “Radical” Religion and Feminine Agency Through Early Modern Atlantic Regionalism

The Nação Rules: A Comparative Analysis of the Bylaws of Western Sephardic Congregations in the Early Modern Atlantic

Religious persecution, segregation, and commercial networks triggered the diaspora of Iberian New Christians and Sephardic Jews throughout the Atlantic in the Early Modern period. Despite the geographical dispersion, the diverse host environments, and the complex religious experiences, the so-called Western Sephardic Diaspora was founded on the principles of unity and preservation, which were cemented by the notion of belonging to the Nação. Thus, as a cross-border community connected by common geographical origins, collective cultural identity, and a shared New Christian background, the concept of Nação was structural for the definition and evolution of the diasporic experience of Portuguese and Spanish exiles and their descendants from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This article overviews the most recent findings and perspectives on the concept of the Nação as a unifying element of the Western Sephardic Diaspora. Then, it problematizes the interpretation of this concept in different Sephardic communities established in Atlantic port cities. This problem is approached by analyzing these communities’ internal bylaws (ascamot) under the lens of two critical questions: (1) the concept of Nação as defining the borders of belonging to the community and (2) the unity and preservation of the Nação as essential drifts of the organization and management of the community. This analysis emphasizes the tension between the dynamism and particularities of each community and the conservatism of the idea of Nação, promoted by small social and economic elites that exercised increasing control over the communities and their interaction with the surrounding environments.

Atlantic Masters: Three Early Modern Afro-Brazilian Artists

Brazil received the largest number of Africans enslaved into the Americas: nearly five million by some estimates. Thus, Brazil became the world’s largest slavocracy. But slavery was not the only experience available to Africans and Brazilians of African descent in slavery-era Brazil. Numerically, Afro-Brazilians dominated the arts in colonial Brazil. However, very few of those artists and artisans, many of whom were enslaved, are known by name today. Free Afro-Brazilian artists, such as Aleijadinho, Mestre Valentim, and Teófilo de Jesus, on the other hand, fared far better. In this article, I turn to these three mixed-race artists’ works and what little is known of their lives, not only as exemplary Afro-Brazilian artists but also as some of the most important artists of Brazil’s late colonial period, where they had the greatest impact on the artistic developments in their home regions. These artists’ careers thus illustrate how artists of African descent contributed to and defined urban and sacred spaces in the early modern Atlantic. This is therefore an invitation to look at Afrodescendants’ role in early modern art beyond the anonymity of slavery and static representation.

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528–1715

In her work Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528–1715, Kimberly Borchard brings a new perspective to the history of Appalachia, a region oft ignored by historians of the colonial period regardless of whether their focus is on Spanish, French, or English North America. Appalachia traditionally only enters modern scholarship when dealing with topics like coal, labor unions, and environmental devastation. In contrast, Borchard reveals not only Appalachia's incredibly important role in the Spanish colonial enterprise but also how the region became a key contested borderland in the latter half of the sixteenth century with the entrance of both French and English explorers. Borchard illustrates how the histories of Anglo and Spanish Appalachia are inextricably intertwined. Here is the crux of Borchard's main argument, “to push aside those longstanding ‘normative assumptions’ with regard to the colonization of Appalachia and demonstrate that the historical separation of Anglo from Latin America, particularly in this region, is largely fictitious” (p. 11). She accomplishes this by linking today's Appalachia with Spanish Apalache and the myth of El Dorado, highlighting the importance of the search for gold to the colonization of the Appalachian states of Virginia and the Carolinas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In so doing Borchard “moves Appalachia from the realm of regional American history into the broader world of Atlantic and global history where it belongs” (p. 12).The myth of Appalachia, or Apalache, begins in the wake of Pánfilo de Narváez's disastrous attempt to conquer Florida. The writings of one of the few survivors, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, helped to isolate a new possible location of the golden city of El Dorado (other options included present-day Colombia and the interior of Venezuela). Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle succeeded in inspiring the voyages of multiple Spaniards searching for the rumored wealth of Apalache in northwestern Florida, first and foremost Hernando de Soto in 1539. With more exploration the location of Apalache began to move northward, reaching the Appalachian Mountains of the Carolinas by the time that Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded the United States’ oldest city in 1565. Menéndez believed that he would find in Appalachia mines of silver and gold and, perhaps more importantly, a route from the Atlantic coast to the Spanish silver mines of Zacatecas, all of which had to be kept out of the hands of the Protestant French.However, by the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish had begun to lose interest in the more northern regions of North America, including Appalachia, as they failed to find both El Dorado and a route to the South Sea. Additionally, all attempted settlements north of present-day Florida had failed within months. At this juncture the Spanish began to question whether Appalachia was worth continuing hostilities with their European neighbors, thus leaving the region open to the hopes of the English. But the English did not locate the famed riches either, and instead Appalachia became a source for Indigenous slaves, leading to the Mississippian shatter zone of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (though violence against the Indigenous peoples of the region was not new, having occurred during the voyage of de Soto, for one). Then when gold was finally found in the nineteenth century, there was a new explosion of violence aimed at the region's Native peoples culminating in the Trail of Tears. Borchard shows how the Appalachian myth of wealth inspired exploration and violence both between European nations and between Indigenous peoples and European colonizers for centuries.Beyond highlighting the place of Appalachia within the larger history of the Atlantic world, Borchard's work is also a treasure trove for scholars of sixteenth-century North America, containing translated excerpts of dozens of key primary sources. The author not only uses historical chronicles to prove her thesis but also provides in-depth literary and historical analyses of the documents. By focusing on the circulation of these chronicles Borchard also shows how literature and knowledge traveled across the early modern world, how explorers of diverse nations were able to learn about Spanish or French expeditions and incorporate the knowledge into their own colonial aspirations. All in all, Borchard's work succeeds in placing Appalachia at the center of many Spanish, French, and English colonial enterprises, putting it squarely within the larger Atlantic world. This is an exciting and innovative piece of scholarship in its own right but perhaps more importantly is the beginning of much more fruitful research on this once forgotten region.

American Babel: History and Empire in the Early American Republic

The history of Babylon, fused from the Christian Bible and classical sources, occupied a critical, but hitherto unacknowledged, place in the conceptual life of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By examining the uses of Babylon and Babel, which early Americans conceived of as the same historical place, this article works to expand historians' understanding of empire in the early modern Atlantic. From the American Revolution through a second "Great Awakening" and the demise of the Federalist party, many Americans turned to Babylon as a model to grapple with their country's growing imperial aspirations. Since the fall of the Tower of Babel the history of Babylon reflected and formed a larger ambivalence toward empire in ways that distinguished it from the familiar narrative of decline and fall. Those who wrestled with Babylon's story saw potential for a lasting empire in the world but were torn as to whether that empire aught to be one of liberty or uniformity. Ultimately, Babylon provided a conceptual space in which Americans wrestled with how best to be a Godly empire.

Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World

In Detestable and Wicked Arts Paul B. Moyer examines early modern witchcraft accusations and trials in their Atlantic world contexts between 1640 and 1670. The book draws on a deep archive of primary sources, ranging from trial transcripts and letters to published work, and provides rich visual contextualization through the many maps, images, and charts. Moyer's analysis draws on and synthesizes a wide range of witchcraft scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic to show how understandings of witchcraft in New England were shaped within a Puritan Atlantic world that included England and Europe as well as parts of the Caribbean, including Bermuda. The seven chapters assess early modern witchcraft from the perspectives and roles of those involved. Chapter 1 provides evidence for the benefit of studying New England between 1630 and 1670 in a transatlantic context. The chapters that follow examine how different actors shaped New England witchcraft. Chapter...

Herman L. Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, 240 p.

Herman L. Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, 240 p.. Un article de la revue Cahiers d'histoire (De mémoire et d’histoire) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Matthew James Crawford and Joseph M. Gabriel (eds.)

<i>Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World</i> by Matthew James Crawford and Joseph M. Gabriel (eds.)

To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic

To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic

The Science of Shallow Waters: Connecting and Classifying the Early Modern Atlantic

AbstractHistories of ocean science have emphasized the ways that state-sponsored deep-sea expeditions ushered in a new age of oceanic understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth c...

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

Dressing like the Great King: Amerindian Perspectives on Persian Fashion in Classical Athens

Abstract This paper examines the phenomenon of individual Athenians adopting elements of Persian clothing, making use of exotic items such as gold and silver drinking vessels, and the like, by comparison to what I argue is a similar sort of contact and exchange involving the European fabric trade and evolving standards of dress and fashion in the Early Modern Atlantic. The ancient literary and archaeological sources discussed document the reaction of a relatively insignificant, marginal people (the Greeks) to the dress practices of a more powerful and arguably far more sophisticated imperial power (the Persians). I suggest that an appreciation of the character and intentions of the much better documented encounter between the English court and Amerindian ambassadors who visited it in the early 18th century provides a potentially useful corrective to the indigenous perspective of our Athenian sources.

To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic. Rachel B. Herrmann, ed. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019. x + 282 pp. $27.95.

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Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Paul B. Moyer

Reviewed by: Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Paul B. Moyer Molly J. Farrell New England, witchcraft, occult crime, witch trials, witch panic, Hartford witch hunt, gender and witchcraft, devil paul b. moyer. Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, Pp. xvi + 276. What if we attempted to understand the nature and contexts of witchcraft accusations in colonial New England outside of Salem? Paul B. Moyer's Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World places what the book defines more broadly as "occult crime" in a transatlantic context and focuses exclusively on the period before 1670. Stopping twenty-two years prior to the infamously exceptional witchcraft crisis in Essex county, Detestable and Wicked Arts looks across to England, and occasionally Bermuda, rather than forward to Salem for comparison and context. As a result, the book offers a detailed accounting of the first half century of reported incidents of witchcraft across colonial New England, proceeding methodically to present an overview of who the witches and their accusers were, of what precisely they were accused, and how the law [End Page 252] handled these reports. The book's frequent deployment of statistics—often putting demographic details about the accused in New England next to their contemporaries in England—is particularly helpful in making the book a resource for anyone interested in witchcraft in this distinctive time and place. Most of the time, as the book freely admits, the charts show that New England was not, in fact, all that distinctive but expressed many of the same fears and beliefs in many of the same ways as metropolitan communities. Occasionally, this transatlantic framework yields insights about, for example, the sources on which the New England Puritans were relying to understand and prosecute witchcraft. The book explains "the paucity of testimony concerning witch flight," for example, by the "more conservative stance" of the Protestant sources on the subject that New Englanders "imbibed" relative to continental sources. Similarly noteworthy, Moyer shows that husband and wife pairs were far more likely to be accused together in New England than anywhere else around the Atlantic and that, curiously, the "relative lack of children" of these married pairs of accused "[stands] out." Also, in this pre-Salem period, when compared with England and other colonies "New Englanders did not generally suspect the young as witches . . . or imagine the existence of witch families." Throughout, the book's discussions are accompanied by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century woodcut illustrations taken from English and continental sources on witchcraft, vivifying the ways that these figures and their malefic acts may have manifested in popular conceptions at the time. By compiling a comprehensive array of sources, data, and images from across these five decades, Detestable and Wicked Arts offers, like Moyer's previous books, a broad and multilayered portrait of the beliefs and practices of everyday settler colonists, shifting focus almost entirely away from colonial leaders, judges, printers, ministers, or other policymakers. Readers of a wide array of backgrounds who want to know who a New England witch was likely to be in the eyes of their peers or what they might be accused of—infesting their neighbor's cheese with maggots more often than flying by night to a large Satanic meeting, for example—will be provoked, intrigued, and entertained thanks to the book's uncomplicated prose and hospitable structure. The final two chapters are the strongest, and likely the most useful to those interested in witch-hunting across a wide array of time periods and locations. The book's sixth chapter, "Very Awful and Amazing," focuses in depth on how the Hartford witch hunt of 1662–1663, the largest in New England prior to Salem, spun out from the sudden sickening and death of a child from a humble family to ensnare many victims across the community, [End Page 253] ultimately resulting in fourteen accusations and four executions. The transatlantic focus is particularly helpful here in placing this hunt in the context of others in East Anglia and Bermuda and pointing out the...

Herman L. Bennett. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic.

Herman L. Bennett. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic.

Review: To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic

Review: To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic

Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 186–188 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.18 Book Review Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA The word “religion” appears only seven times in Pablo Gómez’s extraordinary book, The Experiential Caribbean. Yet the paucity of references is, perhaps paradoxically, an indication that this brilliant study should be foundational to studies of American religion. Gómez, an historian of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book about healing and knowledge production that critiques the category of religion in practice, rather than in theory. The Experiential Caribbean explores the “healthcare marketplace” of the early modern Caribbean, focusing on Black ritual practitioners and health specialists. Goméz’s central argument, which is directed primarily at historians of science and medicine, emphasizes that these individuals were not merely “informers” who helped European collectors create the “New Science” of the seventeenth century. Instead, they were themselves responsible for an “experiential revolution ” that emphasized empirical knowledge production over “first principles” and tradition. While the category of “religion” is not Gómez’s central focus, his findings— and his argument—should be of interest to all scholars of American religion. The “ritual practitioners” and “health specialists” who are the focus of his book, after Katharine Gerbner 187 all, were called brujas, sorcerers, and witches by European authorities. In the archival records that Gómez explores, which include Inquisition records as well as a wide range of underutilized medical texts and recipe books, they are agents of “superstition” whose integration of Catholic rituals into their healing practices was suspect at best, and criminal at worst. Yet even as these practitioners were condemned by ecclesiastical authorities, they were widely sought out not only by Black and indigenous people in need of care, but also by Europeans, including church officials. Their integration of a wide range of material, ritual, and verbal practices proved to be effective and attractive within the competitive healthcare marketplace of the early modern Caribbean. Due to the fact that Black practitioners were marginalized as religious “others ” and excluded from histories of medicine, Gómez makes the conscious choice not to use religion-related terminology in his own narrative. Terms like “witch” and “shaman,” Gómez explains, “betoken the very language … used to condemn black ways of knowing” away from categories such as “rational” and “enlightened” (11–12). Instead, he opts for phrases like “ritual specialist” and “health specialist,” as well as Mohán, a term of Amerindian origin, to describe the Black healers who are the focus of his book. The first two chapters, “Arrivals” and “Landscapes,” set the stage and describe how Africans and their descendants made up the majority of the population in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. These individuals drew on African precedents and Amerindian examples as well as European traditions in order to create a “vibrant, if ruthless, cultural economy of healing and diseasing” (38). Implicit in Gómez’s description of this early modern world is a critique of traditional debates about African traditions in the Atlantic world, which tend to argue that Africans and their descendants either “retained” African culture or that they participated in a process of “creolization.” Gómez sidesteps this historiographical quagmire by arguing that Black practitioners gained expertise and authority through their travels. Chapter three, “Movement,” argues that in the competitive healthcare marketplace of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, incorporation was key to success , and healing traditions were not “enclosed” (85). In fact, the dislocation that characterized the seventeenth-century Caribbean weakened structures of power within the multiple healing and religious traditions in the region and “fostered the development of open, omnivorous epistemologies” (87). Significantly, Gómez also repositions the concept of movement away from the Atlantic, and towards interior mobility: the movement of ritual practitioners inland from cities like Cartageña on rivers and through diverse communities. On a related point, he critiques recent scholarship that has emphasized the transfer of knowledge solely from indigenous and Black practitioners to European collectors...

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

Historians and anthropologists, from Melville Herskovits to David Eltis, have detailed the intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery and long acknowledged modernity's cultural debt to Africans and African Americans. In the process, argues Herman Bennett in African Kings and Black Slaves, scholars have superimposed a subsuming “liberal order” over early Atlantic historiography (p. 20). The overemphasis on commodification and race, in particular, overlooks a critical fifteenth-century phase in the genealogy of slavery. The early Atlantic was not articulated through regimes of property or racialized difference, Bennett argues, but rather through Afro-European logics of sovereignty and dispossession through which liberalism, chattel slavery, and the modern economy would later emerge.In six concise chapters, Bennett engages a wide historiography and offers new perspectives on early Atlantic legal culture, political and religious authority, pageantry, and slavery. Bennett complicates the narrative that Europeans rendered Africans into property and capital through Roman law and Christian theology. He draws from the Catholic legal corpus of extra ecclesiam and humanist writings on sovereignty and natural law to offer careful reappraisals of the Romanus Pontifex (1455) and similar authoritative texts that dealt with non-Christians. Bennett argues that as trading vessels plied the early Atlantic, ecclesiastical authorities restricted Iberian plunder in Africa, just as they had in Andalusia, with legal precedents from Pope Innocent IV (1243) and others. Secular authorities, too, drew from Hostiensian arguments that limited illegal encroachment and dispossession. Pontiffs and legal scholars drew from a rich crusading legalese to shield non-Christians from unjust war and enslavement. Thus, while Roman law and Christian theology sanctioned slavery through just war and rescate, they also helped curtail the development of chattel slavery in the fifteenth-century Atlantic.The strength of African kings also helped curtail enslavement by Europeans. As Portuguese and Castilian monarchs extended trade in Guinea, slavers and traders approached territories with strong lords who limited Europeans to fortified trading factories along the coast. Despite princely ambitions, Bennett claims, slavery's marriage to capitalism in the fifteenth century was bridled by the twin forces of strong African lordship and a dynamic Catholic legal system. A matrix of civil, feudal, and ecclesiastical precedents evolved to extend dominium and imperium to non-Christians, allowing African lords and subjects the right to live outside of grace without European intrusion. While substantial literature details the strength of these African polities elsewhere, Bennett's nuanced analysis of the centrality of canon law to limiting European expansion is a welcome addition to the historiography.African Kings and Black Slaves does not rebuff the history of early Iberian commercial interest in Guinea. Rather, it situates fifteenth-century Christian institutions and Afro-European politics at the center of a discussion of modernity. Drawing on the influential works of Paul Gilroy and Alexander Weheliye, Bennett locates modernity in Atlantic slavery not vis-à-vis liberty or the free market but through Christian dogma and political absolutism. As ecclesiastical and secular authorities recognized non-Christian dominium by Moorish and African kings, Bennett points out, they also stripped other Jews, Moors, and non-Christian Africans of corporate rights, instituting two key features of modernity: legal individualism and the erosion of corporate identity. Iberian trade increased along the African coast as clerical attempts to define sovereignty waned against the growth in secular authority. Bennett points to a rupture of the oikos (economy) as it eclipsed the polis (politics) following sustained European engagement with African slavery. Iberians came to understand sovereignty increasingly through the lens of African political theater, pageantry, captivity, and trade regimes. Europeans developed new slave taxonomies, engaged in African ritual diplomacy, and eventually adopted Atlantic slavery as a baseline of power in early modern absolutist regimes.Bennett's nuanced look at the intersections of Christianity, slavery, and imperial politics successfully engages Gilroy's thesis of modernity and pushes it back to the fifteenth century. His findings—that much of early modern Iberian political theory developed outside Europe, in Africa, among lords, theologians, and merchants equal in trade relations and governed by shared ideologies of sovereignty and dispossession—are provocative and should be debated by students and scholars alike. Bennett's clarity is as sharp as his criticism, which at times borders on piercing. His theoretical interventions are exciting. The analysis of the genesis of modernity through the logic of enslavement under slavery's relationship to imperial governance and church dogma might not transcend the “liberal order” as claimed, but it anchors the discourse more firmly in the history of religious legal practice and politics. African Kings and Black Slaves is one of the boldest and most successful attempts yet to engage the fields of African studies, history, and critical theory equally.