Early Modern Research Articles

Overcoming the Patronage System: Propaganda Fide and Its Portuguese Patronage Documents on China in the Early Modern Period

From its foundation in 1622, the Congregation de Propaganda Fide held supreme jurisdiction over all missionary activities of the Catholic Church at the global level, with authority coming directly from the pope. Its main goals were the expansion of the Catholic faith, the reaffirmation of papal spiritual primacy, and the promotion of Indigenous clergy throughout the world, which put Propaganda Fide in direct competition with secular rulers who also wanted to control missionary activities in their overseas territories. This article will examine one such conflict, namely that regarding Portugal and its royal patronage system in China. The Historical Archive of Propaganda Fide in the Vatican City holds extensive material concerning Portuguese patronage and China, which has remained relatively unknown and understudied. Through an examination of several of the most significant documents, such as the formal terms sent by the Portuguese court to the Holy See, the response of Propaganda Fide, and the final declaration of the Holy See, which would become the cornerstone for all future decisions over the patronage system, it is suggested that these negotiations about China are in fact central to a wider shift in global Catholic policy and politics in the field of missionary activity.

Cultivating Pacific Cocoa: Chinese Plantation Labor in Colonial Era Samoa and Vanuatu

Abstract From the 1890s to the 1930s the cocoa plantations of the southwest Pacific relied on Pacific Islander and Asian indentured labor from China and Vietnam. In Samoa and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) white planters lobbied colonial administrations for permission to introduce Chinese under contract as indentured labor, a coercive and controversial labor system. This article points to the role of transimperial economic competition in encouraging the use of indentured labor, traversing German, French, and British colonial administrations in the Pacific. Cocoa cultivation, white planters argued, required more regular attention compared with sugar or copra, and Chinese indentured workers were deemed the most suitable to meet these requirements. Australian, New Zealand and British administrators in the Pacific, who were keenly aware of ongoing French indenture practices, lobbied to introduce and retain indentured labor. Without the perceived competitive edge of indentured labor, cocoa cultivation was considered unlikely to prosper. It was not until the mid-1930s that recruitment of Chinese indentured labor ended. It came at a time of international and Chinese calls for abolition of coerced labor but was also driven by anti-immigration and pro-white nationalist sentiments. Even after recruitment ceased, the New Zealand administration in Samoa obliged Chinese workers to remain on the cocoa plantations. While the French did repatriate Chinese recruits, they retained Vietnamese workers. Only after 1945 were indentured workers freed from the obligation to cultivate cocoa, and finally permitted to abandon the plantations.

The Dark Lady’s survival in contemporary Black women’s writing

ABSTRACT This article discusses contemporary literary texts that feature the Dark Lady from Shakespeare’s sonnets as a Black woman from the past inhabiting the present: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Bernadine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005), and Caroline Randall Williams’s Lucy Negro, Redux (2019). The analysis draws on recent approaches to temporality that offer a critique of linear concepts of time and their function for discourses of progress and modernity as well as ‘race’. Through the figure of the Dark Lady, Smith, Evaristo, and Williams address Black history and project anachronic relations between the early modern era and the present moment, as well as between Shakespeare and the contemporary Black woman writer.

Favouritism, Patronage and the ‘Family System’ in England, c.1700–1850

Abstract This article examines the interrelationships between familial, social, political and professional ideas about favouritism in England. It shows that there was a cross-fertilisation of discourses over the century-and-a-half between c.1700 and 1850, when favouritism was increasingly problematised in the domestic, social and professional spheres. Although several issues were identified as emanating from its practice, it was the very role of the family itself that increasingly made favouritism so deeply objectionable to those who articulated a vision of social and professional mobility and advancement based on merit rather than interpersonal relationships and family structures. Indeed, the link between the body politic and family was reformulated from the age of reform onwards as concerns about favouritism were directed inward to the privatised family and then to the pathologised individual. Overall, therefore, this article demonstrates that the institution of the family was both conceptually and practically fundamental to the meta-structure of social, professional and political life, long beyond the early modern period.

Historical Study of the Use of Low Seat Dingklik In Java in the Socioeconomic Activities of the Colonial Era (1800-1900)

ABSTRACT Since the 8th century, Indian traders have brought Hindu/Buddhist practices to Java, influencing the culture of sitting low. When furniture came to Indonesia during the colonial era, the Javanese started using low-wooden benches called dingklik for work and informal interactions. Despite having a simple form and being often hidden, dingklik underwent a transformation through socioeconomic activities in Java during the colonial period. Contemporary paintings, photographs, and films were used to analyse dingklik in terms of content, visual elements, and height in socio-economic activity. From an economic perspective, the shape of dingklik was oriented towards mobility so that for carry-on traders, the dingklik had smaller and lighter legs, making it easy to carry. Meanwhile, socially, the form of dingklik was influenced by philosophical symbolism, and for Javanese nobles, it had decorative features similar to royal chairs as symbols of power. This study highlights the shift in the value of traditional Javanese sitting facilities.

Research on the historical spatial characteristics and conservation strategies of colonial cities in Asia and Africa: a case study of 21 typical cities

Colonial cities in Asia and Africa, developed under the dual influence of native and sovereign cultures during the colonial era, exhibit unique urban morphological characteristics and reflect the planning ideologies of diverse cultures. Thus, the morphological study of colonial cities in Asia and Africa is crucial for understanding and identifying the historical and cultural value of these cities, which in turn enables the formulation of precise conservation strategies. In light of this, the study develops an urban morphological analysis methodology comprising "Colonial Background Analysis—Morphological Characteristics Analysis—Driving Factor Extraction" based on the Conzenian Approach, which is used to examine the morphology of 21 typical colonial cities in Asia and Africa across various colonial periods. As a result, "Dual-City" emerges as the core spatial characteristic of colonial cities in Asia and Africa, reflecting the morphological differences in road layouts, urban fabric, and urban cores between native and European zones. Additionally, as native settlement sizes, social structures, and cultural identities differ between cities, three major spatial patterns of the "Dual-City" model can be identified: separated, mediated, and integrated spatial patterns, resulting from the varied planning approaches applied by colonizers. Furthermore, suggestions for the conservation of colonial heritage are proposed based on the driving factors analysis from the morphological study.

Early Modern Histories of Fire on the Australian Continent

Early Modern Histories of Fire on the Australian Continent

Kiskiak: The settlement history of a dispersed village in Tidewater Virginia

Villages organized coastal Algonquian social life in the Chesapeake during the late precolonial and early colonial eras. Even so, archaeologists have only rarely attempted to interpret village or community organization in the region, relying instead on the assumption that communities overlapped closely with individual sites. This study challenges that assumption through a “non-site” assessment of survey and excavation data from Virginia's lower York River. This approach indicates that settlement along Indian Field Creek included spatially discrete but socially connected spaces that comprised the village of Kiskiak. With origins in the Mockley Phase (AD 200–900), this settlement form comes into clear view during the colonial era as a dispersed, creek-side village with domestic spaces around Indian Field Creek, community middens at its mouth, and a palisaded area overlooking the York. The dispersed village and its history in the region represent important dimensions of social life in the Native Chesapeake.

New Approaches to Political Catholicism and Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Authors from a transnational research group analyze Catholic women’s political mobilizations, acknowledging Catholic women’s heritage of organization to maintain their religious practice in their communities from the colonial era onward. These activities afforded women opportunities for civic experience and leadership roles that continued through Mexico’s nineteenth-century political and social debates. This special issue focuses on how twentieth-century women developed new approaches to address revolutionary policies and projects, radical mobilizations, technological changes, and transformations within the Church following the Second Vatican Council. The authors argue that Catholic women have continued to envision themselves as political actors within the framework of their religion, expanding goals to transform religious and civic practices.

Brian P. Levack, Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2023

Brian P. Levack, Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2023

Writing the Law in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scotland: Regiam maiestatem, the Marchmont Manuscript (now St Andrews MS 39000), and its Scribe Robert Ewyn, Notary

This article extends knowledge of sixteenth-century Scottish textual production by exploring the range of writing activities undertaken by Robert Ewyn, scribe, chaplain and notary. Ewyn made a copy of Regiam maiestatem in Scots in 1548. This manuscript was held in a private collection until 2016 and is comparatively unknown: a full codicological description and account of its provenance history is offered here. A biographical profile of Robert Ewyn is constructed from references in wills and other public records, revealing his family connections and his links to the Edinburgh crafts community; his career as a notary, pre- and post-reformation, is investigated and documents prepared by him are identified. Ewyn's scribal hand is traced across three very different writing contexts (literary book production, legal documentation and secretarial note-taking); as a result, evidence emerges of the different kinds of handwriting a professional scribe could produce, and of the multiple forms of employment that pre-modern notaries might undertake.

Migration and Technological Dialogue in Early Modern East Asia: A Historiographical Review

ABSTRACTBy reviewing historiographical trends within existing scholarship on migration and movement, and knowledge and technological dialogue in early modern East Asia, this article demonstrates how these bodies of work have become increasingly interdisciplinary and inclusive, thereby challenging prior characterisations of the region. Recent trends within the field combined with considerations of embodiment are, however, laying the groundwork for more meaningful integration by examining how migrants actually transferred, adapted, and leveraged their knowledge and skills. This article concludes by pointing to the potential to fully bring to the fore the complex nature of both migrants and technological dialogue.

The Good Death in Early Modern Europe

ABSTRACTThe inevitability of death does not change its variability. In The Hour of Our Death (1981), Philippe Ariès positioned the sudden, unexpected, mass death of epidemics (especially from the Black Death) against the personalized, domesticated death for which one had time to prepare. The domesticated death, so he argued, appeared during a specific epoche of European history and was an historical inflection point, coinciding with the 18th century Enlightenment. Ariès looked unfavorably at this climax for what he saw as a process of de‐spiritualization, waning of faith, and the beginnings of commercialization and medicalization of death. Since his publications, scholars from a range of fields—history, anthropology, literature, religion, and art—have sought to address the omissions, exaggerations, and misleading claims in Ariès' account and, in doing so, have developed a rich field studying the cultural history and significance of death. Now situated in a transdisciplinary space, studying the good death and the tradition of ars moriendi (the art of the dying well) offers new perspectives and answers new questions about death. Although there is much that could be discussed, the focus here will be on recent trends in scholarship on the tradition of ars moriendi and its relationship to the interrelated histories of burial, the role of clerical and lay comforters, and the role of physicians as well as the historical and religious‐philosophical problems of the prolongation of life and sudden death.

Ian M. Miller, Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

Ian M. Miller, <i>Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China</i>

Writing, Memory and Subalternity in the Early Modern World

In this introduction to the JEMS collective volume Subaltern Writing and Popular Memory in the Early Modern World, the editors provide a historiographical and theoretical survey on the history of subaltern forms of literacy, as well as of popular modes of remembrance, mainly focused in the early modern period. While providing examples of the ways in which literacy has been carefully policed in different societies, giving way to structures of exclusion, it also points to the more or less fluid relation that common men and women from different backgrounds established with writing, occasionally using it to record personal memory and participate in the collective shaping of the past. The essay tackles the difficulty of recovering the written traces of common men and women, while surveying the ways in which this archive of subaltern writing and memory has been creatively constructed by subsequent scholarly interventions from very different disciplines, including anthropology, paleography, sociology, epigraphy, gender and sexuality studies, and social and cultural history.

Early Modern Deviant Burial in Prehistoric Monuments in Sweden

AbstractThis study deals with Early Modern burials in ancient monuments located nowhere near churches or execution sites. Examples are given from four prehistoric sites in different Swedish provinces, dating from the Early Neolithic through the Roman Period, with a total of 15 buried Early Modern individuals. Written sources along with details of the burial rite suggest that they are plague burials. Such were not welcome in churchyards because of concerns over the poorly understood contagion. Why people all over Sweden occasionally targeted ancient monuments specifically for this purpose is not clear. In one case, they saw the monument as the remains of a church. More generally, they knew that much older burials sanctified and lent some prior sanction to those sites.

‘De los famossos hechos de los yndios cañares y de sus privilegios’: Don Pedro Purqui and the Early Modern Andean Chronicle by Martín de Murua

The article considers the background and interests of don Pedro Purqui of Cañari descent in the late sixteenth century in Cuzco, Peru. Purqui made distinct interventions in an Inca-centric history project and, more broadly, as an Indigenous leader and intellectual in colonial Cuzco’s heterogenous and multivocal ‘lettered city’. His literary efforts contributed to the conceptualization of Cañari social memory as part of a larger process of ethnogenesis during the early modern period. The case study examines legal and chronicle records in juxtaposition with the Galvin Murua (1590-1596), compiled by the Basque Mercedarian friar, Martín de Murua. Purqui’s strategic efforts aimed to defend and promote the Cañari’s privileged but precarious status of nobility and heritage in an emergent and contested colonial context. The analysis demonstrates that the seeming contradictions of the Cañari, locally in Cuzco and regionally in the Andes, involved multivalent, complementary elements in iteratively conceived ethnic identity and social memory.

Letters from Sodom: ‘Emotional’ Agency and Evidence of Sexual Crime in the Early Modern Courts of Italy and Spain

In the judicial system of the Ancien Régime, some crimes were notoriously difficult to prove. It was essential for the prosecution to properly argue the case and, to this end, it was necessary to develop a hierarchical system of evidential means that would allow any hint of suspicion to yield results. The goal of the essay is to carry out a detailed study of the written documents confiscated in judicial proceedings for sodomy in civil courts of the Mediterranean area during the early modern period. The objective is to understand the ‘expressiveness’ that this judicial evidence contributed to the process of signalling criminal practices within the judicial system of Spanish and Italian courts. In addition, by studying love letters between men, missives from their relatives and friends commenting on disagreements, the popular literature consumed by the defendants, certificates and other official documents, and their demands for employment, the essay will shed light on their everyday life and forms of dissidence, with the aim of understanding the particular ‘emotional’ agency of these individuals.

As Reformas religiosas e o nascimento da escolarização ocidental

The religious reforms of the 16th century served as the midwives of early modernity. At a time when the Iberian expansion was globalizing the continents, these reforms sparked religious wars and deeply fragmented the European landscape. This confessionalization of society led to the emergence of a more rationalized form of Christianity, represented by various Protestant churches and Tridentine Catholicism, particularly exemplified by the Society of Jesus. Diverging from medieval Christianity, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans invested in creating their own networks of educational institutions, sparking an unprecedented wave of schooling that aimed to solidify the religious practices of their followers. In response, the Catholic Church also equipped itself, establishing parish schools and, notably, a network of Jesuit colleges that spread throughout the Catholic regions of Europe, Asia, and the New World. In 1599, the Society of Jesus unified its educational establishments with the institution of the Ratio Studiorum — a comprehensive set of Jesuit educational rules that became the foundational curriculum for Catholic schooling in the early modern period. This study argues that the religious reforms were instrumental in the birth of Western schooling, emerging from different Christian matrices — both Protestant and Catholic. This represents a historical shift — in the Foucauldian sense — that led to the rise of schooling in the Western world, characterized by modern discipline, manifested through mechanisms such as time control, spatial organization, the arrangement of forces, a climate of competition and student reward, and an emphasis on moral punishments. This issue is examined through three recent historical-sociological works published in Europe and Latin America: Produção da escola/produção da sociedade: Análise sócio-histórica de alguns momentos decisivos da evolução escolar no Ocidente by sociologist André Petitat; Arqueología de la escuela by sociologists Julia Varela and Fernando Álvarez-Uría; and A invenção da sala de aula: Uma genealogia das formas de ensinar by historians Inés Dussel and Marcelo Caruso. This historiographical reflection examines the emergence of Western schooling, aiming to identify common analytical elements across these three books, while also noting differences, particularly those related to theoretical foundations and socio-spatial contexts.

The Saga of Lohodann: Making Sense of an Annobonese Folktale Rooted in Carolingian Drama

The essay analyzes the saga of Lohodann in relation to the idiosyncratic cultural and religious history of the African Atlantic island of Annobón. It does so by placing the history of the island in the context of the Portuguese expansion in Africa during the early modern era, and studies the folktale in connection to the dissemination of Iberian cultural elements in the region. It pays special attention to the role of confraternities, in the context of which the population of Annobón reinvented and reimagined Iberian culture from an African perspective.