Iberian World Research Articles

Iberian treasures

A-R Editions’s Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era series continues to go from strength to strength, and in recent years has opened up a little more to repertory from the Iberian world. The two volumes under review here—Juan Hidalgo’s opera or ‘fiesta cantada’, Celos aun del aire matan, and the complete works of the little-known Roman composer Santiago Billoni, who worked for some years at Durango Cathedral in Mexico—are particularly welcome. The music is of good quality and deserving of performance, and the editions are of the high standard and presentation that will help to make such performance possible. It is fair to say that Louise K. Stein’s edition of the Hidalgo has been a lifetime project: in the Acknowledgements she notes that she began to work on the piece in 1978 as part of the doctoral dissertation on 17th-century secular Spanish opera which laid the foundations for her classic study Songs of mortals, dialogues of the gods: music and theatre in seventeenth-century Spain (Oxford, 1993). As fellow scholars of the 17th-century will know, Stein has continued to research and publish on Spanish musical culture of the Baroque, making a major contribution to the field. This edition, and the introductory essay that precedes it, represent not only due scholarly depth of knowledge, but also the experience of working with performers such as Jordi Savall and Monsterrat Figueras, who brought the work to the public in a series of concert performances in 2000–2001. Celos was also staged at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2000, with La Grande Écurie et La Chambre du Roy, directed by Jean-Claude Malgloire, based on an edition by the Catalan musicologist Francesc Bonastre. An earlier edition of the music for Celos by the hispanist Jack Sage existed as an appendix to the text edited by the historians of Spanish theatre J. E. Verey and N. D. Shergold, and published by Tamesis in 1970. These editions, however, are either not available or not really serviceable for a modern performance.

Conchylia y cocleae: transformaciones en la percepción culinaria de los moluscos durante la romanización del Noreste peninsular

This paper focuses on the differences in the perception of mollusc cooking, land snails and shellfish, through Iberian (pre-Roman) and Roman periods in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula. Although the data are very scarce, a change between the two moments is observed. In the Iberian world exploitation of marine molluscs is limited to the coast and very little to precoastal areas. The most exploited taxa are Glycymeris and to a lesser extent Cardiidae and Donax. In the Roman world, the consumption of marine molluscs disclaims proximity to the coast and oysters (Ostrea edulis) becomes the most consumed species, but also increases the diversity of consumed species, usually Muricidae (Bolinus, Hexaplex, Stramonita). We also note the widespread consumption of land snails (Otala punctata). With the collapse of the Roman world, mollusc consumption will return to earlier traditions.

Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians

This monograph offers much more than the focus of its title on its little-known—and hence possibly suspect as marginal—subjects might be taken to imply. Out of fragments of the stories of 598 identifiable individuals, out of some 8,100 Asians (and more than a few globally traveled Africans) reaching central Mexico as slaves aboard the returning vessels of the famous Manila galleons from Manila in the Philippines between roughly the 1560s and the 1660s, Seijas has spun sophisticated insight into the laws and politics of Iberian (primarily Spanish, but indirectly also Portuguese) domains in both the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds, the laws, politics, and cultures of Spain’s República de Indios, in the Philippines as well as in New Spain, and the beginnings of racialization of the Hispanic New World. The book’s subtitle alludes to the transcending conclusion: these Asians (except for the Africans arriving from Mozambique via Goa, the Indonesian archipelago, or Macau, who remained negros) were chinos integrated into the Spanish monarchs’ overseas realms as “natives,” protected under the Patronato Real as royal subjects and hence not legally subject to enslavement.The contradictions of the legal ambiguities created by “natives” enslaved in Asia (and beyond) and their theoretical, and often contested, liberty in America generated much of the documentation—petitions, investigations, judgments—that supports the book. Seijas handles these technical materials like a lawyer, and that’s a very good thing, since seventeenth-century Spain was a tangle of plural jurisdictions, royal decrees and fueros, canon law, Inquisitorial jurisdictions, and municipal regulations that she navigates with all the assurance of the pilots of those Manila galleons, framing the records in terms of the relevant jurisprudence, sensing the legal options not pursued, and considering possible circumstances behind the issues but not presentable in courts of law as evidence. She thus turns the very problematics of case records into rich and revealing sources for history. In this review, a single example will suffice to illustrate a necessarily simplified summary of a complex argument: the Tagalog and Visaya of Spain’s Philippines were “Indios” with precisely the same legal indemnities as Nahua in New Spain or Quechua in Peru, but in Mexico as chinos they were treated as enslaveable along with Muslims from the Mughal Empire captured in “just wars” and natives of China or Japan of no less unassailable status as property through their acquisition by purchase.The story climaxes with resolution of these dramas in the 1672 decree making the chinos unambiguously full-blooded “Indians,” leaving them to their further assimilation into the native communities of rural central Mexico and into the emerging castas of its cities. The decree thus left their former captive shipmates, of African origin, as the only legally enslaveable residents of the realm, and Seijas concludes suggestively by remarking on the contemporaneity of this decree with what she sees as parallel racialization of slavery in the English Americas. Among the numerous and revealing arguments that Seijas weaves from these and other legal threads are the ways in which chinos’ persistent filing of legal challenges to their enslavement might have opened the minds of the judges and other officials who made law in the Americas, the concentration of the chinos in urban domestic service and their (and other “Indios’”) harsh treatment in the textile-manufacturing obrajes rather than in rural labor, a leitmotif of contrasts with the status and conditions of the Africans enslaved in the region, and the gritty personal and social dynamics revealed in the proceedings of the Inquisition.Significant broader issues of method and conceptualization emerge in exemplary form as well. The ways Seijas has framed her arguments develop organically from the documentation at hand, resisting awkward alternative approaches—for example, to attempt to force a “social history” of aggregate categories from the small sample available to her. She historicizes the judges as well as the plaintiffs, so that we have the politics and contradictions and inevitable ironies of attempting to create order out of the inherent disorder of human life rather than a mystified implacable law. She writes about people enslaving and enforcing and engineering and evading captivity rather than trying to force humanity in all its variety into a single abstract institutionalized “slavery.” The book, finally, is a model of historicization rather than drifting into the faux sociology that too often still prevails in your reviewer’s own field of early African history, as well as in the American counterpart that proceeds under the unnecessarily qualified label of “ethnohistory.”The reader, and not only an outsider like your reviewer, comes away from this book with wide-ranging and engaging insight into the Iberian world of the seventeenth century, from Madrid to Mexico City to Manila and even Mozambique. Small packages of persona from the past sometimes open up to reveal welcome historical gifts, and this book is one of those happy occasions.

A World in the Making

Th is article provides an outline of the crystallization of the concept of future in the Iberian worlds in a period extending from the end of the eighteenth century until the second half of the nineteenth century. By tracking and analyzing the vocabularies referring to the three dimensions of time—past, present, and future—in a broad corpus of documentary sources (books, journals, memoirs, pamphlets, parliamentary minutes, and so on), and particularly in the debates and speculation with regard to el porvenir, the article shows that, not only in Spain and Portugal, but in much of Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking America, the profound impact of progressive philosophies of history on political and social discourse resulted in a clear politicization of time, parallel to the temporalization of political concepts.

The measurement of time at sea: instruments, voyages and scales in Iberian worlds in the xvith century

A la croisee de l’histoire moderne des empires iberiques et de l’anthropologie des savoirs et des techniques, l’article propose une lecture sociale de l’emploi de differents instruments de mesure utilises par D. Joao de Castro (1500-1548) lors de son voyage maritime de Lisbonne a Goa (1538) a bord du Grifo. Du bateau comme espace social au bateau comme « lieu de savoir », l’attention est portee sur l’utilisation d’un nouvel instrument, l’instrument des ombres, et sur la mesure du temps en mer.

Acts or Identities? Rethinking Foucault on Homosexuality

In the first part of this article I summarize the ongoing historiographical debate over Michel Foucault's theory of the nineteenth-century medical ‘invention’ of homosexuality, as it was formulated in the 1976 first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge. Starting from the now-outdated conflict between ‘essentialists’ and ‘social constructionists’, I underline the ‘blind spots’ of the Foucauldian narrative as highlighted by postcolonial, feminist and queer criticisms. In the second part, I shift to the historiography of the early modern Iberian and Colonial world. Even though a lot of work in this field has already been done, I think that a full comprehension of the connections between this research and the international debate on the history of gender and sexual transgressions is still lacking. Through the analysis of this literature, I propose a revision of Foucault's account, questioning the idea of the nineteenth-century ‘great paradigm shift’. On the one hand, these studies address the long-term genealogy of issues that has fully ripened in the nineteenth century. On the other, they confirm the coexistence in past societies of a multiplicity of understandings of sexual behaviors that questions the hypothesis of a succession of coherent and homogeneous epistemological patterns.

Science by regimento: Standardising Long-Distance Control and New Spaces of Knowledge in Early Modern Portuguese Cosmography

European expansion produced great transformations in the way modern societies were organised as well as in the management of new practices and spaces of knowledge. This article analyses the ways in which the Iberian world responded to such transformations through the creation of a series of control mechanisms that constitute the prehistory of the modern ways of standardising science. This article is thus a contribution to discussions of the normative and institutional development involving long-distance control that took place amongst the expansionist powers of early modern Europe. It examines one of the normative artefacts implemented by the Portuguese crown from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, the Regimento do Cosmógrafo-Mor (1592), the visible face of a complex process of normalisation, control and circulation of information, which ultimately regulated the nautical and cosmographical practice of a long-distance global network. For this reason, this article refers to science by regimento, science that is produced and performed under clear directives. Through the study of this document I aim to highlight not only how the Portuguese overseas enterprise was organised, but also how its technical and scientific configuration, which regulated navigation in the Atlantic, the use of astrolabes, and the directions to depict previously unseen plants and animals, contributed to defining science in early modern Iberian societies.

L'atlantique Révolutionnaire: Une Perspective Ibéro-Américain

L'atlantique Révolutionnaire: Une Perspective Ibéro-Américain

Political Status and Identity: Debating the Status of American Territories across the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Iberian World

This article focuses on the debates that took place across the Iberian world on the political status of the American territories throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. I begin by tracing the constitutional place allotted to the American territories in each of the two Iberian polities. Subsequently, I demonstrate that the political status initially ascribed to the so-called Indies soon became a matter of discussion. At the center of the analysis are the exchanges between institutions in Madrid and Lisbon, on the one hand, and Creole groups in Spanish and Portuguese America, on the other. I focus on the debates generated by the two following topics: first, the rank of the representative assemblies formed in the Asian and American territories under the rule of the two Iberian polities, and second, the participation of American and Asian representatives in the parliaments of Castile and Portugal. This article explores the constitutional implications of these debates.

Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507–1899 by Rainer F. Buschmann, and: Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898 by Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller

Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507–1899 by Rainer F. Buschmann, and: Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898 by Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller

Writing Witch-Hunt Histories: Challenging the Paradigm ed. by Marko Nenonen, Raisa Maria Toivo

Reviewed by: Writing Witch-Hunt Histories: Challenging the Paradigm ed. by Marko Nenonen, Raisa Maria Toivo Erika Gasser Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo, eds., Writing Witch-Hunt Histories: Challenging the Paradigm. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 2014. xiv + 220 pp. Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo’s edited volume, Writing Witch-Hunt Histories, spans a broad geographic and chronological range and provides a useful overview of the trajectories in historical scholarship about European witch hunts from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The volume reflects the field’s foundation in early modern Europe, with side glances at England and America, and reviews both established and emerging scholarship of areas previously viewed as peripheral to European studies: Finland, Russia, areas of northern Norway populated by the Sami people, and parts of the Iberian world receive particular attention. It ends with a chapter that addresses the pertinence of historical scholarship for modern pagan witches, and the potential for this scholarship to factor in current struggles around the world to prevent violence against those suspected of being witches today. Both the first chapter, which is by both of the editors, and the second, by Nenonen independently, provide a comprehensible overview of key trends in witch-hunt scholarship, note the expansion of the field beyond old geographic limits, and suggest possible directions for future research. Graduate students, or anyone who wants a succinct encapsulation of the subject’s lengthy historiography, will find much of use here. There are some curious choices, as when Nenonen devotes far less attention to the question of accused witches’ sex than to social status and scapegoating, all three of which he views as central to theories about witch hunts based on “mistaken generalities” since corrected by more vigorous scholarship. While it is possible this choice followed from a desire to leave space for Toivo’s chapter that addresses questions of sex and gender at length, it has the unfortunate result of suggesting how much more readily one might expect an audience of historians to be willing to dismiss questions of sex in comparison to other factors. Nenonen later returns to gender and social status when considering what he calls the “western European paradigm of witch-hunt history,” in which European scholars’ sense of “political and ecclesiastical geography” distorted their methods and findings (30–35). Whether or not it is “grotesque” that historians have been prompted to pursue new lines of inquiry by external factors such as European union rather than by the discipline’s own inherent rigor (36), the two opening chapters effectively describe and demonstrate some of the key issues that emerge from witch-hunt historiography. Charles Zika’s chapter examines the notable development in witch-hunt [End Page 139] historiography since the 1970s of more sustained and sophisticated attention to images. Zika encourages historians and art historians to continue to sharpen their analysis of images by treating them not as transparent signs of social realities but rather as products of artists with context and agendas of their own. Through a wide-ranging review of scholarly texts and museum exhibits, Zika praises those who have treated images with care and specificity, and suggests several likely avenues for future work. Raisa Maria Toivo’s chapter combines reflection on the historiography of gendered approaches to witch hunts with particular references to Finland. After noting that early feminist studies misconstrued the sex ratio of European trials and mishandled male witches, Toivo argues that to emphasize gender as a dichotomous, hierarchical relationship fails to capture the complexity of gender relations in witch hunts. Furthermore, she states that using gender as a lens through which to understand witch hunts will perpetuate a distorted view, if scholars apply what emerged from moments of strife onto the broader society. Toivo also recommends attention to the shamanic tradition, since it provided men with access to preternatural authority in ways that avoided the victimhood she sees as pervading accounts that center on patriarchal power. The next three chapters, Marianna G. Muravyeva’s “Russian Witchcraft on Trial: Historiography and Methodology for Studying Russian Witches,” Rune Blix Hagen’s “Witchcraft and Ethnicity: A Critical Perspective on Sami Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Northern Norway,” and Gunnar...

Feringhee Dharma: Augustinians, Amerindians and a Bengali deity in an early modern Iberian world

ABSTRACTDharma Thakur has been widely studied as a Bengali folk deity. As an exemplary ‘folk’ deity, scholarship on him has been resolutely focused within a discrete local space. Scholars have sought to dig deep into a local past to understand the deity and his cult. As a result, the more recent historical contexts and particularly the impact of European Christianity upon such deities have been entirely ignored. Using one of the earliest texts of the cult, viz. Rupram Chakrabarty’s seventeenth-century Dharmamangal, I challenge this insular local spatiality. By first locating Rupram himself in his contemporary social and political world, I show his proximity to Portuguese settlements and Augustinian churches. I then use the material culture of foods described in the text to show Rupram’s implication in an early modern Iberian world. In the last two sections, I delve into narrative episodes of the text that reveal complex theological dialogues not only with Portuguese Catholicism, but also indirectly with distant Amerindian shamans. In conclusion, I argue that we need to trace the horizontal connections of folk religion in the early modern world, rather than persisting in the quest for a deep past.

Indios on the move in the sixteenth-century Iberian world

AbstractBetween 1572 and 1575, a man named Diego litigated for his freedom from slavery in several Spanish courts. Identified as an Indio (Indian), he claimed to have been born in the Spanish territory of Liampo (now Ningbo), China, and later carried on a Spanish ship to Mexico, and eventually to Seville. His master, the cleric Juan de Morales, asserted that he had bought Diego in Portuguese Goa and taken him to Mozambique and to Lisbon before finally bringing him to Seville. At issue was whether Diego was a Portuguese or Spanish imperial subject, since Spanish law strictly prohibited the enslavement of Indios in Spanish territories, while Portuguese laws did not. As witnesses (several of them former slaves from disparate locations including Panama, Lima, Goa, Mozambique, and China) tried to determine Diego’s imperial status, not only did they reveal their comparative fantasies about Portuguese or Spanish landscapes, but they also embedded their own diasporic tales of liminality and loss into Diego’s. Here is the ultimate example of the Indio experience in Castile: an attempt to affix imperial boundaries to a construct that was, in itself, a metaphor for how the rapidly changing globe was imagined, experienced, and compartmentalized. The use of the increasingly amorphous cultural label ‘Indio’ in Castile was symptomatic of tensions between imperial regimes’ desire to constitute and reify themselves as bounded entities and the global mobilities of some of the most marginalized subjects who informed those processes.

Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World ed. by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente (review)

Reviewed by: Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World ed. by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente Michael Householder Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World. Edited by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente. [Hispanic Issues, Vol. 40.] (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 2014. Pp. xxiv, 280. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8265-1957-3.) In collecting these essays, editors Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente seek to broaden and deepen our understanding of the roles played by the Catholic Church and various legal/political institutions in the production of coloniality. Looking beyond the formal codifications of the racial, social, and political orders imposed by Spain, the authors of these fourteen essays investigate a range of texts to reveal the complex discursive networks from which these hierarchies were constructed. In doing so, they make a significant contribution to the growing scholarship of the Iberian empire, in particular to our understanding of the formation of colonial identities and modes of thought within it. [End Page 928] The editors group the essays into the three categories of politics, religion, and law. Through careful explication of written and visual texts, the essays articulate the strategies used by colonizer and colonized to adapt existing modes of thought to changing circumstances. Some of the essays focus on texts by recognizably influential writers in the history of colonization such as José de Acosta and Bartolomé de las Casas; others examine lesser known artifacts and figures. Ezekial Stear, for example, closely reads selected episodes from the Anales de Juan Bautista to reveal the tangled responses of indigenous Nahua elites to Christianization and Spanish colonial policy in sixteenth-century New Spain. Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez uses the Historia de Mindanao y Joló to examine how its author, the Jesuit Francisco de Combés, negotiated the jarring encounter between Spanish imperial identity and its Muslim Other during the conquest of the Philippines. Both essays indicate the range of figures, contexts, positions, motivations, texts, and contexts surveyed in the book. The precision, richness, and collective range of these analyses impress and inspire. Careful attention to narrative and rhetorical devices reveals the linguistic traces of coloniality’s conceptual construction, both as it was experienced on the ground by a variety of actors across the Spanish empire and as it was theorized in the centers of imperial power. Especially welcome are those essays focusing on indigenous political agency and the means used to resist, or at least negotiate, the imposition of Western structures. The resulting mosaic suggests the value of such analyses, as well as the directions and forms future work could take. At the same time, the combination of such depth and scope can be frustrating. Readers may be intrigued, for example, by the analysis of the iconography of Marian shrines in the Philippines but will have to look elsewhere to understand how they compare to shrines in other areas of the empire. Readers who are interested in the role of the Catholic Church in colonization may be vexed to find that only a handful of chapters attempt a sustained analysis of the intersection of church doctrine and colonial administrative law. Of course, no collection of essays would be expected to coalesce into a cohesive narrative about something as heterogeneous and complex as the formation of Iberian coloniality. What readers will find instead in these essays is a range of models for analyzing colonial writing and representation, as well as an array of examples that suggest new directions for further investigation. Michael Householder Case Western Reserve University Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

Arthur Engel y Pierre Paris: dos pioneros franceses en los viajes culturales por las regiones arqueológicas de España

Fue España durante el siglo XIX el destino de investigadores e historiadores europeos. En este artículo analizaremos las figuras de los arqueólogos franceses, Arthur Engel y Pierre Paris, cuyo trabajo en el sur y en el levante español sería de gran valor para el conocimiento del mundo ibérico.

Waterloo, the Napoleonic Wars and the Recasting of the Global Iberian World

By bringing the Napoleonic Wars to an end, the Battle of Waterloo gave the last impetus to an ongoing upheaval that, in little over a decade, dislocated a centuries-old global Iberian world. To a limited extent, it also contributed to the unleashing of an era of civil war that resulted in the secession of most of the Spanish American dominions and fuelled the ideological battleground between conservative and progressive, centralist and decentralist forces. Portugal fared no better, troubled by domestic crises and the eventual unravelling of the Lusitanian Empire through the emergence of an independent Brazil.

Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller. Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898.

Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller. Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898.

Book Review: Navigating the Spanish Lake. The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898, written by Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller

Book Review: Navigating the Spanish Lake. The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898, written by Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller

Buschmann, Rainer F., Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller: Navigating the Spanish Lake. The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521 –1898

Anthropos , Seite 220 - 221

Conexiones atlánticas: Fr. Apolinário da Conceição, la erudición religiosa y el mundo del impreso en Portugal y la América portuguesa durante el siglo XVIII

Through the character of the Franciscan Fr. Apolinário da Conceição, this article analyzes some questions regarding the religious and erudite culture in the eighteenth-century Iberian world, as well as the edition and circulation of prints throughout the Portuguese Monarchy. On one hand, it explores a subject traditionally forgotten by historiography: the Portuguese Franciscan written culture and literary production, especially during a period shaped by a progressive ‘intellectualization’ of the Seraphic Order in Portuguese contexts. In this regard, the specific circumstances of Conceição’s intellectual activity will allow us a better understanding of the features defining the writer’s profile inside the Franciscan Order. On the other hand, the analysis of Conceição’s trajectory between Brazil and Lisbon shows the connections he established among these two worlds. These connections were crucial for the publishing of some of Conceição’s works, revealing the scarcely known contribution of the Luso-Brazilian colonial world to printed book patronage. They also supported indirectly Conceição’s participation in the commerce of books, revealing an original, cleric-centred book market, functioning in parallel to the more usual circuits.