Seventeenth Century Portuguese Research Articles

Jesuit Art by Mia M. Mochizuki

Reviewed by: Jesuit Art by Mia M. Mochizuki Thomas Worcester S.J. Jesuit Art. By Mia M. Mochizuki. (Leiden: Brill. 2022. Pp. 219. $168.00. ISBN 9789004462519). A volume in the series Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies, edited by Robert Maryks, this book offers a review and overview of recent work on the history of Jesuit art and to some extent more broadly on Jesuit topics, especially Jesuit culture, from papal approval of the Society of Jesus in 1540 to its suppression in 1773. The author does a good job of showing how even if scholars continue to associate Jesuit art with the Baroque period, they also agree more and more that there is no single Jesuit style: in artistic production as in many other areas, Jesuits responded to varied circumstances and needs. There was no typical kind of Jesuit art. Jesuit art did appeal very frequently to the emotions and to the five senses. Jesuit-produced and/or Jesuit-commissioned works were intended to instruct viewers or hearers in the Catholic faith, and to move them to repent for sin and to embrace a life of virtue, a life nourished by the Church’s sacraments, and by heart-felt imitation of Jesus and the saints. Already in the first decades of the Society of Jesus, Jesuits were spreading out across the globe, and Mochizuki devotes much of her fine discussion and extensive [End Page 201] bibliographies to the global reach of Jesuit art, how it brought European art to the rest of the world, and how Jesuits engaged with and collaborated with the art of other continents though hybridization. If they returned to Europe, Jesuits often brought non-European art back with them, thus fertilizing and broadening the European artistic imagination. A book like this is enhanced by judicious use of images, reproduced clearly and when appropriate and possible in color. The author and the publisher merit praise for a large number of high-quality images. A stunning color photograph of the Church of the Gesù, in Rome (p. 41), is but one example. Another is a detailed photograph (p. 137) of a seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary that includes a copy of the anonymous Salus Populi Romani, a painting of the Madonna and child, much appreciated by St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, a painting long housed in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore basilica. Though painting, and to a lesser extent architecture, dominate this book, prints and images in printed books do also share in the author’s attention. Many scholars have studied Jerónimo Nadal’s Evangeliae historiae imagines, published in 1593 in Antwerp, a work focused on the life Jesus, and intended as an aid for Jesuits and others in doing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. With 153 folio images, the multi-volume work connected biblical texts with images in a way designed to help a kind of prayer in which imagination (“composition”) of place was central, indeed foundational (pp. 78–99). The one disappointment in this book is that it offers almost nothing beyond the late eighteenth century, except for a 2013 image of Pope Francis (p. 14) in prayer before the Salus Populi Romani. Pius VII had restored the Jesuits in 1814, and since the 2014 bicentennial of that seminal event, significant numbers of scholars of Jesuit history have been turning more and more to the period 1814 to the present. What about art history? Mochizuki states that in recent times art historians have moved beyond a singular focus on masterpieces of elite art to a more inclusive study of material and visual cultures (p. 29). Does not such an approach deal with the modern era of the Society of Jesus? If not, why not? Thomas Worcester S.J. Fordham University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

The Homeric Διὸς ἀπάτη and its reuse within the seventeenth-century Portuguese epic poem Ulisseia ou Lisboa Edificada

Abstract Ulisseia ou Lisboa Edificada (Ulysseia or Lisbon Founded) is a seventeenth-century epic poem written by Gabriel Pereira de Castro, which celebrates the mythical arrival of Ulysses in Lusitania and the subsequent foundation of Ulisseia by him. This city built by Greek hands comes to be Lisbon, the head of a great navy empire at the time of Portuguese Discoveries. This epic reshapes both the Odyssean sea voyages and Iliadic warfare, whereas Ulysses, the same crafty wanderer as the Homeric Odysseus, is also the bearer of a god-given mission like the Virgilian Aeneas. In this article, I examine the refashioning of the Homeric Διὸς ἀπάτη (‘Deception of Zeus’) in Ulisseia book 10 from a comparative and literary perspective. Castro follows his Greek model very closely, but at the same time it departs from it in important ways. In portraying the deceitful planning of Hera, with its erotic and humorous tone, he adapts it to the nationalistic purposes of his own epic story. Juno’s plan is granted a more serious tone, since its effects on the war between Greeks and Lusitanians are directly linked to the glorious Destiny of the Portuguese people.

Religious Identity and Imperial Security: Arming Catholic Slaves in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Portuguese India

Abstract In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved Africans and Asians bolstered the population of Portuguese imperial settlements in India. Purchased for a variety of occupations, their presence partially solved the problem of “peopling the empire” in a context of imperial insecurity. Valued for their capacity to fight in times of crisis, the Portuguese armed their slaves repeatedly. This tendency to arm their slaves has often appeared in the secondary literature. However, the religious dimension of arming slaves has not been explored. In the colonial imagination, conversion to Islam threatened slaves’ military loyalty. Fleeing the empire to Muslim-ruled states, slaves who became renegades represented the fears of Portuguese colonial society – fears of being overtaken by the surrounding states. Imperial anxieties about religion and security shaped inquisitorial responses to slaves’ conversions to Islam and crept into the discourse of ecclesiastical council records advocating for the baptism and Christian instruction of slaves.

Nuevos datos sobre dos manuscritos de la Crónica do Imperador Beliandro en la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Utrecht

The Utrecht University Library (Netherlands) houses two manuscript copies of Part III of the Cronica do Imperador Beliandro, an interesting seventeenth century Portuguese chivalric romance that remains unpublished. A brief bibliographical note published in 1963 by Professor Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma (Universiteit Utrecht) is updated with new data derived from recent research on the textual corpus of the Cronica do Imperador Beliandro.

Killing Images: Iconoclasm and the Art of Political Insult in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Portuguese India

The article builds on a succession of visually disturbing events that occurred in Goa—the capital city of Portuguese India—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the early years of the Portuguese conquest (1510), Goa went through a redefinition of its urban space, which implied the appropriation and re-semantization of buildings and other key sites of the old Muslim city. This process included the spread of images and symbols related to several Portuguese viceroys, soon-to-be targets of acts of political insult and even political iconoclasm performed by their Portuguese opponents in a context of growing factionalism. We speak namely of episodes of protest against places of memory associated to different clans, encompassing statues (both official and bogus), textual inscriptions, and viceroys’ portraits. These were European phenomena to a large extent, but coloured by significant local and native elements. The article engages with a grid of questions that places real statues, satirical effigies, and erased faces (and the diverse reactions they have aroused) in dialogue with current debates on popular politics; high and low vis-à-vis the colonial social fabric; the uses of public space; verbal, written, and visual insult; political languages; and disputed authority in an imperial setting.

Introduction: Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeeth-Century Suriname

Through the person of the ex-converso David Nassy, “Regaining Jerusalem” asks how seventeenth-century Portuguese Jews could seek their own religious liberty at the same time they were enslaving Africans in the plantation economies of the Caribbean and the Guyana coast. Living in Amsterdam by the 1630s, Nassy was part of the Jewish community in Dutch Brazil, and then in the 1660s led the Jewish settlement in Dutch Suriname. Nassy was moved in part by eschatological hopes shared with other ex-conversos freed from Catholic tyranny, in part by his interest in plants and geography, and in part by entrepreneurial desire for profit. Nassy and his fellow Jews distinguished their own biblical exodus out of slavery from the destiny of their African captives, incorporating their slaves into the patriarchal Abrahamic household. This paper describes patterns of Jewish culture on the sugar plantations and the varied reactions of African men and women to it.

Lip Ornaments and the Domestication of Trade Goods: Fashion in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Central East Africa

AbstractThis article presents a history of sixteenth and seventeenth century central East African efforts to define elements of a regional fashion aesthetic, one supplied by their engaged participation in wider African and Indian Ocean world economies. I investigate regional artisanal economies in the central East African mainland, looking specifically at communities in what is now southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique and their uses of one of the most “exoticized” elements of their fashion: lip ornaments often called lip-plugs. Close readings of sixteenth and seventeenth century Portuguese accounts and historical linguistics evidence reveals a new history of developing regional fashion trends. Such a history underscores the importance of regional consumers and artisanal experts in shaping wider East African precolonial economies.

Secret Manipulations: Language and Context in Africa by Anne Storch (review)

Reviewed by: Secret Manipulations: Language and Context in Africa by Anne Storch Jeffrey Heath Secret Manipulations: Language and Context in Africa. Anne Storch . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2011 . Pp. xx + 242 . $99.00 (cloth), $45.00 (paper). This book is an extended rant against culturally unsophisticated African descriptive and especially historical linguistics. Like all rants it is often incoherent and tiresome, and your reviewer wished at times that he were reading something relaxing, like Finnegan’s Wake or Mardi. But some of the points it makes are important. To oversimplify, Anne Storch argues that “manipulated” forms and speech registers, i.e., those attributable to conscious creative processes, are widespread in African languages, and that over time they can and do infect the everyday language. The input to manipulation may be internal to the language, as in speech disguise registers, or external (borrowed). In the opening paragraph of chapter 1, it is claimed that “manipulated language may become part of the language from which it was originally derived, inevitably changing it” (p. 3). A comment much later (p. 189) attributes the basic idea to Roger Blench, and locates it especially in the context of armed conflict that expands the use of secret registers within and across language boundaries. Most of the book, however, is about the form and social context of registers. A Wikipedia-style rundown of the full range of these varieties (pp. 19–45) is followed by four major substantive chapters with the enigmatic titles “Secrecy,” “Mimesis,” “Sacrilege,” and “Ambiguity.” Each consists mainly of short case studies. Languages of the Nigeria-Cameroon border and of Uganda recur, reflecting the primary fieldwork by Storch and her colleagues, but there are also excursuses on other African groups, the African diaspora (Caribbean, medieval Portugal), and, for typological comparisons, even France and southern Germany. Some of the case studies are selfcontained and satisfying, others raise as many questions as they answer, and the main thrust of each chapter tends to blur amidst the ethnographic detail. Confusing lapses of English diction, such as “temporary” for “temporal” and “evasive” for (I think) “evocative,” do not help. Much of the content of these central chapters is about spirit possession, witchcraft, and verbal art. Storch is little concerned about book-level plot development; her preface encourages readers to cherrypick, treating the book like a multichapter handbook. “Secrecy” (pp. 53–83) is mostly, but not entirely, about registers and languages intended to be opaque to outsiders. They are characterized by phonological disguise and archaisms, less often by antonymic inversion. Some are multipurpose registers used within subgroups (young people, relic ethnicities). Others are confined to initiation rituals and must be laboriously learned under the tutelage of priests. “Mimesis” (pp. 84–132) is longer and much more difficult to digest or summarize. It begins by unexpectedly reclassifying most of the material in “Secrecy” as iconicity. “Being icons, they represent in a binary way the relations between speaker and world but do not express imitation of a referent” (p. 84). Mimesis does presuppose a referent, but imitation is always incomplete, so in practice it is synecdochic (pp. 85, 111). The case studies are tenuously held together by the concept of imitation. Many involve ironic impersonations of, or other defensive responses to, a colonial or intertribal “Other.” The referent may be a group of humans, a spirit, or a general situation. For example, a general loss of control due to geopolitical subjugation can be “mimed” by substituting speechlessness or a musical instrument for speech (pp. 85–88), but in other cases both meaning and form are intensified. In the most interesting vignette, Sultan Ibrahim [End Page 395] Njoya, an important historical figure in early colonial Cameroon, concocted a new register for use by his courtiers after consulting with Swiss missionaries. Its vocabulary splurged on exotic European consonant clusters, loanwords from multiple European languages, and absurdly polysyllabic function words like muksuru-ruran ‘and’ that make Javanese krama inggil look tame. After this, Storch straps us into a time machine and we watch seventeenth-century Portuguese monks composing mimetic (and, unbeknownst to them, metamimetic) popular songs satirizing African spirit-possession music, which itself had mimicked Portuguese colonists. “Sacrilege” (pp. 133–67) is about masking...

Los actores locales de la nación en la América Latina: Análisis estratégicos

This noteworthy volume gathers papers given at workshops held at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the Colegio de Tlaxcala. Moving away from structuralist analyses, scholars have recovered an actor-centric view now honing in on all social and ethnic groups. Editor Evelyne Sanchez emphasizes in her careful introduction that methods such as microhistory have shed light on “actors who negotiate and do not submit absolutely to a normative system” (p. 7). Network analysis has usually explained boundaries and causes of group actions, argues French historian Michel Bertrand in an interesting twist, but it also elucidates the margins of autonomy of historical actors within or beyond these restrictions. He warns, however, of the pitfalls in recent works that have reverted to pure genealogy or misinterpreted mere contacts between actors for solidarity. This methodological thread loosely stitches together the following chapters.Frédérique Langue maintains that the Venezuelan creole elite largely forestalled the access of pardos (people of mixed African, European, or Indian descent) to the university and the militias. The pardos attained papers from the crown to legitimize their standing (gracias al sacar), which the creoles countered with the discourse of inferiority. Langue argues that the nonwhite groups or those of lower socioeconomic status were excluded from politics “because of or despite their activism” (p. 95). She counters some US scholars who currently emphasize the relative success of these groups. Meanwhile, Edgar Iván Mondragón Aguilera traces the tactics of a Portuguese soap maker in an early seventeenth-century Inquisition trial. While the Holy Office in New Spain withheld the names of accusers and the extent of their claims to probe the soap maker’s faith, the suspect pleaded his insufficient command of the Castilian tongue, for example, to ward off consequences.Lidia Gómez García, in a tightly researched piece, holds that the Bourbon Reforms undermined the authority of the altepetl governors of San Juan de los Llanos, Puebla, because of growing fiscal pressure, forced labor in tobacco cultivation, and militia recruitment. The community nonetheless supported the royalists during the independence period, because it opposed the dissolution of the local “reciprocity and the political economy of revolving power” (p. 128). After independence, political strongmen or caciques assumed the mediating role of the district officials (alcaldes mayores). Mariano Torres Bautista maintains this basso continuo while focusing on the Mexican Revolution. He argues that the indigenous communities did not seek to end poverty but to impose the redistribution of land, because they had been excluded from the nineteenth-century state-building project. Future research may build on these insights to explore the opportunities that individuals saw in these changes.Evelyne Sanchez analyzes the rational actors contending over the freedom of religion in the drafting of the 1857 Constitution. Since majority opinion was not with them, the liberals maintained the privileged position of the church, provided it did not collide with state authority. María de Lourdes Herrera Feria discusses collective and individual actors in the Mexican contributions to World’s Fairs. She shows that the Pueblan rural contributors showed greater cohesion than the urban ones, contrary to what one might expect from an industrialized city. Enrique Guillermo Muñoz demonstrates that President Ávila Camacho’s cronies ran the Puebla municipal water services until losing their influence. During the Miguel de la Madrid presidency, the state of Puebla occupied these posts. The author argues that the Ávila Camacho cacicazgo followed traditional politics as clientelism trumped the law, but embraced modern economics. Finally, the last piece again departs from the book’s focus on New Spain/Mexico. Gabriela Dalla Corte draws on a wide range of archives to show that Paraguay sold large swaths of the Chaco Boreal to foreign investors to pay down its debt. The rise of great landowners such as the Spaniard Carlos Casado del Alisal was generally seen as a favorable foreign influence modernizing the country.This collection of fine essays drawing on substantive archival research will interest all colonial and modern historians, especially since the rhythm of research pulses differently in France and Mexico than in the United States. The editor has credibly discussed the concept of local actors in the transition from the ancien régime to modernity. Another framework holding this book together, however, is the collaboration of the historians in Puebla and Tlaxcala in addition to the two French scholars with whom the editor most likely worked while obtaining her PhD in Toulouse. These contributions thus cover extensive ground both topically, temporally, and regionally. One could ask if a seventeenth-century Portuguese in the jaws of the Inquisition or a successful Spanish investor in the early twentieth-century Chaco were truly local actors of the nation. This scholarly cooperation has nonetheless produced solid essays whose quality more than offsets the volume’s loose internal structure.

The forgotten diaspora: Jewish communities in West Africa and the making of the Atlantic world

This book traces the history of early seventeenth-century Portuguese Sephardic traders who settled in two communities on Senegal's Petite Cote. There, they lived as public Jews, under the spiritual guidance of a rabbi sent by the newly established Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam and were protected from agents of the Inquisition by local Muslim rulers. The Petite Cote communities included several Jews of mixed Portuguese-African heritage as well as African wives, offspring, and servants. The blade weapons trade was an important part of their commercial activities. These merchants participated marginally in the slave trade but fully in the arms trade, illegally supplying West African markets with swords. This arms trade depended on artisans and merchants based in Morocco, Lisbon, and northern Europe and affected warfare in the Sahel and along the Upper Guinea Coast. The study discovers previously unknown Jewish communities and by doing so offers a reinterpretation of the dynamics and processes of identity construction throughout the Atlantic world.

La música en las aldeas de la Amazonia portuguesa (siglo XVII)

Music is very significant as part of the Amerindian cultural universe. Since the arrival of Europeans in America, was described by travelers, colonizers and missionaries. Sound events in the Jesuit missions, however, are usually understood as a vehicle to the oncoming civilization of the Indians. Were, though, extremely important in the approach, communication and translation between indigenous and Jesuits. This article is about this contact through music in seventeenth-century Portuguese Amazon, analyzed by published and unpublished Ignatian documents.

Préserver la pureté : échange culturel et contamination dans l’Inde portugaise de la fin du XVIIe siècle

Este artigo analisa diversas medidas tomadas para regular o casamento hindu e bailadeiras, no sentido de controlar o intercâmbio cultural entre católicos e não-cristãos, no final do século XVII na Índia Portuguesa. Apesar de tais regulamentos, os católicos continuaram a interagir com os hindus, a trocar e inevitavelmente a adoptar algumas práticas. Como demonstra o estudo, tal ocorreu no caso das celebrações do baptismo que assimilou alguns elementos Hindus. De facto, as políticas relacionadas com este intercâmbio foram altamente inconsistentes, em parte devido à frágil posição colonial dos portugueses na Índia neste período.

Naufrágio, cativeiro, e relações ibéricas: a História trágico-marítima num contexto comparativo

Esse artigo compara as narrativas portuguesas de naufrágios dos séculos dezesseis e dezessete, muitas das quais foram publicadas no livro História trágico-marítima, de Bernardo Gomes de Brito (1735-1736), com os relatos coevos de naufrágio e cativeiro hispânicos. Ao examinar não só as estratégias e as estruturas das narrativas de naufrágio e cativeiro, mas também suas conexões intertextuais, pretende-se iluminar o contexto ideológico e literário compartilhado pelos impérios ibéricos na modernidade. A comparação permite desnudar ainda a capacidade destas narrativas de divertir os autores e os leitores modernos como também o seu caráter didático e dessa forma questionar as interpretações contemporâneas que ou priorizam a perspectiva nacionalista ou focam-se exclusivamente no aspecto contra-hegemônico contidos nesses textos.

The Spiritual Concerns of a Mercantilist Empire: Church-State Relations in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Portuguese India

The Spiritual Concerns of a Mercantilist Empire: Church-State Relations in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Portuguese India

"Portuguese" Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries

Preliminary Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Evolution of Portuguese Identity: Luso-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast from the 16th to the Early 19th-Century 2. Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Architecture in the Gambia-Geba Region and the Articulation of Luso-African Ethnicity 3. Reconstructing West African Architectural History: Images of Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Style Houses in Brazil 4. The People There Are Beginning to Take on English Manners: Mixed Manners in Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century Gambia 5. Senegambia from the Mid-Eighteenth Century to the Mid-Nineteenth Century 6. Casamance Architecture from 1850 to the Establishment of Colonial Administration Conclusions and Observations Notes Bibliography Index

Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Faianca and Its Presence in Colonial America

Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Faianca and Its Presence in Colonial America

Biblical Hebrews and the Rhetoric of Republicanism: Seventeenth—Century Portuguese Jews on the Jewish Community

In their rhetoric, the ex-conversos who settled in “lands of freedom” outside the Iberian Peninsula tended to emphasize the anguish and lack of freedom they had endured while in the orbit of the Inquisition–in stark contrast to the free and thriving Jewish collective life they had now built outside it. If the Peninsula had been a swamp of “Egyptian idolatry,” the Jewish ex-converso communities in Amsterdam, Venice, Livorno, and London (to name only the most vibrant) were, by implication, encampments on the way to the Holy Land. Yet one aspect of their new condition subtly undermined the ex-conversos' confidence as Jews vis-a-vis the gentile world. Ever sensitive to their image, they were exquisitely aware of their now unambiguous identification in Christian eyes, not with conviction rewarded, not with faith triumphant, but with a defeated and exiled people.