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This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.
Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) was one of the first books to take advantage of the close relationship between medicine, trade and empire in the early modern period. The book was printed in Goa, the capital of the Portuguese empire in the East, and the city where the author, a Portuguese physician of Jewish ancestry, lived for almost thirty years. It presents a vast array of medical information on various drugs, spices, plants, fruits and minerals native to India or adjoining territories. In addition, it includes information concerning indigenous methods of healing as well as a far-reaching assessment of ancient and modern authors on Asian materia medic...
A thought-provoking study of how knowledge of provenance was not transferred with enslaved people and goods from the Portuguese trading empire to Renaissance Italy In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of "goods" from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial "opening up" of the world transformed the way Europeans understood the global. In this book, K.J.P. Lowe challenges such an assumption, showing that Italians of this era cared more about the possession than the provenance of their newly acquired global goods. With three detailed case st...
In Portuguese Jews, New Christians and ‘New Jews’ Claude B. Stuczynski and Bruno Feitler gather some of the leading scholars of the history of the Portuguese Jews and conversos in a tribute to their common friend and a renowned figure in Luso-Judaica, Roberto Bachmann, on the occasion of his 85th birthday. The texts are divided into five sections dealing with medieval Portuguese Jewish culture, the impact of the inquisitorial persecution, the wide range of converso identities on one side, and of the Sephardi Western Portuguese Jewish communities on the other, and the role of Portugal and Brazil as lands of refuge for Jews during the Second World War. This book is introduced by a comprehensive survey on the historiography on Portuguese Jews, New Christians and 'New Jews' and offers a contribution to Luso-Judaica studies
Based on documents (which appear in the appendix on pp. 129-238), reconstructs the activities of Conversos who fled the Portuguese Inquisition to Antwerp and to London. These "Portuguese Nations" established the Sedakah Rescue Organization to help smuggle fellow Conversos from Lisbon to Antwerp and over the Alps to Italy or to the Ottoman Empire. England served only as a temporary refuge for Conversos who were persecuted in the Low Countries. However, they were generally (despite occasional persecution) allowed to remain in Antwerp due to the policies of Emperor Charles V and local authorities, both of whom were guided by economic considerations. Disputes the view that Charles, who was respo...
James William Nelson Novoa's new book Being the Nação in the Eternal City explores, in a set of case studies focusing on seven carefully chosen figures, the presence of Portuguese individuals of Jewish origin in Rome after the initial creation of a tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1531. The book delves into the varied ways in which the protagonists, representing a cross-section of Portuguese society, went about grappling with the complexities of a New Christian identity, and tracks them through their interactions with Roman society and its institutions. Some chose to flaunt Jewish origins. They espoused a sense of being part of a distinctive group, the Portuguese New Christian na...
This vibrant collected volume considers the question: how, exactly, did the relationship between trade and religion develop historically? Examining a wide range of commercial exchanges across religious boundaries around the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the second millennium, it offers a variety of perspectives on this intriguing and surprisingly neglected subject.
In sixteenth-century Marrakesh, a Flemish merchant converts to Judaism and takes his Catholic brother on a subversive reading of the Gospels and an exploration of the Jewish faith. Their vivid Spanish dialogue, composed by an anonym in 1583, has until now escaped scholarly attention in spite of its success in anti-Christian clandestine literature until the Enlightenment. Based on all nine available manuscripts, this critical edition rediscovers a pioneering work of Jewish self-expression in European languages. The introductory study identifies the author, Estêvão Dias, locates him in insurgent Antwerp at the beginning of the Western Sephardi diaspora, and describes his hybrid culture shape...
In Living under the Evil Pope, Martina Mampieri presents the Hebrew Chronicle of Pope Paul IV, written in the second half of the sixteenth century by the Italian Jewish moneylender Benjamin Neḥemiah ben Elnathan (alias Guglielmo di Diodato) from Civitanova Marche. The text remained in manuscript for about four centuries until the Galician scholar Isaiah Sonne (1887-1960) published a Hebrew annotated edition of the chronicle in the 1930s. This remarkable source offers an account of the events of the Papal States during Paul IV’s pontificate (1555-59). Making use of broad archival materials, Martina Mampieri reflects on the nature of this work, its historical background, and contents, prov...
Every third year, the members of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies (IANLS) assemble for a week-long conference. Over the years, this event has evolved into the largest single conference in the field of Neo-Latin studies. The papers presented at these conferences offer, then, a general overview of the current status of Neo-Latin research; its current trends, popular topics, and methodologies. In 2018, the members of IANLS gathered for a conference in Albacete (Spain) on the theme of “Humanity and Nature: Arts and Sciences in Neo-Latin Literature”. This volume presents the conference’s papers which were submitted after the event and which have undergone a peer-review process. The papers deal with a broad range of fields, including literature, history, philology, and religious studies.