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In Envoys of A Human God Andreu Martínez offers a comprehensive study of the religious mission led by the Society of Jesus in Christian Ethiopia. The mission to Ethiopia was one of the most challenging undertakings carried out by the Catholic Church in early modern times. The book examines the period of early Portuguese contacts with the Ethiopian monarchy, the mission’s main developments and its aftermath, with the expulsion of the Jesuit missionaries. The study profits from both an intense reading of the historical record and the fruits of recent archaeological research. Long-held historiographical assumptions are challenged and the importance of cultural and socio-political factors in the attraction and ultimate estrangement between European Catholics and Ethiopian Christians is highlighted.
One of the earliest and most ambitious projects carried out by the Society of Jesus was the mission to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which ran from 1557 to 1632. In about 1621, crucial figures in the Ethiopian Solomonid monarchy, including King Susenyos, were converted to Catholicism and up to 1632 imposing missionary churches, residences, and royal structures were built. This book studies for the first time in a comprehensive manner the missionary architecture built by the joint work of Jesuit padres, Ethiopian and Indian masons, and royal Ethiopian patrons. The work gives ample archaeological, architectonic, and historical descriptions of the ten extant sites known to date and includes hypotheses on hitherto unexplored or lesser known structures.
Reflecting on humanity's shared desire for certainty, this book explores the discrepancies between religious adherence and inner belief specific to the early modern period, a time marred by forced conversions and inquisition.
In 2015, both Portugal and Spain passed laws enabling descendants of Sephardi Jews to obtain citizenship, an historic offer of reconciliation for Jews who were forced to undergo conversions or expelled from Iberia nearly half a millennia ago. Drawing on the memory of the expulsion from Sepharad, the scholarly and personal essays in Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants analyze the impact of reconciliation laws on descendants and contemporary forms of citizenship.
First published in 2011 by Bristol Phornix Press.
Material Connections eschews outdated theory, tainted by colonialist attitudes, and develops a new cultural and historical understanding of how factors such as mobility, materiality, conflict and co-presence impacted on the formation of identity in the ancient Mediterranean. Fighting against ‘hyper-specialisation’ within the subject area, it explores the multiple ways that material culture was used to establish, maintain and alter identities, especially during periods of transition, culture encounter and change. A new perspective is adopted, one that perceives the use of material culture by prehistoric and historic Mediterranean peoples in formulating and changing their identities. It co...
This book discusses the “long fifteenth century” in Iberian history, between the 1391 pogroms and the forced conversions of Aragonese Muslims in 1526, a period characterized by persecutions, conversions and social violence, on the one hand, and cultural exchange, on the other. It was a historical moment of unstable religious ideas and identities, before the rigid turn taken by Spanish Catholicism by the middle of the sixteenth century; a period in which the physical and symbolic borders separating the three religions were transformed and redefined but still remained extraordinarily porous. The collection argues that the aggressive tone of many polemical texts has until now blinded historiography to the interconnected nature of social and cultural intimacy, above all in dialogue and cultural transfer in later medieval Iberia. Contributors are Ana Echevarría, Gad Freudenthal, Mercedes García-Arenal, Maria Laura Giordano, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, Eleazar Gutwirth, Felipe Pereda, Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto, Katarzyna K. Starczewska, John Tolan, Gerard Wiegers, and Yosi Yisraeli.
“Latin America” is a concept firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and historical meanings. And yet, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues in this landmark book, it is an obsolescent racial-cultural idea that ought to have vanished long ago with the banishment of racial theory. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea makes this case persuasively. Tenorio-Trillo builds the book on three interlocking steps: first, an intellectual history of the concept of Latin America in its natural historical habitat—mid-nineteenth-century redefinitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic intellectualism; second, a serious and uncompromising critique of the current “Latin Ame...
A Lacanian Conception of Populism takes issue with traditional theories of populism, which seek to equate populism with hegemony, arguing that these are not only different but even incompatible logics. Timothy Appleton contends that one of the main differences between populism and hegemony has to do with the social totality: while hegemony absolutises it, populism eviscerates it, setting in its place an (apparently paradoxical) dispersion of singular instances of ‘the people’. The book considers the work of Laclau, Badiou, Žižek and Rancière, before arriving at a novel conceptualisation that Appleton dubs ‘the populism of singularities’. In the second half of the book, the author ...
In the two largest countries in South America, successive waves of structural reforms adopted in the name of development invariably have ended in disappointment. The promise of development never seems to materialize. Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentinaexamines why. Instead of looking for policy failures, F. Antunes de Oliveira’s focus is on the parameters of the public debate about “development” itself. An unfruitful dispute between neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism has dominated Brazilian and Argentine political economy debates to the detriment of both countries. Antunes de Oliveira presents a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the neoliberal and neodevelopmentalist structural reform cycles in Brazil and Argentina and applies insights from dependency theory to craft an alternative political economy framework for the analysis of development challenges.