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In 1606, a Portuguese ship, Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, put into Lisbon laden with peppercorns, porcelain, and other products from Cochin. A large vessel for the time, the merchantman displaced twelve hundred tons and carried three to four masts. The ship foundered during a storm in a northern channel of the Tagus River. Within hours the currents and the storm had torn it asunder and spread its precious cargo along the shores of the estuary. The Pepper Wreck tells the story of the ship’s excavation by crews working in cold water and fast currents between 1997 and 2000, four centuries after Nossa Senhora dos Mártires went down. Author Filipe Vieira de Castro discusses the nautical history...
From Labrador to Lake Ontario, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to French Acadia, and Huronia-Wendaki to Tadoussac, and from one chapter to the next, this scholarly collection of archaeological findings focuses on 16th century European goods found in Native contexts and within greater networks, forming a conceptual interplay of place and mobility. The four initial chapters are set around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence where Euro-Native contact was direct and the historical record is strongest. Contact networks radiated northward into Inuit settings where European iron nails, roofing tile fragments and ceramics are found. Glass beads are scarce on Inuit sites as well as on Basque sites on the Gulf’s ...
This title is a comprehensive survey of maritime archaeology as seen through the eyes of nearly fifty scholars at a time when maritime archaeology has established itself as a mature branch of archaeology.
The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the 'other Virgil' is made clear.
Hans Staden’s sixteenth-century account of shipwreck and captivity by the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil was an early modern bestseller. This retelling of the German sailor’s eyewitness account known as the True History shows both why it was so popular at the time and why it remains an important tool for understanding the opening of the Atlantic world. Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf carefully reconstruct Staden’s life as a German soldier, his two expeditions to the Americas, and his subsequent shipwreck, captivity, brush with cannibalism, escape, and return. The authors explore how these events and experiences were recreated in the text and images of the True History. Focusing on Stad...
Are anxiety or dread negative stages before freedom, a confrontation with humans' own mortality and finitude? Joana Serrado inaugurates anxiousness as a category of mystical knowledge in this innovative historical and philosophical study. Based on the life and mystical writings of Joana de Jesus, a Cistercian nun, intellectual disciple of Teresa of Avila, this study shows the cultural embeddedness of anxiousness: a feeling akin to the Portuguese term »saudade« (yearning, Sehnsucht). A mystical project that reshapes feminist principles of autonomy, agency and desire.
In 1585, at the height of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan, which was begun by Francis Xavier in 1549, Luis Frois, a long-time missionary in Japan, drafted the earliest systematic comparison of Western and Japanese cultures. This book constitutes the first critical English-language edition of the 1585 work, the original of which was discovered in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid after the Second World War. The book provides a translation of the text, which is not a continuous narrative, but rather more than 600 distichs or brief couplets on subjects such as gender, child rearing, religion, medicine, eating, horses, writing, ships and seafaring, architecture, and music and drama. In addition, the book includes a substantive introduction and other editorial material to explain the background and also to make comparisons with present-day Japanese life. Overall, the book represents an important primary source for understanding a particularly challenging period of history and its connection to contemporary Europe and Japan.
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In 1671, Dutch diplomat and scientist Nicolaes Witsen published a book that served, among other things, as an encyclopedia for the “shell-first” method of ship construction. In the centuries since, Witsen’s rather convoluted text has also become a valuable source for insights into historical shipbuilding methods and philosophies during the “Golden Age” of Dutch maritime trade. However, as André Wegener Sleeswyk’s foreword notes, Witsen’s work is difficult to access not only for its seventeenth-century Dutch language but also for the vagaries of its author’s presentation. Fortunately for scholars and students of nautical archaeology and shipbuilding, this important but chaoti...