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- Convenors:
-
Kristina Soric
(The Ohio State University)
Lúcia Helena Costigan (The Ohio State University)
Fernando Morato (Ohio State University)
Jessica Rutherford (The Ohio State University )
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- Location:
- Multiusos 2, Edifício I&D, Piso 4
- Start time:
- 17 July, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel proposes to interrogate the dynamic between knowledge transfer and textual production set within Dutch, British, Portuguese, and Spanish interimperial rivalries through an analysis of the transatlantic circulation and translation of Iberian texts.
Long Abstract:
This panel proposes to interrogate the dynamic between knowledge transfer and textual production set within Dutch, British, Portuguese, and Spanish interimperial rivalries. As a point of departure, this panel begins by exploring the piracy of Jesuit Fernão Cardim's manuscripts on Brazil. Cardim's documents were compiled and translated by English cleric Samuel Purchas as "A Treatise of Brazil, written by a Portugall which had long lived there" in an edition of Purchas His Pilgrimes printed in London in 1625. The panel then goes on to discuss the propagandistic portrayal of Iberian cooperation in the expulsion of Bahia's Dutch invaders of 1624 through Lope de Vega's "El Brasil restituido" (1625). This presentation will go on to discuss the work's subsequent re-circulation via twentieth-century textual production under dictatorial rule in Spain. Dr. Costigan's work will then put Lope de Vega's episode on the Dutch invasion in Bahia and their subsequent expulsion into dialogue with primary texts produced by Portuguese writers such as Father Bartolomeu Guerreiro (1625) and Juan Antonio Correa (1654-1704). Finally, transitioning into the eighteenth century, the symbolic crossing of the Atlantic is contextualized through poems by a Brazilian "mulato", Manuel Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga, describing his voyage from Portugal to Brazil on the last year of Marquis de Pombal's administration and demonstrating how these poems engage with Dutch allegorical images.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jessica Rutherford (The Ohio State University )
Paper short abstract:
This presentation examines knowledge transfer and textual production within the Iberian Atlantic through an exploration of the piracy of Jesuit Fernão Cardim’s manuscripts on Brazil by English Corsair Frances Cooke.
Paper long abstract:
At the turn of the seventeenth century, European missionaries and traveling mercantilists were buzzing with news of the Americas: telling tales of uncharted territories full of potential products from exotic worlds and never-before-seen lands and peoples. Whether a settlement was religious in scope or economic in design—or, both, as in the case of Jesuit missionary settlements—understanding the people, as well as native flora and fauna, and their regional uses across the globe was fundamental to the vitality of imperial expansion. Given the nature of the Jesuits' enterprise, their letters and natural histories were filled with information on local raw materials, goods, medicines, and culture. Jesuits produced a high volume of ethnographic narratives that detailed their initial encounters with native groups throughout the globe. The information collected by Jesuit missionaries was not only important to the religious order as well as the Crown/imperial state but was also coveted on the international market by competing European imperial powers. On March 5th, 1583, the Portuguese Jesuit Father Fernão Cardim departed for Brazil aboard the Chagas de São Francisco as the secretary accompanying Visitador Father Cristóvão de Gouveia. Cardim's journey took him along the coast of Brazil through Bahia, Ilhéus, Porto Seguro, Pernambuco, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and São Vicente—the Jesuit missionary settlement just southeast of what is now São Paulo—within the seven-year span of 1583 to 1590. During this time Cardim compiled a compendium of information now known as the Tratados da Terra e Gente do Brasil.
Lúcia Helena Costigan (The Ohio State University)
Paper short abstract:
Departing from Kristina Soric’s analysis of Lope de Vega’s El Brasil restituido (1625), and José María Viqueira Barrero’s edition of the text (1950), my paper focuses on opposing views of Iberian interimperial cooperation related to the Dutch invasion of Bahia in 1624, and their expulsion in 1625.
Paper long abstract:
Based on analysis of Bartolomeu Guerreiro's Jornada dos vassalos de Portugal pera se recuperar a Cidade de Salvador, na Bahia de Todos os Santos (1625), and of Antonio Vieira's Carta Annua (1625), two major texts by Portuguese writers of the 17th-century, this paper shows that, unlike the Spanish propagandistic efforts by writers such as Lope de Vega and Viqueira Barrero to portray the expulsion of the Dutch from Bahia in 1625 as an interimperial cooperation of Spaniards and Portuguese subjects, the primary texts by and Vieira contradict the views and motives behind the imperial conflcts involving Iberian and Dutch subjects in the 17th-century Atlantic World. One of the major differences in the interpretation of the Spanish and Portuguese writers has to do with the role of New Christians and Sephardic Jews in the imperial conflict. To substantiate my analysis, I take advantage of critical historical interpretations by Charles Boxer, Stuart Schwartz, and other twentieth-century scholars whose views of the motives behind the Dutch invasion of Bahia in 1624, and their subsequent expulsion from northern Brazil in 1625, and how they differ substantially from those depicted in Lope de Vega's El Brasil restituido (1625), and in Viqueira Barreiro's El lusitanismo de Lope de Vega…(1950).
Kristina Soric (The Ohio State University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is analyzes the propagandistic portrayal of Iberian cooperation in the expulsion of Bahia's Dutch invaders of 1624 through Lope de Vega's El Brasil restituido (1625), along with the work's subsequent re-circulation via twentieth-century textual production under dictatorial rule in Spain.
Paper long abstract:
Among the most noteworthy aspects of Lope de Vega's El Brasil restituido is the persistent attention the iconic Spanish dramatist dedicates to the role of Luso-Hispanic cooperation under the Spanish crown against Bahia's Dutch invaders in 1624. In one of the few existing versions of the play, the 1950 edition of Galician scholar José María Viqueira Barreiro repeatedly insists upon the work's historical accuracy in transmitting the details of this event, including the sentiment of Iberian brotherhood between the Portuguese and Spanish against both the Calvinist invaders and Bahia's supposedly treacherous New Christians, alleged conspirators in their operation. Upon further scrutiny of the events of Bahia's recovery according to modern historians and first-hand accounts of the time period, however, the circumstances of this episode call for a reconsideration of both Lope's play and the historical context in which it takes place. Rather than an accurate reflection of the attitudes and events of the time period as Viquiera Barreiro asserts, El Brasil restituido serves as a propagandistic work which seeks to reconcile deteriorating Luso-Hispanic relations within the Iberian Union at the expense of the "heretic" enemies of the empire. Such a reading also sheds light on its re-circulation via Viqueira Barreiro's 1950 edition as a similar attempt at promoting Iberist sentiment, this time under the dictatorial rule of the Estado Novo and the Franco regime.
Fernando Morato (Ohio State University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes poems written by Brazilian mulato Neoclassic poet Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga, during his Atlantic voyage to Brazil after studying at Coimbra University in 1777. The difference between images, poetic forms, and genre are suggestive of the political place in which Silva Alvarenga is inscribing both himself and the colonial intellectual.
Paper long abstract:
The year of 1777 witnessed a huge political change, the fall of the marquis of Pombal, and a relatively smaller event, the return of the Brazilian mulato poet Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga to his homeland. Silva Alvarenga had graduated from Coimbra University the previous year and had published four poems since his arriving into Portugal, a great achievement at that time for a beginner, so the decision of leaving the country was not an obvious one from the point of view of a promising literary career. Perhaps his involvement with Pombal’s politics is a key to understanding his reasons. The poems he wrote during his voyage, a series of satiric comments on the precariousness of the ship, are interesting because they contrast the poetic imagery of Neoclassical culture used in “O Templo de Netuno”, the idealized portrait of the same trip. In this way, “O Templo de Netuno” could be read as the intellectual proposal to the New World, and it’s interesting how the images used by Silva Alvarenga can be traced to the Dutch books which circulated in Portugal, both in this particular poem as well as in the previous ones. Also, the political allegory created in “O Templo de Netuno” and after developed in “A Gruta Americana” indicates a tendency to blend Pombal’s project with the new course represented by the “Viradeira”. The apparent innocent poetic fantasias, until now, read as nationalistic insights from a pre-romantic poet are, indeed, political statements about the place of Brazil and Portugal in the symbolic world of late Eighteenth Century.
Gisele Conceição (University of Porto) Amélia Polónia (University of Porto - Faculty of Arts)
Paper short abstract:
Departing from the theoretical approach and the methodology of the History of Sciences, this paper analyzes information about the nature based on historical sources about the 18th century's Brazil. Our objective is to understand how were the Brazilian fauna and flora observed, described, cataloged and inserted inside the Enlightenment's paradigm.
Paper long abstract:
If during the early days of Portuguese colonization of Brazil the interest of travelers, missionaries and plantation owners was for the sake of survival, the territory's recognition, at the eighteenth century under the influence of the Enlightenment their perception became a way to assist the crown in the investigation of the potential of overseas territories in order to improve an organized and systematic exploitation. A carefully examination made over the historical sources about the Brazil's natural environment produced by Europeans during this period can help us to a better understanding the processes of recognition of the nature's potential which could be useful for both economy and science. Thus, historical sources containing descriptions and observations of nature are fundamental resources to relevant empirical studies within the field of Colonial History and History of Science. That includes pertinent historical aspects to the study of the Portuguese Enlightenment, circulation of knowledge in the Portuguese empire and the importance of colony's biodiversity and natural heritage to the strategic issues of imperial expansion and colonization. We intend in this paper to analyze such historical sources with an interdisciplinary approach, deriving from the theoretical and methodological approach of the History of Science. Therefore, this paper aims to understand how were the Brazilian fauna and flora observed, described, cataloged and inserted inside the Enlightenment's paradigm. It also seeks to discuss how such observations may have influenced the construction of knowledge about the natural world.
Olayinka Akanle (University of Ibadan)
Paper short abstract:
The Yoruba people are a major ethnic group in Nigeria. They had one of the most profound first early contacts with both the European explorers and colonisers with definitive implications for their language as major element of culture and identity. This can be seen in important words, concepts and even names depicting history, roles, knowledge, acceptance and status in colonial and post-colonial society as engagements and opposites of precolonial experiences. Conceptual and theoretical frameworks of diffusion and acculturation were adopted for this study to demonstrate and explain the impacts and intensity of the culture contacts for language and knowledge found among the people. This work profiled such words, sayings, concepts and names in yoruba language and knowledge creation and examined their interpretive understanding and implications as they inform actions, interactions and knowledge within the local existences for global narratives, implications and revisitation. This paper will bring important findings to the conference in empirical manner.
Paper long abstract:
The debate around history of knowledge, transfer and production relative to cultural exchanges and contacts has never been put to rest. There continues to be a need to interrogate the history, ramifications and trajectories of knowledge as cultures meet in space and over time. this paper thus contributes to knowledge in this direction by examining the history, content, nature and usage of words and concepts, including names, among the Yoruba people of South-western Nigeria. The Yoruba people are among the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria and West Africa with citizens spread across the world. The group also has a history of precolonial and colonial contacts which have resonated till date. This is why this study has chosen the group coupled with the fact that the group was/is among those most opened with cultural exchanges and among those with linguistics elements most dynamic and most magnanimous to demonstrate the complexity and reality of the issues under examination. This study used the Yoruba case study to empirically investigate the profoundity and profoundness of knowledge history, production, transfer, usage and continuation within local specificities and and global complexities. Data Collection was through content analysis and oral interviews with Yoruba People to capture the dynamics and trajectories of the problematic. important findings were made through rigorous processes and these will be shared at the conference.