Southern Italy and the New World in the Age of Encounters

Cannibal Basques

Exchanges The Interdisciplinary Research Journal ◽

10.31273/eirj.v7i2.408 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 169-181

Author(s):

Matteo Leta

Keyword(s):

New World ◽

Southern Italy ◽

Religious Controversy ◽

Capitalistic System ◽

Ethnographic Analysis

This article will show the importance of cannibalism in the description of the sabbath among the Basques, in the Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, written by Pierre De Lancre. The Basques were often linked to magic and demons; however, this work constitutes surely the most completed document about such an association. In the Tableau there is a sort of ethnographic analysis of the Basques, who started to be compared to the savages of the New World. Witchcraft and cannibalism are the evidence of a demonic complot, aimed at fighting Christianity and, in some way, the central features of mankind. At any rate, such religious controversy is used also in a totally laical perspective: De Lancre is the representative of the King and his role consists in the affirmation of the French power throughout the region. The purpose of such stereotypes, applied also to other marginalized peoples in Renaissance Europe (such as the inhabitants of Southern Italy portrayed by the Jesuits missionaries), justifies implicitly the necessity to repress and integrate them within the civilization and the forthcoming capitalistic system.

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‘Adapt Yourselves to the People's Capabilities’: Missionary Strategies, Methods and Impact in the Kingdom of Naples, 1600–1800

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History ◽

10.1017/s0022046900013014 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 45 (2) ◽

pp. 269-296 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

David Gentilcore

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

New World ◽

Southern Italy ◽

Religious Life ◽

Crucial Aspect ◽

Council Of Trent ◽

Religious Orders ◽

Kingdom Of Naples ◽

European Periphery

At a time when European missionaries were active in the New World to capture the souls of the ‘heathen’ for Catholicism, their confrères were conducting missions throughout Europe itself. For more than two centuries these missions – variously known as internal, parish or popular – were a crucial aspect of religious life, with numerous religious orders and congregations seeking to weave a fabric of evangelisation and catechetical instruction in areas of Europe that were nominally Catholic but were in many ways cut off from orthodox Tridentine Catholicism. This was particularly so in isolated areas on the European periphery. Southern Italy is a case in point. The persistent absence of an efficient parish structure and the dominance of a rather worldly collegiate clergy in the Kingdom of Naples left a large gap in organised religious life in the years following the end of the Council of Trent (1563), a gap that the missions attempted to fill. The mobilisation of preachers, confessors and instructors was vast, concentrated and unceasing. Such is the significance of the missions that they have been identified as the ‘most characteristic and important’ phenomenon of Italian religious history in the seventeenth century. One way to examine their scale and impact would be to map the areas missionised by the various congregations. But this serial approach would tell us very little, other than the fact that all of the towns and villages were visited, most of them repeatedly, over the centuries. Moreover, the varying quality of the surviving records would permit only partial results.

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