Imagined Pasts, Identity, and Ethnicity in Religious Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-190
Author(s):  
Manoela Carpenedo
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Religious Change

This chapter explains why this community’s attempts at Christian reformation have taken them down to the path of Judaism. By exploring themes related to imagined pasts, identity, and ethnicity, it investigates the sociocultural logics and historical arguments that support the community’s connection with Judaism. For instance, the chapter analyzes how the community mobilizes a Jewish ethnic identity, as descendants of the Bnei Anussim—Iberian Sephardi Jews forced to convert to Christianity during the Inquisition, who migrated to Latin America in the seventeenth century. It is argued that the allusion to a hidden “Jewish” collective memory—either imagined or real—plays an important role in this community’s dramatic Judaizing Evangelical process. The chapter ends by problematizing the utilitarian reasons for this community’s identification with Judaism and Jewishness.

“How drie a Cinder this world is”: Dissociation of Sensibility Redux

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-186
Author(s):  
R. V. Young
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
General Movement ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Classic Essay ◽  
The Impact

Although T.S. Eliot's phrase “dissociation of sensibility,” applied to the changes in poetry during the seventeenth century, made a stir when he introduced it in the review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, it draws less attention now, and seems never to have been adequately explained. Since Eliot's claims are, in part, historical, it makes sense to consider the most historically significant changes occurring during the seventeenth century. It is during this period that the Reformation culminates and its effects become permanently established. Several recent studies of the Reformation by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Carlos M.N. Eire provide clues about how the religious and social cataclysm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have affected the poetic imagination. James Smith's classic essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers a way of analyzing the figurative language of seventeenth-century poetry in order to grasp the impact of the religious change. The investigations by Taylor, Gregory, and Eire into the dynamic of the reforming tendency, beginning in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Scotist and nominalist intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation, prove to be pertinent to Eliot's insight regarding seventeenth-century poetry. The growth of individualism, personal anxiety about religious choice, and materialism portend a general movement towards secularization and influence the way poets see the world. Dissociation of sensibility can thus be understood as a result of the effect of the religious and social dislocations of the Reformation in the realm of poetry.

Spiritualité, Spirituality, and Espiritualidad

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-525
Author(s):  
Rady Roldán-Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Colonial Latin America ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Academic Study

Abstract This article offers a corrective to the widely held idea that the modern concept of spirituality is traceable to the seventeenth century French notion of spiritualité. Instead, the argument is made that the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish terms spiritual and spiritualidad are earlier expressions of the modern concept of spirituality. The article opens with an examination of the place of spirituality in the academic study of religion and proceeds to a discussion of the premises of conceptual history and modern lexicography. In the closing section, the author analyses a plethora of lexicographical and other primary source material from the medieval to the early modern periods that demonstrate the usage of the terms spirital and espiritualidad in Spain as well as in colonial Latin America. Among the sources examined are Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611); Fernando de Valverde, Vida de Jesu Christo nuestro señor (Lima: Luis de Lyra, 1657); and Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid: En la imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1726–1739).

Color and Casta in the Andean Silver Industry

2020 ◽  
pp. 259-293
Author(s):  
Allison Margaret Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Colonial Latin America ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Refractory Ores ◽  
Shed Light

Amalgamation technologies allowed refiners throughout colonial Latin America to profitably extract silver from a wider variety of metals, including even the most refractory ores. These expanded processing capabilities meant that mineral classification and sorting became even more important, as metallurgists had to identify which silver metals to treat with traditional methods and which ones to refine by amalgamation. The vocabularies used to classify metals provide critical evidence of Indigenous contributions to silver refining in the seventeenth century. By tracing the incorporation and removal of Andean color and spatial vocabularies, this chapter shows how scientific writers and translators replaced Indigenous classifications of matter with a racialized language of metallic “castas” that included “pacos,” “mulatos,” and “negrillos.” The chapter concludes by suggesting how a reading of color signatures in khipus might shed light on Andean miners’ experiences in ways that traditional historiographic methods have not yet allowed.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-258
Author(s):  
Meredith McNeill Hale
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Satire ◽  
South Sea ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Battle Scenes ◽  
Intensive Investigation

This concluding chapter focuses on the question of circulation and impact: to what extent did De Hooghe’s satires travel beyond The Netherlands in the seventeenth century and what influence did they have on English political satire of the eighteenth century? The appearance of motifs from De Hooghe’s satires in mezzotints of c.1690 and prints on the subject of the South Sea Bubble of 1720 will be discussed as will instances in which De Hooghe’s satires were reissued in the eighteenth century. However, a comparison of this handful of examples with the liberal use of De Hooghe’s triumphal allegories and battle scenes in such distant locations as Latin America and Russia reveals one of the qualities that epitomizes political satire—its dramatic circumscription by temporal and geographical boundaries. Satire’s embeddedness in a specific political, historical, and cultural moment and its dependence upon text that often channels the idiosyncrasies of spoken language, render it difficult—often impossible without intensive investigation—to understand beyond its immediate context. This is as true for twenty-first-century satires as it was for those produced in the late seventeenth century.

The Long Seventeenth Century in Latin America

Itinerario ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Antonio Annino
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Time Scales ◽  
Linear Time ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Times ◽  
Conceptual Revolution ◽  
Fernand Braudel

During the last thirty years, the nature of historical chronology has changed drastically. Fernand Braudel was among the first to show that historical time is neither uniform nor linear, but rather multiple, irregular and socially determined. However, Braudel and his followers have merely carried to an extreme a conceptual revolution already initiated by Marc Bloch in the 1920s. In his studies on the Middle Ages, Bloch identified several time scales: the linear time of Christian history, the circular time of nature and liturgy, the times of the peasant, the townsman and the merchant, and so on. In short, historical time has been transformed in such a way as to prompt a new search for direction and order in historical studies. The new concept of different and irregular time scales forces us to continually redefine the duration of certain phenomena in order to understand them. Chronologies no longer have the same enduring character that provides a definite and reassuring order for the past, as positivism and historicism had claimed to do. In order to be useful at all, chronologies have to be diverse and indicate dates demarcating durations, if only because it is now a generally accepted fact that the time scales of collective mentalities are not the same as those of the economy, politics, or demography.

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