Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World

Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World PDF

Author: Francois Soyer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-03-27

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 9004395601

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In Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred, François Soyer offers the first detailed historical analysis of antisemitic conspiracy theories in Spain, Portugal and their overseas colonies between 1450 and 1750.

A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome

A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome PDF

Author: Matthew Coneys Wainwright

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 9004443495

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An examination of groups and individuals in Rome who were not Roman Catholic, or not born so. It demonstrates how other religions had a lasting impact on early modern Catholic institutions in Rome.

Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews

Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews PDF

Author: Emily Michelson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-02-27

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0691233411

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A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscape Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism. Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly forced preaching in Rome. As the Catholic Church began to embark on worldwide missions, sermons to Jews offered a unique opportunity to define and defend its new triumphalist, global outlook. They became a point of prestige in Rome. The city’s most important organizations invested in maintaining these spectacles, and foreign tourists eagerly attended them. The title of “Preacher to the Jews” could make a man’s career. The presence of Christian spectators, Roman and foreign, was integral to these sermons, and preachers played to the gallery. Conversionary sermons also provided an intellectual veneer to mask ongoing anti-Jewish aggressions. In response, Jews mounted a campaign of resistance, using any means available. Examining the history and content of sermons to Jews over two and a half centuries, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews argues that conversionary preaching to Jews played a fundamental role in forming early modern Catholic identity.

Jewish Literatures in Spanish and Portuguese

Jewish Literatures in Spanish and Portuguese PDF

Author: Ruth Fine

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-10-24

Total Pages: 686

ISBN-13: 3110563797

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This volume offers a thorough introduction to Jewish world literatures in Spanish and Portuguese, which not only addresses the coexistence of cultures, but also the functions of a literary and linguistic space of negotiation in this context. From the Middle Ages to present day, the compendium explores the main Jewish chapters within Spanish- and Portuguese-language world literature, whether from Europe, Latin America, or other parts of the world. No comprehensive survey of this area has been undertaken so far. Yet only a broad focus of this kind can show how diasporic Jewish literatures have been (and are ) – while closely tied to their own traditions – deeply intertwined with local and global literary developments; and how the aesthetic praxis they introduced played a decisive, formative role in the history of literature. With this epistemic claim, the volume aims at steering clear of isolationist approaches to Jewish literatures.

Strangers Within

Strangers Within PDF

Author: Francisco Bethencourt

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 0691256802

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A comprehensive study of the New Christian elite of Jewish origin—prominent traders, merchants, bankers and men of letters—between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries In Strangers Within, Francisco Bethencourt provides the first comprehensive history of New Christians, the descendants of Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in late medieval Spain and Portugal. Bethencourt estimates that there were around 260,000 New Christians by 1500—more than half of Iberia’s urban population. The majority stayed in Iberia but a significant number moved throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, coastal Asia and the New World. They established Sephardic communities in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. Bethencourt focuses on the elite of bankers, financiers and merchants from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and the crucial role of this group in global trade and financial services. He analyses their impact on religion (for example, Teresa de Ávila), legal and political thought (Las Casas), science (Amatus Lusitanus), philosophy (Spinoza) and literature (Enríquez Gomez). Drawing on groundbreaking research in eighteen archives and library manuscript departments in six different countries, Bethencourt argues that the liminal position in which the New Christians found themselves explains their rise, economic prowess and cultural innovation. The New Christians created the first coherent legal case against the discrimination of a minority singled out for systematic judicial inquiry. Cumulative inquisitorial prosecution, coupled with structural changes in international trade, led to their decline and disappearance as a recognizable ethnicity by the mid-eighteenth century. Strangers Within tells an epic story of persecution, resistance and the making of Iberia through the oppression of one of the most powerful minorities in world history. Packed with genealogical information about families, their intercontinental networks, their power and their suffering, it is a landmark study.

Lost in Translation, Found in Transliteration

Lost in Translation, Found in Transliteration PDF

Author: Alex Kerner

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 9004367055

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In Lost in Translation, Found in Transliteration, Alex Kerner examines communal usage of languages and censorship policies on printed materials, proposing to look at London’s Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ congregation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a linguistic community.

Knowledge and the Early Modern City

Knowledge and the Early Modern City PDF

Author: Bert De Munck

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0429808437

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Knowledge and the Early Modern City uses case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to examine the relationships between knowledge and the city and how these changed in a period when the nature and conception of both was drastically transformed. Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations, impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks in which human and non-human elements continually interact and acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices, shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of cities on knowledge production and innovation. Providing the ideal starting point for those seeking to understand the role of urban institutions, actors and spaces in the production of knowledge and the development of the so-called ‘modern’ knowledge society, this is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern history and knowledge.

Mercenaries of Knowledge

Mercenaries of Knowledge PDF

Author: Fabien Montcher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1009340476

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From Lisbon to Rome via the Gulf of Guinea and the sugar mills of northern Brazil, this book explores the strategies and practices that displaced scholars cultivated to navigate the murky waters of late Renaissance politics. By tracing the life of the Portuguese jurist-scholar Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) across diverse social, cultural, and pol-itical spaces, Fabien Montcher reveals a world of religious conflicts and imperial rivalries. Here, European agents developed the practice of 'bibliopolitics'– using local and international systems for buying and selling books and manuscripts to foster political communication and debate, and ultimately to negotiate their survival. Bibliopolitics fostered the advent of a generation of 'mercenaries of knowledge' whose stories constitute a key part of seventeenth-century social and cultural history. This book also demonstrates their crucial role in creating an inter-national and dynamic Republic of Letters with others who helped shape early modern intellectual and political worlds.