Krass, U. (2023). The Portuguese Restoration of 1640 and Its Global Visualization: Political Iconography and Transcultural Negotiation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 508 pp.

Abstract

The Portuguese Restoration of 1640 ended the dynastic union of Portugal and Spain. This book pioneers in reconstructing the global image discourse related to the event by bringing together visualizations from three decades and four continents. These include paintings, engravings, a statue, coins, emblems, miniatures, a miraculous crosier and other regalia, buildings, textiles, a castrum doloris, drawings, and ivory statues. Situated within the academic field of visual studies, the book interrogates the role of images and depictions before, during, and after the overthrow and how they functioned within the intercontinental communication processes in the Portuguese Empire. The results challenge the conventional notion of center and periphery and reveal unforeseen entanglements as well as an unexpected agency of imagery from the remotest regions under Portuguese control. The book breaks new ground in linking the field of early modern political iconography with transcultural art history and visual studies.

Source

CHSC library reference:: 25-6-20

Bethencourt, F. (2024). Strangers Within: The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite. Oxford: Princeton University Press. 602 pp.

Abstract

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.

Fonte

CHSC library reference: 25-6-23

Subrahmanyam, S. (2024). Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640. University of Texas Press.

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, Across the Green Sea looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India; the Red Sea and Mecca; the Persian Gulf; East Africa; and Kerala. Sanjay Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China’s Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Subrahmanyam himself.

Source

CHSC library reference: 25-6-15

Abstract

By establishing the chronological framework between the First Social Congress (1865) and the First Congress of Socialist Workers of Portugal (1877), João Lázaro successfully identifies the various ruptures and mobilizations within workers’ organizations, their impact on the public sphere, and examines the correspondence between Portugal, Karl Marx, and Engels. The author develops a compelling thesis about the emergence of an internationalist web in Portugal, which poses transnational challenges to socialists. As Professor Fátima Sá emphasizes in the preface: “The book presented here is one that was greatly needed. It was needed by historians working on the 19th century, those studying social movements, and, naturally, those focusing on the labor movement. It was also needed by the so-called ‘general reader,’ or rather, the vast universe of readers outside academia who are interested in the discipline of history in general and in these specific topics in particular, and who are often ignored with Olympian indifference by historians.”

Source

CHSC library reference: 25-6-10

SAMPAYO, Luiz Teixeira de (2001). Compilação de elementos para o estudo da questão de Olivença (Perda desta Praça e Diligências para a Reaver). [S.l.]: Grupo dos Amigos de Olivença. 384 pp.

Abstract

This work by Luiz Teixeira de Sampayo (researcher, Ambassador, and Secretary-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) offers a concise yet thoroughly documented account of the efforts undertaken by Portuguese authorities, following the Congress of Vienna, to reclaim possession of the town of Olivença and its surrounding territories, ceded to Spain by the treaty of June 6, 1801. Introduction by Ambassador José Calvet de Magalhães. Documentary transcription, notes, summaries, bibliography, and indexes by Mário Rodrigues. Afterword by Humberto Nuno de Oliveira.

Source

CHSC library reference: 25-6-9

Fracchia, C. (2019). ‘Black But Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700. Oxford University Press. 232 pp.

Abstract

‘Black but Human’ is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb ‘Black but Human’ is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves.

The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Portugal. The ‘Black but Human’ topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a ‘black nation’ forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings and sketches for costume books.

Source

CHSC library reference: 25-6-5

Rowe, E. K. (2019). Black saints in early modern global Catholicism. Cambridge University Press. 293 pp.

Abstract

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Spanish and Portuguese monarchs launched global campaigns for territory and trade. This process spurred two efforts that reshaped the world: missions to spread Christianity to the four corners of the globe, and the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. These efforts joined in unexpected ways to give rise to black saints. Erin Kathleen Rowe presents the untold story of how black saints – and the slaves who venerated them – transformed the early modern church. By exploring race, the Atlantic slave trade, and global Christianity, she provides new ways of thinking about blackness, holiness, and cultural authority. Rowe transforms our understanding of global devotional patterns and their effects on early modern societies by looking at previously unstudied sculptures and paintings of black saints, examining the impact of black lay communities, and analysing controversies unfolding in the church about race, moral potential, enslavement, and salvation.

Source

CHSC library reference: 25-6-8

Rodrigues, A., & Maia, M. (Org.)(2023). Sacerdotisas voduns e rainhas do Rosário: Mulheres africanas e Inquisição em Minas Gerais (século XVIII). Chão Editora.191 pp.

Abstract

Sacerdotisas voduns e rainhas do Rosário: mulheres africanas e Inquisição em Minas Gerais (século xviii) reúne transcrições de documentos inéditos sobre a vida e as crenças de mulheres africanas perseguidas no Brasil por forças militares e pela Inquisição. Essas mulheres pertenciam a grupos étnicos que habitavam a região da África ocidental chamada pelos portugueses de Costa da Mina. Escravizadas e trazidas para o Brasil, algumas se tornaram lideranças de comunidades negras na posição de sacerdotisas voduns (vodúnsis), ao mesmo tempo que exerciam cargos de juízas e rainhas da irmandade católica de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos — a principal confraria negra mineira. Os manuscritos dos processos contra as sacerdotisas foram localizados em Portugal no Arquivo da Torre do Tombo, entre os códices do Tribunal da Inquisição de Lisboa. O primeiro, de 1747, descreve um complexo culto em Paracatu (mg) dedicado ao “Deus da Terra de Courá”. O segundo e o terceiro referem-se a Ângela Gomes, “mestra” de práticas rituais africanas na comarca de Ouro Preto, coroada como rainha do Rosário. O quarto, datado de 1759, oferece detalhes sobre as práticas de Teresa Rodrigues e Manoel mina na comarca de Sabará. Sacerdotisas voduns e rainhas do Rosário inclui também papéis preservados nos arquivos históricos de Minas Gerais. Embora registrados por agentes do Império português, os depoimentos reproduzidos nos processos desvelam a multiplicidade de vozes e das trajetórias de vida das mulheres africanas, evidenciando a ideologia e a violência do racismo religioso.

Source

CHSC library reference: 25-6-4

Davies, O. (Ed.). (2023). The Oxford History of Witchcraft and Magic. Oxford University Press. 325 pp.

Abstract

This history provides a readable and fresh approach to the extensive and complex story of witchcraft and magic. Telling the story from the dawn of writing in the ancient world to the globally successful Harry Potter films, the authors explore a wide range of magical beliefs and practices, the rise of the witch trials, and the depiction of the Devil-worshipping witch. The book also focuses on the more recent history of witchcraft and magic, from the Enlightenment to the present, exploring the rise of modern magic, the anthropology of magic around the globe, and finally the cinematic portrayal of witches and magicians, from The Wizard of Oz to Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Source

CHSC library reference: 25-6-3

Cruz, B. L.; BRÁS, D. M. (2024). Sustentabilidade: um desafio coletivo. Lisboa : Tinta da China. 232 pp.

Abstract

The Portuguese business fabric, comprised mainly of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), directly employs around 80% of the workforce in Portugal. Due to the various pressures it faces, this sector must become the key driver of cooperation and mutual support to achieve more sustainable development. A more prosperous country, capable of creating greater wealth, ensuring equity, and promoting a new model of economic, social, and environmental development that guarantees a healthy future for upcoming generations, can only be realized through a collective effort. This includes governments, the scientific community, businesses, citizens, civil society movements, and investors. Businesses are called upon to position themselves to ensure greater market adaptability, increased responsibility, competitiveness, and a commitment to serving their stakeholders — shareholders, customers, employees, consumers, and the communities in which they operate. These are some of the foundational elements of an ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Strategy for SMEs, which this publication seeks to present.

Source

CHSC library reference: 25-6-2