Confraternities of Black Brotherhoods in the Atlantic: Freedom and Interest groups of ‘men,’ ‘women’ and ‘young’ people, 1684-1686 

African involvement in the abolition of slavery is often confined to sporadic cases, namely those of ‘shipboard revolts’, ‘maroon communities’, and ‘household revolts’. None of these studies have examined the international-scale legal liberation headed by Mendonça* in the Vatican, 6 March 1684. The court case presented by Mendonça on the 1 abolition of slavery not only included Black Africans, but also other constituencies such as New Christians, Native Americans and the voices of the Africans from different confraternities, including constituencies of ‘men’, ‘women’ and ‘young people’ within the confraternities themselves. This initiative in the Atlantic, led by Africans, has never been researched before. Mendonça questioned the institution of the Atlantic slavery, using four core principles to bolster his argument: Human, Natural, Divine, and Civil Laws. I argue that the relationship between African abolition discourse, the Inquisition of the New Christians, Native Brazilians and their common search for liberty, and how the denial of religious freedom was implicated with the denial of enslaved Africans’ humanity, is a nexus of dialogues that have not been considered together in the context of the Atlantic. The contribution made by Lusophone Africans to the debate on the abolition of the Atlantic slavery and to world history has been, and continues to be, neglected.

*Lourenço de Silva Mendonça (1626-1750), Angolan Prince of Mbundu people.
See https://mmppf.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/lourenco-da-silva-mendonca-the-first-anti-slavery-activist/. (Note of the Organizer, JS)

Dr. José Lingna Nafafé
Senior Lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies and co-Director of Teaching for Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University of Bristol.
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies 
Faculty of Arts 
17 Woodland Road 
University of Bristol
Bristol BS8 1TE 
Tel: +44 (0) 117 928 7433 
Email: jose.lingnanafafe@bristol.ac.uk 
www.bristol.ac.uk/Hispanic

Short Bio: José Lingna Nafafé is Senior Lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies and co-Director of Teaching for Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Dr Lingna Nafafé’s academic interests embrace a number of inter-related areas, linked by the overarching themes of: Black Atlantic abolitionist movement in the 17th Century; Lusophone Atlantic African diaspora, seventeenth and eighteenth century African, Portuguese and Brazilian history; slavery and wage-labour, 1792-1850; race, religion and ethnicity; Luso-African migrants’ culture and integration in the Northern (England) and Southern Europe (Portugal and Spain); ‘Europe in Africa’ and ‘Africa in Europe’; and the relationship between postcolonial theory and the Lusophone Atlantic. In 2016, he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to undertake archival research for the project “Freedom and Lusophone African Diaspora in the Atlantic”. Dr Lingna Nafafé is Co-Investigator for a recently-awarded ERC Advance Grant project with Prof. Julia O’Connell Davidson, the Principal Investigator, University of Bristol, to carry out five years of research in five countries: UK, Spain, Brazil, France and Italy, on “Modern Marronage? The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World”. He leads the project’s Brazil strand, conducting archival research on Quilombo dos Palmares (Alagoas), one of the earliest, largest and most successful Maroon communities in the seventeenth century, and on migrant settlement in São Paulo, Brazil. Dr Lingna Nafafé is currently completing his second monograph, with the title “Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the 17th Century”, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022 - part of the Studies on the African Diaspora series and a feature in the Cambridge lists in Atlantic history, Latin American history, African history, and the history of slavery. The monograph is a ground-breaking contribution to scholarship which is based on rare, original documents and in-depth studies from more than thirty archives and libraries in six countries. This innovative book provides substantial new evidence of the transnational and highly-organised African abolitionist movement (including oppressed peoples of the Atlantic world, such as New Christians and Native Americans) during a crucial period in global history. He is currently writing a third monograph: Beyond Wilberforce’s Experiment in Abolitionism: Unfree Labour and the Market.

 

‘Condorcet’s & ‘Lament’ and Gouges’s ‘Exercise Books’ - Abolitionist Arguments During the French Revolution 

Condorcet´s writings on slavery are challenging for the modern reader. On the one hand, they contain all the ideals and sentiment that we would expect from a philosopher whose love of humanity manifested itself in all his endeavours. On the other, many of the arguments put forward strike us as morally unacceptable. Condorcet wanted abolition, but he wanted it to happen slowly, so that slavery would not disappear for seventy years after the program he wanted to put in place.

Olympe de Gouges expressed impatience at the philosophers who conducted their revolutions in ‘exercise books’. She argued that slavery should be ended immediately, because the conditions of enslaved life were intolerable. However, she responded harshly to the Haitian revolution, condemning the violence of Black men and women, and telling them they ought to have waited for the French revolutionary government to free them legally. Contrasting these two positions, I will ask whether what we find objectionable in Condorcet’s call for patience, and Gouges’s apparent change of heart after the Haitian revolution signalled a comparable lack of genuine desire to end slavery, and whether we should be suspicious of any abolitionist discourse from that period.

Sandrine Bergès
Department of Philosophy
Bilkent University
sandrineberges@gmail.com

Short Bio: Sandrine Bergès is associate professor in philosophy at Bilkent University in Ankara. Herpublications include: Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy (with Eric Schliesser), The Wollstonecraftian Mind (with Eileen Hunt Botting and Alan Coffee), Women and Autonomy (with Alberto Siani)The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (with Alan Coffee) A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics and The Routledge Companion to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

 

A mestizo priest and sodomite burned by the Goa Inquisition: an analysis of the sentence of Bernardo Serrão (1612)

This communication analyses the sentencing of the priest Bernardo Serrão, condemned to burn at the stake by the Tribunal of the Inquisition of Goa, in 1612, for the crime of sodomy. His conviction came during a phase of intense repression against the sodomites in the early years of the 17th century, when it was believed that the city of Goa was “feita uma Sodoma”. The priest Serrão, who was a mestizo, experienced a great deal of conflict with his confrères. He was considered by the inquisitors to be of “má natureza e natural inclinação” to “pecado nefando”, with no possibility of amendment. From his trail, a scenario emerges that exposes an extremely negative conception of mestizos and the native population in general by the inquisitorial officials, which suggests that, from this perspective, the condemnable behaviour of the priest was not related to his mestizo origin, but intrinsic to it. We seek to place his sentence in a broader context, in which disputes regarding ecclesiastical benefits, the pejorative view of different peoples overseas and the atmosphere of deep religious intolerance were often associated with errors of faith, and moral and sexual deviation.

Verónica Gomes, U.F.F., Rio de Janeiro

Short Bio: Veronica de Jesus Gomes is Ph.D. in Modern History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (2019). Her Master’s Degree in Modern History is also from the UFF (2010), where she defended the dissertation “Vício dos Clérigos: Sodomy in the web of the Lisbon Holy Office”. The investigation contributed to the historical grounding for the vote of a minister of the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court in favour of the mandatory recognition of a legitimate family entity regarding the stable union between homosexuals, whose rights and duties must be the same as those granted to heterosexual couples in stable relationships. She published the book “Unspeakable Acts: Ecclesiastics in the web of the Inquisition” (Prismas/2015). She has also participated in congresses in Brazil and abroad, and published articles on the Church’s “sodomites”, condemned by the Portuguese Inquisition.

 

Women and Trade in Colonial Luanda

Women and Trade in Colonial Luanda, Angola (19th century)

Women were important actors in port cities throughout the Atlantic World. In Luanda, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola, women made the majority of the population through most of the nineteenth century. They were the main producers of the foodstuffs in the gardens and arimos (farms); they controlled the retail trade in the streets and markets; and were responsible for performing most of the domestic services. Some women known as Donas became prominent merchants engaging in slave trading and, after abolition, in the commerce of tropical commodities such as cotton, coffee, ivory and wax. Drawing upon the documentation of the Câmara Municipal (Municipal Council) and the gazette Boletim Oficial de Angola this presentation explores the participation of free and enslaved women in trade in Luanda. This paper suggests that social status and trans-Atlantic networks were crucial in the advancement of women’s career in trade.

Vanessa Oliveira, Royal Military Academy, Toronto, Canada

 

A Transatlantic Approach to Christ Child Cults. Sensorial Responses, Memorial Discourses, and Ritual Practices

The Jesus Child, whether in the form of mental prayer, visions, two-dimensional images or dolls, has had an important and continuous presence in religious life from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary period. However, the practices associated with it, the sensory responses and the implications of the different formats have changed over the centuries. The physical or mental support, the identity belonging and the institutional precepts have obviously varied the relationship that the subject established with the Jesus Child.
In this paper, we are going to take a fresh look at this phenomenon, with a "long durée" perspective, from the practices of Medieval Europe to the American colonial period. We will try, first of all, to draw bridges between the different eras, emphasising the continuities between the periods before and after the Tridentine reform. Secondly, we will try to leave behind two principles that still weigh heavily on the study of this type of cult: the belonging to a considered "popular culture”, only associated to the affections and without attributes of theological reflection; and the essentialist look that, in the religious woman-child relationship, sees an expression of frustrated motherhood. Thirdly, we we are going to try to give this type of worship the complexity it deserves: halfway between private and community devotion, and with a specific weight of material and theological message.
We will present two interesting case studies: the different practices associated with the Infant Jesus of Apt (South of France), in the different environments in which it was documented from the 14th to the 18th century. These are the private devotion of a married couple, a community of lay-religious, a Franciscan convent, and a community of friars of the oratory. Secondly, there are the different considerations and practices that the Dominican tertiary Rosa de Lima carried out with the Infant Jesus. She confessed to vivid experiences with this figure: he appeared in her book and when she embroidered. He spoke to her and touched her through paintings and statues. It was a devotion that became a mystical experience, because she lived through a statue of the Christ Child which provided one of the most critical episodes of her life: a spiritual marriage with Christ.

With this, we intend to fix our gaze on three main aspects. The first is the sensorial responses and theological reflections that underly the different cults. The second is the relations of memory and legitimisation that are articulated in each case. Finally, there are the similarities and differences between the pre- and post-Tridentine cults.

Short Bio: Jimena Castro Godoy. Postdoctoral Researcher at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago, Chile), where she is working on the project “La imaginación visionaria en la Colonia”, supported by Fondecyt (ANID) under Grant number 3180064. In this investigation, she is studying the visionary writings of colonial religious women in the context that these experiences occurred and were described. She has a PhD in Latin American Studies from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. 

Short Bio: Sergi Sancho Fibla. Sergi Sancho Fibla has been a researcher at UCLouvain (Belgium) since 2020, when he won a "Fonds Spéciales de la Recherche" contract for his project "Transferring Knowledge in the Nunnery". He works on female spirituality of the Late Middle Ages: reading and writing practices, mysticism, and devotion. Sergi completed his doctoral thesis at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His dissertation focused on the study of the writing and spiritual practices of a medieval mystic writer, Marguerite d’Oingt (Escribir y meditar, Siruela 2018). He later worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Aix-Marseille (2016-2018) and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2018-2019).

 

Unsolved Issues in Early Modern Portuguese Philosophy

I shall be dealing with a period of 230 years: from the foundation of the Coimbra College of Arts (1542) to the reformation of Coimbra University by the Marquis of Pombal (1772), the justification for which will be duly explained. Instead of giving a panorama of the concluded subject matters of research, I shall focus my presentation on issues still to be answered by applied research. Instead of dwelling on historiography, the detective story perspective will be adopted: “Agatha Christie facing the Mystery in the Golden Street'' could also be the title of my paper. Some protagonists, players, trends, books, and polemics will be tackled, such as: Latin, Italian and Portuguese texts from, among many others, Álvaro Gomes, João de Barros, Pedro Barbosa Homem, Leão Hebreu, António Cordeiro and Luis António Verney. I will finish by addressing main absences, thus opening more lines for research to come, dealing with: the epistemology of maritime experience (the century of the prodigies), the strange situation of metaphysics (the scientific appeal), and the silence about women (what about mysticism?).

Mário Santiago de Carvalho, Univ. Coimbra, Portugal

 

Ethics of Care in the Lusophone Baroque

Taking care of the sick and dying has been a societal role that religious women have enthusiastically taken up throughout Christian history. In the early modern world, in the three continents of the Atlantic, religious women developed an experiential knowledge that prepared the living for a true union with the incarnated God. Despite wide scholarship on the Spanish and other European empires, the Portuguese case remains largely unknown.

My paper intends to analyse the voices of religious women and how they can contribute to a philosophy of healing and care. My sources are texts written by religious women in the Portuguese world - Brazil, West Africa, the Philippines, and the Dutch nuns from Alkmaar who fled to Portugal. Alongside their hagiographers, confessors, and persecutors, I shall reveal the still-unknown world of transatlantic narratives of care. As spiritual carers, these women embodied devotional practices in a doctrinal healing; as visionary mystics, they saw their writings as an expression of the collaborative work of divinity; as religious leaders, they made their knowledge concrete through prophetic action with geopolitical world divisional consequences.

Short Bio: Joana Serrado is Wissenschaftlische Mitarbeiterin (Assistant Professor) at the TU-Chemnitz, where she teaches at Prof. Teresa Pinheiro’s Chair for Iberian Studies. After studying philosophy, history and religious studies in Coimbra, Porto, Berlin and Groningen, her research has been focusing on medieval and early modern religious women and the philosophy of emotions. Her most recent publication is a chapter in Jean Andrews and Jeremy Roe’s edited volume "Three willful characters in search of God: visionary action and political identity in seventeenth-century Portuguese women mystics" at Routledge.

 

Methodological Approaches to Recovering Early Modern Women’s Writing: The Question of Value

My presentation will highlight critical and methodological approaches to the study of intellectual value in women’s writing as a category of socio-cultural, literary, and gender analysis, de-problematizing how and why equal-value can be produced differently.

It examines textual and stylistic factors that have promoted the invisibility of intellectual value in women’s writing across genres from the early modern period, a process of “male gendering” of epistemological paradigms that we may define as “textual misogyny”.

Carme Font Paz

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Carme.Font@uab.cat

Short Bio: Carme Font Paz is tenured lecturer at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Director of the European Research Council Project WINK, “Women’s Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity. Her research explores the marginalization of women’s thought in the early modern period from a comparatist approach, engaging in theoretical aspects of early modern women’s intellectual history and socio-economic considerations on textual production. Her latest books are Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2017), and, with Nina Geerdink, Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2018). She is the editor of the Brepols book series “Early Modern Women Writers in Europe: Texts, Debates and Genealogies of Knowledge”.

 

O LEGADO DE KIMPA VITA

A evangelização do antigo reino do Kôngo levou a uma guerra civil que, desde 1543 até 1665. Depois de meio século do declínio no reino do Kongo, com a morte do rei Dom António I Vita Ñkânga em 1665, surgiu uma jovem profetisa ética chamada Dona Beatriz Ñsîmba Vita (conhecido por Kimpa Vita). Criou sua Doutrina na base de kimpasi (religiosidade local), resistiu contra as imposições católicas e montou um sincretismo localmente percebido. Rapidamente, ela ganha uma popularidade, restaura a ordem social, proporciona esperança económica, apazigua os chefes militares e convocou as eleições. Ela foi presa, julgada e queimada viva. A religião serviu de ferramenta cultural para o diálogo entre o Catolicismo e ancestralidade local. O seu legado em África verificou com o messianismo com Simon Kimbangu e Simão Gonçalves Toko que resultou em nacionalismos que conduziu as independências das repúblicas de Congo-Kinsâsa e Angola. Nas Américas, candomblé e umbanda são uma afirmação cultural e servem de uma resistência face aos insumos socioculturais.

Palavras-passe: Kimpa Vita, Reino do Kôngo, Messianismo africano

Short Bio:  Patrício Batsîkama. Licenciado e mestre em História, possuiu doutoramento em Antropologia. Docente no Instituto Superior Politécnico Tocoísta (ISPT, Luanda), é autor de alguns artigos e livros das suas linhas de trabalho: Reino do Kôngo, História de Angola, Estética muntu-angolano e Religiões africanas

 

The Pedagogy of the Body in the Portuguese Baroque

This paper will analyse girls’ education from the perspective of the body, highlighting the path from imitation to embodiment. It was necessary to go against the teleological thread of the narratives. This embodied internalisation process, in the context of post-Trento discipline and regulation, uses all the elements of a feminine pedagogy: gesture, word, book and image. The representations of girls’ bodies before they entered the convent raised questions about phenomena of social taboos that became paradigmatic of the relations between the sexes in the society of the Ancien Régime. Regardless of the veracity of what was said in the devout biographies, what seems interesting here are the underlying perceptions of girls during their childhood and youth, as they reveal a lot about the history of family relationships and ages of life.

Keywords: female education, imitation, embodiment, Portugal, Baroque

Short Bio: Helena Queirós has completed her PhD in Études du Monde Lusophone at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Estudos Literários, Culturais e Interartísticos at Universidade do Porto (cotutelle) on July 16, 2021. Her PhD project, “Spirituality, female education and representations of the female body in Portugal (17th and 18th centuries)”, won a doctoral contract from the École Doctorale 122 Europe Latine/ Amérique Latine. In her research, she developed a transdisciplinary approach (literature, history and anthropology) by exploring the contributions of gender as a category of analysis. She has occupied different positions in French academia since 2013 (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 and Université Paris 8 Vincennes/Saint- Denis). In 2018 she was elected representative of doctoral and post-doctoral students of the Committee of the Société des Hispanistes Français, a responsibility for which she was re-elected in June 2021. She is a research member of CREPAL and an integrated member of CITCEM, interested in female education, female spirituality, female body representations and the spiritual sensibility known as Jacobeia.

 

Maurophilia and the female environmental and dressed body

This is an ongoing research project that aims to survey and interpret expressions of maurophilia in the female universe of the Portuguese court during the 16th century. The theme of maurophilia and Moorish dress has been dealt with in Spanish historiography of the Muslim heritage but very rarely by Portuguese historiography, which tends to favour the approach to Europe beyond the Pyrenees, as if Iberia did not share a common Arab heritage that extended to all Christian kingdoms. The relationship with the Muslim cultural tradition has mainly been treated from a male point of view, leaving aside the female environments in which Moorish practices had prevailed for centuries.

This presentation draws on some case studies that characterise this research topic, using visual, material and written sources related to women from the royal or noble family, raising questions related to the representation of the self and the vision that others, namely travellers, produced about Portugal in the fifteenth century. These visual and written narratives have served to inform prejudiced and subalternising discourses about Iberian religion and culture for centuries, and this continues today.

Short Bio: Carla Alferes Pinto, Ph.D. Investigadora │ Full Researcher CHAM / FCSH NOVA Coordenadora do Mestrado em Património, Dep. História FCSH NOVA│ Coordinator of the Heritage MA, History Dpt. FCSH NOVA Coordenadora da linha de trabalho "Património e Memória"│Head of the "Heritage and Memory" research line:                                                                                                    https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9055-9630                                                           https://vestenovafcsh.wixsite.com/website