This article takes a micro-historical actor-centered approach to study the encounter between the officers of a Prussian East India Company Ship and local elites in 1750s Praia, Cape Verde. Combining recent advances in New Diplomatic History and in Company Studies with insights from the study of Contact Zones and transculturation, it analyzes the diplomatic strategies marginalized and hybrid players

Early modern shipping under neutral flags was an activity that required many capacities, combining practices from three different fields: commerce and shipping, diplomacy, and international law. Th ...

This special issue has been motivated by the drive to contextualize the role of individuals of various backgrounds in early modern foreign relations. All contributions cover a broad geographic scop ...

Of all the technical and scientific developments that made possible the European maritime expansion, the nautical chart is perhaps the least studied and understood. This fact is very surprising as it was with the information contained in those charts, and later imported to geographical maps and atlases, that the newly discovered lands were first shown to the European nations. There was, however, a

The seventeenth century was a turning-point in the cultural and demographic history of the Ottoman Empire. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, Ottoman-Armenian subjects began to flee en masse from the Celali Revolts, war with Persia, and famine in Eastern Anatolia to more secure territories in Western Anatolia, Istanbul, and Thrace. This article documents the arrival of Armenian refugees in Thrace

This article focuses on a group of conversos families from Spain, who established themselves in Palermo after the Expulsion of the Jews in 1492. There they supported financial activities of the Nazione Catalana and established strong relationships with the local aristocracy. Thanks to this alliance, they managed to avoid persecution by the Spanish Inquisition, “cleanse” their “impure” blood and reach

The following article studies the connections between Isocrates’s idea of phronesis (pragmatic wisdom) and the early-modern Jesuit notions of rhetoric and prudence. The article develops previous research on Cicero’s influence on early Jesuits by emphasizing Isocrates’s importance in the history of rhetoric and civic philosophy. Cicero himself was influenced by Isocrates and, more to the point, Isocrates’s

The article argues on the basis of a case from the 1560s in Danzig that prior to the formulation of the legal concept of neutrality by Hugo Grotius, there was a practice of neutrality. It was expressed in various terms and manners. This practice pertained to both cities and states, and the case discloses the first documented instance when the Netherlands explicitly strove for neutrality also by legal

Economic historians have shown that the regulations of craft guilds were a source of innovation rather than inertia in the economy of early modern Europe. Historians of science have shown that craftsmen contributed to the scientific revolution in the same time and place. But very little is known about the role of guild regulation in intellectual (as opposed to social, political and economic) change

In 1580-1581, the Austrian Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman court shared news of a remarkable letter and self-portrait that had arrived from an Ottoman subject in Habsburg captivity. Tracing the scramble for details on the matter and its import for Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy reveals the structure, contours, and challenges of the Habsburg mission in Constantinople. The article argues that the image

This article examines John Bruce's vision of the bureaucratic archives of the British state and empire at the end of the eighteenth century. As Historiographer to the East India Company and Keeper of State Papers in the 1790s and early 1800s, Bruce used the archives of corporate and state government as sources of bureaucratic knowledge to justify and plan imperial and domestic policy. In this way,

In the last decades, a vast body of literature has scrutinized the archive, regarding it as an instrument of power for the Western conquest of the world. More recently, a new, vibrant cultural history of archives has changed our understanding of archives as a fully-fledged historical object and why they matter for extending the geographical scope of history and achieving a more connected image of modernity

By looking at list-making and comparative assessments of trade, this article on central administrative practices of record management aims at discussing the mobilization of archives in French colonial supervision in the eighteenth century. A Bureau des Colonies was created in the French Secretariat of the Marine in 1710: from the very outset, its main mission was to deal with the colonial records,

This article analyzes the formation of scholar-jurists’ archives during Late Renaissance conflicts and their use by individuals and state powers. Departing from the case of the French scholar, Theodore Godefroy (1580-1649), and his role in the Peace of Westphalia (1643-1648), this article shows how scholars’ portable archives were used as archival arsenals during diplomatic negotiations, eventually

The role played by archives in the making of a Portuguese science of imperial administration is scarcely known. Systematic research is still lacking on what literature suggests was a critical dimension in the management of the empire. By focusing on the Casa da India’s activities of production, record-keeping and retrieving of information and knowledge, this study intends to contribute to a better

In 1578, at the behest of Syriac Maronite Patriarch Mihail ar-Ruzzy, Pope Gregory XIII sent three Jesuits to Lebanon to assist the Maronites in ecclesiastical reform. However, the mission’s superior, Tommaso Raggio, desired to leave Lebanon, insulted Mihail, and did little to help the Maronites. Within a year of arriving, Raggio was recalled. The mission’s failure due to Raggio’s actions, especially

Numerous scholars have sought to locate the origins of social scientific research in the late-sixteenth-century ars apodemica, the northern European body of literature dedicated to methodizing educational travel. Little attention has been paid, however, to the earlier model of educational travel that emerged from sixteenth-century Venetian diplomatic culture. For many Venetian citizens and patricians

Through the analysis of a doll made in Florence and destined for a family of Florentine merchants active in Seville, this paper outlines the patterns of consumption and the concept of luxury to be found amongst members of the Florentine economic elite of the sixteenth century. The doll is evidence for a lifestyle which was the culmination of a typically Renaissance intellectual sophistication and aesthetic

According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the sixteenth century saw the emergence of a capitalist world economy in which labor was organized on a global scale, and the production, distribution and use of goods and services were integrated across national boundaries. This article argues that, though exceptional, an integrated, hegemonic division of labor on an international scale did occur before 1500. Adopting

Flores sanctorum (Flowers of the Saints, hereafter flowers) were a uniquely Iberian genre immersed in European efforts to collect the lives of saints and then arrange them according to the liturgical year. Although one of the first books printed in Spain, the genre went into decline by the mid-sixteenth century due to ongoing Inquisitorial censure. Flowers, however, grew again thanks to Alonso de Villegas

This article explores the ways in which Europeans encountered indigenous knowledge in Asia and the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reconstructs the social factors that enabled productive cross-cultural knowledge encounters within a particular temporal and cultural context. By focusing on the tacit nature of medical knowledge and on the structure of the networks that enabled

Third order women religious actively participated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian society. Scholars have argued that the introduction of monastic enclosure for all women religious after the Council of Trent crushed non-enclosed forms of female monasticism in Italy and Europe. The study of third orders reveals, however, that non-enclosed monastic communities survived the Tridentine reforms

Proposing activity as a useful category of analysis, this special issue considers Catholic and Protestant women in Europe and the Americas in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. We examine women in religious communities, which include both monastic communities as well as confessional communities. A close analysis of the social, economic, and cultural actions of these women religious challenges

This article examines the narratives of female mystic journeys that were sometimes included in the biographies and the autobiographies of religious women printed in Spain between the mid-sixteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. By showing the ability of women to convert non-Christians in Asia, North Africa and America, and to defend the Catholic faith in Europe, the texts provide

From the thirteenth century through the nineteenth, the Court Beguinages, large semi-monastic communities for women called Beguines, were integral to urban life in the Catholic Low Countries. In the wake of the Dutch Revolt and reestablishment of Spanish rule in the Southern provinces from the mid-1580s, the Beguinages became increasingly aligned with the ideology of female monasticism, and particularly

Women occupied a central place in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century transatlantic Quakerism. They acted as prophets, missionaries, authors and spiritual leaders of their communities. Recent scholarship has offered important insights into the unparalleled public roles available to women within the early Quaker community. But little is known about the networks of hospitality that developed across the

Radical pietistic and renewal movements gave rise to a diverse number of communities throughout northern Europe starting in the late seventeenth century. Many groups practiced a conventicle-style piety, in which they held religious services in private settings such as houses. A distinctive feature of these semi-sequestered communities was the extent to which women took on active roles, sometimes to

This article aims to explain the process which led to the founding of the Inquisition tribunal in Goa, the first Holy Office tribunal to be created outside Europe. Following a review of previous historiographical studies which have analyzed this question, it examines the mechanisms for Christianization/confessionalization deployed by the Iberian monarchs in Asia and America from a global and comparative

This study explores the reading and writing practices of Joseph Ha-Kohen, a sixteenth-century Jewish chronicler from Genoa, against the background of his Italian and Spanish sources: in what ways and why did he adapt, change or subvert their narratives? It focuses on two of Ha-Kohen’s major works: his Franco-Turkish Chronicle, and his Hebrew adaptation of Lopez de Gomara’s account of the Spanish conquests

The first half of the seventeenth century saw a profound structural shift in the English economy and economic discourse. One of the controversial issues under dispute was the nature of usury. This paper sheds light on the enduring association of Jews with usury and seeks to demonstrate how the two concepts came to be decoupled in mid-seventeenth century England. It focuses on two case studies—the Jewish

English privateer and amateur ethnographer William Dampier’s work abounds with admiring descriptions of the knowledge and skills of the indigenous societies he encountered on his global voyages. These positive descriptions of indigenous culture make a surprising juxtaposition against the tenor of ethnography little more than a century later, when biological theories of race grounded disparaging attitudes

The history of pre- and early-modern science, medicine, and technology in the Islamicate world has been traditionally charted around certain signposts: Translation, Golden Age, and Decline. These signposts tethered the history of Islamic sciences to a European story that culminates in the Scientific Revolution and that links European colonial expansion (causally and chronologically) to modernity. This

To move away from histories of early modern science that are shaped by the notion of a Scientific Revolution, the essay proposes a historiographical methodology that moves away from genealogy and toward juxtaposition as a principle of storytelling. It briefly discusses the study of sound in early modern Manchu texts as an example of this #hashtag (or juxtapositional) history.

Amongst the many narrative strategies in the recent “global turn” in the history of science, one commonly finds attempts to complement the single European story by multiplying histories of knowledge-making in as many different regional and cultural contexts as possible. Other strategies include attempts to generalize the “Needham Question” of why the Scientific Revolution occurred only in early-modern

The categories that structure the study of early modern science are organized around the epistemological liberal regime of facts, objectivity, skepticism, print culture, the public sphere, and the Republic of Letters. The regime of early-modern science in the global Spanish Monarchy is not well known because it was forged in a very different system, one of rewards and legislation in which most activities

The Great Tradition of writing about what came to be called The Scientific Revolution developed in the mid-twentieth century and helped to shape what came to be termed “early modern” Europe. At least two fundamental structural elements of the framework were that a small group of independent minds had been set free to grasp new truths, and that rivalries among many groups in Europe never allowed “European

History of science today needs to fully escape from the categories and narrative frameworks created during the Cold War formation of the discipline. Most problematic is the portentous notion of science conceived as a uniquely European world-historical singular that founded modernity. The idea of a singular historical birth of science in the portentous singular, this article argues, is not a natural

This article is a programmatic statement advocating a materialist reading of early modern Ottoman science. I argue that a history of science that is sensitive to the material life of Ottoman subjects will help scholars cut through the unwarranted vocabulary of “Islamic science,” “Westernization” or “Ottoman civilization.” Two mini studies substantiate the programmatic claims. The first study presents

A bitter conflict between the Spanish and Ottoman empires dominated the second half of the sixteenth century. In this early modern “global” conflict, intelligence played a key role. The Duchy of Milan, home to Simon Sacerdoti (c.1540-1600), a Jew, had fallen to Spain. The fate that usually awaited Jews living on Spanish lands was expulsion—and there were signs to suggest that King Philip II (1527-1598)

This article examines the evolving role of the Ottoman navy in the mid-eighteenth century in protecting Ottoman seas from maritime violence. Despite enjoying a general peace with its European neighbors, merchant shipping in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and coastal settlements were frequently subject to seaborne violence from European privateers, Maltese corsairs, and domestic pirates. Based

This article argues that the method of transregional history offers a valuable new tool for studying early modern territorial borders. Where existing research strands do not always suffice to accommodate the complexity of such boundaries, this new concept can serve as an alternative. Firstly, transregional history points out that early modern boundaries were not the outcome of actions that were pursued

In the fifteenth century, scholars writing in Arabic and Persian debated the nature of historical inquiry and its place among the sciences. While the motivations and perspectives of the various scholars differed, the terms and parameters of the debate remained remarkably fixed and focused, even as it unfolded across a vast geographic space between Herat, Cairo, and Constantinople. This article examines

This article investigates the debates surrounding immigration to England some three hundred years ago and considers why it was that between the 1680s and the 1710s a discernible change occurred in how migrants were treated. Work on the emergence of a “British” Protestant identity and its relationship with continental Europe, on changing ideas of Englishness and on the campaign for a relaxation in rights

The discovery of graffiti in the early years of the twentieth century by the folklorist Giuseppe Pitre left by prisoners of the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition in Palermo has been followed by more extensive investigations in recent years. These images and words have added a concrete and particular dimension to Sicily’s position at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. As well as images of saints

This article investigates the German Moravian slave mission in South Carolina (1738-1740), including its role in beginning evangelical Protestantism among Lowcountry slaves. It documents responses of planters, townspeople, and especially slaves and shows how the mission was connected to the transatlantic evangelical Protestant awakening. Following Wesley’s brief encounter in 1737 and preceding Whitefield’s

This paper uses the 1695 revolt of the O’odham (Pima) in northern New Spain as a window into ritually inflected encounters between indigenous communities and European evangelists. A careful study of the diverse religious and military reports on the O’odham rebellion reveals a more complex rendering of native participation than the dichotomous options of conversion or rejection. Soldiers’ journals,

This article examines Jesuit-signed texts written in the Brasilica lingua franca and used in the religious conversion of native peoples in colonial Portuguese America (1549-1759). I study translation strategies for conveying the sacrament of Communion, arguing that doctrinal explanations and word choices recorded in catechisms and dictionaries reflect Tupi-Guarani beliefs that shaped Christianity.

Missionaries were often the most prolific writers on non-European peoples and cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. As a result, their sources have proven to be indispensable for early modernists. For decades, historians have explored missionary encounters and the sources they inspired to gain insight into a wide variety of topics including native history, the history of religion, labor history

The Institutum Judaicum represented a new movement in the realm of Christian interactions with the Jews. The mission, and the Pietist movement as a whole, proposed an alternative, non-supersessionist understanding of the Jews and their role in history. They made efforts to interact with that people and share with them the Pietist reading of the scriptures and a messianic vision for the End Times. While

Marie de l’Incarnation’s letters and mission reports advanced a particular ideotype of the Ursuline missionary as “warrior of God” and were received and disseminated as exempla in several seventeenth-century French religious texts. One of these was an anthology entitled La Gloire de Ste. Ursule (The Glory of St. Ursula) (1656), a collection of summaries of French Ursuline spiritual biographies, including

In the past two decades, empires have increasingly attracted the attention of historians of the early modern period to the detriment of the traditional focus on states as the default political unit of analysis. The emergence of global history is not alien to this turn. This article maintains that our understanding of configurations of the early modern political map would only benefit from detaching

Looking at historiography and methodology for the risks of Eurocentrism and presentism, this essay reflects on the study of the history of religion in the two decades of the Journal of Early Modern History’s life to date. It first counts the locations of the subjects of the Journal’s articles, both generally and specifically on religion, to measure patterns in geographical focus. Considering the language

Until quite recently, the field of early modern history largely focused on Europe. The overarching narrative of the early modern world began with the European “discoveries,” proceeded to European expansion overseas, and ended with an exploration of the factors that led to the “triumph of Europe.” When the Journal of Early Modern History was established in 1997, the centrality of Europe in the emergence

The three books under review offer the opportunity to consider attempts to write the history of the wider world from the Renaissance to the present day. Although they are vastly different in focus: from a selection of travel narratives and histories; volumes from a multi-authored reference work to the study of a single street; what they all have in common is their comparative methodology and their

With their bold foray into global exploration and trade, the Dutch, through the East and West India companies, established centralized trading entrepots and capitals in Batavia on Java and Willemstad on Curacao. Both of these cities were built following Dutch urban planning principles and were filled with Dutch-styled buildings that reflected the architecture at home, yet were hybridized as they drew

This study focuses on the observations of two eighteenth-century visitors to Mantua’s Palazzo Te, Rabbis Isaac Lampronti of Ferrara (1679-1756) and Hayyim Yoseph David Azulay of Jerusalem (1724-1806), especially their impressions of the echo in its Chamber of the Giants. The rabbis’ response to Palazzo Te closely resembles that of dozens other European travelers, whose writings about the echo chamber

Gift-giving was an important feature of cross-cultural diplomacy in the complex political landscape of the early modern Gold and Slave coasts. The article examines gift-giving practices that European trading companies used toward African rulers and elites, relating them to European courtly diplomacy. Tracing the repertoire of gift objects, it argues that the very function ascribed to gifts required

The essays in this collection explore diplomacy as a form of cultural translation. Out of necessity, Europeans sought new ways of conducting diplomacy in the changing environment of the early modern world, as they grappled with challenges from within their old but crumbling respublica christiana, and also with changing relations with powers and communities beyond it. Reflecting the current vitality

The embassy of Don Garcia de Silva y Figueroa, sent in 1614 by Philip III of Castile and II of Portugal to negotiate an alliance with Shah Abbas against the Ottomans, was a fiasco. Not only did it fail to secure a deal, but within three years of the ambassador’s departure from Ispahan, in 1622, Persian troops, with the help of English ships, conquered the strategic island and fortress of Hormuz at

Historians of Christian European diplomacy have tended to approach Ottoman diplomatic practice from a rather Eurocentric perspective in that they presuppose initial Ottoman non-involvement in the development of the modern diplomatic system followed by a reluctant adoption of it when faced with a period of economic, military and political decline. In this article I read two fethnames [victory missives]