Alexandra Curvelo
I am a Full Professor at the Department of History of Art, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas - Universidade Nova de Lisboa and hold a PhD in History of Art on Nanban Art and Its Circulation between Asia and America: Japan, China and New Spain (c.1550 – c.1700).
From January 2023, I am the Director of the Art History Institute (IHA) and Affiliated Postdoctoral Researcher of the Portuguese Center for Global History (CHAM) at NOVA FCSH.
From 2010 to 2016, I was the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies and am currently a member of the board of directors of the Art History Journal published by IHA.
Previously, I worked at the Museu Nacional do Azulejo (Azulejo National Museum), the Portuguese Institute for Conservation and Preservation, and the National Art Museum (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga), Lisbon.
My experience in Museum Studies and my field of research led me to be invited to be Co-Curator of the Exhibition A Striking Story: Portugal-Japan 16th-20th centuries, Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, Lisbon (29 November 2018-26 March 2019) and of the exhibition Portugal, Jesuits, and Japan: Spiritual Beliefs and Earthly Goods, Boston, McMullen Museum of Art, 16 February-2 June 2013. I was the Scientific Curator of the exhibition Namban Commissi—the Portuguese in Modern Age Jap. Lisbon, Museu do Oriente, 17 December 2010 – 31 May 2011.
From March 2012 until September 2015, I was the Principal Investigator of the research project Interactions between Rivals: the Christian Mission and Buddhist Sects in Japan (c.1549-c.1647), financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).
My research focuses on the visual and material culture of early modern Japan during the Iberian presence and on processes of cultural transfers between Asia and the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries.
From January 2023, I am the Director of the Art History Institute (IHA) and Affiliated Postdoctoral Researcher of the Portuguese Center for Global History (CHAM) at NOVA FCSH.
From 2010 to 2016, I was the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies and am currently a member of the board of directors of the Art History Journal published by IHA.
Previously, I worked at the Museu Nacional do Azulejo (Azulejo National Museum), the Portuguese Institute for Conservation and Preservation, and the National Art Museum (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga), Lisbon.
My experience in Museum Studies and my field of research led me to be invited to be Co-Curator of the Exhibition A Striking Story: Portugal-Japan 16th-20th centuries, Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, Lisbon (29 November 2018-26 March 2019) and of the exhibition Portugal, Jesuits, and Japan: Spiritual Beliefs and Earthly Goods, Boston, McMullen Museum of Art, 16 February-2 June 2013. I was the Scientific Curator of the exhibition Namban Commissi—the Portuguese in Modern Age Jap. Lisbon, Museu do Oriente, 17 December 2010 – 31 May 2011.
From March 2012 until September 2015, I was the Principal Investigator of the research project Interactions between Rivals: the Christian Mission and Buddhist Sects in Japan (c.1549-c.1647), financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).
My research focuses on the visual and material culture of early modern Japan during the Iberian presence and on processes of cultural transfers between Asia and the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Like Peru, although with a very different colonial historical framework, the Philippines is a ‘contact zone’ as Pratt describes it, a place of cultural encounters and clashes wherein power was negotiated.
This text aims to analyse the circulation of commodities in the context of the dispute for control and dominance in the Philippines and the surrounding oceanic space, a point of intersection between Asia and the so-called Spanish America, namely the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. Its timeline coincides with the establishment of the Manila-Acapulco route and the voyages of the ‘Naos de China’ that shifted the Philippines’ economy from a subsistence agriculture-based system to what Ubaldo Iaccarino calls the ‘Galleon system’, a change that occurred between 1571 and 1593.
By following mercantile networks and the demand for specific objects and products, we are forced to adopt a decentralised, almost kaleidoscopic view of this space and of the relations it shaped.
Like Peru, although with a very different colonial historical framework, the Philippines is a ‘contact zone’ as Pratt describes it, a place of cultural encounters and clashes wherein power was negotiated.
This text aims to analyse the circulation of commodities in the context of the dispute for control and dominance in the Philippines and the surrounding oceanic space, a point of intersection between Asia and the so-called Spanish America, namely the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. Its timeline coincides with the establishment of the Manila-Acapulco route and the voyages of the ‘Naos de China’ that shifted the Philippines’ economy from a subsistence agriculture-based system to what Ubaldo Iaccarino calls the ‘Galleon system’, a change that occurred between 1571 and 1593.
By following mercantile networks and the demand for specific objects and products, we are forced to adopt a decentralised, almost kaleidoscopic view of this space and of the relations it shaped.
In their highly variable and asymmetric relations, during which the politi¬cal-military elites of Japan at times not only favoured, but also opposed and strictly controlled the European presence, missionaries – particularly the Jesuits – tried to negotiate this power balance with their interlocutors.
This collection of essays analyses religious and cultural interactions between the Christian missions and the Buddhist sects through processes of coopera¬tion, acceptance, confrontation and rejection, dialogue and imposition, which led to the creation of new relational spaces and identities.
This book is available in open access: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1190560
Published by Sophia University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mni.2023.a920401
For additional information about this article:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920401
Title: Interactions between Rivals: The Christian Mission and Buddhist Sects in Japan (c. 1549–c. 1647) ed. by Alexandra Curvelo and Angelo Cattaneo (review).
Contact and Registration
workshopreires@isem.cnr.it
Once registered, shortly before the event, participants will receive an invitation for the Zoom link at the email address provided.
EVENT PROGRAM
Friday, 16 April 2021, 3:00 pm CET
Gaetano Sabatini (Director, CNR ISEM)
Welcome Note
Marcello Verga (Università degli Studi di Firenze, CNR ISEM - ReIReS WP7 Leader)
Presentation
Angelo Cattaneo (CNR ISEM)
Convenor
3:15 pm Alexandra Curvelo (IHA - NOVA FCSH, Lisbon)
The Christian Mission in Early Modern Japan through the lens of an Art Historian
3:40 pm Linda Zampol D’Ortia (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Tracing Feelings on Paper: Emotions in early modern Jesuit missions in Asia
4:10 pm Ana Carolina Hosne (National Council for Scientific Research - CONICET, Argentina)
The question of "barbarism" in the Jesuit missions, from Asia to Spanish America (16th-18th centuries)
4:30 pm Angelo Cattaneo (CNR ISEM)
Early Modern Missions and the Creation of the First Global System of Connected Languages. The case of the Portuguese Padroado
5:00 pm Sabrina Corbellini (University of Groningen)
Discussant
5:20 pm General discussion and conclusions
The webinar “Translating and Connecting Worlds” will be recorded in view to be broadcasted through the CNR ISEM YouTube channel shortly after the event.
EVENT DESCRIPTION
The online international research seminar “Translating and Connecting Worlds” aims to highlight and analyze the paramount importance of religious archives and sources connected to the activities of religious orders (in particular of the orders engaged in early modern and modern missions), for the study of several branches of modern cultural history.
“Translating and Connecting Worlds” was specifically conceived and designed in accomplishment with the general goals of ReIReS (Research Infrastructure on Religious Studies) to mobilize “the widest range of expertise, sources, resources and facilities of the domain of historical religious studies, by opening up to users a plurality of both documents and sources and research tools and instruments.”
Over the past three decades, a complex and highly articulated set of research projects, doctoral theses and publications, has unequivocally highlighted that both religious archives and documentation prove to be essential for the history of linguistics, the history of books and reading, the history of geography, the history of the European expansion and empires and orientalism, ethnography, art history, the history of cultural encounters, translations and clashes. Altogether, these compsite fields of enquiry have demostrated the great potential of religious archives, libraries and sources beyond more traditional and “internal” religious research perspectives, such as the History of Religion(s) or of Religious Orders.
Religious archives and libraries are aggregators of knowledge that preserve and mediate fundamental sources for the study of several social and cultural processes. At the same time, these processes allow us to understand the persistent pervasiveness of religious phenomena or phenomena connected or mediated by religious practices, in the history of early modern and modern cultures, well beyond the institutional History of the Church or Religious History, and the simplistic claims of the “secularization” tout court.
Religious archives are also fundamental to promote reflections on situations where cross-cultural communication worked or broke down in early modern and modern missions.
They are of particular value for understanding the processes of learning each other’s languages, sharing and negotiating systems of beliefs, world views, values and histories, by exchanging languages, visuality and oral traditions.