Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

The Environmental Impacts of Early Modern Catholic Missions in the Atlantic Space
Online and in-person, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, 9 March 2024

This is one in a series of workshops aimed at exploring the role of the Catholic Church, through its missionary undertaken, in the global environmental upheavals and discoveries of the early modern period. Venturing wide and far beyond the familiar European sphere, early modern missionaries frequently used the rhetoric of Theatrum Mundi to reflect on their encounters with previously unknown cultures. What has escaped scholars’ attention, however, is how these rapidly evolving dramas of evangelization in turn shaped the seemingly timeless backstage setting of Nature. As the missionaries voyaged away and established new religious communities, they were not only faced with social and cultural challenges raised by the vastly different linguistic, political, and philosophical traditions, but they also had to adapt to unfamiliar geographical, climate, and material conditions as they sought to construct churches or realize liturgical rituals, not to mention the extensive agricultural and medical activities they had to pick up for personal survival in often severe natural conditions.

One overarching method we want to propose is to think about early modern Catholicism in the plural term, as theorized by Simon Ditchfield. Studies on post-Tridentine missions tended to emphasize the central authoritative role of Rome, focusing especially on the role of the missionary as leader in the creating of new religiosity, new economical exchanges, or new societies. The new attention paid to missionaries’ interactions with local natural conditions will complicate our understanding of Rome as one of the few truly global institutions of the early modern period acting not only as a religious and evangelist force but also in the colonialist expansions.

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p r o g r a m m e

13.30  Introduction — Silvia Mostaccio (Université Catholique de Louvain)

13.45  Yasmina Rocio Ben Yessef Garfia (Università di Napoli Federico II) — La natura contro gli indigeni: religiosi e racconti della catastrofe nel viceregno del Perù (s. XVII–XVIII)

14.30  Nils Renard (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) — The Catholic Church and the Liberty Trees during the French Revolution: An Environmental Syncretism between France and the New World

15.15  Break

15.45  Thomas Brignon (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) — A Predatory Arcadia: Revisiting Animal Husbandry, Hunting, Fishing, and Gathering in the Jesuit-Guaraní Missions (Paraguay, 17–18th Centuries)

16.30  Andréanne Martel (Université du Québec à Montréal, Université de Genève) — Nommer la faune, la flore et le territoire « en Canada » : écriture, oralité et savoirs autochtones dans les cartes du missionnaire jésuite Pierre-Michel Laure (1688–1738)

17.15  Break

17.30  Isabel Harvey (Université du Québec à Montréal, UCLouvain) — L’environnement comme protagoniste historique

18.00  Final Discussion

Organizing Commitee
• Isabel Harvey, Université du Québec à Montréal
• Alysée Le Druillenec, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Wenjie Su, Princeton University