Public rituals in the Portuguese empire (1498-1822)

Public rituals in the Portuguese empire (1498-1822)

This project aims to build an open access, full text searchable digital collection of historical sources (c. 1000 books, c. 30 000 pages) in order to analyze public rituals in the making of the early-modern Portuguese empire in comparative perspective. Public rituals commemorated a wide range of occasions, from solemn entries to royal births, marriages, and funerals to religious feast days. This project seeks to explore the role that public rituals played in the Portuguese empire, and beyond. How did they fashion and strengthen social identity and political power? Did their visual codes facilitate political communication, and legitimize territorial and social divisions? Or were they primarily sites of discord, expressing the tensions and contradictions of imperial arrangements? How do these functions compare to other empires? To explore these questions, RITUALS will concentrate on printed accounts and images of early modern festive rituals in the Atlantic, African and Asian Portuguese territories, as well as in the metropolitan world. Festival accounts provide synthetic or detailed descriptions of the events the participants and observers (Europeans and nonEuropeans), the ephemera used, and the local itineraries followed. Festive rituals thus constitute a privileged lens to explore dimensions of the Portuguese empire which are frequently excluded from historical knowledge, in particular the history of non-European peoples. The project privileges four axes of analysis: (1) the material production and circulation of the accounts; (2) the urban landscapes where these events took place; (3) the political imagination and visual culture entailed and fostered by the events they describe; and (4) the complex social and political landscapes they reveal. With the collaboration of leading scholars working on these topics as well as the Portuguese National Library and the Library of Palácio da Ajuda, RITUALS will digitize approximately 750 books and images, which will complement the species already digitized existing in these libraries. The complete collection ? similar to collections existing in other libraries, such as the British Library?s ?Renaissance Festival Books? (https://www.bl.uk/treasures/ festivalbooks/homepage.html) - will become accessible through the project website and the Luso-Brazilian Digital Library/Biblioteca Digital Luso-Brasileira (http://bdlb.bn.br). The texts will be transcribed using OCR to create a pioneering text searchable database dedicated to historical sources of the early modern period. The major publication outputs will be an edited book tentatively titled Connecting Festivals in the Portuguese Empire aimed at Oxford University Press, a Special Issue aimed at the Journal of Early Modern History, articles submitted to peer-review journals, book chapters, and a digital glossary. By the end of the project, an exhibition will take place at the National Library of Portugal.

 

Estatuto: 
Proponent entity
Financed: 
Yes
Entidades: 
Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia
Keywords: 

Rituals, portuguese empire, imaginários políticos, coesão social

This project aims to build an open access, full text searchable digital collection of historical sources (c. 1000 books, c. 30 000 pages) in order to analyze public rituals in the making of the early-modern Portuguese empire in comparative perspective. Public rituals commemorated a wide range of occasions, from solemn entries to royal births, marriages, and funerals to religious feast days. This project seeks to explore the role that public rituals played in the Portuguese empire, and beyond. How did they fashion and strengthen social identity and political power? Did their visual codes facilitate political communication, and legitimize territorial and social divisions? Or were they primarily sites of discord, expressing the tensions and contradictions of imperial arrangements? How do these functions compare to other empires? To explore these questions, RITUALS will concentrate on printed accounts and images of early modern festive rituals in the Atlantic, African and Asian Portuguese territories, as well as in the metropolitan world. Festival accounts provide synthetic or detailed descriptions of the events the participants and observers (Europeans and nonEuropeans), the ephemera used, and the local itineraries followed. Festive rituals thus constitute a privileged lens to explore dimensions of the Portuguese empire which are frequently excluded from historical knowledge, in particular the history of non-European peoples. The project privileges four axes of analysis: (1) the material production and circulation of the accounts; (2) the urban landscapes where these events took place; (3) the political imagination and visual culture entailed and fostered by the events they describe; and (4) the complex social and political landscapes they reveal. With the collaboration of leading scholars working on these topics as well as the Portuguese National Library and the Library of Palácio da Ajuda, RITUALS will digitize approximately 750 books and images, which will complement the species already digitized existing in these libraries. The complete collection ? similar to collections existing in other libraries, such as the British Library?s ?Renaissance Festival Books? (https://www.bl.uk/treasures/ festivalbooks/homepage.html) - will become accessible through the project website and the Luso-Brazilian Digital Library/Biblioteca Digital Luso-Brasileira (http://bdlb.bn.br). The texts will be transcribed using OCR to create a pioneering text searchable database dedicated to historical sources of the early modern period. The major publication outputs will be an edited book tentatively titled Connecting Festivals in the Portuguese Empire aimed at Oxford University Press, a Special Issue aimed at the Journal of Early Modern History, articles submitted to peer-review journals, book chapters, and a digital glossary. By the end of the project, an exhibition will take place at the National Library of Portugal.

 

Observações: 
RITUALS is funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under “PTDC/HAR-HIS/28364/2017” project.
Parceria: 
Unintegrated

RITUALS

Coordenador ICS 
Referência externa 
PTDC/HAR-HIS/28364/2017
Start Date: 
20/02/2018
End Date: 
30/09/2022
Duração: 
48 meses
Active