INTELLECTUAL CULTURE, MANUSCRIPT CIRCULATION, VISUAL COMMUNICATIONTop

The almost clichéd idea constructed by historiographers of a Franciscan world characterized by “anti-intellectualism” and disregard for learned culture, of a world removed from learning and written practices, does not stand up for long in the face of certain evidence which shows a deeply intellectual world. We can see this just by looking at some of the libraries in Franciscan convents in Early Modern Portugal: in the metropolitan world, they brought together several of the most important collections of books linked to Church institutions (Carvalho, 1998; Carvalho, 2005; Rocha, 1994), and there are few differences between them and the libraries of other orders of the period (Campos, 2015).[1] Essentially, the Franciscans had a range of intellectual references and texts which, beyond the spiritual and theological texts linked to their own traditions and identity, was not very different from those of the Augustinians, Jesuits, Dominicans and Carmelites. And it was the same in colonial contexts. While information on the Order’s libraries in Asia and Portuguese America is far from complete,[2] there is enough to know that their collections were reasonably well stocked with treatises on dogmatic and moral theology, exegesis, patristics, sermon handbooks, the history of the Church and philosophy, to name only a few categories. A more “virtual” reconstruction, built on the basis of learned methods and the texts referred to in their writings, reveals not only intellectual practices similar to those found in the metropolitan world but also a textual world which, to a great extent, they shared with their co-religionists from the Old World. This was often supplemented by other erudite traditions and local religious, natural and medicinal knowledge, gathered from lived experience and knowledge already accumulated by others in the region (Xavier, 2011). Deep involvement in the field of erudition, furthermore, would become even more explicit from the end of the seventeenth century and over the course of the eighteenth century, when the Franciscans began —in Portuguese contexts, at least— to increase their presence in learned circles and academies, achieving even greater success in print than they had before (Kantor, 2004; Palomo, 2014).

In spite of everything, however, it is undeniable that in both the Spanish and Portuguese worlds the Friars Minor were less visible in print. In part, this was the result of an apparently weaker practice of writing. They never developed, for example, a system of written correspondence like the Jesuits did. And their limited involvement in academic spheres meant they were not particularly prominent in genres like theological treatises, philosophy and canons. Only sermons and devotional texts seem to have had greater relevance and to have been printed in greater quantity. In summary, compared to the output of the Jesuits, Oratorians and Dominicans, the Franciscans wrote less —and possibly cultivated genres which we might today consider to be less important. Indeed, a range of factors could be at play here— material issues, such as the high cost of printing a text for an institution principally identified with poverty (Xavier and Županov, 2014: 143), but also institutional issues within the Order which prescribed who could be involved in learned activity and when and how they could do so, often making Franciscan writing a controlled and authorized form of writing (Palomo, 2014: 114-120). There were even issues of a spiritual nature; some friars saw writing as the expression of a sort of vanitas which went against the humility demanded of them, while others established an irreconcilable dichotomy between apostolic work and writing, contrary to the relatively common vision of writing as a way of prolonging missionary activity (Palomo, 2015).

Alongside these considerations, we should also ponder the importance which manuscripts had in Franciscan written production, both in the metropolitan and colonial worlds. Manuscripts undoubtedly played a central role in the Order’s means of communication and memory, which in principle entailed more restricted and controlled circulation. To some extent, this also explains why the volume of extant texts represents in reality only a tiny part of what the Franciscans actually produced during the Early Modern Period, reinforcing yet again the charge of seeming intellectual detachment which has so often been levelled at them. However, the catalogues of Nicolás Antonio, Barbosa Machado, Wadding and Juan de San Antonio contain several indications that a number of texts written by Franciscans were circulated in manuscript form and have since been lost.

This apparent preference for manuscript form does not mean that the Franciscans did not also make use of print, or indeed that they were unaware of the technology’s potential. We need only recall Juan de Santa María and Diego de San Francisco’s printed texts on Franciscan martyrs in Japan to prove this. They are a clear display of the intentional propaganda which Spanish Franciscans were so keen to use to capitalize upon the glory of the martyrs in Japan as part of their ongoing competition with the Jesuits.[3] However, their use of printing was often confined by determining factors which left many texts in manuscript form waiting to be printed: political constraints (like those which affected Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia General); the aforementioned financial issues; and decisions made by superiors in the Order according to the opportunities and/or circumstances of the time.

Such difficulties were perhaps exacerbated in colonial contexts, especially in places like Portuguese India and Portuguese America, where printing presses were only rarely (if at all) present, which meant writers had to turn to European printers for their needs. In these contexts, manuscript form probably played a more determining role, as shown by chronicles. Essentially, the chronicle genre, beyond its importance for recording history, for identity and for edification, often took on propagandistic tones in the disputes which took place within the missionary field. The Jesuits were quickly able to put in writing the history of their missions in Asia and even in Portuguese America; the Friars Minor did not have such luck. In India, Paulo da Trindade never saw his Conquista Espiritual do Oriente printed, and writers such as Miguel da Ilha and Vicente do Salvador composed texts in the first decades of the seventeenth century on the Franciscan presence in Brazil which only ever circulated in manuscript form. The first Franciscan chronicle on Brazil to be published was António de Santa Maria Jaboatão’s in 1761, in which he recounted the works and writers of the province and showed how important manuscripts had been in his co-religionists’ written production (Jaboatão, 1761: 209-228). Franciscan historiography was undoubtedly more visible in print, and at an earlier stage, in the Spanish world. Juan de Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana was published in Seville in 1615; Diego de Córdoba y Salinas’ Coronica on the province of Peru was printed in Lima in 1651; Diego de Mendoza’s work on the Franciscans of San Antonio de los Charcas was published in Madrid in 1661. Even then, though, there was a countless number of historical texts, like the two Historias of Toribio de Benavente and Jerónimo de Mendieta, which circulated in manuscript form. In New Spain itself, where printing was quite common, at least during the sixteenth century, the circulation of handwritten texts was always a particularly important instrument of evangelization and more generally in the shaping of Franciscan intellectual culture (González Rodríguez, 1992).

We must not, however, neglect to mention the status of visual culture, and even oral culture,[4] in the Franciscans’ means of communication and memory within the Iberian world. The use of images in New Spanish missionary contexts is well-known, such as the pictographic language found in catechisms such as Peter of Ghent’s. Furthermore, it was particularly successfully expressed in Diego de Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579). This text, as is obvious from its title, underlined the importance of orality as a vehicle for evangelizing indigenous people. However, it also included some 26 engravings, a number of which were offered as a powerful mnemonic tool for the ministers who were tasked with the conversion (Maza, 1945; Báez Rubí, 2005; Ortega Sánchez, 2013). The emblematic and hybrid character of some of Valadés’ images was also present in drawings in Portuguese India, such as in Fr. António de São Tiago’s Visão de Afonso Henriques, a text of political providentialism which is analyzed in the present dossier by Ângela Barreto Xavier. The Franciscans used images, in fact, for a variety of purposes. For Fr. Cristóvão de Lisboa, for example, they were an instrument for natural knowledge: he depicted over 160 species in his História dos animaes e arvores do Maranhão (Walter, 2000). But images could also be used for propagandistic and devotional purposes; Jacques Callot and Wolfgang Kilian’s engravings about the Franciscan martyrs of Nagasaki had a particular great reception across the whole Iberian world, and were replicated in altars, paintings and tiles such as those which are found in the convents of Saint Francis in Porto and Recife. The frescoes at Cuernavaca, although based on other sources, also depicted the same episode.

IMPERIAL CONNECTIONSTop

Despite the relative lack of attention they have received, the Franciscans were often at the forefront of the political, social and religious make-up of the regions which constituted the Iberian empires. They were without doubt an essential element in proselytizing activities which went beyond the strictly religious. They thus contributed, through indoctrination and religious framing, to the political and cultural integration of indigenous peoples living under Spanish and Portuguese rule, seeking to turn them into “good Christians” and hence into “good subjects” (Xavier, 2008; Díaz Serrano, 2010; Díaz Serrano, 2012). But, along with their religious roles, they were also central to the make-up of the societies which emerged in overseas Iberian contexts. Not only did they create links with indigenous people, mestizos, slaves and so on through their doctrinas, brotherhoods and other institutions, but they also established close relations with colonial elites themselves, often demonstrating a certain level of overlap with criollo/casado groups.[5]

The experience of the Asian and American worlds made the Franciscans, along with other groups, somewhat “specialists” or “experts” on the Empire (Gruzinski, 2010: 185-205). The duties they carried out in the missionary field allowed them to build up considerable knowledge of “worldly matters”, of the places and natural environments which they inhabited, of the range of native political, social, religious and cultural realities they faced. In this field, it was undoubtedly the Capuchins, another branch of the Franciscan family, who were particularly keen to describe such matters in their writings concerning their missions in the Atlantic —missions paid for by Rome and other powers (Daher, 2002; Santos, 2011). But the Franciscans in the service of the Iberian crowns also took part in the written and/or visual production of this missionary and colonial knowledge. In general, this knowledge was built on a complex exchange between the European world, which acted as a point of reference, and indigenous or local knowledge which the friars brought together and accommodated to their own logic with the aim of understanding and controlling that knowledge (Castelnau-L’Estoile et al., 2011). Mastering the indigenous languages is an excellent example of this: for the task of evangelization itself, knowledge of these languages implied “colonizing” them, fitting them into (Latin) grammatical models which were foreign to them, often configuring “general languages” and, in some cases, also giving them a written form (Pinheiro, 2009; Estenssoro and Itier, 2015). As well as grammar manuals and dictionaries, such as those written by Andrés de Olmos, Alonso de Molina (Nahuatl), Cristóvão de Jesús (Konkani) and Mateus de Jesús María (Aruan), this linguistic knowledge entailed the production, and often the translation, into indigenous languages of an endless stream of catechisms, manuals of confession and other doctrinal and devotional texts produced to serve as an instrument for evangelization.

Missionary activity also favored the development of an almost ethnographic knowledge about the societies which were the object of conversion efforts. In this respect, Franciscan written production about the sixteenth-century Meso-American world (Motolinia, Sahagún, Mendieta, Torquemada), once again, is particularly eloquent on the strategic and missionary interest in understanding those societies, but also on the methods used to understand and describe their social and political order, their forms of belief, and their material culture —methods not really different from those employed by the missionaries of other religious orders. Far from readings of these texts which have removed them from their contexts, which have seen in them expressions of an avant-la-lettre anthropology and ethnography, it is better to interpret them essentially as forms of “cultural translations”, necessarily conditioned by ideological factors, by specific schemas of knowledge and belief, by concrete expectations and by defined intentions. All of these elements inevitably shaped the vision built by the Franciscan missionaries —as the visions built by other missionaries— about the indigenous populations in the Americas and in India, dictating the categories which they used to identify them and identify their rites, “idolatries”, customs, government and social hierarchies (Ríos Castaño, 2014; Xavier and Županov, 2015).

These epistemological factors were also instrumental in the development of a particular type of natural knowledge towards which the Franciscans, thanks to their spiritual tradition, were probably especially inclined.[6] Built on the foundation of their own experiences and the indigenous knowledge which they gathered, this understanding of the natural world was given material form in descriptions of spaces, but also through the accumulation of information about the regions’ flora and fauna and about the potential uses and applications of fruits, plants, birds and so on. Indeed, some even produced complete pharmacopoeias and texts on medicinal knowledge and practice which were usually based on indigenous traditions (Pardo-Tomás, 2013). This natural knowledge often took on an essentially pragmatic outlook, focused on the qualities and characteristics of the objects they were describing; they were sometimes represented visually, as in Cristóvão de Lisboa’s aforementioned História. In other cases, however, understanding of flora and fauna of the imperial territories was conditioned by a theologically-rooted perception of the world, whose legibility allowed the writers, through a kind of exegetic exercise, to decode the spiritual and moral significance of plants and animals (Pimentel and Marcaida, 2008).

As noted above, the Franciscans were deeply involved with colonial societies alongside their role in the missionary field and in the production of colonial knowledge. They often became keen observers of these societies, of their mixed nature, of the problems arising at the heart of them between different groups and wishes, and of the problems arising from metropolitan power structures. At times, they spoke up to criticize the colonizers’ and the Crown’s abuses, and at other times set out to defend the interests of specific groups and of their own institutions. The quantity of reflections arising from their experiences of the colonial world was by no means small —reflections on the two Empires, on their history and construction, on their governance, on the regions they occupied and on those regions’ inhabitants. And these reflections translated into several genres, some of them unexpected: accounts addressed to the King, but also chronicles, hagiographies, writings on natural history, sermons and devotional texts. They all served as forms of writing in which the authors could not only level criticism and heap praise, but also articulate (often by employing their dense intellectual heritage) specific ways of understanding the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, deeply rooted in their colonial context. Traditions native to Europe —millenarism, providentialism, Roman imperialism, stoicism, and so on— and even elements of local politic imaginations often were at the basis of the religious and missionary discourses on imperial realities (MacCormack, 2007).

In this sense, the Franciscans continually sustained, both in Portuguese India and in Iberian America, a literature which in some ways came to proclaim the worth of colonial spaces, which were often relegated to subalternity by the metropolitan outlook. Friars such as Alonso de la Rea, Antonio Ramírez and António do Rosário underlined in chronicles and other texts the perfection of the climate, nature and the riches in the provinces where they lived. They thus sought to “sanctify” these territories, often framing them in Edenic terms and adopting a discourse which other colonial actors also used (Holanda, 2010; Cañizares-Esguerra, 2008: 239-283; Rubial García, 2010: 210-230). Lives and hagiographies also played a fundamental role when building up this tropical holiness, a land which always had “criollista” undertones (Rubial García, 1999). It is little wonder, then, that the Franciscans quickly attracted a good number of people born in the colonies to families of Spanish and Portuguese origin. In some places, like Peru, the links with criollo groups were even more intense than those established by the Jesuits (Gálvez Peña, 2012). Aspirations for autonomy and the demands made in the face of the position of gachupines and reinóis found a perfect expression in the writings of the Franciscans in New Spain, Peru, Brazil and Portuguese India. They thus contributed to the growth of a criollo self-consciousness or self-identity which ran through much of their writing and which also often favored the emergence of an urban patriotism and even the resignification of the indigenous past (Lavallé, 1982; Rubial García, 2010: 213-342; Xavier, 2007; Jeanne, 2012; Gálvez Peña, 2012).

But Franciscan texts did not only reflect the aspirations of colonizers of peninsular origin. At times, they accompanied friars’ efforts to frame certain communities within the heart of colonial societies and integrate them, defining and reinforcing their respective identities within an ethnically and culturally mixed world. And promoting specific devotions through sermons, images, celebrations and so on often proved to be an effective way of doing that. Beyond the cults advocated specifically to indigenous populations, there were several others related to specific members of the Order which the Franciscans attempted to integrate into some groups’ daily lives. One important example is the figure of Gonçalo Garcia, a mestizo. Born in Portuguese India and one of the friars martyred in Nagasaki in 1597, he became a particularly successful object of worship in the Portuguese-American world during the eighteenth century, becoming a devotional referent promoted to pardo communities in places like Bahia and Recife (Bezerra and Almeida, 2012).

The connections between the Asian and American worlds associated with Garcia and his cult in Portuguese America bring to light one final aspect of the phenomena which resulted from the Franciscans’ role in the imperial Iberian world. The growth of a truly international network of convents allowed members of the Order to establish links with each other between Mexico, Macau, Goa, Lima, Seville and a number of other places, which in turn encouraged the circulation of books, images, money, relics and people. It allowed for journeys like Martín Ignacio de Loyola’s between Spanish America, the Philippines and Portuguese Asia, and for the publication in New Spain of Diego de San Francisco’s manuscript Relación, written in the Philippines in 1625, with an imprint from Manila. A central role in the formation of these connections went to those who moved from the frontiers of both Empires to their European centers. Diego de Valadés, Jerónimo de Mendieta, Miguel da Purificação, Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdoba and Francisco de Ayeta all travelled to advance their provinces’ affairs, from participating in general congregations to demanding autonomy and government, from jurisdictional conflicts with bishops to recruiting missionaries and attempting to promote the beatification of certain figures (Rubial García, 2012; Gálvez Peña, 2012; Jeanne, 2012; Xavier, 2014). They often carried their own texts or their co-religionists’ (such as catechisms, grammar manuals, chronicles, hagiographies and records) which they sought to have printed in Europe or which they simply presented to their superiors or to the royal and pontifical authorities. In part, they thus contributed to “making present” imperial realities in metropolitan contexts. This, in turn, simultaneously contributed to the accumulation of a large body of linguistic, political and natural knowledge in Lisbon, Madrid and Rome, which other friars used to form their own new perceptions of colonial worlds (Xavier and Županov, 2015: 158-201).

The present dossier brings together five studies based on the topics outlined in this brief introduction, all of which focus on a different aspect of the Franciscans’ intellectual output in Iberian imperial contexts, and especially within the Portuguese Empire. The first essay, by Ângela Barreto Xavier, analyzes how political providentialism was expressed in Portuguese India by António de São Tiago, who used it as an instrument to legitimize the Braganza monarchy. This theme of the formation of an imperial imagination created in colonial places is continued by Federico Palomo, who focuses on António do Rosário and his text Frutas do Brasil (Lisbon, 1702) and examines how the author made use of his knowledge of the plant-based natural world to construct a complex allegory rooted in Portuguese America. Zoltán Biedermann explores how the notion of spiritual conquest affected the textual organization of knowledge in Paulo da Trindade’s Conquista Espiritual do Oriente, written in the 1630s. He stresses the prevalence given to time over space in this Franciscan friar work. Trindade weakened the link between knowledge and space, making time to emerge as a central organizing principle. Liam Brockey’s work looks at the construction of Franciscan historical records in East Asia, underlining both how they differ from other orders’ chronicles and the role they played in disputes with other missionary groups such as the Society of Jesus. Chronicles are also the subject of Zulmira Santos’ work, which focuses on António Maria Jaboatão’s Orbe Brasilico (Lisbon, 1761). However, her analysis homes in on the role which the text played, at a time when the Jesuit Order was in crisis, in entrenching “Franciscan holiness” in Portuguese-America and in turn attempting to create a Franciscan Brazil.

I would like to end this introduction by thanking all the authors for their commitment and interest in contributing to this dossier, as well as the journal’s editorial board for the opportunity to take forward this project and the trust they have placed in me.