Sabina Brevaglieri
I am an historian with a full education as an art historian and further expertise in cultural heritage. Over the last years, I have been a Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (2022) and a Visiting Professor at IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lynx – Lucca, Italy (2023).
I am interested in the dynamics of dissonant heritages between worlds and their complex temporalities, as well the material dimension of knowledge from an interdisciplinary perspective. My research focus is on material agency and the multiple and competing agencies interplaying with it. I have been working on missionaries and informal diplomacies in the colonial Iberian empires and Holy Roman Empire, paying also attention to their interconnections.
In particular, I am an expert of Rome and the interconnectedness between its trans-local urban space, the Papal court and institutions. I have been working on natural knowledge at a global scale, and I am still engaging wth the interdependencies between formal and informal political communication and knowldge production.
I am interested in the dynamics of dissonant heritages between worlds and their complex temporalities, as well the material dimension of knowledge from an interdisciplinary perspective. My research focus is on material agency and the multiple and competing agencies interplaying with it. I have been working on missionaries and informal diplomacies in the colonial Iberian empires and Holy Roman Empire, paying also attention to their interconnections.
In particular, I am an expert of Rome and the interconnectedness between its trans-local urban space, the Papal court and institutions. I have been working on natural knowledge at a global scale, and I am still engaging wth the interdependencies between formal and informal political communication and knowldge production.
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News by Sabina Brevaglieri
Missionary collecting, Quaderni Storici by Sabina Brevaglieri
The special issue explores different missionary attitudes and strategies of both discursive and material engagement operated by competing missionary communities in early 16th Mexico. It addresses tensions among orders striving for privileges and exclusive rights as well as shifting relationships with the diocesan churches in 17th century Philippines and Caribbean regions. The articles map negotiations with colonial powers between object removals and complex re-sedimentations in the Italian peninsula and Rome over time. The long-lasting missionary material engagement finally was rearticulated in 19th and 20th centuries museums and collections, taking shape in relationship with nation building and colonial imagination by monopolizing and often reusing past experiences and paper knowledge.
Book Natural desiderio di sapere by Sabina Brevaglieri
Centro della rivendicazione universalistica pontificia e spazio comunicativo fra vecchi e nuovi mondi, Roma emerge come teatro barocco di un progetto di capitalizzazione dei saperi, che mobilita appassionati virtuosi, filosofi “straccioni”, medici mediatori, agguerriti pittori, scultori in gara con la natura, missionari in cerca di legittimazione.
Attraverso il racconto dell’affascinante storia del Tesoro messicano – imponente volume tardivamente pubblicato nel 1651 – si ricostruisce un cantiere di produzione naturalistica, fra sconosciuti exotica e artefatti stranamente familiari, scambi e competizioni, conflitti e negoziazioni, individuando nei saperi una lente per comprendere la dinamica storica.
Coordinated by Roberto Antonelli
corte, dominata dall’interesse individuale.
Centro della rivendicazione universalistica pontificia e spazio comunicativo fra vecchi e nuovi mondi, Roma emerge come teatro barocco di un progetto di capitalizzazione dei saperi, che mobilita appassionati virtuosi, filosofi “straccioni”, medici mediatori, agguerriti pittori, scultori in gara con la natura, missionari in cerca di legittimazione.
Attraverso il racconto dell’affascinante storia del Tesoro messicano - imponente volume tardivamente pubblicato nel 1651 - si ricostruisce un cantiere di produzione naturalistica, fra sconosciuti exotica e artefatti stranamente familiari, scambi e competizioni, conflitti e negoziazioni, individuando nei saperi una lente per comprendere la dinamica storica.
Book chapters by Sabina Brevaglieri
The special issue explores different missionary attitudes and strategies of both discursive and material engagement operated by competing missionary communities in early 16th Mexico. It addresses tensions among orders striving for privileges and exclusive rights as well as shifting relationships with the diocesan churches in 17th century Philippines and Caribbean regions. The articles map negotiations with colonial powers between object removals and complex re-sedimentations in the Italian peninsula and Rome over time. The long-lasting missionary material engagement finally was rearticulated in 19th and 20th centuries museums and collections, taking shape in relationship with nation building and colonial imagination by monopolizing and often reusing past experiences and paper knowledge.
Centro della rivendicazione universalistica pontificia e spazio comunicativo fra vecchi e nuovi mondi, Roma emerge come teatro barocco di un progetto di capitalizzazione dei saperi, che mobilita appassionati virtuosi, filosofi “straccioni”, medici mediatori, agguerriti pittori, scultori in gara con la natura, missionari in cerca di legittimazione.
Attraverso il racconto dell’affascinante storia del Tesoro messicano – imponente volume tardivamente pubblicato nel 1651 – si ricostruisce un cantiere di produzione naturalistica, fra sconosciuti exotica e artefatti stranamente familiari, scambi e competizioni, conflitti e negoziazioni, individuando nei saperi una lente per comprendere la dinamica storica.
Coordinated by Roberto Antonelli
corte, dominata dall’interesse individuale.
Centro della rivendicazione universalistica pontificia e spazio comunicativo fra vecchi e nuovi mondi, Roma emerge come teatro barocco di un progetto di capitalizzazione dei saperi, che mobilita appassionati virtuosi, filosofi “straccioni”, medici mediatori, agguerriti pittori, scultori in gara con la natura, missionari in cerca di legittimazione.
Attraverso il racconto dell’affascinante storia del Tesoro messicano - imponente volume tardivamente pubblicato nel 1651 - si ricostruisce un cantiere di produzione naturalistica, fra sconosciuti exotica e artefatti stranamente familiari, scambi e competizioni, conflitti e negoziazioni, individuando nei saperi una lente per comprendere la dinamica storica.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0peCDTKWvo&t=616s
4 March-29 April 2021
Missionary objects and collecting (16 th-20 th centuries) is a new seminar series inspired by the heated debate surrounding the Humboldt Forum's opening in Berlin. The aim is to contribute to the interdisciplinary undertaking of plurally thinking the future of ethnological objects and collections in Europe today. This international initiative will present and discuss ongoing historical research dealing with missionary practices of attention, selection, and exposition of artefacts across time and space. The set of seminars will explore entanglements of missionary objects within the competitive and conflictual colonial spaces and address the essential role of the religious dimension in defining and expanding the complex meanings of these objects, as well as in continuously reconfiguring their contexts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0peCDTKWvo&t=651s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ehENrSGZ9I&t=3s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HYCuPKKuh8&t=3s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1D9WoRYjr8&t=2s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3JSUjbRSYo&t=55s
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2F3l4_KQD_VDJUKjDUOP_w
This exploratory workshop has been designed with a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, it aims to substantially contribute to the conceptualisation and design of a ground-breaking digital humanities project dedicated to the so-called Tesoro Messicano (Mexican Treasury) and its multiple production and circulation contexts between the old and new worlds. On the other hand, it introduces a series of working meetings that are expected to boost a highly innovative research agenda focusing on the complex relationships between cultural heritage and history. Thus, the potential of the concept of paper-heritage-making will be analysed, and thoroughly discussed at the analytical crossroad between a historical issue (heritage as a process), a conceptual resource (digital), and an impact strategy oriented towards the circulation of knowledge and know-how, interdisciplinary training-through research, and social participation. This multilevel approach will continuously return to Rome, meant as both a trans-local urban space, opened to further comparison and entanglement, and a complex global dimension materialised through scholarly, diplomatic and missionary networks as well as multiple contexts of plural confessional cultures.
The workshop argues for the Mexican Treasury as a paper-monument, i.e. a complex artefact made up of strict interconnections of textual, visual and material dimensions, fostering shifting entanglements of knowledge practices, multiple searches for legitimation, political claims, and competing memory production. As is well known, the Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus was published in 1651 as the late result of Francisco Hernández’s complex medical and natural-historical legacy. Though many actors participating in its plural and long-lasting making regarded this “monstrous” in-folio as a scientific failure, it was nevertheless published in Rome. While the Papal city was losing its political centrality in Europe and renegotiating its universal aurea, the Mexican Treasury was resumed, and a complex bulk of knowledge on the natural American world was made public after lengthy exposure to different appropriations, re-significations and sedimentations, thus reinventing spatial and temporal junctures with the earlier past.
In the last years, the apparently increasing scholarly attention towards such a “born-old” natural history of the new worlds invites us to reflect on its multiple material dimensions, plural contexts, and different uses. By opening up a collective reflection on this paper-monument, the time is now ripe to thematise the Papal city as a complex urban space of paper sedimentation, artefact entrapments, as well as a trans-local communicative arena where knowledge-making and competing processes of value-creation, resignification, oblivion and destruction, continuously renegotiate the future.
Congreso International La antesala de la modernidad: el reinado de
Carlos II
Missionary knowledge from the Ibero-American territories circulated across the Thirty-Years-War Europe, addressing different actors and publics, mobilizing competing jurisdictions, and interplaying with conflicting political projects. Both the Spanish royal court and the Papal congregations strived to monopolize written and visual reports of such a far-flung experience meant as an essential resource for the colonial information system, as well as the universal Catholic claims. Trans-imperial learned networks fully participated in these continuous negotiations across loyalties and boundaries.
Against this background, the paper argues for a complex role played by missionary procurators sent to Europe and aims to investigate the dynamics of shifting collectives of papers, maps, and objects clustering around them at the crossroad between imperial politics, religious claims, and knowledge making. Gregorio de Bolivar was a Franciscan Observant with a 25-year experience in both Perù and Pacific areas. In 1625-1626, he went back to Europe, travelling between Rome and Madrid, claiming for ecclesiastical reformation, informing on wonderful American animals and territories, and intervening as arbitrista on confessional politics. Between courts, archives, and different urban settings, Bolivar’s paramount case allows for a better understanding of the complex entanglements, competitions and conflicts triggered by missionary knowledge between Spain and the Papacy.
Negotiating its complex collective configuration in a global turning-towards-Baroque Rome, the Accademia dei Lincei engaged with shifting understandings of natural knowledge, and a multi-layered reflection on the epistemic value of ars and industria. This project interconnected different actors, interests, and claims in an unstable dimension, which was shaped by urban competitions and continuous patronage repositioning, as well as by confessional tensions and international conflicts. My talk addresses the writing of the so-called Mexican Treasury, published in 1651 but already in print almost 25 years earlier, as the material communicative arena in which such a Lincean enterprise was deployed. Between presence and distance, intermedial practices and epistolary exchanges, artefacts, papers and prints, scientific transformation and artistic creativity strove to emerge as a political resource in making a universal Papal Rome.
Language: Italian
Humbold University, Berlin.
25 March 2021, 17h.
Discussant (English): Birgit Tremml Werner-Linnaeus University
Beyond the borders. Laboratory of history and historiography, networking action between Europe and Central America (Sapienza 2020–22), di cui sono partner i seguenti atenei: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC – Prof. José Edgardo Cal Montoya), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM – Prof. Gibrán Irving Israel Bautista y Lugo), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM – Prof. Antonio Álvarez Ossorio Alvariño), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UOA – Prof. Gerassimos D. Pagratis), Università di Palermo (UNIPA – Prof.ssa Valentina Favarò), Università di Milano (UNIMI – Prof.ssa Blythe Alice Raviola). Responsabile: Gaetano Lettieri – Responsabile operativo (Project Manager): Alessia Ceccarelli