Poder pastoral, acomodo y territorialidad en las Cartas Annuas jesuitas de Quito (Estudios)

Este artículo analiza las Cartas Annuas jesuitas entre 1586 y 1660 que hacen referencia a la Audiencia de Quito. Esta fuente poco consultada se utiliza para sondear las estrategias jesuitas de evangelización y el régimen de administración de sacramentos de la orden en Quito. El artículo propone que las estrategias de evangelización jesuita dieron un giro al pasar de un encuentro con la religión nativa que incluyó un interés en mitos prehispánicos y extirpación de idolatría a un enfoque tabula rasa que se centraba en la administración de sacramentos. El artículo atribuye este giro a la transferencia del Colegio jesuita de Quito de la provincia jesuita de Perú a la provincia del Nuevo Reino (Nueva Granada). El artículo contextualiza el encuentro jesuita con la cultura nativa y la operación del régimen sacramental con referencia al concepto de las dos evangelizaciones de Juan Carlos Estenssoro, la noción de poder pastoral de Michel Foucault y la idea de la confesionalización perteneciente a la historiografía de la modernidad temprana europea.

Domesticating the calendar: the hours and the almanac in Tudor England

This article examines two genres of text which were extremely popular in the late-medieval and early modern periods, and it pays particular attention to women users. The printed almanacs of sixteenth-century England were enormously influential; yet their contents are so formulaic and repetitive as to appear almost empty of valuable information. Their most striking feature is their astrological guidance for the reader, and this has led to them being considered 'merely' the repository of popular superstition. Only in the last decade have themes of gender and medicine been given serious consideration in relation to almanacs; but this work has focused on the seventeenth century. This chapter centres on a detailed analysis of sixteenth-century English almanacs, and the various kinds of scientific and household guidance they offered to women readers. Both compilers and users needed to chart a safe course through the religious and scientific battles of the time; and the complexities involved are demonstrated by considering the almanacs in relation to competing sources of guidance. These latter are Books of Hours and 'scientific' works such as medical calendars compiled by Oxford scholars in the late middle ages. A key feature of this chapter is that it gives practical interpretations of this complex information, for the guidance of modern readers unfamiliar with astrology.

The evolution of strategy: thinking war from antiquity to the present

Latin had no word for "strategy", but the East Romans, whom we call the Byzantines, did. This book tracks the evolution of the concept of warfare being subjected to higher political aims from Antiquity to the Present, using Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, English and German sources. It tracks the rise, fall, and resurrection of the belief in the Roman and later the medieval and early modern world that warfare was only legitimate if it pursued the higher goal of a just peace, which in the 19th century gave way to a blinkered concentration on military victory as only war aim. It explains why one school of thought, from Antiquity to the present, emphasised eternal principles of warfare, while others emphasised, in Clausewitz's term, the "changing character of war". It tracks ideas from land warfare to naval warfare to air power and nuclear thinking, but it also stresses great leaps and discontinuities in thinking about strategy. It covers asymmetric wars both from the point of view of the weaker power seeking to overthrow a stronger power, and from the stronger power dealing with insurgents and other numerically inferior forces. It concludes with a commentary of the long-known problems of bureaucratic politics, non-centralised command and inter-service rivalry, which since the 16th century or earlier has created obstacles to coherent strategy making.

'Thou glorious kingdome, thou chiefe of empires': Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature

Bringing together a range of little-considered materials, this article assesses the portrayal of Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature and drama. In particular it argues that such texts use their awareness of Islamic sectarian division to portray Persia as a good potential trading partner in preference to the Ottoman Empire. A close reading of John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins’ The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (1607) demonstrates how the play develops a fantasy model of how relations between Persia and England might function. The potential unity between England and Persia, imagined in terms of both religion and trade, demonstrates how Persia figured as a model ‘other England’ in early modern literature.