Within this chapter I evaluate the still unfolding evolution of digital resources in the case of museum and archive practice related to Nagasaki and their suitability in assisting in the task of teaching the difficult history of the atomic bombing. Memorial museums do exist to convince, and to assist the public in recalling public and collective…[Read more]

This article analyzes representations of cities in two pictures created around 1600: Theodor de Bry’s engraving of Macao, and the views of Kyoto attributed to Iwasa Katsumochi Matabei. The relationship between fragmented and total forms of repre- sentation is studied in both pictures. The European engraving depicts urban space as a whole, while t…[Read more]

Review of a book by Giuseppe Marcocci on politics and culture in the Portuguese Empire in the long 15th century.

This chapter explores the survival of a Portuguese presence in Mylapore (today a suburb of Chennai, South India) after the loss of its political and military autonomy. Notions of sovereignty and the boundaries between a pre-colonial and a fully colonial dimension are here questioned on the basis of a little known case study.

Norbert Bar-Le-Duc (1697- 1769), also known as Abbé Jacques Platel, Pierre Parisot, Pierre Curel, traversed identities and continents, making a career out of controversy, becoming knowns as “le fameux Père Norbert”. He worked in South India as a missionary in 1736-1739 and thereafter played a pivotal role in the Malabar Rites controversy. Back…[Read more]

This chapter challenges the idea tha Roberto Nobili was a pioneer of interreligious dialogue and inculturation. On the contrary, it suggests that his interest for our times is rather his theology of religions. A man of the Counter-Reformation, Nobili made propositions as daring as the ones of today’s “Asian theology”.

This article is an archival contribution to the reassessment of the concrete phases of Roberto Nobili’s education. Here I demonstrate that, contrary to what previous historians repeated, Nobili’s involvement with the College Romano was very short. Moreover, I have discovered that, before joining the Society of Jesus, he studied at the Seminario…[Read more]

The Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano, praised for adapting Christianity to the cultures of Japan and China, did not support a similar strategy for India and Africa. He theorized racial hierarchies in which a darker skin was associated with ignorance and vice, whereas the similarity to European physical features implied a higher degree of…[Read more]