Age of Exploration

Book Title: The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources
Volume Editors: Christina Lee & Ricardo Padron
Series: Connected Histories in the Early Modern World
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521 -- with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan -- and 1815 -- the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also Spanish America, China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that in the Spanish imagination were extensions of its Latin American colonies. This reader provides a selection of documents relevant to the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific among Europeans, Spanish Americans, and Asians while highlighting the role of natives, mestizos, and women. A-first-of-its-kind, each of the documents in this collection was selected, translated into English, and edited by a different scholar in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies, who also provided commentary and bibliography.

Download the table of contents & intro: https://assets.ctfassets.net/4wrp2um278k7/11hsfvrPcAxqxL2y9i0JTz/e4bb2a22ed2daaa9fa3964245b4bc8bf/9789048552276_ToC_Intro.pdf

Stadendenkmäler in Deutschland und Brasilien.
Aus Anlass der Einweihung des neuen Staden-Denkmals in Wolfhagen.

Das historische Gedenken an Hans Staden und sein epochales Brasilienbuch (Warhaftige Historia, Marburg 1557) hat natürlich heute auch einen memorialtopischen Aspekt: die Orte, die Staden während seiner Reise besucht hat, oder die mit seiner Lebensgeschichte vor und nach der Reise verbunden sind, haben sich-allerdings erst spät im 20. Jhdt.-seiner erinnert und ihn in Deutschland und Brasilien durch öffentliche Denkmäler und Benennungen von Straßen und Plätzen nach ihn gewürdigt. Der Beitrag stellt die Denkmäler vor und die Umstände ihrer Errichtung. Ferner werden kurz künstlerische Reflexe von Stadens Werk und Stadenfilme angeführt.

Beginning in the early fifteenth century, European states began to embark on a series of global explorations that inaugurated a new chapter in world history. Known as the Age of Discovery, or the Age of Exploration, this period spanned the fifteenth through the early seventeenth century, during which time European expansion to places such as the Americas, Africa, and the Far East flourished. This era is defined by figures such as Ferdinand Magellan, whose 1519–1522 expedition was the first to traverse the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and the first to circumnavigate the globe. The European Age of Exploration developed alongside the Renaissance. Both periods in Western history acted as transitional moments between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Competition between burgeoning European empires, such as Spain and England, fuelled the evolution and advancement of overseas exploration. Motivated by religion, profit, and power, the size and influence of European empires during this period expanded greatly. The effects of exploration were not only felt abroad but also within the geographic confines of Europe itself. The economic, political, and cultural effects of Europe’s beginning stages of global exploration impacted the long term development of both European society and the entire world.

In Part I of this paper, I focused on the contribution that the great trading companies made to the development of the West at the beginning of the Age of Exploration. In this second part, I investigate the non-merchants that plied the oceans as common carriers to smaller traders and others without their own dedicated fleets.

Emerging domestic prosperity created popular demand for exotic imported goods. It was commerce – and not imperialism – that initiated the growing western hegemony. The entrepreneurial trading companies and the independent cargo shipping companies each made unique contributions to this expansion.
This paper continues to study the birth of international trade through the lens of postal history.

A newly-prosperous middle class was beginning to emerge at the dawn of the Age of Exploration. Mercantile political and economic theories notwithstanding, it was the importation of goods, rather than exports, that was important. The Age of Exploration was not about military or imperial expansionism. It was about trade.

The great trading companies of this period were granted monopolies by European monarchs and roamed the seas to Africa and Asia. These firms had fleets of privately-owned ships. The trading companies’ representatives, the ship officers, and crew all relied upon the mail for communications back to the home countries. This paper views the birth of international trade through the lens of postal history.

Continued development of a comprehensive national geodatabase for underwater cultural heritage (UCH) in response to Maritime Archaeology in Uruguay: Towards a Manifesto (Herrera et al. 2010), requires a risk identification, assessment, management, and analysis for geospatial information system (GIS) project activities for the Comision del Patrimonio Cultrual de la Nacion de Uruguay (Cultural Heritage Commission of the Nation of Uruguay). The goal of this project is to create an analytical GIS platform able to incorporate geographical, geophysical, archaeological, and historical data from research areas.

The nation of Uruguay poses on of the most prolific collection of Age of Exploration shipwrecks in new world archaeology. The concentration, density, and diversity of wrecks is due to the nations location as South America’s, most Southern port city. With such a critically positioned port, and due to the rich maritime heritage, there is a pressing need for protection and conservation of these multinational cultural materials. This need precipitated into the development, collection, and production an incipient Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) database for the country of Uruguay. To complete the production of this database, certain goals and elements are being met and are mission critical for success.

Fundamental, shared public assumptions about the value, purpose and future of natural history collections have regularly changed since the Age of Exploration, when Royal Cabinets of Curiosity (forerunners of museums and systematics) blossomed. Those shared notions treat objects as representatives of a tangible past as well as a tangible future. Assumptions about the future have shaped the criteria for selecting what is collected, and modes of exhibiting the collections. Anthropologists will note that those assumptions, like other aspects of public culture in any society, must periodically be renewed in rituals which reiterate the community's commonality of notions and assert the "sacredness" of the endeavor itself, and the units of society carrying it out. This contribution considers some examples of the collection, use, and display of early natural history objects that reached Europe from the "new world," in order to determine some of the underlying assumptions about the future that those collections entailed.

十六世紀半ばから十七世初頭にかけ、日本イエズス会により、日本語の教理書が出版されたということは周知の通りだ。世俗のヨーロッパ文学である『イソップ物語』の和訳、そして天草版『平家物語』、『太平記抜書』の存在もよく知られている。しかし、日本語で書かれたオリジナルのキリスト教説話が現存するということは案外知られていない。近年、このテキスト群を「異文化接触」というレベルで取り上げた研究が現れているが、漢訳仏典や漢籍の影響を受けた『日本霊異記』『今昔物語集』などとは対照的に、室町末期にラテン語文脈から国語に翻案されたキリスト教文学は、残念ながらこれまで国文学として扱われてこなかった。その理由をここで詳しくは追究できないが、日本精神というものが（漢文脈との関連性ではある程度まで認められている一方で）キリスト教との関係性については根本的に異質で相容れないものと一般的には理解されていることが、その背景にあると考えられる。しかし、キリスト教説話を聞いた織豊期の日本人がこのように日本精神とキリスト教を両極的なものとして捉えていたということは、資料からは読み取れない。本稿では、キリスト教も日本精神も信仰していない筆者が日本中世キリスト教の代表的な説話集をバレト写本という資料の中から取り上げ、その原典が何であったかを明らかにし、さらに、同時代の日本文学との関係性を探る。その結果、この説話集は当時の武士階級によって評価された軍記・語り物文学、取り分け幸若舞と最も関連性が深いということを示す。

The stern construction of the Emanuel Point II shipwreck was systematically analyzed and compared to eight other shipwrecks from the 16th century to determine the true nature of the stern’s original shape. It has largely been assumed that Iberian vessels from the mid-16th century onward carried a square tuck stern, but archaeological analysis of the sternpost, gudgeons, and pintles from the Emanuel Point II shipwreck as well as other wreck sites have produced a list of characteristics archaeologists can apply to wreck sites in order to gain a better understanding of stern shape. Archaeological evidence suggests that the shape of the stern of the Emanuel Point II shipwreck has a higher probability of being rounded, an earlier trait of ship construction from the Iberian Peninsula.

During the Early Modern period, global trade routes determined a new idea of market and exchanges. The traditional idea of European expansion has been questioned over the last few decades, and exchanges between different cultures have been reconsidered analysing interactions in a multifaceted way. This session wishes to explore, not only the perception and reception of new products on the European market, but also their agency in facilitating the intersection between different cultures, by looking at:-How objects and ingredients arriving from the 'Indies' (either the Far East or the Americas) were received in Europe during the Age of Exploration-How these same items were to some extent readjusted to European taste-How European products and art were received and re-elaborated in non-European contexts-The relevance of cartography, not only in terms of exploration and representation, but also as a way to understand and 'assimilate' new worlds

This year marks the quadricentenary of the first confirmed European arrival in Western Australia. On 25 October 1616, Dutch skipper Dirk Hartog and his crew landed at the northern tip of the island now named Dirk Hartog, in Shark Bay. Many have written about Hartog’s ‘accidental’ landfall and the inscribed pewter plate that he erected to mark his landing. This seemingly mundane event on the Western Australian coast earned Hartog a, then unforeseen, prominence in the legacy of seafaring history and in the early European history of Australia. It established him as a notable figure in the Age of Exploration. Today, the historical events and the physical remains of Hartog’s landing in Western Australia are firmly embedded within the context of European activity in the Indian Ocean region and, more specifically, Dutch exploration of the Australian coastline in the 17th century. This article sets out to provide a critical assessment of the life and seafaring activities of the first known European to set foot on Western Australian soil; and the history of Eendracht, the earliest known Dutch ship to explore the Western Australian coast.

An account of Americas by an Ottoman author, written in 1580s tells us many things about what is
not well studied in today’s historiography. The historical background of the book goes back to the period
called Ottoman Age of Exploration in which Ottoman Empire’s policies after the annexation of Mamluk
territories changed and Sultans of Rum actually started to develop policies in the Indian Ocean both
economically and both religiously in relation with their claim of universal caliphate. After various attempts
to overrule the territory and get rid of or at least weaken the Portuguese existence in the region, Ottomans
remained with limited power when Murad III come to the throne. During his reign, a book written by an
unknown author, claimed to be commissioned by Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, suggested Sultan Murad III to
pay attention to the developments in the “New World”.