Liam Matthew Brockey – författare

No Saints tells a story of the Catholic Reformation from an unexpected vantage point. Instead of saints, it follows frauds, abusers, and opportunists whose lives—preserved in trial records and Inquisition casefiles—offer a different view of religious reform in the late sixteenth century.Set in Lisbon, one of the largest and most dynamic cities of early modern Europe, the book reconstructs the early phases of Catholic Reform through a series of striking cases drawn from archival documents. These sources preserve the memory of individuals largely forgotten by history: a Dominican nun who faked stigmata, a phony friar who convinced churchmen in Italy to supply him with relics, a widow who tricked Fray Luis de Granada into believing she was the recipient of miracles, and a disgraced Jesuit who abused children while running a home for orphan boys, among others. Taken together, these snapshots reveal how fraud and opportunism intersected with major themes of Catholic Reform, including the emergence of schools, the cult of relics, women’s piety, and the proliferation of healing shrines.By shifting attention away from exemplary models of sanctity, No Saints shows how the actions of marginal figures forced religious institutions to respond and, in doing so, helped shape the emerging structures of early modern Catholicism. Told through vivid archival episodes, this lively and engaging narrative will interest scholars and students of early modern Europe, Catholic history, and Iberian studies, as well as general readers curious about the lived realities of religious reform.

It was one of the great encounters of world history: highly educated European priests confronting Chinese culture for the first time in the modern era. This “journey to the East” is explored by Liam Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries who sailed from Portugal to China, believing that, with little more than firm conviction and divine assistance, they could convert the Chinese to Christianity. Moving beyond the image of Jesuits as cultural emissaries, his book shows how these priests, in the first concerted European effort to engage with Chinese language and thought, translated Roman Catholicism into the Chinese cultural frame and eventually claimed two hundred thousand converts. The first narrative history of the Jesuits’ mission from 1579 until the proscription of Christianity in China in 1724, this study is also the first to use extensive documentation of the enterprise found in Lisbon and Rome. The peril of travel in the premodern world, the danger of entering a foreign land alone and unarmed, and the challenge of understanding a radically different culture result in episodes of high drama set against such backdrops as the imperial court of Peking, the villages of Shanxi Province, and the bustling cities of the Yangzi Delta region. Further scenes show how the Jesuits claimed conversions and molded their Christian communities into outposts of Baroque Catholicism in the vastness of China. In the retelling, this story reaches across continents and centuries to reveal the deep political, cultural, scientific, linguistic, and religious complexities of a true early engagement between East and West.

In an age when few people ventured beyond their place of birth, André Palmeiro left Portugal on a journey to the far side of the world. Bearing the title “Father Visitor,” he was entrusted with the daunting task of inspecting Jesuit missions spanning from Mozambique to Japan. A global history in the guise of a biography, The Visitor tells the story of a theologian whose extraordinary travels bore witness to the fruitful contact—and violent collision—of East and West in the early modern era.In India, Palmeiro was thrust into a controversy over the missionary tactics of Roberto Nobili, who insisted on dressing the part of an indigenous ascetic. Palmeiro walked across Southern India to inspect Nobili’s mission, recording fascinating observations along the way. As the highest-ranking Jesuit in India, he also coordinated missions to the Mughal Emperors and the Ethiopian Christians, as well as the first European explorations of the East African interior and the highlands of Tibet.Orders from Rome sent Palmeiro farther afield in 1626, to Macau, where he oversaw Jesuit affairs in East Asia. He played a crucial role in creating missions in Vietnam and seized the opportunity to visit the Chinese mission, trekking thousands of miles to Beijing as one of China’s first Western tourists. When the Tokugawa Shogunate brutally cracked down on Christians in Japan—where neither he nor any Westerner had power to intervene—Palmeiro died from anxiety over the possibility that the last Jesuits still alive would apostatize under torture.

Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World is a collection of essays on the cities of the Portuguese empire written by the leading scholars in the field. The volume, like the empire it analyzes, has a global scope and a chronological span of three centuries. The contributions focus on the social, political, and economic aspects of city life in settlements as far apart as Rio de Janeiro, Mozambique Island, and Nagasaki. Despite the seeming (and real) disparities between the colonial cities located in South America, Africa, and Asia, this volume demonstrates that they possessed a range of commonalities. Beyond their shared language, these cities had similar social, religious, and political institutions that shaped their identities. In many cases, the civic bodies analyzed in these essays such as the city councils or the Misericórdias (charitable brotherhoods), no less than the convents and houses of Catholic religious orders, contributed more to making these cities Portuguese than their allegiance to the crown in Lisbon. Rather than dividing the globe into Atlantic and Indian Ocean spheres, Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World takes the novel approach of bringing together analyses of the social history of these cities in order to stress their shared aspects as well as to suggest paths for fruitful comparisons. By encouraging further scholarship in this rich, yet understudied subject, this collection will not only further comparisons between cities found within the Portuguese empire, but also raise important issues that will be of interest to historians of other European empires, as well as urban historians generally.