Dr. Pedro Cardim, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Visiting Professor, NYU, presents “Portugal, the Spanish Monarchy and the Iberian World (16th-18th centuries): Recent Historiographical Perspectives”.
Until recently most of the scholarship about the early modern Iberian world focused solely on one country and usually adopted a national perspective to analyze subjects and matters that rather than national, were instead multi-territorial and multi-“national”. The main result was a partial and distorted understanding of the Iberian world, one that regarded the Iberian past as a mere juxtaposition of two unified national histories. In the past two decades, however, knowledge of early modern Spanish and Portuguese history advanced substantially. Comparative approaches, as well as connected and entangled analyses, became more frequent, and the same can be said about the research on the interactions between the various parts of the Iberian world (including the non-European lands under the influence of Iberia). The aim of this presentation is to discuss such recent historiographical developments, as well as some of the theoretical implications of the methods and topics currently being explored. This presentation also discusses the epistemic demands posed by studying the Iberian world as an entwined ensemble, as a world with a complex, polyphonic and diverse past.
For more information, visit the Humanities Institute website.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Instituto Camões, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Iberian Studies and the Americas Before 1900 Working Groups of the Humanities Institute
