Cultural Encounters: the Circulation of the Sacred in the Early Modern World

The century after Columbus’ first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 has long been characterized as the ‘Age of Discovery’. But perhaps it would be better termed the ‘Age of Self-Discovery’. The effect of the unprecedented circulation of goods and people around the globe was not only to devastate populations without resistance to western microbes and muskets, but to transform how Western Europeans understood their own Christian heritage as the latter was appropriated and adopted by indigenous peoples from Manila to Mexico; Calicut to Cuzco. This lecture will argue that the end result of this circulation of the sacred was the conversion of the Old World by the New (a process that is still unfolding).

This lecture is the first in a series entitled Cultural Encounters: Travel, Religion, and Identity in the Early Modern World, which explores the findings and implications of the research coming out of the Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe project.

Cultural Encounters poster (PDF , 738kb)