The new parameters of a global world in the early modern period gave rise to an expansion of movement that facilitated spatial and social mobility for women of different social ranks. Through their reexamination of archival documents and travel narratives, these essays investigate the opportunities for female mobility across the Spanish Empire, narrating the journeys of women who assumed new and unpredictable roles in distant environments. Some risked transoceanic journeys to hold positions of colonial power, while nuns traveled to found convents. Portuguese and Genoese women financiers and merchants traversed the Mediterranean to command enterprises in different cities. Breaking with tradition, the noblewomen considered in these essays exercised political agency as ambassadresses and diplomatic spies at various European courts. Still other women fled across borders from oppressive marriages or cross-dressed as soldiers to perform adventurous feats in support of imperial causes. Their frequently distorted histories, authored by men, have been revised and rectified by the authors of this volume.

In Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines, the author analyzes the literature and politics of 'spiritual conquest' in order to demonstrate how it reflected the contribution of religious ministers to a protracted period of social anomie throughout the mission provinces between the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. By tracking the prose of spiritual conquest with the history of the mission in official documents, religious correspondence, and public controversies, the author shows how, contrary to the general consensus in Philippine historiography, the literature and pastoral politics of spiritual conquest reinforced the frontier character of the religious provinces outside Manila in the Americas as well as the Philippines, by supplanting the (absence of) law in the name of supplementing or completing it. This frontier character accounts for the modern reinvention of native custom as well as the birth of literature and theater in the Tagalog vernacular.

This book offers a panorama of movement, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world. While the pre-modern centuries have long been portrayed as static and self-contained, it is now acknowledged that Europe from the Middle Ages onwards saw increasing flows of people and goods. Movement also connected the continent more closely to other parts of the world. The present work challenges dominant notions of the 'fixed,' immobile nature of pre-modern cultures through study of the inter-connected material, social, and cultural dimensions of mobility. The case studies presented here chart the technologies and practices that both facilitated and impeded movement in diverse spheres of social activity such as communication, transport, politics, religion, medicine, and architecture. The chapters underscore the importance of the movement of people and objects through space and across distance to the dynamic economic, political, and cultural life of the early modern period.

Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities - or lay Catholic brotherhoods - founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious confraternities founded by subaltern subjects, both in rural and urban spaces of colonial Latin America, to understand the dynamics and relations between the peripheral and central areas of colonial society, underlying the ways in which colonialized subjects navigated the colonial domain with forms of social organization and cultural and religious practices. The book analyzes indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance shaped by local devotional identities that also transgressed imperial religious and racial hierarchies. The analysis of these practices explores the intersections between ethnic identity and ritual devotion, as well as how the establishment of black and indigenous religious confraternities carried the potential to subvert colonial discourse.

During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells' shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.