Os mártires e a cristianização do território na América portuguesa, séculos XVI e XVII

O artigo investiga um grupo de atores sociais bastante relevante para viabilizar a cristianização na América portuguesa: os mártires cristãos, indivíduos muito especiais, dispostos a regar a terra com seu próprio sangue, de forma a tornar definitiva e irreversível a ocupação cristã do território. Os mártires - e principalmente a narrativa em torno deles - parecem ter sido bastante acionados para integrar a América portuguesa e seus habitantes nativos à temporalidade e territorialidade cristã. Os mártires dos séculos XVI e XVII, principalmente missionários, reeditavam os martírios do início da cristandade, que espalharam o cristianismo rumo a diversas partes do mundo na antiguidade. Dessa forma, viabilizaram a cristianização das novas fronteiras, consagrando o solo com seu sangue divino e viabilizando posteriores processos de urbanização. Além da função estratégica dos mártires para os cristãos, o texto mostra que eles também tiveram significado peculiar na interlocução com as culturas ameríndias, que tinha como um de seus principais personagens o grande guerreiro, disposto a perder seu sangue em prol de seu grupo.This paper looks into a group of social agents who played a significant role in the Christianization of Portuguese America, namely, the Christian martyrs - very special individuals who were ready to wet the land with their own blood in order to make possible a definitive and irreversible occupation of the territory by Christian settlers. The martyrs, and above all the stories told about them, seem to have been called upon to integrate Portuguese America and its native inhabitants into the temporalities and territory of Christendom. Mostly made up of missionaries, this group of 16th and 17th-century martyrs reedited the martyrdom of early Christians, who spread their creed across numerous parts of the Ancient World. They enabled the Christianization of new frontiers by consecrating the soil with their divine blood and paving the way for subsequent processes of urban development. In addition to their strategic significance for Christianity, the text also shows that their martyrdom played a specific role in the Christian settlers' interaction with Amerindian culture, whose main cults included the figure of the great warrior, ever ready to shed his own blood for his group

Anthony Bale. Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages

No abstract is available

A ghostly corpse in the city. Spatial configurations and iconographic representations of capital punishment in the 'Belgian Space'

This contribution addresses the complex relation between ‘sovereign’ power, legitimate State violence, and public space in the ‘Belgian’ territories. By linking the spatiality of the execution and its iconographic representation to changing socio-political power configurations, it studies the role of the Belgian ‘culture of capital executions’ in its specific path of State formation. The trend of removing the death penalty from the communal agora is a general issue in the West. From the Middle Ages, capital executions were characterised by specific appropriations of space by central authorities, local elites and ordinary citizens. During the eighteenth century, local powers faced attempts of the central governments to control the public execution, and more specifically the death penalty. Data from the 1770s to the 1850s, during several quickly succeeding political regimes, supports the hypothesis of a decline of publicly exposed death penalties. In nineteenth century Belgium, the gradual disappearance of the public execution as a spectacular expression of the State runs parallel with the (all but) inexistence of an iconography’ of public executions. The guillotine appears as the expression of a change in criminal justice and it also influences the representation of capital execution. It focuses now on the cutted head, the seat of the mental faculties. During the same period, cell confinement is considered by the State as a mean of control the criminal's mind