From Neophyte to Non-White: Moral Theology and Race Mixture in Colonial Brazil
The first global debate about racial admixture originated in the exegesis of papal privileges designed to aid Catholic converts in Spanish and Portuguese Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Later Scholastics contributed to the ontology of race by aligning religious status with origins, or blood, in ways...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
De Gruyter
2017
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| In: |
Journal of Early Modern Christianity
Year: 2017, Volume: 4, Issue: 2, Pages: 167-193 |
| IxTheo Classification: | CG Christianity and Politics KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history KBR Latin America KDB Roman Catholic Church NBE Anthropology NCA Ethics |
| Further subjects: | B
Canon Law
B Mestizo B neophyte B Colonialism B Race B Latin America |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | The first global debate about racial admixture originated in the exegesis of papal privileges designed to aid Catholic converts in Spanish and Portuguese Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Later Scholastics contributed to the ontology of race by aligning religious status with origins, or blood, in ways that departed from raging controversies around Jewish and Muslim converts to Catholicism. Through recourse to seventeenth-century probabilism, these moral theologians and canonists debated the meaning of the term mestizos , a Spanish term that appeared alongside the Latin mixtim progeniti ("mixed offspring") in marriage privileges granted to neophytes in colonial contexts. Were persons with 25% of non-European blood mestizos , or, instead, Europeans? Were mulattos, as mixtim progeniti, mestizos also? The mestizo conundrum, and the opinions and papal bulls that it generated, shaped legal constructions of whitening (Spanish blanqueamiento , Portuguese branqueamento ) in colonial Latin America, and anticipated the moral and legal dilemmas of Brazil’s present-day affirmative-action program. |
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| ISSN: | 2196-6656 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of Early Modern Christianity
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1515/jemc-2017-0009 |