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Please join the Early Modern Iberian Worlds virtual event with Miguel Martínez (Professor of Spanish Literature and the College, University of Chicago).

"Colonial Grotesque:��Carnival and Idolatry in 17th-c. Manila"

This presentation will focus on carnivalesque culture and practices in colonial Manila. While most religious writers celebrated the self-restraint and propriety of the Philippines vis-à-vis the excesses of Carnival in other places, Manila’s streets saw constant pushing against the limits of “honest entertainment,” disputing the boundaries between acceptable festive practices and those licentious, tumultuous appropriations that could potentially antagonize the social order of a missionary colony. The language of idolatry occasionally surfaced to describe the Europeans’ festive practices. This arguably made carnival more dangerous in the Indies than it was back in Europe precisely because it could contribute to unearth the idolatrous, profane substrate of old Christianity, those “traces of ancient paganism” (veteris paganismi vestigia) that Erasmus observed in Siena’s Carnival in 1509. It pointed to the always imperfect conversion of those who had come to the Philippines allegedly to convert pagans.��

Email earlymoderniberianworlds [at] gmail.com (earlymoderniberianworlds[at]gmail[dot]com) for Zoom link.

Hosted by the��Early Modern Iberian Worlds research group, part of the Division of Litertures, Cutures, and Languages (DLCL) Research Unit.