IMPACT

Investigating the negotiation of sanctity between Rome and geographically distant areas participates in globalizing the history of early modern art. As the spreading of Catholicism served as the ideological justification for European expansion under Iberian rule, negotiation of an individual’s saintly status amounted to a negotiation of the status awarded to the ‘new’ Catholic societies within the order established by the Iberian colonial and mercantile empires. Because this process attests to the claims and aspirations of Christian societies around the globe beginning at an early stage of European expansion, it calls into question the dynamics of desire and demand generally associated with its economic aspects. Such an investigation is therefore qualified to challenge established perspectives on Roman Catholicism, colonialism, and the early modern world at large, impacting not only art history, but historical research at its broadest and most interdisciplinary.

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