Between Translation and Confusion

A UCL Early Modern Exchanges seminar with Eduardo Fernández Guerrero (The Warburg Institute) and Carlos Cañete Jiménez (CSIC).

Eduardo Fernández will present his current postdoctoral project “European Translations of African Christianity” investigating the production and dissemination of knowledge about African Christianity in Europe during the sixteenth century, focusing on Ethiopian Christianity and its representation by European authors.

Carlos Cañete will discuss his recent article ‘Porque algunos se podrán ganar de esa lengua’ on the connection between Jesuit missions in the Morisco communities of the Iberian Peninsula and in Ethiopia (16th–17th centuries), showing how the extension of a common model of evangelization resulted in a perception of linguistic and cultural continuities between both spaces.

The UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges is dedicated to the study of the diverse cultural, economic and social exchanges between early modern states in the Old World and beyond in the period 1450-1800. Our work focuses on how complex intercultural interactions from translation to trade began to create borders and frontiers between countries, vernacular literatures and identities in this period.

About the Speakers

Eduardo Fernández Guerrero

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at The Warburg Institute

Eduardo is a historian specialising in texts and beliefs in early modern Christianities. He holds a PhD in early modern history from the European University Institute, where his research was supported by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the Bibliographical Society, and the Renaissance Society of America. He has been a lecturer at the Università di Pavia and held visiting fellowships at the Scuola Normale Superiore, the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, and KU Leuven.

Carlos Cañete Jiménez

Senior Researcher (Tenured) at Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East (ILC) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

He has previously been a professor of the Department of Arabic, Islamic and Oriental Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). He has also been a Fellow at the Center for 17th- and 18th- Century Studies at University of California, Los Angeles; a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Princeton University; and a Edward W. Said Fellow at Columbia University. He is the author of Cuando África comenzaba en los Pirineos: una historia del paradigma africanista español (ss. XV-XX) (Marcial Pons, 2021) and co-author of The Archaeology of the Jesuit Missions in Ethiopia (1557-1632) (Brill, 2017).