Eric Nelson

Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (review)

could take the place of cash as required and yield compensation. Fontaine likewise touches on this facet of exchange revealing how some aristocrats developed a passion for the process of bargaining and turned their collecting habit into a source of income, with the ebb and flow of goods through their collections. “Old” and “new” elided in this marketplace, likewise the brokers and investors in goods crossed social boundaries. Theft was also a commonplace and the fruits of larceny routinely found their way into second-hand markets. Women were particularly prominent in this regard. Tessa Storey’s exploration of courtesan activity in the second-hand market offers other fascinating insights into the female economy of make-do, as these women strived to negotiate the material resources in their control for potential future security. Although much of this volume is focused on Europe, the second-hand trade crossed boundaries and regions. Colonial expansion brought traffic in second-hand wares, from guns to uniforms. Manuel Charpy’s lively assessment of the nineteenth-century Parisian used clothes market reveals both the unique fashion stylings of Parisian students and the long distance trade in uniforms that flourished from mid century, reaching Brazil and the Dominican Republic. At the same time, specialist collections began to be established, to serve theatre and opera companies – indeed, it was from these that the clothing collections of our major museums originated. Collecting and trading outside the mainstream, whether in stamps, antiques or second-hand cars, are two of the more contemporary issues addressed here. In sum, this volume offers an array of insights into the multifaceted means employed to construct material advantage. Second-hand markets functioned within a variety of circumstances, as modern economies developed. States routinely struggled to gain and keep control over the precocious commercial habits of their citizens; and at the same time, individuals and families manipulated the resources at their command to sustain themselves and their families. This volume offers insights into a creative management that took many forms and varied across time. Often messy and sometimes illegal, these exchanges represented the imperfect agency of generations and are essential to understanding their economies and societies.

Review: Megan C. Armstong, The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers During the Wars of Religion, 1560-1600, Rochester University Press: Rochester NY, 2004; 278 pp.; 9781580461757, £40-00 (hbk)

Italian reconstruction of the past. Triulzi, on the other hand, referring to the famous colonial battle of Adowa against Ethiopian troops, looks at Italy’s official myth-making and institutional acts of remembering/forgetting. He emphasizes with skill and clarity the way in which the Italian memory of this military event has been characterized by a ‘cumbersome ideological scaffolding’ (146) that needs to be reconsidered by historians. The legacy of colonialism is also examined through the lens of graphic representations, on the one hand, and of contemporary immigration, on the other. Sandra Ponzanesi’s interesting contribution directs attention to the visual practices representing black female nudity during the fascist period and the postcolonial era, discussing the construction of the racial Other. Her analyses of images of the Black Venus are followed by Jacqueline Andall’s concise and convincing essay on the Eritrean presence in contemporary Italy. Nevertheless, Andall perhaps pushes her reasoning a bit too far when comparing fascist citizenship policies concerning mixed-race children (born to an Italian father and an African native during the colonial period) with the situation of the offspring of Eritrean parents born in the peninsula today. While the message is clear (i.e. contemporary Italy has been applying restrictive citizenship principles since 1992 vis-à-vis the second generations), the similitude with the past brings some confusion between two totally different citizenship rules: jus sanguinis on the one side, conditional jus soli on the other. By expanding on the issue of colonial migration, the volume moves on to explore and discuss contemporary literary texts written in Italian by Africans in diaspora (Cristina Lombardi-Diop’s contribution) and, less successfully, immigrant images in contemporary Italian cinema (Pauline Small’s study). Finally, in the last essay, Ruth Iyob ends the collection with an illuminating discussion on the ways in which certain political and socio-cultural (in)visible ties still bind African citizens with their former metropoli long after the demise of alien rule. Overall, this book is a useful introduction to the themes of colonial legacy and memory and will surely appeal to a wide audience thanks to the scope and breadth of the volume. It also stimulates further research on the topic, but the uneven quality of the individual contributions and the surprisingly frequent editing errors (too numerous to list here, but especially evident in the endnotes and in the bibliographies), make this publication a less rigorous piece of scholarship than it could have been.