Paul NELLES
2024-2025
François Chevalier
Carleton University
Religion in Transit: materialities and mobilities of religious objects and images, 1550–1700
Paul Nelles holds a PhD in History from the Johns Hopkins University and is currently Associate Professor of History at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern Europe. His research falls into two broad subject areas that occasionally intersect. The first lies at the intersection of the history of knowledge with the history of libraries, books, and writing practices. Publications include contributions on Conrad Gessner and the concept of the universal library, the Vatican Library and the Counter-Reformation, and early modern collecting practices. His second major research area is in the history of religion with a focus on early modern Catholicism and the Society of Jesus, with publications on Jesuit scribal practices, communication networks, and the global circulation of religious objects. Recent research pursues topics related to mobility and movement in the early modern world.
Projet de recherche
The current program of research investigates the relationship between the mobility of religious materials and the evolution of global Christianity in the period 1550–1700. Research is oriented around two intersecting axes of investigation. The first charts the mobility of a defined cluster of religious materials that originated in Rome and were transported by Jesuit missionaries across the globe. The second reconstructs the up-close itineraries of people, religious materials, and objects through localized geographic sites connected through Jesuit networks: Rome, Lisbon, and the linked hub and node of Mexico City and Puebla. Research maps the global itineraries of four categories of Roman religious materials that traveled in the company of Jesuit missionaries: wax Agnus Dei disks; rosary beads blessed by the pope; copies of the icon of the Madonna of Santa Maria Maggiore; and relics. These typologies of religious materials often traveled together and were frequently combined with other materials. The objects were small, of relatively low economic value, and abundant. The research contributes to new ways of understanding materiality, mobility and religion that question traditional dichotomies between religion and things.
Sélection de publications
2023. Nelles, P. and Salzberg, R., eds. Connected Mobilities: The Practice and Experience of Movement in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Press.
2023. Nelles, P. and Salzberg, R. “Movement and Mobility in the Early Modern World: an Introduction,” in Connected Mobilities, pp. 7–38.
2023. “Devotion in Transit. Agnus Dei, Jesuit Missionaries, and Global Salvation in the Sixteenth Century.” In Connected Mobilities, pp. 185–214.
2023. “Martyrs and Madonnas: Inácio de Azevedo, the Brazil Martyrs, and the Global Circulation of the Madonna of Santa Maria Maggiore,” Religions 14, 617.
2021. “Libraries and Catalogs,” in A. Blair, P. Duguid, and A.T. Grafton (eds.), The Princeton Companion to the History of Information, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp. 567–78.
