English Iconoclast Corsairs in Spanish America, 1567–1595
Fig. 1. Verstegan, Richard. Théâtre des cruautez des héréticques de nostre temps , traduit du latin en françois. monographie imprimée, Anvers: A. Hubert, 1588. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Réserve des livres rares, RES-H-711.
Roxana Nakashima studied History at the University of Buenos Aires. She graduated in 2003 and soon after she moved to Dresden, where she focused her research on sixteenth century English corsairs’ travel accounts. The increasing interest on the topic led her to move to Paris to pursue a MA under the supervision of Roger Chartier at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). In 2010, she received a scholarship from the European doctoral programme Europe and the Invention of Modernity. Affiliated to both, EHESS and the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (SUM), Florence, she studied different aspects of the English corsairs in the Spanish America, co-supervised by Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Jacques Revel. She obtained her PhD degree in 2013. In 2014, she became a research fellow at the John Carter Brown Library where she is studying the use of galleys in the Caribbean sea in the 16th century. Her research interests include political and religious conflicts that emerged during the European overseas expansion of the sixteenth century, focusing on the presence of English corsairs in the Americas, and their impact to the Spanish global monarchy.
English Iconoclast Corsairs in Spanish America. 1567–1595
For the last decades of the 16th century English corsairs arrived to the Spanish America coasts to trade, rob and plunder. The political and economical enmity was reinforced by the religious conflicts that opposed Catholics and Protestants. English presence was perceived as a material and also a spiritual menace in the New World. One of the most notorious claims that Spanish authorities made against the Englanders was related to the destruction of religious images as part of the attacks. The aim of Nakashima’s project is to analyze how this iconoclast practice was diffused into overseas territories, and also she will try to identify the kind of Catholic devotional images that were broken in the attacks. By comparing the images that were destroyed in the same period in English churches, she aims at understanding the visual culture of English crews that arrived into America. Her objective is to place these attacks in a bigger context. Her claim is that English corsairs were the vectors of Reformation practices and the iconoclast episodes in the New World should be considered as part of the same wave of destructions of religious images that was taking place in different parts of Europe.
