Journal of Ecclesiastical History

I've recently taken over as one of the editors of this wonderful journal, which at the same time is an alarming responsibility, a significant workload, a source of endless fascination and - thanks to the rest of the editorial and office team - a consistent delight.

Lots of things going on with it: in particular, the Journal's remit is the whole of the history of Christianity, but it has traditionally been centred on some specific areas and periods, and we're trying to broaden the range, especially beyond the North Atlantic world.

But I mention it today because the October issue is just out (vol. 65 no. 4, for those who are counting): and, in what I hope will become a regular service, I want to flag up a highlight or two from it.

Of course all the articles are excellent (we don't publish anything else). But the one I want arbitrarily to highlight is by Hector Avalos, a campaigning and controversial figure in American religious studies: you don't write a book called The End of Biblical Studies if your main intention is to make everyone like you. His article in this issue of the Journal is characteristically combative. The subject is a precise and momentous one: what exactly did that monument to Christian virtue, Pope Alexander VI, say in the 1490s about the right of the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors to enslave the native peoples in the lands they discovered? One text in particular, the 1497 papal letter Ineffabilis et summi patris, has been cited to exculpate the papacy on this point. It has been read to imply that the Pope only allowed for indigenous peoples to be subjected or enslaved if they somehow voluntarily submitted themselves. Such a provision would of course have been completely ineffectual, but it fits well with a narrative that tries to distance the Church from responsibility for colonial atrocities.

That's not a narrative which Avalos instinctively likes, and this claim has roused him to do a terrific piece of scholarly detective work. The article is a precise and, to my eyes, devastating attack on this reading of Ineffabilis. Once he has translated the whole thing (not simply cherry-picked sections), and correctly identified the individuals involved and the political context within which they were operating, the attempt to defend the papacy's role vanishes like a mist. The letter was more about jockeying for position between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, and in particular the Portuguese attempting to test the limits of the Tordesillas settlement which had excluded them from the western hemisphere. Who was allowed to enslave which heathen peoples was hotly disputed. The fact that Christians could and should enslave them was not in doubt.