Description
Book SynopsisPresents and analyzes a set of unpublished images from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Kongo and Angola created within the Capuchin Franciscan mission to the region.
Trade Review“Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola promises to help reorient this particular corner of the early modern world, and will be enlightening to those interested in the paintings for their own merits, or as documentation of aspects of social life and material culture than were outside the scope of the Capuchins’ own intentions.”
—John Thornton,author of The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706
“Fromont’s attention to the archive’s materiality and her vibrantly close reading of a large, unique body of sources are compelling. Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola reveals a much broader Capuchin visual genre than previously known, one that contains a distinctive approach to Africans (borne out of Capuchins’ experiences in central Africa) and to representing missionary experiences, and it significantly extends the visual archive for early modern European-African interactions.”
—Surekha Davies,author of Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters
“A visually striking book. . . . Fromont’s book instructs us to reject the ongoing violence of imperialism and build a decolonial future that centres epistemologies and ways of being human that operate outside of the framework of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism.”
—Robert John Clines Renaissance and Reformation
