Books by Fabien Montcher
Renaissance Quarterly , 2025
The Journal of Modern History, 2025
From Lisbon to Rome via the Gulf of Guinea and the sugar mills of northern Brazil, this book expl... more From Lisbon to Rome via the Gulf of Guinea and the sugar mills of northern Brazil, this book explores the strategies and practices that displaced scholars cultivated to navigate the murky waters of late Renaissance politics. By tracing the life of the Portuguese jurist-scholar Vicente Nogueira (1586-1654) across diverse social, cultural, and political spaces, Fabien Montcher reveals a world of religious conflicts and imperial rivalries. Here, European agents developed the practice of 'bibliopolitics'-using local and international systems for buying and selling books and manuscripts to foster political communication and debate, and ultimately to negotiate their survival. Bibliopolitics fostered the advent of a generation of 'mercenaries of knowledge' whose stories constitute a key part of seventeenthcentury social and cultural history. This book also demonstrates their crucial role in creating an international and dynamic Republic of Letters with others who helped shape early modern intellectual and political worlds.
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2024
REVIEWED BY Adrian Masters Trier University Mercenaries of Knowledge sets out to study the practi... more REVIEWED BY Adrian Masters Trier University Mercenaries of Knowledge sets out to study the practices and tactics of a type of scrappy semimarginal traveling scholar active during the turbulent seventeenth century. Montcher proposes that in an era straddling that of the humanists of the 1500s and of the philosophes of the 1700s, circulated what he calls "mercenaries of knowledge." These were widely dispersed, pragmatic, mobile, and socially precarious intellectuals. They held tolerant, reformist views and often engaged in libertine practices behind closed doors. These scholars of fortune traveled between the mightiest courts of the time, hopping from patron to patron and offering new intellectual, bibliographical, and political services to each new master. Montcher envisions these merchants as the products of a generation of instability and conflict. During to the Thirty Years' War, in which many intellectual circles rose, fell, and were dispersed, these actors operated in-between states and patrons and thereby linked multiple Republics of Letters. Yet their political loyalties were as fluid as the times. Some such mercenaries were women, like Catalina de Eraso, but most were men; all traded in strong masculine styles of behavior. Many also moved in a globe-spanning network of libertine connections, which Montcher describes as "emotional communities" held together in part by "same-sex relations" (18). This book (which is very nearly a biography) studies this generation of mercenaries of knowledge through the life of Portuguese-born Vicente Nogueira (1586-1654). It consists of three sections. The first, comprised of two chapters, describes Nogueira's early life in the context of the 1580 to 1640 Spanish-Portuguese composite monarchy and its vast social and intellectual circles. It traces how Nogueira, son of a Portuguese New Christian jurist, trained at elite Iberian universities, formed a robust network of intellectual contacts, became a Lisbon jurist, clergyman, and book collector and editor of literary and historical works. Propelling Nogueira's abandonment of law was his own servant's 1614 allegation he was a "sodomite," a scandal worsened by his polemical aristocratic protector Juan de Tassis's loss of courtly favor with the 1618 retirement of Spanish royal premier Francisco de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma. Tassis's libertine dalliances with other men provided a pretext for the new Spanish premier Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, and his inquisitorial allies to pursue Nogueira and other dissenters. Chapter 2 considers how Nogueira's location in the Iberian Peninsula during his early life gave him access to
Articles by Fabien Montcher
Supplicant Empire, 2025
This volume is a collection of reflections from leading senior and junior historians regarding th... more This volume is a collection of reflections from leading senior and junior historians regarding the merits of historical comparativism in the field of Iberian history. The first purpose of the book is to encourage a dialogue between scholars of the Iberian Empires and to foster a reconsider how they see the broader history of the early modern world in light of recent historiography. The second aim of the book is to prompt scholars of other regions in global history to consider the recent literature on the Iberian Empires anew, to move beyond the tropes of the Black Legend and narrative of growth, splendour, and decline, and to study those imbrications had connected disparate parts of the world and which the postcolonial turn has unearthed. In a series of articles and interviews, contributors were encouraged to consider the role of linguistic divides in the growth of historiographical strands, and to speak plainly about the possible siloes that have emerged in the field. Contributors discuss the Atlantic turn, corporate cultures, the Catholic adoption of Protestant ideals, gender and race, all while drawing on insights from scholars who work on early modern nuns, the material history of sugar and coffee, or those who are exploring the uses of the concept of barbarity in borderlands.
Global Networks in Early Modern Rome: Images, Objects, and Diplomacy, ed. by Francesco Freddolini, 2025
This paper explores the concept of baroque commons—idealized visual representations of nature cre... more This paper explores the concept of baroque commons—idealized visual representations of nature created by elite families in early modern Europe amid environmental disruption, confessional unrest, and global crisis. Due to fears of natural chaos and social instability, dynastic powers turned to theatrical images of harmonious landscapes, gardens, and symbolic maps to assert control over both real and imagined spaces. These representations not only legitimized territorial expansion and bonded labor but also reframed nature as a manageable and sovereign domain. Focusing on transregional 17th-century campaigns of families such as the Farnese and Borghese, this study examines how baroque commons served as tools of environmental imperialism and dynastic self-promotion, offering new insight into the entangled politics of nature, image-making, and power during a global age of crisis. In this article, Prince Ottavio Farnese’s dissertation served as a key text in promoting baroque commons, using visual and textual strategies to advance dynastic claims and assert control over nature amid environmental and political upheaval.
Polyhistor Europaeus, t. II, ed. by M. Da Vinha, B. El Gammal, M. Forycki, and M. Zuili, 2025
The Renaissance World Routledge Ressources Online, 2025
Iberian-connections, 2020
https://iberian-connections.yale.edu/articles/the-zest-of-still-life-empires/
"...While working... more https://iberian-connections.yale.edu/articles/the-zest-of-still-life-empires/
"...While working on the economic and intellectual history of citrus fruits–including their derivatives like jams, perfumes or images–across the Iberian Empire (1580-1640), I have determined that the circulations of these fruits and associated products contributed to the rhizomatic articulation and disarticulation of empires that were perpetually prolonging themselves, breaking off and starting up again. Through these processes, fruit circulations contributed to visual reinventions, physical displacements, and intellectual connections across and amid the ever-changing political structures of empires..."
Pedralbes, 2020
This article analyses how intellectual and political conversations about the exchanges of fruits ... more This article analyses how intellectual and political conversations about the exchanges of fruits interacted with knowledge-power relations across the Western Mediterranean during the Late Renaissance. I argue that scholarly networks fostered informal diplomacy through the use of paradoxical meaning of citrus goods newly arrived via Iberian monarchies, and that this political communication was articulated around concepts such as tolerance and sweetness. Between Spain, Portugal, and Rome, I demonstrate how political practices and discourses about citruses fuelled struggles for sovereignty during a time marked by continuous wars and debates about the status of religious minorities.
Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 2, 2019
À l ’époque moderne, l ’écriture officielle de l ’histoire dans la monarchie
hispanique passait p... more À l ’époque moderne, l ’écriture officielle de l ’histoire dans la monarchie
hispanique passait par la nomination d’historiographes royaux. Ces nominations contribuèrent à la mise en place d’un dispositif de contrôle de l ’accès aux archives et de l ’écriture de l ’histoire. Cet article décrit les principaux éléments de ce dispositif en montrant ses limites et son caractère polycentrique et polyphonique.
This article analyses the formation of scholar-jurists’ archives during Late Renaissance conflict... more This article analyses the formation of scholar-jurists’ archives during Late Renaissance conflicts, and their use by individuals and state powers. Departing from the case of the French scholar, Théodore Godefroy (1580-1649), and his role in the Peace of Westphalia (1643-1648), this article shows how scholars’ portable archives were used as archival arsenals during diplomatic negotiations, eventually leading to the adoption of a system of “archival absolutism” in France. This archival absolutism was a reaction to the fragmentation of archives that had previously fostered trans-imperial exchanges among scholars. This article also demonstrates, through the case of Godefroy’s portable archive and correspondence, how the search for legitimacy by a peripheral actor–like Portugal–during a period of conflict between the chief hegemonic powers in western Europe–Spain and France–contributed to the distinct development of those states’ uses of legal experts and their archives over the course of the seventeenth century.
This article focuses on how learned communication conditioned the continuity and developments of ... more This article focuses on how learned communication conditioned the continuity and developments of political communication during early modern times of war. Exchanges of books and the plundering of libraries and archives constituted only a small part of a wide array of practices, which this articles refers to as "bibliopolitics," which were responsible for such continuity and developments. During open conflict, bibliopolitics secured political communication and contributed to the development of multilateral foreign relations. By taking as its main point of reference the relations that Iberian scholarly dissidents established with other European states from positions of exile in Rome during the first part of the seventeenth century, this article invites the reader to reconsider the role that Iberian men of letters and the Republic of Letters played in connecting multiple state information systems and in securing transfers of imperial hegemonies.
The trajectory of Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) demonstrates how an Iberian intellectual who was w... more The trajectory of Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) demonstrates how an Iberian intellectual who was well attuned to the composite governmental structure of the Iberian empire (c.1580–c.1640) strengthened the ties between state communication systems and learned communities during the Late Renaissance. This article highlights the political valence of historical knowledge that was gathered and distributed throughout the Republic of Letters with emphasis on the code-switching of a scholar who styled himself differently across learned communities depending on his political circumstances, interests, and interlocutors. The study of Nogueira’s itinerary demonstrates the need for a history of early modern scholarship that takes into account the ways that early modern politics and state communication systems were connected by learned networks.
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Books by Fabien Montcher
Articles by Fabien Montcher
"...While working on the economic and intellectual history of citrus fruits–including their derivatives like jams, perfumes or images–across the Iberian Empire (1580-1640), I have determined that the circulations of these fruits and associated products contributed to the rhizomatic articulation and disarticulation of empires that were perpetually prolonging themselves, breaking off and starting up again. Through these processes, fruit circulations contributed to visual reinventions, physical displacements, and intellectual connections across and amid the ever-changing political structures of empires..."
hispanique passait par la nomination d’historiographes royaux. Ces nominations contribuèrent à la mise en place d’un dispositif de contrôle de l ’accès aux archives et de l ’écriture de l ’histoire. Cet article décrit les principaux éléments de ce dispositif en montrant ses limites et son caractère polycentrique et polyphonique.