Acknowledgments
This book was conceived, written, and revised during a research stay financed by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation together with the Institut für Archäologie und Kulturanthropologie / Abteilung für Altamerikanistik of the University of Bonn that began in August 2019. I am very greatful to that foundation for providing ideal conditions for the completion of this book and to my host Karoline Noack for believing in this project and for receiving me so well.
I have been gathering materials on the Jesuit experience in Amazonia since 2012 in archives and libraries located in Seville, Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, Lisbon, Évora, Rome, Buenos Aires, Washington DC, New York, Bloomington (Indiana), Quito, and in other cities. I am very grateful to the employees of these institutions. A special thanks to the staff of the Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit in Quito, for facilitating my access to the incredible collection of Jesuit manuscripts housed in that library.
The project took shape between 2013 and 2016, when I received financial support from The São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp, Brazil) and the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA, Netherlands), during a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of History of the Americas at the University of Seville. It was during this period that I conducted the bulk of the research in Spanish, Italian, and U.S. archives. Of particular interest was the opportunity to consult the Lilly Library at Indiana University, which holds the correspondence of Manuel de Uriarte, a Jesuit who worked in Amazonia during the eighteenth century. I spent the summer of 2016 at Vanderbilt University as a visiting scholar, where I had access to an excellent library, and in 2017 was able to consult the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, thanks to a grant from that institution. My hosts provided the best conditions for the composition of this work. I am very grateful to Guillermo Wilde, Pedro Puntoni, Emilio José Luque Azcona, and Jane Landers.
Some parts of this book originally appeared in articles or were presented at academic conferences.1 I am very grateful to my audiences in Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg, Lisbon, Resistencia, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Seville, and Tandil. Over the last three years, I have carefully revised this data, adding a considerable amount of new information and interpretations, and rearranging the material in its present form. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions and the editorial team of Brill Publishers for their support and assistance in the completion of this project.
I am very grateful to all those who have offered advice, assistance and support over the last few years. The exchange of ideas with Adone Agnolin, Akira Saito, Carlos Zeron, Irina Saladin, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Kazuhisa Takeda, Luis Miguel Glave Testino, María Susana Cipolletti, and Rita Eloranta-Barrera Virhuez provided significant contributions to the evolution of this work, perhaps more than they imagined. To all of you many thanks!
I am especially grateful to my wife, Kara Schultz, for helping me with the translation of this book into English and providing editorial suggestions, and for her indispensable support in recent years.
Francismar Alex Lopes de Carvalho
Bonn, June 2022
Varia Historia 31, no. 57 (2015); Revista de História (USP) 173 (2015); Anuario de Estudios Americanos 73, no. 1 (2016); Anos 90 23, no. 43 (2016); História Unisinos 21, no. 3 (2017); Revista de Indias 78, no. 274 (2018); Revista Complutense de Historia de América 44 (2018); and Portuguese Studies Review 1 (2019).