Pastoral Visitations in the First World Empires (Spain and Portugal in the 16th and 17th Centuries): A Comparative Approach

Abstract

Using a comparative approach, attentive to the assumptions of global history, this paper undertakes a comprehensive and holistic survey of the role of pastoral visits in the Christianization of Spanish America and in the Portuguese empire. It argues that the models and practices of visits in Spain and Portugal were replicated in their extra-European territories (adapted in accordance with the particularities of the local context), though the visits realized in the Hispanic world were not absolutely identi- cal to those carried out in the regions under Portuguese domination. It concludes that pastoral visits were an important tool of Christianization, and a way of disciplining the behavior of clerics and laity through the application of preventive and punitive forms of justice, as well as being a means of negotiation that sought to affirm the episcopal authority before other powers.