Fromont, Cécile. Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the scholarship of early modern global missionary Catholicism, much of the focus has been on the various means by which European missionaries-Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, among others-converted non-Christians and integrated them into the larger apparatus of the emerging colonial logics of European imperialism.From Mexico and Peru to Goa and the Philippines, so the scholarship suggests, European missionary efforts cannot be extricated from the rise of European empires.While all of this remains true, Cécile Fromont's compelling study of missions to Kongo and Angola interrogates a visual corpus that suggests that such an epistemologically hegemonic world of European imperialism need not be the only lens through which we view Catholic evangelization.In fact, Fromont argues throughout, while central Africa is perhaps a "complex and singular sociopolitical situation" (7) that stands outside what we typically see with Catholic missions, it nevertheless is an important case study on the limitations of missionary work and how evangelization was not always a top-down creation of Catholic populations, but could also be a negotiated process that included Europeans and Indigenous peoples.A visually striking book, with nearly 200 images from a wide array of European archives, the book convincingly shows that Catholic evangelization in central Africa centred on cross-cultural interaction, which forces us to rethink early modern encounters beyond the teleology of European empire.Fromont's argument hinges on reading this visual corpus against the grain; rather than seeing it as evidence of European evangelization alone, Fromont interrogates how the Capuchins depicted in these images had to operate outside of a framework of European colonialism and work with the local population if they hoped to find any success.Because of the unique geopolitical situation of the Kingdom of the Kongo-a Catholic state with both a long-standing relationship with the institutional church and a strong independent streak that pushed against the growth of the Portuguese Empire's role in the Atlantic slave trade and desire to control the whole of the African coast-Capuchin missionaries were often invited in and needed to work under the auspices of a ruling elite that cautiously allowed them to proceed.This reality shaped not only how
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.056 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".