“Papermakers and Paperusers: Support as Image in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic”

Early modern Europe and its colonial holdings ran on paper. It was indispensable as a support for letters, orders, trials, and receipts, in addition to drawings and prints. Yet, when backlit, many papers reveal hidden content: watermarks, which flicker in and out of legibility. When considered seriously as emblems with iconographic and textual programs, watermarks transform the blank pages they are indivisible from into images. And as images-often with religious components, such as crosses or monstrances-they garnered the attention of individuals charged with monitoring the proper usage of such symbols: the functionaries of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. In this talk, I will use the inquisitors' debates on the merits of censoring papers with religious watermarks to reflect on the tensions and correspondences between ancient sacred symbols and modern commodities in a global colonial system.

Adam Jasienski received his PhD at Harvard University in 2016, and serves as Associate Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University. His first book, Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and the Inquisition, was published by Penn State University Press in 2023 and was awarded the Ronald H. Bainton and Eleanor Tufts prizes.