Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal

The reconstruction of the church of São Domingos de Lisboa: Architects, painters, sculptors, and woodcarvers (1755-1791)

João Francisco Grave — 2024-09-27

The following study aims to present a significant number of manuscripts, with which the author is dealing with since 2017, related with the reconstruction of the Convent of São Domingos de Lisboa after the Earthquake of 1755. Based on the gathered data, this article is divided in two chapters. The first one focuses the years from 1755 to 1786, regarding the first moments of the rebuilding process, and discussing the authorship of the architectonical project. The second chapter deals with the period from 1786 to 1791, explaining the evolution of the construction site with Manuel Caetano de Sousa as architect.

Lock, stock and two smoking crimes. Two criminal figures captured by French criminal law in the 19th century: The insurance swindler and the fraudulent bankrupt

Louis Terracol — 2024-10-03

In the 19th century, to protect private property, the legislator sometimes had to be wary of dishonest owners. Faced with the resurgence of certain financial crimes, swindles and other frauds, legislative policy oscillated between rigorous repression, intended as a deterrent but deemed excessive, and more flexible sentencing, to make criminal law more effective. The legislator’s main concern was to define the contours of the criminal figures that were developing as a result of the century’s economic and social changes. Among these, two stand out: the insurance swindler, an owner who sets fire to his own property in order to defraud his insurer, and the fraudulent banker, who makes undue profit from mismanagement. In trying to catch them, French law tries, with varying degrees of success, to meet society’s need to identify and punish criminal scams fairly.

Noir in the 1980s and 1990s: Decolonizing ideologies

Jean-Hugues Bita’a Menye — 2024-10-22

This article discusses the growth of noir in France and the United States of America (USA) in the 1980s and 1990s. Under its various forms such as the polar, the sub-genre embraces a leftist agenda, aiming at exploring the rise of domestic issues such as race, gender discrimination, and poverty to expose the dark side of neoliberalism and its ideologies of equality, prosperity, and justice. A decolonial reading of Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire (1983), Daniel Pennac’s La petite marchande de prose (1989), and Walter Mosley’s Black Betty (1994) demonstrates how the process of narration and a conscious focus on “decent people” threaten ideologies of nation building, consumerism, and gender/racial equality. Through the works of Walter Mignolo and Achille Mbembé, we aim to show how neoliberal capitalism follows the same pattern of appropriation of resources and bodies that has been in place since the Industrial Revolution. A pattern deconstructed by noir writers with the aim of promoting more humanity.

An analysis of transnational networks of criminological studies based on the works of Dr. Francisco Ferraz de Macedo (1873-1907)

Fernando Fontes Cepulli — 2024-12-06

This article deals with the formation and maintenance of networks of criminological knowledge in the Atlantic World through the figure of Francisco Ferraz de Macedo, a Portuguese doctor and anthropologist who grew up and studied in Brazil, but whose professional path led him to work in some of the main European centres for criminological studies. From his various works, we
will observe how his medical-anthropological discoveries relate to the international scientific debate at the end of the 19th century. In this way, we aim to analyse the importance of the historical study of the figure of Ferraz de Macedo in the process of understanding the mechanisms that promoted the transnational character of criminological sciences in this period.