Faculty

Research

The Body and Society in early modern Spain

Dr. Berco’s research program focuses on the body and society in the early modern Hispanic world. Though he has published widely on a variety of topics, including the decriminalization of sodomy in nineteenth-century Argentina and gender identity and self discipline in Baroque Spain, his main interests entail the following:

1. The Body, Sexuality and Society, specifically male homosexual behaviour, its reliance on gendered constructs, and its uneasy relationship to social status in early modern societies. Gleaned from Spanish trial records, this research focuses on the border between the hierarchies constructed through the sexed body and those available from public understandings of status. Dr. Berco’s book on the subject, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Golden Age Spain argues that, though homosexual behaviour was widespread due to a penetrative conceptualization of masculinity, public anger was mobilized into trials when these sexual relationships violated normalized power relations, as in the case of Muslim slaves sodomizing Christian adolescents. At the same time, because of the diffuse nature of an inquisitorial trial, magistrates did not always follow through on the public intent to punish, effectively shielding some groups like the clergy from harsh sentences. Dr. Berco has also published separately on the intimate connection between patriarchal forms of power and sodomy, both in practice and in terms of the constructs informing them.
2. The Body, Disease and Society. This research focuses on syphilis and its sociocultural implications as a lived illness. By combining institutional and notarial records, this research examines this chronic disease in its full personal and social dimensions. Dr. Berco’s book From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain traces the complex lives of syphilis patients at Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago, moving from the somatic aspects of infection and treatment to the sociocultural implications for patients living with this chronic illness in terms of marriage, work, and community relationships.
3. The Body, the Brain and Inquisitors. This new research interest grew out of combining Dr. Berco’s recent work on the perception of the clothes body and his collaboration with choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde on the body and its relationship to vision and movement. Relying on novel methodologies from the burgeoning field of neurohistory, Dr. Berco is thus currently focusing on historicizing the inquisitorial brain. Focusing mainly on sensory perception, motor-emotional control, and cognition, this research has already led to the publication of “Perception and the Mulatto Body in Inquisitorial Spain: A Neurohistory,” Past & Present 231, no. 1 (2016): 33-60”. Dr. Berco is currently continuing this work with an eye to writing a monograph on the inquisitorial brain.

Publications

Book

From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2016)

• Winner: American Association for the History of Medicine Welch Medal (2018)
• Winner: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Book Prize (2017)
• Finalist: Canadian Historical Association Ferguson Prize (2017)

Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age (University of Toronto Press, January 2007).

Articles in Journals and Chapters in Edited Collections

“Fashioning Disease: Narrative and the Sick Body in the Spanish Inquisition,” in Hilaire Kallendorf, ed., A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 205-232

“Determining Insanity in the Inquisition: Sensory Perception and Legal Culture in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 36 (2017): 42-61.

Perception and the Mulatto Body in Inquisitorial Spain: A Neurohistory,” Past & Present 231, no. 1 (2016): 33-60.

“The Great Pox, Symptoms, and Social Bodies in Early Modern Spain,” Social History of Medicine 28, no. 2 (2015): 225-244.

“Miscegenation” and “Sodomy”,  in Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills, eds., Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Technologies of a Transatlantic Cultural Transfer (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014), pp. 219-20 and 324-5 respectively.

“The Many Faces of Female Discipline: Gender Control, Subversion and the Nun-Confessor Relationship in Golden Age Barcelona,” in Manuela Scarci, ed., Creating Women: Representation, Self-Representation, and Agency in the Renaissance (Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013), pp. 149-65.

“Syphilis, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Spain,” Journal of Early Modern History 15, no. 3 (2011): 223-53.

“Crossing Borders: Identity, Difference and Community,” Journal of Eastern Township Studies 37 (Fall 2011)

“Textiles as Social Texts: Syphilis, Material Culture and Gender in Golden Age Spain,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 785-810.

With Stephanie Fink De Backer, coauthor. “Queerness, Syphilis and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Madrid,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos 35, no. 1 (2010): 31-48.

“Producing Patriarchy: Male Homosexuality and Gender in Early Modern Spain,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 3 (September 2008): 351-376.

“The Masks of Normalcy: Homosexual Behaviour, Syphilis, and Decline in Juan Calvo’s Valencia,” in Kenneth Borris and G. S. Rousseau, eds., The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 92-113

“Social Control and its Limits: Sodomy, Local Sexual Economies, and Inquisitors during Spain’s Golden Age,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 2 (2005): 331-358.

“Juana Pimentel, the Mendoza Family, and the Crown,” in Helen Nader, ed., Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: The Mendoza Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 27-47.

“Revealing the Other: Moriscos, Crime, and Local Politics in Toledo’s Hinterland in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Medieval Encounters  8, no. 2-3 (2002): 135-159.

“Between Piety and Sin: Zaragoza’s Confraternity of San Roque, Syphilis and Sodomy,” Confraternitas 13, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 3-16.

“Silencing the Unmentionable: Non Reproductive Sex and the Creation of a Civilized Argentina, 1860-1900,” The Americas 58, no. 3 (January 2002): 419-441.

Research

1. Aboriginal Treaty Rights and historical memory: Treaty #9 and the process of colonization. The First Nations, of what is now called northern and northwestern Ontario, signed a treaty with the federal and provincial governments in 1905 and 1906. While the First Nations have an oral history of the negotiations which indicate that the treaty was simply one of ‘peace and friendship,’ the federal government believes that something much more was represented in the treaty’s terms. However, its corporate memory does not include an historical understanding of what those terms would have meant at the time of signing. This research will explore the context under which the terms were drafted by the federal and Ontario governments and thus elucidate the governments’ understanding of the treaty negotiation process at the turn of the 20th century. Ideas such as the “King’s protection,” “bounty and benevolence,” and “obeying the law” will be discussed, as well as the hunting and fishing clauses, education and reserves.
2. Aboriginal Treaty Rights and cultural colonization: The Technologies of Treaty #9. The purpose of this research is to build on the conclusions drawn from the first project and trace, through various technologies such as the pen, the canoe, and the survey map, how the idea of the treaty being a document for colonization came to be disseminated to the broader provincial and Canadian public.
3. Aboriginal Treaty Rights and state formation: Treaties #3 and #9 and the role of surveyors and engineers in the expansion of the liberal state. This research will examine Ian McKay’s seminal article on his “Liberal Order Framework” and how it affected Canadian understandings of Aboriginal title to land. It focuses on surveyors, who acting on behalf of the state, went into Aboriginal homelands and transformed them, through their maps and reports, into resource hinterlands ripe for development.

Publications

Books

2007

• The Culture of Hunting, principal editor, Vancouver: UBC Press, pp.276

1999

• Cross-Currents:  Hydro-electricity and the Engineering of Northern Ontario, Waterloo:  Wilfrid Laurier University Press, pp.209.

Book Chapters and Journal Articles from 2000

2011

• “The Historical Erasure of an Indigenous Identity in the Borderlands:  The Western Abenaki of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Quebec,” in Journal of Borderlands Studies, Vol.26: no.2, (August, 2011), pp.179-196.

2010

• Liberalism and the Numbered Treaties, Aboriginal Policy Research: a History of Treaties and Policy, Jerry B. White et al., eds., Toronto:  Thompson Educational Publishing, Vol.VII, pp.41-57

2007

• “Modernity’s Contested Terrains of space and place:  Hunting and Algonquin Park, 1890-1950,” in The Culture of Hunting, Jean L. Manore and Dale G. Miner, eds., Vancouver:  UBC Press, chp.9, pp.121-147.

2006

• “Rivers as Text: From Pre-Modern to Post-Modern Understandings of Development, Technology and the Environment in Canada and Abroad,” in A History of Water, The World of Water, Vol.III, T.Tvedt and T. Oestigaard, eds., London: I.B. Taurus & Co. Ltd., pp.229-253.

2003

• “The Construction of Rivers and Community Transformation:  An Alternative History of the St. Francis River,” in Journal of the Eastern Townships, No.23, Fall/Automne, 2003, pp.27-40.

2001

• “The Promise of Hydro?  Comparative and contrasting hydro-electric development in Ontario and Quebec,” in Canada Confederation to Present, Chris Hackett and Robert Hesketh eds., CD-Rom, Edmonton: Chinook Multimedia Productions.

2000

• “Indian Reserves vs. Indian lands:  Contrasting Views of Reserves, Crown Lands and Natural Resource Use in northeastern Ontario, 1906-1990,” in Ontario since Confederation, Edgar-Andre Montigny and Lori Chambers eds., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 195-213.

Conference Papers and Reports from 2000

Papers

2011

• Treaty #3 and the interactions of landscape and memory in the Rainy River area during the late nineteenth century, CHA, New Brunswick.« Le Traité no 9 et la perméabilité des frontières entre les rapports oraux et écrits des négociations, » Paper to be presented at the ACFAS Annual Conference, May, Sherbrooke ACFAS Sherbrooke.

2010

• “Treaties as tools for modern state formation?  Aboriginal arguments to the contrary in Treaty #3 and #9” American Society for Ethnohistory, Ottawa.

2009

• “Indigeneity meets Industrialism: Contrasting and Colliding Views of a Canadian northern hinterland, 1870-1930” forthcoming (August), International Congress on Environmental History, Copenhagen.
• “Liberalism and The Numbered Treaties,” Aboriginal Policy Research Conference, Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada/University of Western Ontario.

2007

• “Treaty 9 and the Borderland of Northern Ontario: Liberalism, Colonialism and Native Resistance to State Expansion,” Canadian Historical Association Annual Conference, University of Saskatchewan.

2006

• “Treaty 9:  Is it or is it not part of Canada’s ‘Liberal Order Framework?’” Wahnapitae Annual Aboriginal Conference, Temagami Ontario.

2005

• “Foreigners in their own Land: The erasure of Abenaki history in the Eastern Townships,” for Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, University of Western Ontario.
• “Professing an interest in First Nations History: Reflections on Teaching and Researching Native/settler Relations in a Canadian University” for “First Nations, First Thoughts,” School of Canadian Studies Annual Conference, Edinburgh.

2003

• “The Technology of Rivers and Community Transformation:  An Alternative History of the St. Francis,” ETRC annual conference, Bishop’s University.

2001

• Modernity’s Contested Terrains of space and place:  Hunting and Algonquin Park, 1890-1950,” Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Laval.
• “Rivers as text: from pre-modern to post-modern understandings of development, technology and the environment in Canada and abroad,” International Water History Association Conference, Bergen, Norway.

Research Reports

2008

• “The Numbered Treaties,” Report prepared for Treaty Policy Directorate, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, pp.250.
• Kanai First Nation First Nation Specific Claim re WWII Bombing and Gunnery Range, pp.62 plus appendices.
• TLE Review: North Caribou Lake First Nation, pp.65, Joint Research for Specific Claims, Indian and Northern Affairs and Ontario Native Affairs Secretariat.
• Island Claim re: Fawn Island, 36pp. plus appendices; Surrenders for Timber, 42pp. plus appendices; Dock and Sawmill, 17pp. plus appendices.

2004

• Munsee-Delaware First Nation Reserve Allocation Claim, for Specific Claims, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 85pp. plus appendices.
• “Overview of Euro-Canadian Understandings of Treaty #9, 22pp., for Treaty Policy and Review, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.
• “Mohawks of Akwesasne Specific Claim to Cairn Island,” Research Report for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, pp.19 plus appendices.

2003

• “Pabineau First Nation Specific Land Claim to Gould Island,” Research Report for the Department of Indian And Northern Affairs, pp.49 plus appendices.
• “Walpole Island First Nation Claim to Peche (Peach) Island,” Research Report for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, pp.46 plus appendices.

2002

• “Sandy Lake First Nation Treaty Land Entitlement Review,”  Research Report for the Ontario Native Affairs Secretariat, pp.75 plus appendices.

2001

• “Eabametoong First Nation Treaty Land Entitlement Review,” Research Report for Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Canada and the Ontario Native Affairs Secretariat, pp.120 plus appendices.

2000

• “Chapleau Ojibway First Nation Treaty Land Entitlement Review,” Research Report for Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Canada and the Ontario Native Affairs Secretariat, pp.109 plus appendices.
• “Missanabie Cree Land Entitlement” and “Chapleau Cree Land Entitlement,”  Research Reports for the Ontario Native Affairs Secretariat, pp.24 and 18.
• “Treaty 9:  Its origins and interpretations,” Report for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, pp.100.