Mapping the Public Rituals of the Portuguese Empire: Afterword

This special issue is a powerful testament to the contribution of the study of public rituals and festivals in the Portuguese-speaking world, broadly conceived, and to the burgeoning field of festival studies.This issue and the other publications emerging from the project mentioned in the introduction, RITUALS: Rituais Pblicos no Imprio Portugus, 1498-1822-including a digital archive of festival accounts (http://rituals.ics.ulisboa.pt/)-canhelp remedy a long-standing gap in European festival studies.Portuguese texts were absent from landmark print and digital collections of early modern European festival accounts, such as the two-volume Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (2004) and the 253 Renaissance festival books digitized by the British Library (previously available at https://www.bl.uk/treasures/festivalbooks/homepage.html).However, this special issue does not just fill a European gap but also points the way to a much broader-indeed, a global-mapping of early modern festivals and ritual encounters.Each of us began our research on colonial Latin American festivals through a focus on specific areas in the Spanish viceroyalties: Potos and Lima, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and Mexico City in New Spain (Voigt 2005(Voigt , 2016;;Valerio 2022 Valerio , 2023)).And yet we both turned to Brazil for comparative and methodological insights (Valerio 2022, 26-79; Valerio 2023; Voigt 2009; Voigt 2016, 53-83, 121-150), in part inspired by groundbreaking research on Brazilian festivities in the two volumes of Festa: Cultura e sociabilidade na Amrica Portuguesa (2001), among other works.Voigt's Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial Mining Towns enriched the study of festivals in the silver mining boomtown of Potos with attention to the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, Brazil: despite the many important differences, the unique strengths in each set of primary sources complemented and helped illuminate comparable strategies of self-promotion pursued by various groups in each place.In Valerio's Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640, the rich Brazilian pictorial and textual archive of Afro-descendent festive participation helped compensate for silences and absences in colonial Mexican