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The Missionary Syndrome: Crusader and Pacific Northwest Religious Expansionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Robert I. Burns S.J.
Robert I. Burns S.J.
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

The search for medieval parallels and for medieval roots in New World history has become a fascinating genre. My own university has produced one of the major figures in this field, Lynn White, Jr., and has recently honored another, Luis Weckmann. With the Columbus centennial rushing toward us, we may expect more exercises in their spirit. Such an approach is not farfetched or whimsical. We are the heirs of medieval technology and mentalities. In both, as White has reminded us, the United States may be “closer to the Middle Ages than is Europe.“ And the great historian Shelomo Goitein, after spending most of his working life in pre-Nazi Germany and then in Israel, upon moving to the United States was startled to recognize the medieval flavor of our social structures and mentalities; as a lifelong student of the Middle Ages, he found that “one feels quite at home“ here.

Type
Catholicism and the Frontiers of Conflict
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , April 1988 , pp. 271 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1988

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References

1 See especially Weckmann, Luis, La herencia medieval de México (México D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1984), of which Fordham University will publish a translationGoogle Scholar; and White, Lynn, Jr., Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

2 White, Lynn, Jr., “The Legacy of the Middle Ages in the American Wild West,“ in White, Medieval Religion and Technology, 105Google Scholar; Goitein, Shelomo, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 4 vols. to date (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), II, ix.Google Scholar

3 See especially my The Jesuits and the Indian Wars of the Northwest. Yale Western Americana Series no. 11 (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1966Google Scholar; paperback reissue Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho, 1986); my “Missions in the Northwest,“ in History of Indian-White Relations, Washburn, Wilcomb, ed., Vol. IV (1988)Google Scholar of Handbook of North American Indians, Sturtevant, W. C., general ed., 20 vols. projected (Washington. D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978)Google Scholar; and my position papers (with their bibliographies) in the Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, Lamar, H. R., ed. (New York: T. Crowell Co., 1977), 1033–44,Google Scholar and in the Dictionary of American History, rev, . ed., 7 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977). III, 478–501.Google Scholar

4 See especially the following works, with their bibliographies: my Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Islam under the Crusaders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Crusader Valencia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 and 1986)Google Scholar; and Society and Documentation in Crusader Valencia (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1986).Google Scholar

5 See Burns, Jesuits and Indian Wars, 3. Since the present work is interpretative, based on materials and conclusions elaborately documented in the works cited in notes 3 and 4, I shall refrain from multiplying citations and footnotes. For the Whitman and the early Protestant missions generally, see of course the many works of Clifford Drury, M., culminating in his Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Opening of Old Oregon, 2 vols. (Glendale, Calif.: A. H. Clark Co., 1973).Google Scholar As an introduction to the wider bibliography on Indian missions, see, for example, Bowden, Henry Warner, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Berkhofer, Robert F., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965)Google Scholar; and Coleman, M. C., Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes toward American Indians, 1837–1893 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986). For the Jesuit and Catholic missions, see the works listed in note 3.Google Scholar

6 Khaldun, Ibn, Muqaddimah, Rosenthal, Franz, tr., 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), I, esp. ch. 2, sees. 22–23, and ch. 5, sec. 5.Google Scholar

7 White, Lynn, Jr., “The Crusades and the Technological Thrust of the West.“ in White, Medieval Religion and Technology, 295–96.Google Scholar

8 Miller, Christopher L., Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; see my review in the Western History Review, 17:4 (1986), 471.Google Scholar For the millennial movement and the priority of missions among the Franciscans, see Daniel, E. Randolph, The Franciscan Concept of Mission in the High Middle Ages (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), ch. 5.Google Scholar

9 The two tactics are analyzed in my “Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West: The Thirteenth-Century Dream of Conversion,“ American Historical Review, 76:5 (12 1971),Google Scholar 1386–1434. For general background, see also Kedar, Benjamin Z., Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984),Google Scholar esp. chs. 4, 5; and the studies (including my own) in The Latin West and the Muslim Frontier: Medieval Societies in Comparative Perspective, Powell, J. M., ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, in press).Google Scholar

10 Axtell, James, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), ch. 3.Google Scholar

11 Muldoon, James, Lawyers, Popes, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250–1550 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 73.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 37.