We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Chapter 4 focuses on the early seventeenth century, when religious policy in the kingdom came to be in the hands of a determined new Audiencia president, an ambitious archbishop, and a radical group of Jesuits. With the support of a broad coalition of the kingdom’s leading settlers, these reformers took Christianisation in a new direction. The reformers focused on the promotion of the regular and frequent participation in a range of quotidian Catholic practices and institutions that their sixteenth-century predecessors had generally discouraged or withheld from Indigenous people, particularly private devotions, popular celebrations, confraternities, and public ceremony. This began in a handful of parishes entrusted to these Jesuit reformers, who had a very particular understanding of the role of ‘external’ manifestations of piety, and who used these sites as testing grounds for new approaches to Christianisation. These ultimately had the effect of affording Indigenous people space and opportunities to engage with Christianity in new – if, for the reformers, not always desirable – ways, laying the foundations for the reformation of the kingdom.
Chapter 3 analyses why three warlords in the southern island of Kyushu in Japan converted to Christianity in the 1560s–1580s: Ōmura Sumitada, Arima Yoshisada and, most importantly, Ōtomo Yoshishige (or Sōrin) of Bungo. It begins by describing the complex religious scene and its relationship to political authority in the ‘warring states’ era of the sixteenth century. Religious diplomacy mattered more in Japan than anywhere else, given the association between access to Portuguese trade and receptivity towards the Jesuit mission. Most of the chapter, however, is spent on describing the way that immanent power mattered to these daimyo, plunged into existential competition with rivals. The attraction of appealing to a new source of supernatural assistance in battle or in possession and healing crises is shown in a detailed narrative of the conversion of elite families of Bungo generally and of Ōtomo Sōrin and his son Yoshimune in particular. However, the tumultuous context also meant that questions of loyalty, sacral authority and societal order were also on warlord minds when they pondered questions of religious allegiance.
Chapter 4 explains why Christianity did not become the faith of more than a small minority of warlords and why it was rejected and ultimately persecuted by the rulers who unified Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The plural religious scene – including competing sects of Buddhism, alongside Confucianism and Shinto – afforded an intellectual opening for Christianity. This mattered in particular to the conversion of certain elites in the Gokinai of the 1560s. However, the most emotional debates centred on the dynamics of immanent power noted in the last chapter, and here Buddhism, as a transcendentalist system, found ways of countering the force of Christian arguments. Indeed, on an institutional level, too, the sangha represented a formidable enemy for daimyo contemplating conversion. This chapter then proceeds to analyse the actions, diplomatic letters and anti-Christian edicts of Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu in order to identify the terms by which Christianity was identified as a subversive and unnecessary force. The transcendental elements of Japanese religion therefore played a decisive role in constraining the reach of the Japanese Christian movement. Lastly, the unifiers were intent on sacralising their authority, particularly post-mortem, and Christianity had little to offer in this regard.
Thomas Aquinas and most Christian theologians after him asserted that it is improper to attribute hatred to God. In 1598 the Jesuit theologian Gabriel Vázquez intrepidly argued that God can hate – not only with hatred of abomination but also with inimical hatred. Vázquez's surprising innovation is best explained in the context of the theological disputes between Jesuits and Dominicans on justification. Specifically, Vázquez is elaborating on the idea found in the Council of Trent that justification is a transition from enmity to friendship requiring a real change in the person being justified. He did so to counter views among Dominican theologians that this interior renewal could be in some way operated by God from the outside by way of a reconceptualisation of the sinner or a reevaluation of the value of his meritorious actions. These polemics drove Vázquez to rely on a robust, realist picture of friendship, based on the idea that affections must fit real qualities.
Chapter 6 examines the ‘rediscovery’ of the Buddha when, during the ‘Age of Discovery’ in the sixteenth century, accounts from Catholic missionaries in China and Japan began to appear in Europe. Despite the inclination of the Jesuit missionaries to view all Asian idolatry as inspired by the Devil, they were instrumental in discerning that, while there were many idols referred to by many names, they were only local variations of a single figure: many idols, and many gods, but only one man – the Buddha. That said, it was a time of many imaginings, of multiple confusions, and numerous blind alleys – of the Hindu understanding of the Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu, of the Buddha as the equivalent of the patriarch Noah or the gods Mercury, Wod, and Oden, and of the African origins of the Buddha – as he was variously read into fanciful eighteenth-century readings of the origin of all religions in the time of Noah and the universal Flood.
This article examines two different missionary areas where the Society of Jesus was sent to evangelise the native population: the Andean territories previously under Inca domination and the remote Mariana Islands in the Pacific Rim. The gathering of “other barbarians” living outside “civilised” societies was a tool of early modern colonisers within Europe and beyond. The English did so in sixteenth-century Ireland and the Spanish began reducing the so-called American Indians to new settlements in New Spain and Peru. In this paper, I want to compare the methods used to concentrate the natives of the Viceroyalty of Peru, where the Jesuits actively collaborated, with the borderland mission of the Marianas, where the Jesuits worked as parishioners of a much less sophisticated people: the CHamoru.1 As I will demonstrate, this policy of gathering souls was not an isolated one, but part and parcel of a universalistic principle of spreading God's word that was irremediably embedded in colonial structures of coercion and political control in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.
Three centuries after the Mongol-era historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318) wrote his influential account of China, an émigré Christian convert from Islam translated Matteo Ricci's book on China into Persian in Mughal Delhi. In doing so, he provided a remarkably detailed depiction of the rulers, religions, and regulations of the Ming empire that greatly updated, and superseded, Rashid al-Din's celebrated account. Nonetheless, by the very virtue of its triangulated origins—between China, Europe, and India; between Chinese, Latin, and Persian—this was a fraught endeavour. For Chinese cultural traditions had to be rendered into Islamicate Persian terms that were approximate equivalents for Latin Christian terms which themselves inevitably misrepresented Confucian terms that in turn provided biased depictions of Buddhist and Daoist beliefs. By looking at two moments of the transmission of Ricci into Persian—in the early modern era of manuscripts and amid the colonial ascent of Indian print—this article uses translation as a lens through which to observe both the reach and limits of the cross-cultural connections that have captivated global historians in recent decades.
The history of French Sinology—that is, of scholarly research on things Chinese by French-speaking authors working from Chinese sources—goes back to the seventeenth century and can be divided into several periods determined in large part by sociopolitical factors, and marked by different approaches and emphases: I propose to describe them as the missionary age (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries); the first academic efflorescence (nineteenth century); the advent of field research and the impact of colonialism and the social sciences (first half of twentieth century); and the postwar era of specialization and internationalization (second half of twentieth century), which marked the end of a certain French domination of Chinese studies in the West.1
Since the 1990s, Indonesia has been confronted with the growing influence of a radical Islamist movement that challenges the state doctrine (Pancasila), which was adopted in 1945, and demands a greater place for Islam, which is the religion of nearly 90 per cent of the population. The hardline groups wish to call into question the Indonesian state’s pluralistic and inclusive religious identity, which they see as a conspiracy hatched by the Christian minority to deprive the Muslim majority of its ostensible rights. The Society of Jesus, which has been present in Java since the nineteenth century, is considered by Islamist critics as the main architect of this alleged plot. Furthermore, one of its members, Father Josephus Beek, is presented by Islamist radicals as one of the founders of the New Order (1966–1998), the regime led by General Suharto which was very hostile to political Islam in its early days. This article analyses how the Society of Jesus was able to integrate Catholicism into the Javanese spiritual landscape and explores the subsequent roles played by Jesuit leaders in the genesis and defence of Pancasila. It also sheds light on how Josephus Beek’s very real manoeuvres have provided fodder for militant Islamist circles seeking to delegitimate Indonesia’s secular status quo.
Francis Bacon’s A Letter written out of England to an English Gentleman remaining at Padua, published anonymously around February 1599, reported the alleged plot against the life of Elizabeth I contrived between Edward Squire and the Jesuit Richard Walpole. Widely understood as the official government publication on the Squire affair, it was answered by a number of exiled English Catholic writers, most notably Martin Aray and Thomas Fitzherbert, who identified its anonymous author, and launched a detailed attack on his account of the Squire affair. This article analyzes those responses to argue that Bacon’s Letter was a belated entry in the government propaganda campaign. It forwarded a streamlined and simply anti-Jesuit narrative, rather than the rather muddled version of events that had previously emerged from the interrogations, trial, and early government publications.
What do we do when a beloved comedian known as 'America's Dad' is convicted of sexual assault? Or when we discover that the man who wrote 'all men are created equal' also enslaved hundreds of people? Or when priests are exposed as pedophiles? From the popular to the political to the profound, each day brings new revelations that respected people, traditions, and institutions are not what we thought they were. Despite the shock that these disclosures produce, this state of affairs is anything but new. Facing the concrete task of living well when our best moral resources are not only contaminated but also potentially corrupting is an enduring feature of human experience. In this book, Karen V. Guth identifies 'tainted legacies' as a pressing contemporary moral problem and ethical challenge. Constructing a typology of responses to compromised thinkers, traditions, and institutions, she demonstrates the relevance of age-old debates in Christian theology for those who confront legacies tarnished by the traumas of slavery, racism, and sexual violence.
The Illinois, particularly the Kaskaskia, are well known to have converted in large numbers to Catholicism under the guidance of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, another lesser-known missionary society, the Missions Étrangères, also evangelized among the Illinois. The juxtaposition of these two French Catholic missionary societies working among the same Native nation provides an ideal case study to understand what aspects of Catholicism Native people appreciated and rejected. Converted Illinois people chose a specific practice of Catholicism that upheld fundamental values, enhanced gender roles and kinship connections in Illinois society, and strengthened their relationship to the secular aspects of the French empire.
The final chapter considers the fixed, devotional brainwork that early modern writers attributed to Catholic English girls in particular who were training to serve God. By turning their body-minds toward a life of perpetual virginity, these girls might retain the cognitive gifts of adolescence indefinitely. In this way, they challenged early modern ideas about cold, mentally inert female adulthood as well as Protestant-inflected trajectories of female development that culminated in marriage. The chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century life writings and paintings that chronicle the teenage years of Mary Ward, the Catholic Englishwoman who founded over a dozen, unenclosed religious houses on the Continent based on the Jesuit’s apostolic mission, which included educating England’s recusant daughters — a process that included teaching them theatrical skills necessary for defending their faith back home. In her writings, written during her 30s, Ward is keenly aware of her adolescent mind’s ability to turn toward God with intention. Through her memorial reconstructions, she explicitly figures herself as occupying and owning the stage of girlhood that extended from puberty to marriage — using it to enact a particular kind of cultural memory about English Catholicism while projecting hopes for its future.
The first principles behind the developmental idea are linear time, interiority and staged structure. ‘Development’ is one particular historical way of conceptualizing the primary principle of change; in it, human time is an attempt at successful ‘recapitulation’ (a term that would reappear with modern developmental psychology’s founder, G. Stanley Hall) of Adam’s initial failure. In monotheism, time constructs interiority as permanence, ‘the mind’, in contrast with the temporary visitations of pagan or shamanic religion. Medieval psychology saw a proliferation of its ‘faculties’ (memory, imagination, judgement) and ‘operations’ (abstraction, attention, consciousness, logical reasoning, information-processing), which penetrated both the monastic and the humanist idea of the individual. Augustine’s ‘six ages’ of man gave the lifespan a fixed structure. Following the Reformation, change in the elect minority was seen either as instantaneous or as a stadial sequence: Jansenists and Calvinists on the one hand, Jesuits and Arminians on the other, disputed the function of human agency in relation to divine determinism.
The global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires prompted a remarkable flourishing of the classical rhetorical tradition in various parts of the early modern world. Empire of Eloquence is the first study to examine this tradition as part of a wider global renaissance in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, with a particular focus on the Iberian world. Spanning the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the book argues that the classical rhetorical tradition contributed to the ideological coherence and equilibrium of this early modern Iberian world, providing important occasions for persuasion, legitimation and eventual (and perhaps inevitable) confrontation. Drawing on archival collections in thirteen countries, Stuart M. McManus places these developments in the context of civic, religious and institutional rituals attended by the multi-ethnic population of the Iberian world and beyond, and shows how they influenced public speaking in non-European languages, such as Konkani and Chinese.
Chapter 3 argues that the classical rhetorical tradition was a powerful tool for both European and non-European Jesuit missionaries seeking to advance the cause of Iberianized Catholicism. To do so, it places the Jesuit spiritual conquest of the Americas within the context of the Society of Jesus’ parallel efforts in Asia. More precisely, it follows the career of a Japanese Jesuit, Hara Martinho (c. 1568–1629), from his early education in the Jesuit college at Arima in Japan, to his participation in the Tenshō Embassy to Rome and finally to the crowning achievement of his humanist career, the delivery of his Latin panegyric oration to his fellow Jesuit students at Goa. While no Jesuit sermons in Japanese survive, there are several surviving Chinese sermons, which reveal that the classical rhetorical tradition could influence public speaking in East Asian languages. When taken as a whole, the case of this Japanese Cicero shows that the classical rhetorical tradition in its Renaissance humanist garb was a valuable weapon for Jesuit missionaries seeking to expand the boundaries of Catholicism in a much more militaristic way than most recent scholarship suggests.
St Alban’s English College in Valladolid, established at the height of the Catholic Reformation for the training of English secular clergy under the rule of Spanish Jesuits, underwent an alteration in its management after the expulsion of the religious order from Spain in 1767. As part of this process, numerous valuable archival records were produced which have not, thus far, been studied. This article analyses a portion of these documents: the surviving manuscript inventories of the library. It also considers the series of governmental orders issued by the Spanish authorities as part of the process of expulsion and examines how these orders shaped the production of the library inventories. It offers an overview of the contents of the catalogues, with descriptions of some of those specific book entries that make these inventories unique. The study of these archival documents provides insight into, and understanding of, a key moment in the College history: its shift from Spanish Jesuit control to an English secular one and the difficulties that the Spanish authorities faced because of this change in the College’s national identity.
This chapter analyzes the language black interpreters helped produce about the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of blackness in the distinct missionary scenarios they led. In identifying and parsing this language in the context of its delivery and comparing it with other writings and images about black Christian conversion from the early modern Iberian world, the chapter argues that black interpreters circulated discourse about black beauty and black virtue that is seldom seen in other Spanish or Spanish American texts.
The collection of Jesuit texts describing black interpreters’ lives and labor in seventeenth-century Cartagena demonstrates that the black men and women employed as evangelical linguistic intermediaries before and after the publication of Alonso de Sandoval’s 1627 treatise were far from the invisible and easily replaceable assistants Sandoval suggests. In fact, the texts analyzed in this chapter provide rich details regarding the biographies and roles assigned to and adapted by the black interpreters in Cartagena. The interpreters’ stories, told in part through highly mediated accounts given by some of the black interpreters themselves, present them as linguistic and spiritual intermediaries who are leaders of black communities in the city and influential participants in the Jesuit mission. The sources demonstrate that the interpreters took advantage of the space of negotiation provided by the mission to acquire privileges unique to enslaved laborers during this period and became avenues for newly arrived black men and women to make some successful demands through their participation in the Jesuit mission.
Writings by and about Úrsula de Jesús from seventeenth-century Lima depict her as a black visionary and spiritual intermediary who conveyed messages between souls in purgatory, God, and the living. Úrsula de Jesús’s spiritual diary, in particular, develops a notion of beautiful and virtuous Christian blackness, framed as a corrective to the worldly hierarchies separating the poorer and darker-skinned slaves, servants, and donadas from the wealthier Spanish or criolla nuns in colonial Lima.