Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia

Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia
Author: Nadine Amsler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2019-10-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0429671504

Over recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in early modern Catholic missions in Asia as laboratories of cultural contact. This book builds on recent ground-breaking research on early modern Catholic missions, which has shown that missionaries in Asia cooperated with and accommodated the needs of local agents rather than being uncompromising promoters of post-Tridentine doctrine and devotion. Bringing together some of the most renowned and innovative researchers from Anglophone countries and continental Europe, this volume investigates how missionaries’ entanglements with local societies across Asia contributed to processes of localization within the early modern Catholic church. The focus of the volume is on missionaries’ adaptation to four ideal-typical social settings that played an eminent role in early modern Asian missions: (1) the symbolically loaded princely court; (2) the city as a space of especially dense communication; (3) the countryside, where missionary presence was only rarely permanent; (4) and the household – a central arena of conversion in early modern Asian societies. Shining a fresh light onto the history of early modern Catholic missions and the early modern Eurasian cultural exchange, this will be an important book for any scholar of religious history, history of cultural contact/global history and early modern history in Asia. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

A Companion to the Early Modern Catholic Global Missions

A Companion to the Early Modern Catholic Global Missions
Author: Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2018-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004355286

A survey of the latest scholarship on Catholic missions between the 16th and 18th centuries, this collection of fourteen essays by historians from eight countries offers not only a global view of the organization, finances, personnel, and history of Catholic missions to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, but also the complex political, cultural, and religious contexts of the missionary fields. The conquests and colonization of the Americas presented a different stage for the drama of evangelization in contrast to that of Africa and Asia: the inhospitable landscape of Africa, the implacable Islamic societies of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, and the self-assured regimes of Ming-Qing China, Nguyen dynasty Vietnam, and Tokugawa Japan. Contributors are Tara Alberts, Mark Z. Christensen, Dominique Deslandres, R. Po-chia Hsia, Aliocha Maldavsky, Anne McGinness, Christoph Nebgen, Adina Ruiu, Alan Strathern, M. Antoni J. Üçerler, Fred Vermote, Guillermo Wilde, Christian Windler, and Ines Zupanov.

Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia

Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

Over recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in early modern Catholic missions in Asia as laboratories of cultural contact. This book builds on recent ground-breaking research on early modern Catholic missions, which has shown that missionaries in Asia cooperated with and accommodated the needs of local agents rather than being uncompromising promoters of post-Tridentine doctrine and devotion. Bringing together some of the most renowned and innovative researchers from Anglophone countries and continental Europe, this volume investigates how missionaries' entanglements with local societies across Asia contributed to processes of localization within the early modern Catholic church. The focus of the volume is on missionaries' adaptation to four ideal-typical social settings that played an eminent role in early modern Asian missions: (1) the symbolically loaded princely court; (2) the city as a space of especially dense communication; (3) the countryside, where missionary presence was only rarely permanent; (4) and the household - a central arena of conversion in early modern Asian societies. Shining a fresh light onto the history of early modern Catholic missions and the early modern Eurasian cultural exchange, this will be an important book for any scholar of religious history, history of cultural contact/global history and early modern history in Asia.

Deus Destroyed

Deus Destroyed
Author: George Elison
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684172799

"Japan’s “Christian Century” began in 1549 with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries led by Saint Francis Xavier, and ended in 1639 when the Tokugawa regime issued the final Sakoku Edict prohibiting all traffic with Catholic lands. “Sakoku”—national isolation—would for more than two centuries be the sum total of the regime’s approach to foreign affairs. This policy was accompanied by the persecution of Christians inside Japan, a course of action for which the missionaries and their zealots were in part responsible because of their dogmatic orthodoxy. The Christians insisted that “Deus” was owed supreme loyalty, while the Tokugawa critics insisted on the prior importance of performing one’s role within the secular order, and denounced the subversive doctrine whose First Commandment seemed to permit rebellion against the state. In discussing the collision of ideas and historical processes, George Elison explores the attitudes and procedures of the missionaries, describes the entanglements in politics that contributed heavily to their doom, and shows the many levels of the Japanese response to Christianity. Central to his book are translations of four seventeenth-century, anti-Christian polemical tracts."

Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas

Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas
Author: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2018-08-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004373829

The present volume is a result of an international symposium on the encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, which was organized by Boston College’s Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College in June 2017. In Asia, Protestants encountered a mixed Jesuit legacy: in South Asia, they benefited from pioneering Jesuit ethnographers while contesting their conversions; in Japan, all Christian missionaries who returned after 1853 faced the equation of Japanese nationalism with anti-Jesuit persecution; and in China, Protestants scrambled to catch up to the cultural legacy bequeathed by the earlier Jesuit mission. In the Americas, Protestants presented Jesuits as enemies of liberal modernity, supporters of medieval absolutism yet master manipulators of modern self-fashioning and the printing press. The evidence suggests a far more complicated relationship of both Protestants and Jesuits as co-creators of the bright and dark sides of modernity, including the public sphere, public education, plantation slavery, and colonialism.

Conflict and Conversion

Conflict and Conversion
Author: Tara Alberts
Publisher:
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2013-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199646260

Explores how Catholic missionaries, merchants, and adventurers brought their faith to the strategically and commercially crucial region of Southeast Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Jesuits and Matriarchs

Jesuits and Matriarchs
Author: Nadine Amsler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780295743806

In early modern China, Jesuit missionaries associated with the male elite of Confucian literati in order to proselytize more freely, but they had limited contact with women, whose ritual spaces were less accessible. Historians of Catholic evangelism have similarly directed their attention to the devotional practices of men, neglecting the interior spaces in Chinese households where women worshipped and undertook the transmission of Catholicism to family members and friends. Nadine Amsler's investigation brings the domestic and devotional practices of women into sharp focus, uncovering a rich body of evidence that demonstrates how Chinese households functioned as sites of evangelization, religious conflict, and indigenization of Christianity. The resulting exploration of gendered realms in seventeenth-century China reveals networks of religious sociability and ritual communities among women as well as women's remarkable acts of private piety. Amsler's exhaustive archival research and attention to material culture reveals new insights about women's agency and domestic activities, illuminating areas of Chinese and Catholic history that have remained obscure, if not entirely invisible, for far too long. The open access publication of this book was made possible by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia

The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia
Author: Felix Wilfred
Publisher:
Total Pages: 685
Release: 2014
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199329060

Named by the International Bulletin of Missionary Studies as an Outstanding Book of 2014 for Mission Studies Despite the ongoing global expansion of Christianity, there remains a lack of comprehensive scholarship on its development in Asia. This volume fills the gap by exploring the world of Asian Christianity and its manifold expressions, including worship, theology, spirituality, inter-religious relations, interventions in society, and mission. The contributors, from over twenty countries, deconstruct many of the widespread misconceptions and interpretations of Christianity in Asia. They analyze how the growth of Christian beliefs throughout the continent is linked with the socio-political and cultural processes of colonization, decolonization, modernization, democratization, identity construction of social groups, and various social movements. With a particular focus on inter-religious encounters and emerging theological and spiritual paradigms, the volume provides alternative frames for understanding the phenomenon of conversion and studies how the scriptures of other religious traditions are used in the practice of Christianity within Asia.