Christian Windler - Böcker

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.

This open access title explores how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Empire, hosted Catholic missionaries of more diverse affiliations than most other cities in Asia. Attracted by the hope of converting the Shah, the missionaries acted as diplomatic agents for Catholic rulers, hosts to Protestant merchants, and healers of Armenians and Muslims. Through such niche activities they gained social acceptance locally. This book examines the activities of Discalced Carmelites and other missionaries, revealing the flexibility they demonstrated in dealing with cultural diversity, a common feature of missionary activity throughout emerging global Catholicism. While missions all over the world were central to the self-fashioning of the Counter-Reformation Church, clerics who set out to win over souls for the “true religion” turned into local actors who built reputations by defining their social roles in accordance with the expectations of their host society. Such practices fed controversies that were fought out in newly emerging public spaces. Responding to the threat this posed to its authority, the Roman Curia initiated a process of doctrinal disambiguation and centralization which culminated in the nineteenth century. Using the missions to Safavid Iran as a case study for “a global history on a small scale,” the book creates a new paradigm for the study of global Catholicism.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Department of Early Modern History of the Institute of History, Universitaet Bern

This open access title explores how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Empire, hosted Catholic missionaries of more diverse affiliations than most other cities in Asia. Attracted by the hope of converting the Shah, the missionaries acted as diplomatic agents for Catholic rulers, hosts to Protestant merchants, and healers of Armenians and Muslims. Through such niche activities they gained social acceptance locally. This book examines the activities of Discalced Carmelites and other missionaries, revealing the flexibility they demonstrated in dealing with cultural diversity, a common feature of missionary activity throughout emerging global Catholicism. While missions all over the world were central to the self-fashioning of the Counter-Reformation Church, clerics who set out to win over souls for the “true religion” turned into local actors who built reputations by defining their social roles in accordance with the expectations of their host society. Such practices fed controversies that were fought out in newly emerging public spaces. Responding to the threat this posed to its authority, the Roman Curia initiated a process of doctrinal disambiguation and centralization which culminated in the nineteenth century. Using the missions to Safavid Iran as a case study for “a global history on a small scale,” the book creates a new paradigm for the study of global Catholicism.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Department of Early Modern History of the Institute of History, Universitaet Bern

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.