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.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest edited volume is Entangled Empires: Anglo-Iberian Atlantic Worlds 1500–1830 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
Robert Maryks has published widely on the history of the Jesuits, including, most recently, the edited volume Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Africa (Brill, 2018).
R.P. Hsia is Edwin Erle Sparks professor of history and Asian studies at Penn State University. Among his most recent edited books is A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions (Brill, 2018).
I Figures
Introduction: Protestantism and Early Jesuits
Robert Aleksander Maryks
Part 1: Asia
1 Introduction
Ronnie Po-chia Hsia
2 We are Not Jesuits: Reassessing Relations between Protestantism, French Catholicism, and the Society of Jesus in Late Tokugawa to Early Shōwa Japan
Makoto Harris Takao
3 Kirishitan Veneration of the Saints: Jesuit and Dutch Witnesses
Haruko Nawata Ward
4 Jesuit and Protestant Use of Vernacular Chinese in Accommodation Policy
Sophie Ling-chia Wei
5 Shaping the Anthropological Context of the “Salus populi Sinensis” Madonna Icon in Xian, China
Hui-Hung Chen
6 Jesuit and Protestant Encounters in Jiangnan: Contest and Cooperation in China’s Lower Yangzi Region
Steven Pieragastini
7 Protestant and Jesuit Encounters in India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Délio Mendonça
8 Beyond Words: Missionary Grammars and the Construction of Language in Tamil Country
Michelle Zaleski
Part 2: The Americas
9 Introduction: Jesuit Liminal Space in Liberal Protestant Modernity
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
10 José de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit–Protestant Author: Print Culture, Contingency, and Deliberate Silence in the Making of the Canon
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
11 Negotiating the Confessional Divide in Dutch Brazil and the Republic: The Case of Manoel de Morães
Anne B. McGinness
12 A French Jesuit Parish, without the Jesuits: Grand Bay’s Catholic Community and Institutional Durability in British Dominica
Steve Lenik
13 “Tis nothing but French Poison, all of it”: Jesuit and Calvinist Missions on the New World Frontier
Catherine Ballériaux
14 “Americans, you are marked for their prey!” Jesuits and the Nineteenth-century Nativist Impulse
Robert Emmett Curran
15 Wars of Words: Catholic and Protestant Jesuitism in Nineteenth-century America
Steven Mailloux
“The reader interested in Jesuit missions will gain a new perspective on how these missions were perceived over time and by different religious entities. Most any reader will learn from these erudite essays or at the very least be able to use them as helpful reference and bibliographic tools for much needed further research not only of Jesuit missions but those of other orders as well.”
Thomas J. Santa Maria (Yale) in The Sixteenth Century Journal
“The essays in this collection complicate the narrative of animosity, often drawing attention to contexts where cooperation or inheritance were the more compelling markers of Jesuit-Protestant interactions.”
Andrew T. Kaiser, in: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 71, No. 3 (2020), pp. 653–654.
