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Gibbs, Jenna M.; Juterczenka, Sünne
doi: 10.1163/15700658-bja10006pmid: N/A
AbstractThe global mission mandate, present in the New Testament and pre-modern Christianity, took on new force in the early modern period. Missionaries promoted the globalization of Christianity, and in so doing contributed to the broadening of intellectual horizons across the world. Often traveling by sea, they were among the first to cover the vast distances that the maritime empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would subsequently span. This special issue explores the connections between three dynamic fields of research: missions, the history of knowledge, and maritime history. Taking a global and trans-denominational perspective, we seek to shed new light on some of the encounters, networks, exchanges, and transfers facilitated by maritime missions and the interactions of culturally and religiously diverse protagonists during the long eighteenth century.
doi: 10.1163/15700658-bja10005pmid: N/A
AbstractThis article explores the scientific travels of French members of mendicant orders in the early modern Atlantic World. The Royal Cosmographer André Thevet, the Capuchin Claude D’Abbeville and the Minim Charles Plumier demonstrate a coherent but evolving Franciscan perspective in missionary scientific observation on the colonial frontier. It argues that the Franciscan monastic tradition, the Franciscan reform movement, and the teachings of the Minim order interacted with the colonial landscape and encounters with local environments and indigenous peoples in the Atlantic and Caribbean to produce a unique tradition of natural knowledge production. This tradition culminates in the convergence of the Minim worldview with the cartographic and observational program of the Paris Academy of Sciences in the Atlantic voyages of the French Minim friar and scientific traveler Louis Feuillée at the turn of the eighteenth century.
doi: 10.1163/15700658-bja10003pmid: N/A
AbstractIn the second half of the seventeenth century, Italian Capuchin missionaries who traveled to West Central Africa both colluded in and critiqued Portuguese slave trading practices. Drawing from their experience on slave galleys in the Mediterranean and their medieval Franciscan heritage, Capuchins brought earlier concepts governing enslavement to bear in Central Africa. Examining Capuchin interventions in exchanges of goods and slaves, their declamations against Portuguese warmongering, their efforts to free unjustly enslaved Africans, and the ways in which they sought to prohibit slave sales to Protestants, this article positions this group of religious agents as important mediators of struggles for empire between the Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, and Spanish in precolonial coastal Africa and as protagonists in their own right. On the basis of the Capuchins’ critique of economic gain and the Kongolese embrace of Catholicism, Capuchins crafted a counter discourse that, if only partially successful, challenged emerging models of Atlantic enslavement.
doi: 10.1163/15700658-bja10009pmid: N/A
AbstractThe ex-slave-turned-missionary Jacobus Capitein (c. 1717–1747) was one of the first Africans to study at a European university and the first to be ordained as a Protestant minister. Capitein is particularly known for his 1742 Leiden University dissertation, which defended slavery as compatible with Christian liberty. This has given rise to the question of whether Capitein should be considered an “Uncle Tom” who merely wrote what his benefactors wanted to hear.This study contends that when his dissertation is considered in its historical- intellectual context, a more nuanced picture of Capitein emerges. By considering Capitein’s actual arguments, the missional agenda behind his dissertation, and the overwhelming corroboration afforded to his views by early modern Dutch theological and juridical sources, it argues that Capitein was an intellectual in his own right, who through his dissertation sought to pave the way for his return to Africa as a missionary.
doi: 10.1163/15700658-bja10008pmid: N/A
AbstractWhile Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg and his pastor colleagues from Halle have gone down in history for their pioneering work – organizing the Lutheran Church on North American soil – they are not known for missionary projects to Native Americans. This article examines how things changed after a second generation of Halle pastors arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1760s. It was, above all, down to Mühlenberg’s later son-in-law Johann Christoph Kunze, who had a rather different view on America’s indigenous people. During his whole lifespan in America, Kunze pursued his goal of establishing a mission to Native Americans. This engagement contributed to a paradigm shift in the Lutheran Church. In contrast to Mühlenberg and the first generation of Halle pastors, Kunze sought transnational support that was no longer exclusively centered in Halle’s Glaucha Institutions but based on pan-Protestant, maritime networks.
doi: 10.1163/15700658-bja10007pmid: N/A
AbstractIn March of 1831, three American missionary families commenced service with the American Marathi Mission in Bombay. In just over three years, half of the party had died, and the survivors set sail for America. Their story is like what happened to many American missionaries at the end of the long eighteenth century who sought to expand the empire of Christ. From their voyage on the high seas to their everyday life in Bombay, they were confronted by their various states of dependence. Forced to reckon with unfamiliar social, cultural, economic, and political realities, they struggled on the margins of Anglo-Indian society. This article explores the uneasy relationship between American missionaries, who were acutely aware of their dependency on others as colonial interlopers, and the maritime empires they encountered.
doi: 10.1163/15700658-bja10004pmid: N/A
AbstractThis paper explores the influence of Pietism on the radical evangelical Christian movement known as the Open Brethren movement. In the 1830s, Anthony Norris Groves (1795–1853) met with German Lutheran missionary Karl Rhenius in India and praised his methods, which included support for indigenous Christian leaders and the independent churches that they led. Karl Gützlaff promoted similar methods in China and influenced wealthy London Brethren to found the China Evangelization Society (CES) in 1850. The CES founders also took the Moravians as a model, noting that a single congregation had launched a global missionary movement that had perpetuated itself from generation to generation. Although they had no formal relationship with the Moravian United Brethren, the Open Brethren knew of their work and that of Pietist institutions like the Francke Foundations both through personal contacts and publications. This paper utilizes the concept of “ensampling” to analyze the ways that Open Brethren founders modeled their work on practices that Pietist missionaries and philanthropists had developed in the long eighteenth century.
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