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
Rezensionen / Stimmen
This is a landmark book which deftly probes the issue of commensurability in the intercultural encounter across continents in the newly globalizing world of the 17th century. Windler asks pertinent questions about the nature of confessionalism, a Christian-European concept, and how it fared in early modern Iran, a non-Western, Muslim society. The complex portrait he paints by way of answers should serve as a starting point for future studies about similar encounters elsewhere. * Rudolph Matthee, Professor, University of Delaware, USA * Missionaries in Persia is an important contribution to historical scholarship that is of great interest to all researchers who study global Catholicism and the Catholic missions. * Ronnie Hsia, Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA * What Windler has presented here is a tremendously knowledgeable and impressively well-documented, nuanced, sophisticated, and very thoroughly thought-through analysis of the Persian mission in its structural, financial, and religious-political terms. * Markus Friedrich, Professor, University of Hamburg, Germany * This is an astonishingly detailed study of a mission the historical significance and interest of which lies less in the number of converts actually made (from either the Shia Islam or Armenian Christian communities), but rather in what it tells us about the multi-tasking of a group of missionaries, whose distance from Rome and small numbers ensured they would have to be particularly enterprising and creative in order to survive. * Simon Ditchfield, Professor, University of York, UK * Taking as a starting point a tiny observatory studied with a high intensity, the master work of Christian Windler approaches most of the key issues which concern today the historians of the "first globalisation". Missionaries appear there as actors in a field in tensions between different norm systems: that of Western Europe versus that of Safavid Persia, but not only: each side appears featured by a pluralism of contradictory and competing norms. * Bernard Heyberger, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), France * Until Windler's pioneering study, hardly anything was known about Christian missionary attempts in Safawid Persia. In his magisterial work, he depicts a fascinating, multifaceted, often surprising picture of transcultural diversity in early modern Iran. Christian mission was anything but a success story though. Drawing on an abundance of sources in various languages, Windler shows how missionaries of the Post-Tridentine Order of the Discalced Carmelites navigated between Papal claims to confessional clarity and constraints of everyday interreligious coexistence. * Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Professor, Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
Maße
Höhe: 234 mm
Breite: 156 mm
Dicke: 22 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-7556-4940-2 (9780755649402)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Christian Windler is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He specializes in the social and cultural history of diplomacy, religious practices, and global entanglements from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. His publications include La diplomatie comme experience de l'Autre: Consuls francais au Maghreb (1700-1840) (2002), a pioneering study in new diplomatic history.Since the early 2000s, he has broadened his interest in cultural intermediaries by focusing on missionaries as cultural brokers and "glocal" actors.He has been principal investigator on several externally funded projects in new diplomatic history and in the history of religious practices in Europe and beyond.
Autor*in
University of Bern, Switzerland
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Glossary of Latin terms
Introduction
1. 1. The short arm of Rome: The Curia, superiors and missionaries
The Holy Office and the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide: Aspirations and obstacles to enforcing papal primacy
The Discalced Carmelites: Dysfunctional institutions and internalized discipline
Maintaining proximity from a distance
"Stepmother" or protectress? Missionaries and the Propaganda Fide
2. 2. In the shadow of the Shah: The Safavid Empire as an arena for Catholic mission
The European powers in the Safavid system of imperial rule
The Safavid practice of power, between inclusiveness and orthodoxy
Global actors: The Armenian merchants of New Julfa
Omens of conversion or Machiavellianism?
3. 3. Christian 'ulama? Missionaries and Muslims
Missionaries at the Safavid court
Missionaries and Shi'a scholars
Medicine, the belief in miracles, and the administration of the sacraments
From social closeness to conversion to Islam
4. 4. Among "brethren," "schismatics" or "heretics"? Missionaries and Armenians
Good correspondence and sacramental community with rediscovered "brethren"
"We do not need you": New practices of confessional disambiguation
Accommodation and dissimulation
5. 5. As Christians among Muslims: Missionaries and European laypeople of different confessions
European laypeople in Isfahan and New Julfa
Missionaries among themselves
Transconfessional "good friendship and correspondence"
Shared religious practices in the diaspora
6. 6. Local interconnections and observance: The missionaries in conflict with the norms of their order
The Discalced Carmelites: Unsuited to mission?
Local social integration and observance
All-too worldly business
The mission as a world turned upside down: Justification strategies and cultural relativization
7. 7. Undesirable outcomes: From mission to Enlightenment?
Doctrinal disambiguation
Truth claims and limits to norm enforcement: The practice of avoiding decisions
Normative orders outside the Church
Conclusion
Sources and Bibliography
Index
