What is it about?
The Jesuits are considered the first "globalists"--but how much did individual Jesuits know about the non-European world? Were they trained at all before going on missions? While they read romanticized versions of martyrdom and triumph over non-Christian religions, they learned little of the language, history, or culture of the places they risked their lives to move to.
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Why is it important?
This uses data from Jesuit library collections to investigate the level of knowledge missionaries would have before going on missions between the 1540s and the 1770s. It is part of the book _Embodiment, Identity, and Gender in the Early Modern Age_, edited by Amy E. Leonard and David M. Whitford (Routledge, 2021)
Perspectives
European specialists have rarely focused on such concerns, which those working on Asian, American, and African missions have written at length about language acquisition, cultural conflicts, etc. This shows that even 200 years into the missions, such knowledge was largely acquired on the job, and European priests were ill-prepared for real life outside the Jesuit colleges.
Professor of History Kathleen M. Comerford
Georgia Southern University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Did the Jesuits introduce “Global Studies”?, December 2020, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003051046-20.
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