Reformation Strategies: Conversion, Civility, and Utopia in Missionary Writings about the New World, c. 1610-1690.

Abstract

This thesis is an intellectual and comparative history of French, Spanish, and English missions to the native peoples of America in the seventeenth century. It argues that missionaries came to the new world as the cutting edge of reform movements in Europe. Foreign missions were thus a central part of the European processes of Reformation and Counter-Reformation as they extended into the seventeenth century; the study of European early modern Christianity needs to take these experiments into consideration accordingly. Whereas the historiography of missions tends to treat them as the religious wing of imperial history, my project seeks to study missions as the imperial wing of religious history. Despite their presence in the New World, missionaries should be considered as a central source for the study of European intellectual and religious history: they were products of the best European education, were well aware of current intellectual, political and religious debates taking place in Europe, and were completely dedicated to what they considered to be international — Catholic or Calvinist — movements. At the same time, their isolation from Europe and their encounter with a group of people that they often perceived as untainted by European civilisation allowed them to develop a very critical view on the Old World and its problems. Missionary efforts reveal that Catholicism and Calvinism, as implemented among native societies, shared an intense vision of Christianity. Scholarly focus on the difference between these religious worldviews has meant that their common intellectual heritage remains to be explored. Thus this project studies, through a thematic approach, missionaries’ understanding of civility and religiosity. It also compares the institutional relationship of missionaries with their home countries, examines the legal status of their enterprises, and engages with the criticisms and ideals missionaries formulated about settler communities and Europe. This research seeks to open new avenues for understanding early modern religion and to offer a new appraisal of source materials usually studied with the tools and methods of social and cultural history. It also attempts to emphasise the confessional contribution to political thought in the early modern Atlantic world.