Religion in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Henk Isom

The period of Catholic religious history that stretches from about 1450 to 1700 encompasses a huge range of topics.  Historians must grapple with complaints and reforms about church hierarchical corruption and papal abuses, theological developments separate from and in response to the Protestant reformers, a renewed focus on salvation through an emphasis on popular piety and proper religious practices in Europe and missionary efforts throughout the world as Catholics encountered non-Europeans and non-Christians, efforts to purify the faith through the Inquisition in Spain and stricter censorship, and schismatic offshoots and new organizations such as Jansenism and the Jesuits.  While this part of the Roman church’s past is traditionally called the Counter Reformations, scholars have suggested alternative labels such as the Catholic Reformation, Catholic Renewal, Early Modern Catholicism, Catholic Restoration, Baroque Catholicism, and the Tridentine Era, among others.  Each of these names was invented to emphasize particular aspects of Catholicism’s history in this period as a result of the number of subjects those terms could potentially cover.  For example, “Counter Reformation” highlights Catholic theological and political efforts that explicitly countered Luther, Calvin, and the other Protestant reformers, “Catholic Reformation” emphasizes the fact that Catholics, too, wanted to reform their church’s theology, practices, and hierarchy separate from any Protestant instigation, “Catholic Renewal” puts the spotlight on popular piety.

Hubert Jedin, an historian of the mid-twentieth century, spearheaded the use of “Counter Reformation” and Henry Outram Evennett confirmed it in the English historiography.  Both described this episode of Catholic history as entirely reactive to the Protestant Reformation (hence the name).  Recently, religious historians have questioned the term because it reinforces the notion that with the Reformation, a dynamic Protestantism pushed the West into modernity while Catholicism remained stuck in the Middle Ages.  Notable works on this period that attempt to rename the subject include Robert Bireley’s The Refashioning of Catholicism: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation, Guy Bedouelle’s The Reform of Catholicism, 1480-1620, and R. Po-Chia Hsia’s The World of Catholic Renewal: 1540-1770.  Hsia’s work deserves special notice for its popularity.  Although he frames his study using a new term and focuses on the top-down reorganization of the church and the interaction of politics and religion, he ultimately settles on a presentation of the Catholic Reformation as a response to the Protestant Reformation, going against other current scholarship that takes Catholic reform efforts in the Early Modern period on their own terms.  John O’Malley has probably written the most definitive and most useful book on the Counter Reformation naming controversy with Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era.  In it, he suggests calling this period of religious history “Early Modern Catholicism”.  This neutral term carries no baggage or assumed meaning, and allows scholars to describe their work in more specific terms under this larger umbrella.

The number of Catholic religious orders speaks to church that has experienced a series of reformations throughout its history, and defies the practice of studying Early Modern Catholicism as a unique period of rupture and flux.  Monastic reforms of the Middle Ages produced new orders such as the Cistercians and Cluniacs, and a late Medieval belief that monks should involve themselves in society rather than living a life of isolation produced mendicant orders like the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians.  Although all of those orders participated in the Catholic Reformation by establishing missions in Europe and throughout the world, no order had a greater impact on Early Modern Catholicism, global missionary efforts, European politics, and the historiography than the only major religious society to emerge from the Catholic Reformation: the Jesuits.  Founded by Spanish soldier Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits were initially conceived as an order that would help Christians examine their own sins and live with more spiritual purity through the administration of the Spiritual Exercises.  The order spread through Europe, ministering to rural populations whose isolation had led to wayward practices, as well as spreading the Word through public preaching in urban centers.  As the Society expanded, it focused on the administration of the sacraments, works of mercy, education, catechism, and publishing in addition to personal spiritual reform and the ministry of the word.  Most notably, as Catholic kingdoms established colonies overseas the Jesuits worked on the salvation of souls and conversion through a far-flung missionary effort.  William V. Bangert wrote a definitive history of the order with A History of the Society of Jesus.  John O’Malley has authored The First Jesuits, a useful book on the Society’s foundation and early development.  O’Malley also edited the two volume Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, a collection of articles written by Jesuit scholars that highlights the order’s wide ranging impact.

Starting with Loyola and the Spiritual Exercises, which allowed flexibility in their administration, the Jesuits were consistently willing to adapt their conversion efforts to the social, cultural, and political customs of the societies they visited.  Scholarship on individual missions emphasizes, among other things, this adaptability or accommodation.  Notable work the Jesuit mission to the East includes Liam Brockey’s Journey to the East: the Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 and R. Po-Chia Hsia’s A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610.  Ricci founded the mission in China.  Ines Zupanov’s Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments in Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India describes the controversy over Roberto de Nobili’s accommodations in the mission at Madurai and provides a guide for reading Jesuit letters.  Historians of the Jesuit Missions in Spanish America have focused on two seemingly contradictory trends in the missions there: the use of missionaries as frontiersmen to establish a Spanish presence in remote locations, particularly in northern Mexico, and the Jesuits as advocates of the societies they evangelized.  Frederick Reiter’s They Built Utopia: the Jesuit Missionaries in Peru, 1610-1768 is representative of the former, while Charlotte Gradie’s Jesuit Missionaries and Native Elites in Northern Mexico, 1572-1616 is an example of the latter.  In New Spain, the Jesuits played second fiddle to the Franciscans who were the first order in the province and who, for a long time, enjoyed exclusive rights to missionary activities, and Steven Hackel’s Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Frances: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 and Vivania Diaz Balsera’s The Pyramid Under the Cross: Franciscan Discourses of Evangelization and the Nahua Christian Subject in Sixteenth Century Mexico analyze those efforts during two different periods in the region’s history.  In French America, the sparse European population and the isolated missions produced sites of deep cultural exchange, Jesuit assimilation into native cultures, and competition between French and English, or Catholic and Protestant, imperial and missionary projects.  James Axtell’s The Invasion Within: the Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America and Colin Calloway’s Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England are emblematic of that focus. Scholars of these missions have also produced a number of works on individual Native American conversion stories, such as Allan Greer’s Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits and Emma Anderson’s Betrayal of Faith: the Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert.

The historiography of the Jesuits features two other major trends.  First, the Jesuits were deeply involved in the politics and economics of European courts, for which many contemporary observers accused them of manipulation and exploitation.  This overlaps with the confluence of imperial and religious project seen again and again in studies of overseas Jesuit missions.  Eventually, this involvement would get the Jesuits suppressed from the major European powers and their empires during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  Jonathan Wright’s God’s Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue, and Power – a History of the Jesuits is a comprehensive account of the order that highlights this facet of their history, and Robert Bireley’s The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors describes their political involvement during that conflict.  Second, historians are using the scope of the Jesuit missions to attempt to write global histories.  Luke Clossey’s Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions attempts to bring together Jesuits in China, Germany, and Mexico because they shared common origins and a common fixation on soteriology.  Steven J. Harris’s article “Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge” depicts the Jesuits as a globalizing company by focusing on their combined economic and scientific efforts.

Early Modern Catholicism: Reformations, Counter Reformations, Renewals
R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal: 1540-1770 (1st ed. 1998, 2nd ed. 2005, 3rd ed. 2010)

John W. O’Malley, S.J., Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (2000)

Guy Bedouelle, The Reform of Catholicism, 1480-1620 (2008)

Anthony David Wright, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World (2005)

Robert Byerlee, The Refashioning of Catholicism: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (1999)

Henry Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter Reformation (1968)

The Jesuits
John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (1993)

John W. O’Malley, ed., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (1999)

John W. O’Malley, ed., The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (2006)

Jonathan Wright, God’s Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue, and Power – a History of the Jesuits (2005)

William V. Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus (1972)

Missions in Europe:
Louis Châtelier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c.1500 – c.1800 (1997)

Robert Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors (2003)

Thomas M. McCoog, ed., The reckoned expense : Edmund Campion and the early English Jesuits : essays in celebration of the first centenary of Campion Hall (1996)

Missions in China:
Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (2007)

Gauvin A. Bailey, Art in the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773 (1999)

R. Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610 (2010)

Missions in India:
Ines C. Zupanov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments in Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (1999)

Ines C. Zupanov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (2005)

Missions in Spanish America:
Gauvin A. Bailey, Art in the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773 (1999)

Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (1991)

Frederick J. Reiter, They Built Utopia: the Jesuit Missions in Paraguay, 1610-1768 (1995)

Charlotte M. Gradie, Jesuit Missionaries and Native Elites in Northern Mexico, 1572 to 1616 (1997)

Henrietta Stockel, Salvation Through Slavery: Chiricahua Apaches and Priests on the Spanish Frontier (2008)

Thomas E. Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacácori, the Baca Float, and the betrayal of the O’odham (2006)

Franciscans:
Steven Hackel, Children of coyote, missionaries of Saint Francis : Indian-Spanish relations in colonial California, 1769-1850 (2005)

Vivania Diaz Balsera, The pyramid under the cross: Franciscan discourses of evangelization and the Nahua Christian subject in sixteenth-century Mexico (2005)

Missions in French America:
Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: the Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (2007)

Kenneth M. Morrison, The Embattled Northeast: the Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations (1984)

Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (2004)

Global Missionary Efforts and Globalization
Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (2007)

Steven J. Harris, “Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge” in Configurations 6 (Spring 1998)

Christian Empires of the Atlantic
J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (2006)

Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (2010)

Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c.1500 – c.1800 (1995)

Protestant and Catholic Interaction and Competition
Thomas Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (2004)

James Axtell, The Invasion Within: the Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985)

Colin Calloway, Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (1991)

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