Missionaries in Persia: Cultural Diversity and Competing Norms in Global Catholicism

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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.

Reviews

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 Windlers 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 *

Author Bio

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 exprience de lAutre: Consuls franais 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.