Christian materiality between East and West: Notes of a Capuchin among the Christians of the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

This essay presents the Theâtre de la Turquie, a work compiled by an anonymous Capuchin missionary (‘Michel Febvre’) based in the Ottoman Empire in the late seventeenth century. Published in French in 1682, the Theâtre offers an intriguing glimpse of how Catholic missionaries used religious materiality as a prism through which to make sense of the religious diversity of the Ottoman world. Moreover, writers like Febvre also drew on the evidence of Eastern Christian religious practices as a way of defending Roman Catholicism against its Protestant critics. The essay uses the Theâtre to reflect on the geography, chronology and afterlives of the ‘paradox of Christian materiality’ described in Bynum’s 2011 study.