Luke Clossey

Merchants, migrants, missionaries, and globalization in the early-modern Pacific

In 1571 the founding of Manila made possible regular transpacific trade and thus forged the missing link in the global trade network. American interest in China and Japan soared to new heights. In the next two centuries this attraction fuelled other globalizing exchanges—parallel to the commercial ties—across the Pacific. Thousands crossed the ocean to create the America’s first Asian diaspora communities, and Mexico became Europe’s clearinghouse for information about Asia. The most intense connection was missionary, for churchmen in America worked with one eye relentlessly turned to East Asia and dreamed of the possibility of evangelization, and of its alluring dangers. These exchanges, and the attendant expanding mental horizons, evince enough similarities with modern globalization to warrant incorporation into that concept.

The geographies and methodologies of religion in the Journal of Early Modern History.

Looking at historiography and methodology for the risks of Eurocentrism and presentism, this essay reflects on the study of the history of religion in the two decades of the Journal of Early Modern History’s life to date. It first counts the locations of the subjects of the Journal’s articles, both generally and specifically on religion, to measure patterns in geographical focus. Considering the language these articles use to describe religion, the essay then draws a contrast between treating religion on its own terms and adapting a more analytical, though invasive, approach. Andrew Gow’s emphasis on continuity between the medieval and the early-modern inspires a late-traditional perspective that avoids both eurocentrism and presentism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Early Modern History is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holders express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700 by Tara Alberts (review)

disguise his admiration of Jenkins—namely, for the latter’s “steadfast courage” in allowing the Vagina Monologues to be shown and performed at Notre Dame in spite of the disapproval of Bishop John D’Arcy, the local Ordinary. Similarly, he is full of praise for Jenkins’s invitation to President Barack Obama to give Notre Dame’s commencement address in 2009—again, in spite of Bishop D’Arcy’s disapproval, exemplified by his refusal to attend the commencement ceremony itself. Sayre also notes that Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, declined to accept the Laetare Medal on that occasion.

The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia by Liam Matthew Brockey (review)

T carefully argued and richly contextualized study of the Portuguese Jesuit André Palmeiro (Lisbon, 1569–Macau, 1635), inspector of the Society’s missions in India and the Far East, consciously makes use of the unfashionable genre of life-and-times biography to make two polemical points. The first is that it is necessary to remember that the Society of Jesus, which in recent decades has come to be seen as standing for everything that was ‘“modern” about the early-modern age, was not an undifferentiated Zeitgeist but made up of individuals who often were to be found on both sides of the many controversies of the age (not excluding the strategy of cultural accommodation with which the Society’s missions are perhaps most closely associated). In Brockey’s words, one should not forget they were “a community representative of the rich variety of early modern Catholic piety and preoccupations” (p. 19). Second, Brockey excoriates the tendency of much recent scholarship to misuse the term global and to see the members of the Society as “harbingers of globalization” (p. 428). Instead, by restoring “depth and texture to the men of the early modern Society of Jesus” (p. 19), the author seeks to show how pragmatism was king, heroism in short supply, and failure more common than success. “Alas, no,” Brockey writes in his conclusion, “It was not the world that became more connected because of the Jesuits; rather, it was the Society that, owing to the limitations of communications in early modernity, became more thinly stretched as it spread out across the world” (p. 429). Emblematic of this was the definitive loss of the Japanese mission by the mid-seventeenth century, which, as Brockey memorably puts it, “lies at the eastern terminus [of] ... this panorama of Jesuit dead ends” (p. 432). The latter included the failed missions of Ethiopia, Agra, Tibet, Sri Lanka, the