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Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer PrizeWhile the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America.
Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. Whether petitioning superiors for support, preparing to extirpate Native ¿idolatries,¿ or protecting their conversions from critics, Jesuits found power in their persecution and victory in their victimization. This book correlates these tales of sacrifice to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how martyrological idioms worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, missionaries invoked an agricultural metaphor that reconfigured suffering into seed that, when watered by sweat and blood, would one day bring a rich harvest of Indigenous Christianity.
List of contents
List of Abbreviations | xi
Introduction: Suffering and Salvation | 1
1 Seeds: Planting Conversions | 29
2 Weeds: Ritual Confrontations | 61
3 Fruits: Passionate Expansion | 95
4 Deserted: Prolonged Isolation | 133
5 Uprooted: Missionary Expulsion | 170
Epilogue: Civilization and Savagery | 199
Acknowledgments | 215
Notes | 219
Bibliography | 277
Index | 311
About the author
Brandon Bayne is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
