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How did gender shape the expanding Jesuit enterprise in the early modern world? What did it take to become a missionary man? And how did missionary masculinity align itself with the European colonial project? This book highlights the central importance of male affective ties and masculine mimesis in the formation of the Jesuit missions, as well as the significance of patriarchal dynamics. Focusing on previously neglected German actors, Strasser shows how stories of exemplary male behavior circulated across national boundaries, directing the hearts and feet of men throughout Europe toward Jesuit missions in faraway lands. The sixteenth-century Iberian exemplars of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, disseminated in print and visual media, inspired late-seventeenth-century Jesuits from German-speaking lands to bring Catholicism and European gender norms to the Spanish-controlled Pacific. The age of global missions hinged on the reproduction of missionary manhood in print and real life.
List of contents
Acknowledgements, Introduction: Missionary Men on the Move: Jesuits and Gender in the Early Modern World, Chapter 1. Manly Missions: Reforming European Masculinity, Converting the World, Chapter 2. Braving the Waves with Francis Xavier: Fear and the Making of Jesuit Manhood, Chapter 3. Of Missionaries, Martyrs, and Makahnas: Engendering the Marianas Mission I, Chapter 4. Martyrdom, Matrilineality, and the Virgin Mary: Engendering the Marianas Mission II, Chapter 5. Writing Women's Lives and Mapping Indigenous Spaces: Conceptual Conquest, Missionary Manhood, and Colonial Fantasy Between the Pacific and Europe, Conclusion and Epilogue, Bibliography, List of Figures, Index
About the author
Ulrike Strasser is a professor of history at the University of California San Diego. Her publications include the award-winning monograph
State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (University of Michigan Press, 2004).
