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Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas. Edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Aleksander Maryks and R. P. Hsia. (Jesuit Studies, 14; Boston College International Symposia on Jesuit Studies, 3.) Pp. x + 365 incl. 28 black-and-white and colour ills. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2018. €135. 978 90 04 35768; 2214 3289

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

Andrew T. Kaiser*
Affiliation:
Shanxi Evergreen Service, Taiyuan, Shanxi
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Abstract

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Nearly five hundred years have passed since the Protestant Reformation and the founding of the Society of Jesus. Over the centuries much has been said about the animosity that supposedly marked interactions between Jesuits and Protestants on the mission field. In June 2017 a group of scholars from around the world gathered at Boston College to reexamine this relationship with respect to Asian and American contexts. The fourteen papers from the conference included in this volume are divided evenly between the two regions, and present a wide range of scholarship. As befits a publication of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, this is a collection primarily about Jesuits, touching on Protestants mostly in comparative perspective. While all the essays are historical, they range so widely (the Incan Empire, Tokugawa Japan, Civil War America, etc.) that few readers will be able to engage fully with every contribution. This is not a criticism of the scholarship on display, for interested parties will find plenty to explore – and some articles worthy of particular attention. Hsia's introduction to the Asia section provides a useful outline for understanding the significant connections between the early Jesuits who served in Asia and the Protestant missionaries who followed in their footsteps – particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mendonça's essay on early developments in India is an admirable attempt to combine the Protestant and Jesuit experiences into one integrated narrative. Though less focused on Jesuit-Protestant encounters, Zaleski provides a fascinating case study from the history of Tamil linguistics that highlights the important but often unacknowledged interplay between the ways language is learned and codified and the cross-cultural process itself – a subject worthy of much further study. Lenik's survey of Grand Bay parish in Dominica provides a fascinating example of an institutional and physical legacy that persisted after the Jesuits had departed, leaving its mark on subsequent Protestant communities. The similarities in mission strategy employed by Jesuits and Calvinists on the early American frontier, as presented in Ballériaux's chapter, is a valuable reminder that even where animosities existed Protestants and Catholics may have had much in common. Mailloux goes further, showing how nineteenth-century American Catholics and Protestants could both be accused of ‘Jesuitism’. Taken together, the essays in this anthology complicate the narrative of animosity, often drawing attention to contexts where cooperation or inheritance were the more compelling markers of Jesuit-Protestant interactions. Some readers may find the lack of author biographies frustrating.