The fruit of a workshop held in 2013 at the Moore Institute in Galway, Ireland, this volume of nine essays explores a diversity of ways in which mission was understood and undertaken, especially by early modern Catholic religious orders and congregations committed to a mobility that stretched far beyond Europe to nearly all corners of the globe. In a concise and helpful introduction, editors Forrestal and Smith point out that these missionary efforts had been ignored by the Council of Trent (1545–63), whose focus remained exclusively European. Franciscans, Ursulines, Jesuits, and other friars, nuns, and priests, whether in places such as Canada, Chile, Madagascar, or the Balkans, met with complex and often hostile responses to evangelization, and they had to consider revising and adapting their methods. The missionaries “came to conclude that the missionary church was heavens apart from the ecclesiastical system that they had left behind” (21).

One can well imagine that disappointments and failures may have brought some missionaries to tears, but the stimulating essay by Karin Vélez also focuses on other sources of tears among Jesuits and the peoples to whom they were sent. Jesuit reports of their pastoral activities in far-flung places often mention how a sermon was received with tears, a response that Jesuits like to interpret as proof of the sincerity of a conversion to Catholicism. In the perspective of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, tears could be an indication of sincerity of conversion and repentance, or of genuine compassion when hearing about the suffering of others, especially that of Jesus, or of consolation in coming to know grace and salvation. But Jesuit missionaries such as Jean de Brébeuf (Canada) sought to avoid shedding tears while being tortured because they thought such weeping would be seen as weakness by their warrior captors. Jesuits sought to manage the flow of tears, their own and those of others, even though tears were not necessarily subject to rational control.

Dominique Deslandres emphasizes success, not failure, nor any kind of tears, in the work of the Ursuline Marie de l’Incarnation in Quebec City. Deslandres highlights her skills in learning new languages, and calls her “at once a writer, expert linguist, anthropologist, innovating educator, musician, artist … and an architect who designed the plans of her monastery and supervised its construction herself” (45). Yet Deslandres is more nuanced in her account of the Ursuline effort in Frenchifying Amerindian girls in order to make them suitable as future wives for French men, an effort Marie de l’Incarnation supported at first but eventually recognized as both unnecessary in order to make the girls Christian, and as an effort limited, in any case, by what she came to see as an “irreducible” otherness of Amerindians. As stimulating as this essay is, it would be even more so with a developed comparative dimension: was Marie de l’Incarnation utterly exceptional in her perspectives, or were her views comparable to at least some of the other French missionaries in Canada, male or female?

While Deslandres gives very little attention to conflicts or tensions among missionaries in North America, such tensions are the main focus of Megan Armstrong’s essay on Franciscans in the Holy Land. Since 1431 Observant Franciscan friars had had the custody of Christian holy places such as where Jesus was thought to have celebrated the Last Supper or been crucified. In the sixteenth century the division between Conventual and Observant friars was further complicated by the addition of another reform-minded movement of friars, the Capuchins. Armstrong does a masterful job of examining the competition and rivalry between Capuchins and Observants in the Holy Land, a rivalry stoked and exacerbated by Jesuits and Discalced Carmelites also seeking a role in ministering at the holy sites. By the 1600s the situation became even more complex with the creation of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome. Against no small opposition, it sought to increase papal control of missions everywhere outside Europe; in the same era, the French monarchy sought ever greater influence and power in many parts of the world, including the eastern Mediterranean. In Holy Land Franciscan feuding, France sided with the Capuchins.

Essays in this volume offer well-chosen and potentially seminal case studies of the “frontiers” of missionary Catholicism from 1500 to 1700. These frontiers were not only geographic, but institutional, national, dynastic, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious.