This book is no ordinary edited collection. Rather, the idea for it was conceived over lunch in Wolfenbüttel and gradually evolved into an intellectual adventure spanning several years, involving ten scholars who collectively shaped its content. In transconfessional research teams, each responsible for one chapter, we placed comparison at the heart of the project. Questions of gender – and particularly the role of women – had remained surprisingly negleced in the history of Christian missions, and well-founded comparisons between Jesuit and Lutheran missions were almost entirely absent.
The volume investigates Jesuit and Protestant missionary enterprises of the 17th and 18th centuries through a transconfessional, comparative perspective. Using a series of microhistorical case studies from different regions of the world, it explores how missionaries, patrons, converts, and local collaborators negotiated gender norms and emotional practices within diverse colonial settings. The history of emotions offered a particularly promising way to bring missionary history and gender history into dialogue. Religion is transmitted through emotional practices and experiences, while emotions, in turn, are deeply rooted in the construction of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in a broader sense. Despite important theological and institutional differences, Catholic and Protestant missions relied on remarkably similar emotional practices, gendered forms of authority, and strategies of cultural translation.