Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions

This is the first truly global study of the Society of Jesus's early missions. Up to now historians have treated the early-modern Catholic missionary project as a disjointed collection of regional missions rather than as a single world-encompassing example of religious globalization. Luke Clossey shows how the vast distances separating missions led to logistical problems of transportation and communication incompatible with traditional views of the Society as a tightly centralized military machine. In fact, connections unmediated by Rome sprung up between the missions throughout the seventeenth century. He follows trails of personnel, money, relics and information between missions in seventeenth-century China, Germany and Mexico, and explores how Jesuits understood space and time and visualized universal mission and salvation. This pioneering study demonstrates that a global perspective is essential to understanding the Jesuits and will be required reading for historians of Catholicism and the early-modern world.

• Vergil: Aeneid, The (2nd Edition)
• The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)
• The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement
• The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges
• Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724
• The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present