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In Envoys of A Human God Andreu Martínez offers a comprehensive study of the religious mission led by the Society of Jesus in Christian Ethiopia. The mission to Ethiopia was one of the most challenging undertakings carried out by the Catholic Church in early modern times. The book examines the period of early Portuguese contacts with the Ethiopian monarchy, the mission’s main developments and its aftermath, with the expulsion of the Jesuit missionaries. The study profits from both an intense reading of the historical record and the fruits of recent archaeological research. Long-held historiographical assumptions are challenged and the importance of cultural and socio-political factors in the attraction and ultimate estrangement between European Catholics and Ethiopian Christians is highlighted.
Based on doctoral thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007.
The Jesuit Ethos aims at revisiting important moments in Jesuit history from the margins, and in light of the current global challenges. It argues that by examining Jesuit history from the margins, one better appreciates this history as a spiritual journey, a constant quest for the unity of hearts and minds among the members. Their cultural and political origins, the diversity of their ministries, their apostolic dispersion amid the “First Globalization,” and constant assaults from declared enemies kept the Jesuits on the verge of implosion and immolation and made the unity among their members a matter of survival. By analyzing how the Jesuits exploited their diversity of cultures and politics to build a global ethos, and how this global organization was sustained for the last 500 years, relevant lessons can be learned to address the ongoing challenges of our global community. While speaking to a broader, global-oriented audience, such a history might be the first of such by an African (thus its originality), in a context of shifting demographics in the Church and Society of Jesus, and questions about the identity of its institution and mission.
This book presents an early modern Jesuit attitude towards Hindu and Ethiopian strains of asceticism. The Jesuits’ descriptions of both the yogis and the Ethiopian renunciates were marked by ambivalence. While critical of these ascetics, the missionaries also pointed out admirable facets of their comportment. In both the Society of Jesus’ positive and negative impressions, there are glaring ethnocentric views that shift the spotlight onto the other’s flaws. Like many historical cases, these perceptions evolved into a sort of inverted mirror image of the self that revealed differences between the European Catholic and the native renunciate.
This critical edition and translation of the Relaçam do Equebar, Rey dos Mogores (1582) and the Commentarius Mongolicae Legationis (1591), the first detailed European accounts on Mughal India written by Antoni de Montserrat, offers an updated and renewed reappraisal of the first Jesuit mission to the Mughal court (1580-1583). It also includes a reassessment of Montserrat’s career, highlighting his role both as a missionary and a diplomatic agent at the Mughal court
Shortlist--2023 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize Winner--2022 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize Nineteenth-century European representations of Africa are notorious for depicting the continent with a blank interior. But there was a time when British writers filled Africa with landed empires and contiguous trade routes linked together by a network of rivers. This geographical narrative proliferated in fictional and nonfictional texts alike, and it was born not from fanciful speculation but from British interpretations of what Africans said and showed about themselves and their worlds. Investigations of the representation of Africa in British texts have typically concluded that the continent operated in the ...
In this wide-ranging consideration of intellectual diasporas, historian Peter Burke questions what distinctive contribution to knowledge exiles and expatriates have made. The answer may be summed up in one word: deprovincialization. Historically, the encounter between scholars from different cultures was an education for both parties, exposing them to research opportunities and alternative ways of thinking. Deprovincialization was in part the result of mediation, as many ŽmigrŽs informed people in their "hostland" about the culture of the native land, and vice versa. The detachment of the exiles, who sometimes viewed both homeland and hostland through foreign eyes, allowed them to notice what scholars in both countries had missed. Yet at the same time, the engagement between two styles of thought, one associated with the exiles and the other with their hosts, sometimes resulted in creative hybridization, for example, between German theory and Anglo-American empiricism. This timely appraisal is brimming with anecdotes and fascinating findings about the intellectual assets that exiles and immigrants bring to their new country, even in the shadow of personal loss.
The Global Latin II Conference has highlighted the role of the Latin language as cultural medium between West and East. Adopting a diachronic perspective which spans from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, the conference and its proceedings have paid special attention to texts related to Africa and Asia. The richness of literary genres as well as the dialogue between the Humanities and hard sciences characterize this volume. Students of Classics will find reflections on the role of Latin in the humanistic and missionary traditions, whereas historians of ideas and historians of religions will be able to pinpoint key moments in the use of Latin language and culture in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Ethiopian contexts. This volume can also be of interest to people working on Digital Humanities and computational linguistics in Latin language, and it represents a novelty on the world scene, along the lines of the previous Global Latin I Conference, which was yet again held in Siena in 2019.