Event

Please join us Wednesday, May 2, 2018, for Dr. Ines Zupanov's talk: Rival Mission, Rival Science? Jesuits and Pietists in the 17th-18th c. South India. Refreshments will be served at 4:00PM in the SAST conference room, Williams 826. The talk will begin at 4:30PM. Please see below for the abstract. 

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Two European missionary teams, one Catholic and the other Protestant, encountered each other in the Tamil country in the first decade of the eighteenth century. They acted and thought that their goals were irreconcilable, even if the Protestants in Tranquebar admitted that the Catholic Jesuit proselytism in the region had been efficient as “preparatio evangelicae” for the Protestant mission. Jesuits and Pietists were not only rivals, they also collaborated, uneasily and unequally, in collecting, processing and disseminating knowledge. Missionary linguistic and medico-botanical expertise was considered an indispensable proselytizing tool, in addition to showcasing their “scientific” achievements, admired and envied in Europe. Both Pietists and Jesuits of this period were fighting the early Enlightenment atheists, while feeding them the materials from the missions. Both missionary groups were also victims of the Enlightenment historiography. This lecture is an exploratory effort at connecting historiographies and histories of the missionary agents that have for long been considered in watertight compartments created by their hagiographers or detractors. My aim is to open a dialogue between these missionary experiences and work out visible and invisible links between the Pietists and Jesuits in South India during the early eighteenth century.