Until relatively recently, interpretations of early modern Catholicism have focused on a binary – broadcast/reception - model with unidirectional waves of proselytising missionaries emanating ultimately from Rome being passively received (to a greater or lesser degree of comprehension) by indigenous peoples in the four parts of the globe visited by missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Africa, Europe, Asia and America). This interpretation presupposes a model of religious change essentially in terms of ‘spiritual conquest’. More recently, historians - myself included – have sought to complicate this decidedly crude model of cause and effect by emphasising reciprocity, albeit within a forcefield of inequality, in which indoctrination and influence were filtered through an awareness of the degree to which conversation rather than conversion took place; a process that left plenty of space for misunderstanding and misappropriation. This lecture uses as its case study, Francesco Ingoli’s Report on the Four Parts of the World, written in the early 1630s to brief members of the papal committee responsible for the missions: the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, which had been founded in 1622, about the state of and prospects for Roman Catholicism throughout the globe.
Speaker
Prof. Simon DITCHFIELD
Department of History, University of York
ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183