Jesuit and Pietist Missions in the Eighteenth Century

During the long eighteenth century, the hitherto predominantly Catholic missionary activity overseas received noticeable competition from new Christianisation projects initiated by Protestants. In this context, the anthology raises the question of how the missionaries of different Christian denominations in the mission areas dealt with one another when they came into contact on a daily basis.
In view of their particular early modern intra-Christian pluriconfessionality, two regions were chosen as the focus: the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent. As the eight contributions to the volume demonstrate in detail, these regions were frequently the site of interconfessional contacts, which sometimes followed the patterns of interpretation and action familiar from Europe, but frequently also followed their own patterns of development due to the specific contexts overseas.
Thus, the volume does not only contribute to the comparative study of Christian missions in the long eighteenth century. At the same time, it demonstrates the usefulness of global confessionalisation research, whose heuristic potential for analysing the history of non-European Christianity in the early modern period has hardly been tested thus far.