The Oxford History of the Reformation by Peter Marshall

Author:Peter Marshall [Marshall, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192648389
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Taking the Christian Message from the New to the Old Worlds

It has been suggested that, chronologically speaking, the Christianization of the New and Old Worlds roughly coincided. However, I would argue that it was only thanks to the expanded missionary imagination, and set of practical skills, developed in response to the challenge of evangelizing the New World that the Old World came to be (re-)Christianized in the way that it was. Put simply, the New World converted the Old, a process which is still unfolding today. It is rare, but not unknown, to find the same people involved in missions to both the New and the Old Worlds, but it is less uncommon to find missionaries who moved from one overseas mission to another: notably from Europe to Mexico, and then on to the Philippines and China. However, of massive importance to the process whereby the Old World recalibrated its understanding of mission and conversion were the reports about the experience and findings of the missions to Asia and the Americas. Such reports, many of which came to be printed, flooded western Europe in the early modern period. From publication of one of the very first New World descriptions, the Paesi Novamente Ritrovati (Countries recently discovered) of 1507, down to the thirty-four volumes of Lettres édifiants et curieuses (1702–76), culled from Jesuit reports about their global missionary enterprise, information poured from Europe’s printing presses in an uninterrupted flow. Such reports took myriad Latinate and vernacular forms: carefully edited missionary letters; copiously illustrated volumes of sacred geography and topography; histories of missionary religious orders; collective and individual saints’ lives; theatre and epic poetry. Tales of missionary derring-do reinvented chivalric romance for a confessional age. Indeed, sacred romance became a recognized literary genre in the seventeenth century. One of its most successful Italian examples was the evocatively entitled Il Cappuccino scozzese (The Scots Capuchin) of 1644 by Giovanni Battista Rinuccini (1592–1653), later to be much less successful as a papal nuncio to Ireland (1645–9). This was loosely based on the story of George Leslie, who became a Capuchin friar and a successful missionary, before returning to Scotland to convert and console many of his countrymen and women, including his heretic Calvinist mother, won over by the avowedly rational arguments he proposed in debate with her Protestant chaplain. Such stories provided entertaining yet uplifting listening matter for the religious in refectory (both male and female); consolation for those Roman Catholics who were living under oppressive regimes; and encouragement for those on the confessional frontier.

Amidst this veritable tsunami of print there is one title that deserves special mention. This was the Rhetorica Christiana, published in 1579. The title alone does not single it out, since the genre of treatises on Christian eloquence was already well established, and this title resembled, in important ways, the almost contemporary (1582) Rhetoricae Ecclesiasticae by the Dominican Luis de Granada (1505–88), whose collected works represent for the literature of spiritual guidance much the same as Thomas Aquinas’s do for Scholasticism.

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