Jesuit and Pietist Missions in the Eighteenth Century Cross-Confessional Perspectives

In the long 18th century, the hitherto predominant Catholic missionary activity overseas received noticeable competition from new Christianisation projects initiated by Protestants. In this context, the anthology deals with the question of how the missionaries of different Christian denominations in the mission areas dealt with each other when they came into contact with each other on a daily basis. In view of their special 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, interconfessional contacts frequently took place in these (and numerous other regions of the world), the conduct of which sometimes followed the patterns of interpretation and action familiar from Europe, but frequently also followed its own patterns of development due to the specific contexts overseas. Thus, the volume not only makes a contribution to the comparative study of Christian missions in the long 18th century. At the same time, it represents an important contribution to a globalisation of confessionalisation research, whose heuristic potential for analysing non-European Christianity history in the early modern period has hardly been tested so far.