Missionary Scientists

Missionary Scientists PDF

Author: Andres I. Prieto

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2011-03-28

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0826517463

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The first scientists of the New World

Sojourners in a Strange Land

Sojourners in a Strange Land PDF

Author: Florence C. Hsia

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-04-15

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0226355616

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Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise. Sojourners in a Strange Land develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China.

Missionary Strategies in the New World, 1610-1690

Missionary Strategies in the New World, 1610-1690 PDF

Author: Catherine Ballériaux

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1317271505

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The study is an intellectual and comparative history of French, Spanish, and English missions to the native peoples of America in the seventeenth century, c. 1610–1690. It shows that missions are ideal case studies to properly understand the relationship between religion and politics in early modern Catholic and Calvinist thought. The book aims to analyse the intellectual roots of fundamental ideas in Catholic and Calvinist missionary writings—among others idolatry, conversion, civility, and police—by examining the classical, Augustinian, neo-thomist, reformed Protestant, and contemporary European influences on their writings. Missionaries’ insistence on the necessity of reform, emphasising an experiential, practical vision of Christianity, led them to elaborate conversion strategies that encompassed not only religious, but also political and social changes. It was at the margins of empire that the essentials of Calvinist and Catholic soteriologies and political thought could be enacted and crystallised. By a careful analysis of these missiologies, the study thus argues that missionaries’ common strategies—habituation, segregation, social and political regulations—stem from a shared intellectual heritage, classical, humanist, and above all concerned with the Erasmian ideal of a reformation of manners.

Colonialism and Missionary Linguistics

Colonialism and Missionary Linguistics PDF

Author: Klaus Zimmermann

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 311040320X

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A lot of what we know about “exotic languages” is owed to the linguistic activities of missionaries. They had the languages put into writing, described their grammar and lexicon, and worked towards a standardization, which often came with Eurocentric manipulation. Colonial missionary work as intellectual (religious) conquest formed part of the Europeans' political colonial rule, although it sometimes went against the specific objectives of the official administration. In most cases, it did not help to stop (or even reinforced) the displacement and discrimination of those languages, despite oftentimes providing their very first (sometimes remarkable, sometimes incorrect) descriptions. This volume presents exemplary studies on Catholic and Protestant missionary linguistics, in the framework of the respective colonial situation and policies under Spanish, German, or British rule. The contributions cover colonial contexts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia across the centuries. They demonstrate how missionaries dealing with linguistic analyses and descriptions cooperated with colonial institutions and how their linguistic knowledge contributed to European domination.

Nature and the Godly Empire

Nature and the Godly Empire PDF

Author: Sujit Sivasundaram

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-11-17

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780521848367

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A study of the relations between nineteenth-century science and Christianity.

Webs of Words

Webs of Words PDF

Author: John Considine

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2010-02-19

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1443820253

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Webs of Words: New Studies in Historical Lexicology brings together ten papers on aspects of the history of words and vocabulary, which address aspects of Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English (including Caribbean varieties), German, Italian, Māori, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and other languages. In the first four essays, focussing on pre-1800 material, Karel Kučera and Martin Stluka’s opening essay discusses the plotting of the relative historical frequency of common words, drawing on their work with the diachronic portion of the Czech National Corpus; Ian Lancashire asks why Tudor England had no monolingual English dictionary; Chiara Benati discusses the interplay between Low German, High German, and Latin in an early modern surgical text, and Mateusz Urban sorts out the competing etymologies of English balcony, Italian balcone, and similar forms in Persian and Russian. The next six turn to more recent material. Jane Samson analyzes the nineteenth-century debate as to whether the Māori language was too primitive to have a word for “blue”; Vivien Waszink discusses the Dutch prefixes bio- and eco- and their documentation in a new dictionary; Tommaso Pellin examines a series of attempts to provide a grammatical terminology in Chinese; Lise Winer surveys the naming of fauna in the English / Creole of Trinidad and Tobago; Mirosława Podhajecka writes on the treatment of Russian loanwords in the current revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, with special attention to Google Books as a research tool; and Isabel Casanova asks whether Portuguese dictionaries should register English words. The contributions to this volume share an interest in empirical evidence rather than in lexicological study at a highly theoretical level, and in the wide contextualization of the words which constitute this evidence in the social and cultural lives of their users.