Distant souls: Global religion and the Jesuit missions of Germany, Mexico, and China, 1595--1705

This dissertation suggests the new knowledge to be won by approaching the Jesuit missions as a macrohistorical phenomenon. Its first half, using the concept of local religion as a foil, develops the idea of "global religion" and suggests why the Jesuits' mentality can only be understood in a world-spanning context. Global religion also served to give legitimacy to a developing world church, to fuel (and to be fueled by) the Jesuit world missionary project.; The second half explores how this new conception of mission found expression in the form of a world church. Almost without exception, historians have treated the early-modern Catholic missionary project simply as a disjointed collection of regional missions directed and supported from centers of power in Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon. An impressive scholarship covers every locale in the global range of this proselytizing activity---but without considering the missions as a single world-spanning unity. The vast distances separating the missions led to logistical problems of transportation and communication incompatible with the traditional historiography's view of the Society of Jesus as a tightly centralized and smoothly running military machine. In fact, a rich variety of connections unmediated by Rome sprung up among the missions in the seventeenth century. To demonstrate the extent of such decentralization, this study presents archival research pursuing the trails of information, personnel, and financial support exchanged between missions in Germany, Mexico, and China.; The key to conceptualizing Catholic reform is to find coherence in soteriology rather than in ecclesiology, in the missions rather than the Church hierarchy. Finally, the dissertation considers the Jesuit mission in terms of early modern world history.