Reframes missionary history through the study of affect, embodiment, and devotion, uncovering the human experiences that shaped Catholic expansion and intercultural negotiation across the early modern globe.


Catholic missions were among the most powerful engines of cultural and religious encounter in the early modern world, yet their emotional dimensions have too often been overlooked in favour of theological controversy and intellectual history. Bringing together the histories of missions, emotions, ritual, and embodied devotion, this volume offers a major new perspective on how Catholicism was experienced, communicated, and transformed across the globe.

Across a series of richly interdisciplinary essays, contributors investigate how missionaries sought to move hearts as much as minds, and how emotions shaped these encounters between Catholicism and the diverse cultures it engaged. Questions of suffering, sanctity, persuasion, and identity recur throughout the volume, revealing the central role of affective experience in missionary life.

Essays on Jesuit mortification, pain, and martyrdom examine how bodily discipline and emotional performance operated as markers of holiness and spiritual authority, while studies of canonisation and missionary rhetoric show how emotional narratives shaped global perceptions of sanctity and persecution. Across the collection, emotions are also traced as instruments of communication and cultural exchange, through which affective practices circulated, adapted, and acquired new meanings across early modern Mexico, Ireland, the Atlantic world, and Asia.

Together, these essays illuminate the emotional foundations of Catholic reform and reveal how gestures, rituals, and sensory experience shaped missionary activity during a period of unprecedented global change.