Kenneth Mills, Anthony Grafton, eds. Conversion: Old Worlds and New. Rochester: University
of Rochester Press, 2003. xvii + 301 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-58046-123-8.
Reviewed by Rachel O’Toole (Department of History, University of California, Irvine)
Published on H-Atlantic (March, 2006)
Comparing Conversions: Linguistic Transformations, Local Practices, and Religious Identities in the Early
Modern and Modern World
In this ambitious anthology, Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton have published selected papers from a
two-year seminar entitled “Conversion: Sacred and Profane” held at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. The book is intended to complement a previous publication (Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton,
Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages:
Seeing and Believing [2003]) by bringing a wider geographical and temporal scope to the question of conversion “to, within, and around forms of Western Christianity” (p. ix). By bringing together articles on western
Europe, imperial China, early modern and modern India, highland Peru, the midwestern United States, and
colonial Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the anthology builds on
previous comparative anthologies that explore the meaning of religious conversion.[1] The editors suggest that
while scholars have considered Christian conversion in
the context of military conquest and colonial exploitation, understanding a change in religious practices and
identities within the realm of cultural exchange opens
new avenues of inquiry. Organized chronologically, the
essays speak to three recurring themes that move beyond
the question of syncretism or assimilation. First, the authors explore the language of conversion and religious
responses to demonstrate the possibilities for miscommunication as well as the opportunities for subaltern appropriations and transformations of religious terms and
practices. Second, the authors suggest that complete conversion was rare, as “local Christians” inserted themselves within the religion that often accompanied colonization or imperialism. Third, the essays explore how
long-time practitioners constructed new Christian identities that rejected Church hierarchies and mandates.
First, for missionaries language was a critical tool for
communication in imperial China that converts in Tamilspeaking south India and nineteenth-century midwestern United States could employ for their own interests. In
“Translating Christianity: Counter-Reformation Europe
and the Catholic Mission in China, 1580 ” 1780,“ R. PoChia Hsia charts a shift in Jesuit conversion practices that
began with intentional conversations between missionaries and the Chinese elite, beginning in the sixteenth
century, and shifted to a singular goal of catechismeducation by the end of the eighteenth century. Court
officials and urban scholars were impressed with the linguistic deftness and the intellectual vigor of early Jesuits
such as Matteo Ricci, whose dialogical model of conversion was a free, frank, and affectionate conversation
among peers (p. 88) on all topics except religion (p. 91).
Printed books expanded these conversations, but also allowed for the institutionalization of conversion into catechism (p. 100) as missionaries focused on the conversion
of commoners by the 1780s.
Further elaborating on Jesuit linguistic skills, Ines Zupanov argues that Jesuits divorced Catholicism from Portuguese imperial goals to blend saints with local deities,
and thus invited Tamil-speaking Parava fishing communities in south India to construct new identities on
this early modern colonial frontier. In “Twisting a Pagan Tongue: Portuguese and Tamil in Sixteenth-Century
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Jesuit Translations,” the author chronicles “the gradual
failure of Portuguese linguistic ’colonialist’ domination”
(p. 111), as the Jesuits adapted to their Tamil surroundings and even transported south Asian vocabularies to
a growing literate Portuguese public. While royal officials roughly translated Tamil into Portuguese, the Jesuits employed Tamil “as a refined tool of conversion” (p.
119) that was required to access and to transform “pagan” minds to Christianity (p. 126). In turn, the Parava
communities seized on Catholicism as a means to secure
their status as Portuguese clients and adapted Latin or
Portuguese words to signify particular sacred occasions
firmly rooted in south Indian contexts.
(p. 273) and while the constitution assured the right
to propagate alternative faiths, Indian nationalists constructed conversion as a threat. Viswanathan re-reads
scholarly texts and political campaigns to suggest a postnationalistic reading of conversion as a means to resist
fixed categories of ethnicity, race, religion, and language
(p. 276). Thus, Christian mission schools that teach English literacy skills to lower-caste individuals allow for
the creation of new selves as well as the means to access
technical and vocational skills that lead to higher-paying
occupations and professions. Conversion, thus, cannot
be understood strictly within a paradigm of violence and
imposition, but also can serve as an entry into democratic
processes and economic development.
Andrew Isenberg demonstrates that the dedication
of missionaries to learning the Dakota language reveals
how Yankee Presbyterians and the Lac qui Parle, an
Eastern Dakota village in northern Minnesota, initially
shared a common mission of withdrawal or independence from secular Euro-American society in the 1830s
and 1840s. In “ ‘To See Inside of an Indian’: Missionaries
and Dakotas in the Minnesota Borderlands,“ the author
explains how the missionaries brought livestock, seeds,
and tools necessary for intensive corn agriculture that
would allow the Dakotas of Lac qui Parle to transition
from the fur trade and possibly survive the encroachment of Euro-American settlers. In the same period, inspired by the Second Great Awakening, the Presbyterian
missionaries retreated from an increasingly commercialized society and came to admire Dakota morals and charity. As primarily Dakota women converted to Christianity, the community integrated the missionaries into social kinship networks by bestowing Dakota names and
adopting the missionaries’ children as the Presbyterians
struggled to learn the Dakota language. Following the
Lakota Uprising of 1862, the missionaries followed Lac
qui Parle men to the forts where they were imprisoned
to serve as spiritual guides and advocates. Yet the next
generation of Presbyterian missionaries discarded living
among Dakota peoples in favor of boarding schools and
a categorical repression of native culture as settlers overwhelmed the midwestern borderlands.
Second, the essays suggest that complete conversion
was rare, as “new converts” adapted Christianity to fit
with local practices, beliefs, and rituals in colonial Peru,
Quebec, and Zimbabwe as well as the modern Atlantic
world. In “Converting the Ancestors: Indirect Rule, Settlement Consolidation, and the Struggle over Burial in
Colonial Peru, 1532-1614,” Peter Gose suggests that conversion was “a cultural project … central to Spanish
colonial rule in Peru” (p. 140), producing divergent and
sometimes contradictory results. In the sixteenth century, Christian missionaries believed Andeans would and
could convert as indigenous people saw conversion as
a sign of alliance and post-conquest reconciliation. By
the late sixteenth century, however, religious indoctrination intensified with mandated inhabitation of colonial
towns and clerical campaigns to extirpate Andean “idolatry.” The new impositions of Spanish Catholic culture
included Christian burial, while Andean peoples continued to worship their ancestors in hidden tombs. Three
positions emerged among Andeans: those who accepted
exclusive Christianity, others who rejected rigid Catholicism, and still others who accepted Christianity “but did
not share its sense of boundaries or exclusivity” (p. 163).
Gose concludes with an example of a community which
requested the Catholic baptism of ancestral mummies, indicating the ambiguity of converted status and the suggestion of conversion as a long-term process with few
definitive “victories” (p. 168).
Gauri Viswanathan emphasizes the importance of
language within controversies regarding conversion and
Indian nationalism in her essay, “Literacy in the Eye of
India’s Conversion Storm.” The author argues that conversion can be a liberating practice, allowing individual
choice of community affiliation in the late twentieth century during a “sudden surge of hostility toward Christians” in modern India (p. 272). In the 1940s and 1950s,
Indian nationalism was imbued with “a Hindu ethos”
Allan Greer also focuses on early American encounters in his exploration of the Jesuit mission among the
Iroquois on the St. Lawrence River near Montreal in
seventeenth-century Quebec. Migrant Iroquois settled in
the Jesuit mission where baptism meant membership into
a new community, and Catholic ritual reinforced collective identities that bonded distinct Iroquois nations (p.
183). In “Conversion and Identity: Iroquois Christianity
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in Seventeenth-Century New France,” Greer argues that
the Iroquois did not completely accept Catholicism or reject native practices, but created new religious identities
that expressed the “middle ground” of Iroquois Catholicism (p. 179). Rather than belief, Catholicism was a system of behaviors that migrant Iroquois employed to mark
themselves apart from “pagan” natives and even Jesuit
missionaries.
Third, the essays also explore how western European
Christians redefined religious identities to the point of
resistance against church authorities. In “Conversion
and Compromise in Thirteenth-Century England,” Valerie Flint explores the agency of women adherents to the
veneration of a relic, the Precious Blood shed by the crucified Christ. For devotees, the blood symbolized the suffering of martyrs as well as the shedding of blood in warfare, while elevating women who had made these sacriEuropean and Euro-American travelers, writers, and fices. A “second-stage” conversion of women, especially
scholars also sought to fit Christian definitions of reli- married women and invalids, to a fervent devotion of the
giosity into their own needs to mark modern racial hi- Blood was also an internal criticism of thirteenth-century
erarchies. In “Object Lessons: Fetishism and the HiEnglish ecclesiastical authorities, as the devotion allowed
erarchies of Race and Religion,” David Murray traces
medieval women to object to sending their husbands on
how nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. narratives military crusades against Muslims in the Middle East (p.
constructed the idea of fetishism that distinguished be- 13). Constant clerical admonishments suggest clerical
tween “Indians” and African Americans. While Euro- suspicions that the firmly converted Christian women
peans and Euro-Americans gradually commodified in- also may have been nominally devoted to supporting a
digenous religious objects, the same authors constructed
resistance position.
African-American religious objects as dangerous. Observers linked African-American object usage to nonIn “Conversion and Conformity in the Early Fifteenth
religious practices (idolatry or magic), while U.S. ethno- Century,” John Van Engen explores how western Eugraphers elevated Native American spiritual uses of ob- ropeans understood conversion as an intensification of
jects to religion and spirituality “by downplaying the ma- Christian practice that could include illiterate peasants.
terial specificity of their fetish practices and objects” (p. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, me210). Murray ascribes these changes to an increasing dieval Christian clerics sought to defend the prestige of
disassociation of religion from materiality in nineteenth- the traditional cloister, as western lay Christians “repucentury western discourses and the increasing need in diated the ’world’ around them … [turning] away from
the United States to distinguish the “economic and mate- their families, neighbors, and countrymen” (p. 35). Even
rial role of Indians and African Americans” (p. 212).
religious orders experienced a split between traditionalists and “Observants” (reformists) who proposed converCarol Summers continues the exploration of local sion as a rejection of customary practices and demanded
Christian practices in her essay, “Tickets, Concerts, and
more regulated devotion. Thus, conversion fit within a
School Fees: Money and New Christian Communities
renewed effort of western Europeans to purify Christian
in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1900-1940” to explain how Zim- practices from below.
babwean Christians infused missionary impositions with
their own interests. In the early twentieth century,
In a further exploration of how European Christians
Africans flocked to new missions in search of education, marked their resistant devotions, Brad S. Gregory proChristian identities, and relief from the colonial labor vides three examples of resisters to conversion whose reeconomy. On the British Wesleyan mission, students and ligious identities were rooted in scriptural reading. In
parents funded the schools with their labor and by pay- the essay entitled “ ‘To the Point of Shedding Your Blood’:
ing fees that qualified them for respectable membership The Bible, Communities of Faith, and Martyrs’ Resistance
and marked economic and religious positions in the new to Conversion in the Reformation Era,“ Gregory explores
mission community, and, in many ways, access to God how martyrs resisted attempts at conversion to Catholi(p. 254). Still, Christian Zimbabweans organized con- cism or Protestantism based on their individual readings
certs which missionaries found sinful, and benefited from of Biblical texts and shared convictions with others in a
a superior education to become teachers and a nascent community of faith (p. 71). In this way, Gregory quesmiddle class in colonial Rhodesia, as “becoming Chris- tions the scholarly trend to doubt the sincerity of faith.
tian meant assembling the money necessary to sponsor Instead, the example of the three western European marand maintain a school” (p. 262) that was African rather tyrs demonstrates that Christian convictions based on orthan European.
thodox interpretations of texts could be in both support
and opposition to early modern secular and ecclesiastical
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authorities.
our attention to how an imperial project failed in south
India as Tamil language colonized Portuguese and local
One weakness of the anthology reflects its inception communities employed Catholicism as a means to access
as a series of seminar papers. In some cases, the essays re- transregional trading networks. Greer suggests that the
flect their preparation for presentation (pp. 4, 33) rather Jesuit missionaries and Catholic Iroquois developed parthan publication. Four of the essays (those by Flint, Hsia, allel societies that, rather than clashing or evading, fed
Van Engen, and Viswanathan) require more attention to
off of each other in a curious yet mutually beneficial resetting the particular context of their case studies. Withlationship. Viswanathan moves beyond the colonial conout an understanding of “the Conquest” of medieval Eng- text to explore not just the economic and cultural possiland (p. 2), or the European context of the early fif- bilities of Christianity, but uses them as a way to underteenth century (p. 30), or the imperial background to stand conversion as liberating on personal and collective
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, or the po- levels. Thus, we need to ask: where else did cultural cololitical parties of contemporary India (p. 271), even world
nialism fail? What did “failure” mean for those colonized
historians are left to guess the larger impact of the auand those colonizing? What were the conditions for cothors’ arguments. Yet most of the essays (especially those existing communities of mutually dependent colonizers
by Gose, Greer, Isenberg, and Zupanov) provide suffi- and colonized? How can we re-read colonial tropes into
cient background that even scholars from outside their a national present and a post-national future?
respective fields can appreciate their useful contextual
summaries.
In this way, conversion provides a lens to see not the
similarities of religious identities or practices, or even
The strength of the anthology, however, lies in its
uniform responses to religious imposition. Instead, “concomparative nature. The careful contextualization alversion” provides a way to understand religious practice
lows the reader to pick out significant themes, but also as available for public, cultural consumption. By examinto observe significant theoretical frameworks and sug- ing beliefs and rituals through “conversion,” the editors
gestive conclusions for religious histories. Flint ques- suggest that actions and transformations lie at the core
tions the religious depth of those assumed to be fully of religions and religiosities. Thus, the anthology would
converted, such as thirteenth-century English married
serve an advanced undergraduate or a graduate class on
women, to question the scholarly assumption that all Eutransregional religious or colonial history. Individual esropean Christian communities maintained uniform and says that deftly set the particular context could also be
orthodox Christian practices. Likewise, Gregory calls our assigned (Gose, Isenberg, and Zupanov) in colonial Latin
attention to understanding “reconversion” (p. 70) within American, Native American, and World History courses
Protestant-Catholic contexts where Christian texts still to spark larger connections about the impact of Christian
provide a unifying discourse. Gose, Isenberg, Summers,
conversion processes.
and Zupanov highlight the agency of newly converted
Andean, Dakota, Zimbabwean, and Tamil-speaking comNotes
munities. Together, these authors suggest that schol[1]. Robert W. Hefner, ed., Conversion to Christianarly work demonstrating why non-Christians would or
ity:
Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great
would not convert, including a wide range of adaptaTransformation
(Berkeley: University of California Press,
tions, choices, and rejections, still is a fruitful avenue of
1993);
Peter
van
der Veer, ed., Conversion to Modernities:
inquiry. In fact, the comparative colonial examples disThe Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge,
rupt any categorical assumptions about colonization and
1996); and John Wolffe, ed., Religion in History: Conconversion.[2] Furthermore, Hsia and Isenberg not only
highlight subaltern agency, but also describe missionary flict, Conversion, and Coexistence (Manchester: Manchperspectives, intentions, and motivations with sensitivity ester University Press, 2004).
reminiscent of Inga Clendinnen’s masterful work, Am[2]. For other examples of this rich and growing
biguous Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517 scholarship in colonial Latin America, see Carolyn Dean,
“ 1570 (1987). The narrative of imposing missionaries Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Coloand passive natives is no longer even a straw man within nial Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999);
these articles.
Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus
The anthology also sparks some highly suggestive di- to Blade Runner (1492 - 2019) (Durham: Duke University
rections for comparative colonialisms. Zupanov directs Press, 2001), esp. “Images in War,” pp. 161-207; and Irene
Silverblatt, “Political Memories and Colonizing Symbols:
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Santiago and the Mountain Gods of Colonial Peru,” in Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American
Perspectives on the Past_, ed. Jonathan D. Hill (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 174-194.
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Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-
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Citation: Rachel O’Toole. Review of Mills, Kenneth; Grafton, Anthony, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New. HAtlantic, H-Net Reviews. March, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11516
Copyright © 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication,
originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at [email protected].
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