A growing body of scholarship in recent years has begun to uncover the extensive missionary efforts of various Protestant groups in many parts of the world during the early modern period. Scholars now appreciate that Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Moravian Brethren and other denominations engaged with peoples and societies around the world and sought to convert them to a brand of Protestant Christianity as early as the seventeenth century. One of the most intense, albeit short-lived, campaigns was the Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) undertaking to convert Indigenous peoples of Taiwan (Formosa) from 1624 to 1662, when the United East India Company (VOC) was a dominant force on the island. Christopher Joby, a research associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London, has made a solid contribution to this line of scholarship. He offers a detailed narrative and analysis of the missionary work by Dutch ministers in Taiwan. His book also provides a valuable examination of the linguistic and cultural translation of Christianity in Taiwan by both Dutch and the Spanish missionaries and its long afterlife in texts, visual images and dramatic presentations diffused across Taiwanese and European repositories.

Combining the methodological insights of reception study, missionary linguistics and post-colonial theory, Joby embarks on a close and detailed analysis of how Dutch missionaries, such as George Candidius and Robert Junius, rendered Reformed teachings into Siraya and Favorlang. Siraya was a widely used dialect among the Sinckan in the southeastern plain of Taiwan, while Favorlang was influential in the region just to the north. In addition, Joby also widens the scope of his investigation to include Catholic linguistic work in Basay, a language used in the northern corner of Taiwan, where the Spanish maintained a foothold from 1626 to 1642. Just as missionaries elsewhere in the early modern world, Dutch and Spanish translators collaborated with Indigenous linguists to construct written vernaculars with a Roman alphabet and European grammar out of oral phonetic language and then instruct local peoples in those translanguages.

Joby organises the book into seven chapters, along with a prologue and epilogue. The opening two chapters background the Taiwan missions with in-depth treatments of the European Renaissance and Reformations, early modern missionary and imperial enterprises, and the Dutch colonisation and conversion campaign from 1624 until the collapse of VOC power on the island in 1662. The bulk of his close analysis follows in the next four chapters that focus on Dutch activity. Chapter iii considers the translation of texts; chapter iv narrates the introduction of Christian praxis; and chapter v explores the linguistics of missions. In these chapters, Joby discusses a wide range of texts, including lexicons, catechisms, sermons, prayers and hymns and bible translations. He also elucidates the strategies utilised to overcome semantic divergences that involved incorporating loan words, calques and periphrases, and broadening definitions in Siraya and Favorlang. Chapter vi is a standalone coverage of Spanish missions in the north and translation work in Basay. To counter the lack of extant sources on the Spanish presence in Taiwan, Joby discusses their missions in the Philippines, whose language and religious culture mirrored that of peoples in northern Taiwan. Chapter vii traces the afterlife of Dutch, and to a lesser degree, Spanish missionary endeavour in the texts that have come to light in European libraries and in the vestiges of Christian concepts transmitted in oral and written artifacts of religious culture. Four appendices offer supporting materials, the most important of which are Robert Junius’ Siraya translation of the Lord’s Prayer and his compilation of prayers and sermons.

The book’s overall argument contends that Christian missions to Taiwan mattered in the seventeenth century owing to the sophisticated collaborations between European missionaries and Indigenous linguists. Joby argues that the missions remained significant in subsequent centuries because of the resilience of Christianity in Taiwan and because of the utility of missionary texts used later by scholars to depict Taiwanese culture. Scholars have tended to dismiss the relevance of these missions, since the Chinese invasion of 1662 wiped away any contact with Christian missionaries until the nineteenth century. Joby unearthed ‘shards of reception’, such at Robert Junius’ Lord’s Prayer (in Siraya), the Utrecht Manuscript (a bilingual lexicology), Gospel and Formulary diglots, and Dutch Favorlang texts that have proven important in reconstructing linguistic, anthropological and historical depictions of Taiwanese culture.

There is much to recommend this book to scholars and students of Taiwanese history, reception studies and missionary linguistics. Chapters ii, iii and vi offer the finest and most detailed narrative of the Dutch and Spanish missionary experiments in Taiwan. The technical analysis of Dutch missionary linguists goes far beyond my competence, yet it conveys the compelling strategies in rendering seemingly incommensurate concepts across the linguistic and cultural divides.

One difficulty of presentation inherent to this study that Joby does not quite resolve is the distinct academic audiences – historians of missions, linguists, theorists of reception and post-colonial studies – that the book’s thematic focus overlaps. As a historian of the early modern period, I found the detailed description of the European background, including the printing press, humanist thought, competing Reformation theologies, to be contextual overkill. Yet there is no discussion of the competing cultures of translation in Europe during this period. Likewise, the theoretical explications of the nuances of reception theory detracted from the historical and linguistic analysis. Nevertheless, Joby’s meticulous research and clear expository style offer a range of scholars a comprehensive treatment of missions in seventeenth-century Taiwan and make a convincing case for their ongoing relevance.