The early modern era is well represented by the twin themes of conversion and violence. In Reformation Europe the fires of faith raged on both the scaffold and the battlefield alike. The European encounter with the New World meant that the Christian religion accompanied plagues, pillagers and pilgrims across previously unchartered continents. The expansion of empires to and from the East yielded yet more opportunity for conversion – of language, doctrine, practices and peoples – but also met visible limitations. Tokugawa Japan's top-down rejection of Christianity resulted in the martyrdom of thousands. In the Middle East, missionaries encountered the traditional resistance of an old rival and perhaps one no less lethal for their evangelising ends. The geographical spread of missions, their contextual diversity and the range of human voices, create a vast landscape of potential subjects and interpretations. The field of study is rendered yet more complex by the loaded language of ‘conversion’ and ‘violence’.
This volume of essays is comprised of papers originating from a symposium on conversion accounts held at Macerata in 2015. The title of the volume, drawn from the Parable of the Great Banquet in St Luke's Gospel (xiv.23), is described by the editors as a reminder ‘that behind every conversion lies hidden a degree of violence, and that Christian doctrine, over the length of its history, has been anything but accommodating’ (p. 11). This latter reference to the well known policy of accommodation, spear-headed by missionaries such as the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, also comments on the risk of softening the reality of violence in the language we use to characterise encounters in histories (although care is taken to acknowledge the prominence of the role of violence in histories of the New World, especially in the wake of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Columbus voyage).
The volume adopts a three-part structure. The first explores ‘the theoretical or ideological world’ of the missionaries, the second ‘actual colonial and missionary practice’ and the third focuses on conversion accounts (p. 14), with a stated aim to ‘better understand how the issue of violence, in symbiosis with that of conversions, has been filtered by missionary narratives and how it was worked through, not only at the doctrinal level, but also back in actual missionary practice’ (p. 15). Likewise, a particular methodological emphasis across the essays was the view that ‘behind every individual conversion story, behind its apparent agency, there is an often neglected legal, theological and institutional apparatus that needs to be taken into account, as well as a dogmatic context’ (p. 13).
A key strength of the volume is the extension of ‘the violence-conversion nexus’ to the ‘extra-European sphere’ (p. 13). As ever in such a project there are many more missions that could have been incorporated, but this volume provides a good range of case studies including some lesser-known. Here the ‘non-European world’ includes: the South Atlantic, Portuguese America, Safavid Persia, Japan, China and South India. It was satisfying as a reader to move between distinctive perspectives, topics and regions in the same section, but also to find a balanced assimilation of the European world, with two essays focusing on subjects based in European cities (Loreto and Rome). The result of this global approach is that the response to the themes is cumulatively varied and creative.
Noting the claim of an ‘irreducible core of violence’ at the heart of every conversion (p. 9), the authors explored various manifestations of the violence/conversion relationship, including martyrdom and sacrifice in Jesuit identity (Girolamo Imbruglia), missionary views on forced conversion (Carlos Zeron), military action (Pedro Lage Correia) and missionary abuses (Sabina Pavone). Contributors also address more implicit themes, for example the violent ‘reduction’ of language inherent in catechesis (Adone Agnolin), the ‘veil’ drawn over violence in Jesuit accounts of conversions in Loreto (Vincenzo Lavenia) and the curious omission of violence in Tommaso Campanella's epic global vision for conversion in his Quod reminiscentur (Chiara Petrolini). It is interesting too that a notable thread in several essays is the lack of violence: see Christian Windler's analysis of Catholic missionaries in Safavid Persia and Ronnie Po-chia Hsia's essay on the Jesuit mission to China.
The combination of essays illuminates the extent to which the dynamic between violence and conversion was shaped by the balance of power between empires and institutions, as well as by the personalities and evangelising affinities (or lack thereof) of the individual missionaries. For example, Hsia's contribution showed a paradoxical reversal of the Great Banquet Parable and the possible interpretation of compulsion therein: ‘[M]issionaries were not the Lord's servants who forced others to attend the banquet; they were themselves eager guests at the tables of the Chinese elites’ (p. 144). It is especially clear in this contrast, well encapsulated in the imagery of this biblical parable, how varied the experiences of conversion and violence could be across the world.
The volume would have benefited from a final reflective essay drawing the main conclusions of the contributions together. The introduction ably contextualises the topics of the essays in the wider debates and themes pertinent in the literature. However there was potential to go further in connecting the contributions horizontally and vertically across the volume's three-part structure of missionary worldviews, realities and accounts. Such an analysis would have given the volume greater cohesion and its broader argument an added focus. Nevertheless, Compel people to come in provides a helpful springboard for future research with its range of perspectives. It also supplies creative examples for how we can interpret the complex and enduring relationship between violence and conversion in a global context.
