Christian missionaries always sought to make church history global, but only within the last quarter century has this end been substantially achieved, in many ways unimagined by the pioneers of evangelization before World War I and the institution-builders of the interwar and post-1945 colonial decades. In the recent literature of imperial and global history, missionaries have to a degree come into their own as complex actors, their thoughts and deeds undergoing renewed scrutiny, or at the very least being exposed in the course of scholarly rummaging of the archives of now moribund mission societies.

This addition to the Eerdmans series, now twenty-two volumes published since 2000, brings the number of edited volumes to eleven. The early strength of the series rested on studies of missions to China and India, with Africa figuring more fully rather later on, as might be explained by its relatively recent decolonization and the unfolding of circumstances including the intensification of religious activity since the 1980s manifested in proliferating Pentecostalism and the sustained following of older Christian denominations now under African leadership. The collection, while it assays many times, places and currents of thought and understanding, is consistently strong, well documented, and engaging. It is muted in mood, compared with the hinge volume in the series, Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (edited by Brian Stanley, 2003) which was bookended by a sharp critique of field missionaries by Adrian Hastings and a discussion of the post-colonial decades in Africa (1955–1975) by Ogbu Kalu, who noted the historiographical shift from attention to agency to that of popular reception of Christianity. The Spiritual in the Secular inhabits both historiographies as it traverses the intellectual history of discrete missionaries who brought knowledge to the metropole through publication in journals and books and by depositing data and artifacts in museums and universities.

Each of the editors is at a highpoint in his career, Harries as Professor of African History at the University of Basel and Maxwell newly installed as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University. They share a special interest in Southern Africa; Harries has been more committed to the theoretical and thematic thrust of this volume, displayed so richly in his monograph, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). Maxwell, on the other hand, concentrated on Zimbabwe, most recently publishing African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.) Maxwell's chapter in the present collection, reflecting his current research, takes up the case of W. F. P. Burton, a British missionary who co-founded a Pentecostal faith mission in the Belgian Congo where he served from 1914 to 1960, passing through a series of accommodations with specifically Luba culture and moving him, as the chapter title says, “From Iconoclasm to Preservation.” When paired with the other chapter set in the Congo (1937–2007) by Honoré Vinck, a former Flemish missionary priest associated with the Aequatoria Center, a hub of Catholic research and publication concentrating upon its surrounding people, the Mongo, one obtains a remarkable picture of the dynamic contexts and processes of accruing knowledge and the shaping of ethnicities in the southeastern part of the country.

In spite of gestures toward natural science and its pursuit by missionaries especially before World War I who were polymaths, its relevance bears most on the historical course of African ethnography as it escaped premises that exotic communities could be placed closer to nature on a scale of evolution toward civilization. A principal thread of the volume, thus, is the changing scope and aims of anthropology and the ways in which missionaries were implicated. For an invaluable overview of this topic, readers would do well to consult Harries's chapter, “Anthropology,” in Missions and Empire, edited by Norman Etherington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), which is cited by a number of contributors in the volume under review. Beginning in the 1920s, academic leaders of anthropology distanced the profession from missionaries whose religious purposes putatively interfered with disciplined social observation. Yet programmatic colonial state-building in the name of development was embedded in colonial health and welfare projects that enlisted missionaries in institutional elaboration. Where did the initiation of research reside in such circumstances? Natasha Erlank's chapter argues that the activities of the International Missionary Council women staff members in promoting research on marriage in association with the International Africa Institute exemplify advocacy emanating from underappreciated directions. Deborah Gaitskell, in her examination of the work of Dora Earthy, an Anglican missionary in southern Mozambique, goes further than any other contributor in exploring the complex ways in which a radical program of creating a community of Christian widows protected from forced remarriage by inheritance became linked with research enabled by a team of these widows, the ultimate product of which was a book, Valenge Women (London: Oxford University Press, 1933).

Missionaries who were nascent and then accomplished cognoscenti were sometimes reined in by superiors determined to pursue narrower missiological goals and/or appreciated by metropolitan (or sub-metropolitan) savants largely as collectors supplying the wherewithal for authoritative analysis. The case studies show that some missionaries courted the attention of curators, editors of scholarly journals, and professional experts while others, prompted and stimulated to serve as collectors, became reinforced in their appetite and skill for observation and description framed as social science. Yet others, on commission, made important studies of new urban societies, the topic of an appreciative chapter on Dorothea Lehmann and John V. Taylor in late colonial Zambia, by John Stuart.

The Spiritual in the Secular is an eye-catching, somewhat misleading title. Within its covers, however, readers will encounter an array of original studies, spanning the continent from Ghana to the Cape, introducing memorable missionary scholars. The authors and their subjects challenge us not to sacrifice specificity for the sake of generalization.