The most harrowing part of Philippe Avril's overland journey to China in the 1680s (he would not make it) were not the obstructions of people an events but rather nature itself, a near-shipwreck on the very first leg in the eastern Mediterranean off Crete. Gale blowing, sea surging, waves crashing over the gunwales, sailors holding on for dear life and unable to man the lines or the helm, panicked and resigned to fate. At that moment, Avril took confession from many, led them to repentance, and extracted vows to celebrate Mass in the name of the Virgin should they come safely to port. A force of calm amid the storm, the ship was Avril's mission field long before his intended destination. Avril's self-discipline transformed the sailors' debilitating timor servilis into a repentant timor filialis before God that empowered the crew to return to their stations and bring the ship through. It also established Avril's credentials as a world-travelling Jesuit missionary.
From Ulrike Strasser, we learn that shipboard scenes like this were standard in Jesuit travel accounts. The voyage was a rite of passage as well as an actual passage, an opportunity to confront genuine fear of death under circumstances not replicable through imagination or meditation. Given the opportunities for spiritual and physical discipline in the face of adventure and hardship, the list of applicants to the global mission field was thousands of names long. From a handful of men in the mid-sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus grew to tens of thousands by the mid-seventeenth.
The founding and growth of the Society were a watershed moment in European masculinity, says Strasser. It established a novel gender form that opened new worlds of fulfillment to men, emotional as well as spiritual. To Catholic men of the Counter-Reformation and Baroque, the Society of Jesus reimagined clerical masculinity as a homosocial fellowship of men.
Emotions were central to Jesuit masculinity. Strasser insists that the new masculinity constituted an affective piety that affirmed and disciplined the emotions rather than suppressing them. Through spiritual discipline and repeated exercise, Jesuits learned how to feel passions correctly and to translate those feelings into correct action. Through repeated practice, these became habituated into an ethical life. Experienced Jesuits led younger men in these exercises in an expressly father–son relationship. These relationships yielded an emotionally fulfilling intimacy between men and an action-oriented mysticism.
Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the Society's first missionary to India and the Far East, embodied Jesuit practice, performing in his life what it meant to feel, think, and act like a Jesuit. Would-be missionaries in the seventeenth century self-consciously fashioned themselves into emulations of Xavier.
Strasser's principal source is Der neue Welt-Bott, a serial publication (1726–1758) edited at Graz by the Jesuit Joseph Stöcklein. Stöcklein's series was modeled on, and frequently translated from, the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses of Charles le Gobien and Jean-Baptiste Du Halde. Both the French and the German series were a response to loud clamoring by scholars of the Republic of Letters for the knowledge that the Society was known to possess of world languages and cultures, of science and technology, and of exotic naturalia. Both were carefully curated collections whose documents were published long—usually decades—after they were first composed. Both were important sources for ethnological information in eighteenth-century Europe. At the same time, both were cast as edifying examples of the courage, devotion, and faith of Jesuit missionaries in the Americas, India, and the Far East. Where the French series emphasized reports from China, Stöcklein's German series emphasized the Marianas, which headlined the early issues of the series.
From these field reports, Strasser reconstructs not the target society of the Chamorros but an ethnography of gender identity among the Jesuits themselves. From the reports of Augustinus Strobach, S.J., as edited by Stöcklein, we learn much about Jesuit anxieties regarding women, authority within marriage, sexuality, and nudity, although less about the structures of matrilineality in pre-Christian Chamorro society. Methodologically, then, Strasser's book stands at the intersection of women's and gender history and of world and global history.
Women played a notable role in Jesuit missions by their absence rather than their presence. Having no female wing of the Society, as was customary in most monastic orders, Jesuits were released from curia monialium and hence free to travel. Women serve as a counterpoint to Strasser's analysis of masculinity, the Tridentine policy of women's enclosure making their passage on ships much more difficult than for the active Jesuits. Das gemalte Leben Maria Wards, a cycle of paintings at the Jesuit Congregation at Augsburg depicting a group of women who did travel, serves as an example here. Although being a male-only Society opened the possibility of traveling the world as missionaries, Jesuits' separation from women ruled out any possibility of assimilating to matrilineal Chamorro society. Conversion to Christianity required not only repentance before God but an entire social restructuring that centered the patriarchal family of Catholic Europe.
Jesuit masculinity met a challenge in indigenous male spirituality as well. The Welt-Bott reports reveal Jesuit anxieties over spiritual and male competition with Chamorro makahnas, who mediated the relationship between the living and their deceased ancestors, whose skulls were kept, venerated, and consulted, not unlike relics. The missionaries dismissed the services performed by the makahnas as magic. But some Chamorros saw the newcomers as makahnas themselves. They too were spiritual advisors to political authorities, healed “both body and soul, used ritual paraphernalia to communicate with the spirit world, and organized collective ceremonies of veneration” (134). Multiple masculinities and competing models of marriage and family played out along a “gender frontier” (35, 115, 149) in the late-seventeenth-century Marianas.
The Jesuit mission in the Marianas was not a victory for cross-cultural relations. Although Jesuits identified their brand of a clerical masculinity of cooperation as an alternative to male competition in the military masculinity of the conquistadors, Jesuit missionaries were only too willing to take cover under Spanish force and violence. Several of the deaths that Jesuits presented as martyrdoms can be better read as acts of war. By 1700 or 1750, the Chamorro population in the Marianas was on the brink of extinction (136, 168).
Authors of Lives of missionary martyrs were closely attuned to the same models of Jesuit self-fashioning that colored the reports that the still living sent back home. Hagiographers further fictionalized their human subjects by emphasizing spirituality, righteousness, and faith in the face of adversity. The final and longest chapter of Strasser's book shows how Stöcklein yet again reworked hagiographies, reports, and maps for public consumption in Der neue Welt-Bott. Just as our access to pre-Christian Chamorro culture is obscured through several layers of interpretation, so is our access to Jesuit missionaries themselves.
