Brandon Bayne leads the reader of borderlands history back into the trenches of Jesuit missionary thinking in Missions Begin with Blood. The endeavors of the Society of Jesus in New Spain are well studied, as is their expulsion from New Spain in 1767–1768 along with the rest of the Jesuit brethren from other points across the Spanish American Empire. Prominent scholars from Herbert Bolton to Edward Spicer examined Jesuits’ writings to study the missionaries, their deeds, and the experiences of those they colonized through missions. More recent work has added nuance to our understanding of Jesuits’ intellectual history, including that of their emotions and preparation for missions. Bayne adds a needed study to this body of work. His takes one inside the missionaries’ viewpoint, gazing via the available documents on their perspectives of the missionary life, martyrdom, and meaning of one's vocation as a Jesuit missionary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the northern-most area of frontier missions in Spanish North America. To do this, Bayne utilizes Jesuit rhetoric that combines the shedding of blood (and sweat and tears) with the vision of the Christian church as garden which requires watering and sustenance to flourish. These tropes and their appearances within the letters, reports, memorials, and other commentaries yield further expressions on martyrdom that, one can admit, were unique to the Jesuits of the period. Bayne's explication of red and white martyrdoms is a solid contribution to studies of Jesuits in the Americas and beyond.

To set the reader on the intellectual journey thus described, Bayne utilizes motifs found within the missionaries’ writings: the garden of the Christian community, and how they viewed their work in fostering the growth of the garden, its tending, and the ideal of watering seeds and plantings with blood to foster further growth. While some of this, as Bayne documents thoroughly, is the standard discourse of later medieval and early modern Roman Catholic missiology, Bayne makes his contribution to the literature by distinguishing the differences in Jesuit thinking in New Spain on martyrology. To this end he provides useful, believable examples of specific Jesuits’ understandings of red, or physical, martyrdom, versus white, or virtual, imagined martyrdom. Early chapters focus on the development of the ideal of sacrifice in one's mission – offering one's life as the ultimate imitation of Christ – and how that ideal was realized in certain circumstances. Jesuits were not the only ones to claim a longing for such a sacrifice, but Bayne shows that New Spain's Jesuits were inclined heartedly in some periods to that over some other orders’ members. With his chapter on the isolation and long-suffering nature of a long life in one's mission in the northern reaches of the colony, Bayne eloquently draws a picture of the concept of the dry, or white, martyrdom of offering the years of one's life for the missionary cause. Such a martyrdom was the norm, and as other historians have noted for a century or more, the later, eighteenth-century Jesuits in New Spain wrote with such a chip on their shoulder, notably the imports to the Iberian world from other Jesuit provinces abroad. Reading Segesser or Pfefferkorn, for example, is a fairly reliable way to understand the hours of boredom, failed plans, and sheer frustration of the long-serving Jesuit in the northern missions.

The other significant contribution Bayne makes is to examine the narrative arc beyond expulsion for the members of the Society of Jesus who were removed in 1767–1768 to Europe, against their wishes. Bayne's connection of this later narrative with the fully-developed idealization before expulsion of the missionary field as a garden to watered with blood is a wonderful part of the study, and one that makes this truly useful for teaching and comparative studies in the Roman Catholic missionary experience in the later early modern Atlantic world. It provides a fuller, more useful study for teaching students of the Jesuit influence and experience in the greater orbit of Spain's colonies, and works well for connecting this Jesuit experience with those in East Asia, India, and elsewhere in the Americas. By going past the expulsion and closely reading the sources of the priests who wrote in defense of their work in New Spain once removed, Bayne works that earlier narrative of the garden, blood, martyrdom, and so on, to demonstrate the usefulness of all of that in defending (we might say successfully) their work in the far reaches of New Spain. That the replacements who took over those missions did not fare well in their efforts does not harm that narrative, either, and one might wish to see a touch more examination of the successors’ failures after the Jesuit expulsion. That said, this is a strong and worthy study, one that merits use in the classroom and in graduate education for budding researchers of Jesuitica.