1st Edition
Missionary Enchantment in South Asia, 16th-18th Centuries Catholic Histories and Fictions
Biography
Ines G. Zupanov is a historian at CNRS, Paris. She is a social/cultural historian of Catholic missions in South Asia and the Portuguese empire. Author of three monographs and a dozen edited volumes, she has contributed many articles and chapters to scholarly books and journals in different languages
“This book […] contributes to [a] broader scholarly effort to understand the reciprocity between global processes and local affairs in specific historical moments. The central theme revolves around “missionary enchantment” in the Indian subcontinent between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. […] Understanding “enchantment,” which is deeply subjective and experiential, poses significant challenges when attempting to interpret it across vastly different cultural and historical contexts. The book shows how missionaries navigated this challenge through various strategies, revealing the inherent difficulty in establishing shared meaning and genuine understanding of such experiences.” - Haila Manteghi, University of Muenster, Germany in Mission Studies
"Enchantment is defined as a state of personal fulfilment and shared belonging, produced by experiences of wonder that exceed rational explanation. Through the study of histories, biographies, treatises, and letters, the author illustrates how missionaries continually responded to their environment and reinvented their strategies of enchantment to inspire fervor among the missionaries and followers and to persuade unbelievers. [...] Županov’s Missionary Enchantment is a major contribution to missionary historiography. Her novel conceptual framework offers a fresh perspective on the field." - Juan O. Mesquida, Ler Historia
