Scholarship on early modern global Christianity has done a great deal to shift our perceptions of evangelization and its entanglement with European imperialism, as well as local resistance. Focus on missionaries, acculturation, cross-cultural dialogue, and propaganda has allowed us a clearer picture of the ways Christianity spread throughout the early modern world. There has also been important art historical work that illustrates how images operated within the larger landscape of global evangelization and European imperialism.

Adding to this conversation is this collection of essays that aims to illustrate the ways in which images pertaining to missions, conversion, and catechesis functioned as propagandistic tools for evangelization. In particular, the essays in this volume emphasize that “images do not travel alone, just as they do not speak alone” (17), as the editors underscore in their introduction. By focusing on the visual autonomy of the viewer as well as the artistic enterprise of the image itself, the contributors compel us to rethink Christian imagery as propaganda, and consider that, while these images often operated in colonial spaces, we must bear in mind that we can never fully penetrate the ways they were viewed or internalized. Moreover, given the plurality of patrons, viewers, contexts, presentations, and articulations of Catholic devotion, pinpointing how these images worked discursively would be difficult for any scholar to achieve.

In turn, this book provides a wide range of perspectives on how images functioned as propaganda in evangelization and conversion. The book is laid out in three parts, focusing on conversion and imagery, devotion, and propaganda, respectively. The book begins with Pierre-Antoine Fabre’s essay on the early Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines, an important starting point, given the centrality of that collection of images in the push toward the use of images in evangelization and devotion after the Council of Trent. Going forward, the themes of the three sections, while distinct, nevertheless overlap in important ways. For example, Valentina Borniotto’s essay in Part 1 on the elimination of idols in New Spain has thought-provoking parallels with Stephanie Porras’s exploration in Part 3 of the archangel Michael, and how combatting the devil was central to compelling Indigenous Mexicans to covert. This establishes an important dialectic between conversion, devotion, and propaganda, serving as a reminder that these images were crucial tools not only in conversion, but in providing pathways toward a spirituality that could operate autonomously in local communities after the fact.

The main strength of the book is its geographical reach. This allows for a wider exploration across time and space that makes for intriguing juxtapositions and parallels. It also facilitates a more polysemous approach to understanding the early modern Christian world and recognizing that a lack of uniformity allowed for local conditions and native cultures to experience Christianity in unique ways. Mauro Salis’s study of Spanish Sardinia, for example, illustrates that local Marian devotion, often central to Catholic devotion, operated within the larger rivalry between Mercedarians and Trinitarians, both of whom sought to control the market to ransom in this case Sardinians enslaved by Muslim pirates. In a similar vein, Michela Catto’s study of portents and natural disasters in China and Federico Palomo’s essay on the martyrs of Japan both illustrate how the persecutions and martyrdoms of Christians became means of propagating Christianity as well as the role that foreign missionary work played in devotion at home.

While the book does still skew toward Catholicism with significant focus on the Jesuits and an essay on Judaism would have been welcomed, there are several essays that challenge the historiographical trends that tend to ignore the place of Protestantism and Islam in the context of global evangelization. Francesco Sorce’s essay on Philippe Thomassin’s Triumphus Ecclesiae (1602) argues that anti-Ottoman propaganda operated both as a condemnation of Islam, but also as a claim to Catholic universalism and papal power against all rivals. Likewise, Stephanie Porras reminds us that the painter of the altarpiece in question in her essay, Maerten de Vos, was in fact a Protestant, evidence that personal and economic ties, as well as aesthetics, often trumped dogmatic differences. Such plurality of religious identities also impacted the effects of evangelization and missionaries’ need to accommodate, as Silvia Notarfonso illustrates in her essay on confessional co-existence in the Ottoman Balkans as a challenge to Franciscan missionary efforts.

For readers of this journal, there is much to explore regarding the Jesuits. The collection both contains several essays on the Society of Jesus itself as well as provides important counterpoints to Jesuit missions. This will allow scholars of the Jesuits to position their own work beyond the confines of the historiography of the Society and consider more fully that the goals of the Catholic Church, especially after the establishment of Propaganda Fide, need not necessarily line up with those of the Society, and vice versa. Likewise, the collection illustrates that the Jesuits were not alone in being compelled to accommodate local cultures and hybridize art and devotion.

This is a useful book for those of us attempting to undertake a more holistic exploration of the Jesuits and of early modern Catholicism. Moreover, and I think this is what is most important across the board, the book pushes us to question the notion of early modern Catholicism itself, as such a concept often ignores both the plurality of the experiences of Catholics across the globe as well as the myriad other religious traditions that Catholics confronted in seemingly endless contexts. In this sense, this collection gives us much to consider regarding the role of images in not only European-driven evangelization, but in the ways being Catholic often existed beyond the reaches of Rome, European powers, and their imperial agents.