Printing the Americas for Catholic Europe: Jesuit Knowledge, Missionary Imagination, and Identity in the German-Speaking Lands, 1546–1800

This article examines how Jesuit and Jesuit-related printed writings about the Americas circulated in the German-speaking lands between 1546 and 1800 and how they mediated Catholic knowledge, missionary imagination, and claims to collective identity. Drawing on a representative, though not exhaustive, selection of German-language originals and translations—including letters, missionary reports, books, compilations, and periodicals—it combines diachronic textual analysis with the history of ideas. Rather than treating circulation as evidence of reception, the article examines how authors and editors represented American societies and missionary activity for their intended audiences. It identifies three overlapping phases. From the 1540s to the 1670s, narratives of suffering, martyrdom, and conversion represented the Americas as a theater of missionary sacrifice and reinforced Jesuit corporate and Catholic identity. From the 1670s to 1767, accounts of American customs, polities, and religions increasingly organized difference through hierarchies of civilization and offered a framework through which forms of German-speaking collective identity could be imagined. After 1767, and especially following the suppression of the Society in 1773, writings by former Jesuits and Jesuit-related authors became more defensive while also displaying greater internal differentiation. In this context, Creole writers defended the natural world and peoples of the Americas against claims of degeneracy, thereby giving greater visibility to their own claims to epistemic and cultural authority, whereas German-speaking former Jesuits placed greater emphasis on defending the legitimacy of the missionary enterprise. The article shows that these writings both transmitted knowledge about American realities and selectively organized that knowledge through Eurocentric assumptions. Across these phases, representations of Indigenous societies as requiring Christian and civilizational tutelage and of missionaries as agents of conversion, improvement, and social order provided a discursive framework through which missionary and colonial intervention could be presented as legitimate.