How do new ideas and beliefs take root when they cross cultural and linguistic borders? In seventeenth-century Taiwan, both Dutch and Spanish missionaries tried to replace Indigenous gods, practices, and laws with their own Christian traditions. Christopher Joby’s Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan: A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices (Brill, 2025) explores this moment in history through a new lens: reception. Rather than focusing only on what missionaries brought, he looks at how Indigenous communities responded. Central to the story are experiments in translation and text-making, including ministers creating prayers and catechisms in local languages, and the invention of new scripts.
The legacy of these efforts stretched far beyond the seventeenth century, too. Some texts continued to shape religious practice in Taiwan after the Dutch were expelled in 1662, while others circulated in Europe, informing how outsiders imagined the island. By tracing these journeys, Joby shows how Taiwan’s early missions were not just local episodes but part of a much larger global history of translation, improvisation, and exchange. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of early modern Taiwan, the history of Christian missions, and the global circulation of texts and ideas.
And if you are interested in learning more about his work, you can listen to Joby's earlier appearance on the New Books Network to talk about an earlier book, The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900), here.
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