Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500-1700

Conflict and Conversion explores how Catholic missionaries, merchants, and adventurers brought their faith to the strategically and commercially crucial region of Southeast Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This region conjured visions of the exotic in the minds of early modern Europeans, and became an important testing ground for ideas about the nature of conversion and the relationship between religious belief and practice. Some Southeast Asians adopted Christianity and even died for their new faith while others resisted all incentives, menaces, and cajolement to reject their original spiritual beliefs and practices. In this volume, Tara Alberts explores how Catholicism itself was converted in this encounter, as Southeast Asian neophytes adapted the faith to their own needs. Read more