| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas. Ed. by James Muldoon. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. viii, 273 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-8130-2771-3.)

The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas culminates a project comparing the spread of Christianity in Europe and America. Originally intended for a single volume, the task proved too large, so the research on medieval Europe appeared separately in 1997. Even so, the ten essays plus the introduction that make up this work cover a staggering amount of material in terms of time—from antiquity to the Enlightenment—and space—virtually the entire Western Hemisphere. They engage not only the usual suspects of missionary history in the early modern Americas—Jesuits, Franciscans, and Puritans—but Dutch Reformed Protestants, Portuguese Catholics, and German Lutherans as well. Although no author makes the point, so broad an enterprise would have been inconceivable before the convergence of several historiographic trends: the merging of previously discrete narratives of colonization under the unifying rubric of Atlantic history; the rejection of the assumption that Europeans seamlessly re-created the Christianity of their homelands; and increasing attention to religious encounters from multiple viewpoints, including those of the so-called heathen Indians and Africans. These perspectives, in turn, have facilitated comparison across imperial domains and more sophisticated evaluations of evangelical endeavors. Having swung far in the direction of hugely blaming missionaries for corroding indigenous cultures, the interpretive pendulum is now accelerating toward a more moderate position recognizing that churchmen could seldom impose faith and that native beliefs always tempered their appropriation of the Europeans' god.

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