Crafting a continent: Jesuits, Puritans, Franciscans, and the creation of an early American missiology, 1542-1763

Over more than two centuries, Christian missionaries laboured to convert Indians across early America. The effect on Indian individuals, communities, and nations has been emphasised in recent scholarship on the religious encounter; this thesis focuses instead on the reciprocal effects on the missionaries themselves. The religious encounter in early America had profound and varied effects on missionaries in each space that they claimed. Letters, speeches, and publications produced by Jesuits, Franciscans, and Puritans are analysed as discursive spaces through which missionaries interrogated, adapted, and added to the complex of concepts, paradigms and strategies that guided their evangelical endeavour. This thesis traces the subsequent evolution of their respective missiologies in New France, the Spanish borderlands, and New England, a process understood as inextricable from the broader dynamism of Indian and colonial power. Through a deliberate process of manipulation by the missionaries themselves, all three missiologies were localised as early American phenomena, suitable to the colonial spaces that members of each tradition encountered on the continent. Then, from the early-eighteenth century, those who continued to articulate the logic of missionization in each region began expressing common missiological themes, finally forging a continental, early American philosophy of mission. These successful transformations of each missiological tradition sustained missions as institutions promoting imperial-colonial, diplomatic and commercial interests; the conclusions of this thesis therefore necessitate analysing the history of colonialism across the continent as, in part, shaped by the dynamic intellectual response of Jesuits, Franciscans and Puritans to the early American cultural encounter