ABSTRACT
The “Atlantic World” paradigm, pioneered by economic historians, has had its greatest successes in the area of trade and migration studies. Studies of the African slave trade and of points within a broad African diaspora stand out in particular, as do investigations of heartlands and frontiers.1 The religious and cultural history of an early modern Atlantic, in contrast, remains uneven and fragmentary, with research still conducted largely in isolated silos divided by language, nationality, and region.2 The example of Charles Boxer’s transoceanic work across various zones of Iberian domination or influence in Africa, the Americas, and Asia stands almost alone and ought to both inspire and challenge current Atlanticist projects.3 Studies that focus on “missionaries” and a variety of religious transformations in the Americas connect quite imperfectly with abundant research on earlier and contemporaneous Christian cultures of western and northern Europe and the circum-Mediterranean region. The gap between Atlantic promise and reality may yawn widest in discussion of the expansion and trajectories of Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our aim in this chapter is thus twofold: to survey the Atlantic dimensions of early modern Catholic Christianity in light of recent developments on a number of largely separate scholarly fronts and to explore a few of the most promising lines along which investigations might proceed. We believe that a reconsideration of Catholic Christianities in the colonial Americas can lead historical interpreters away from artificial fragmentation and toward some illuminating connections and reverberations. As will become clear, we regard the Atlantic World as an organizing frame and set of principles in a discussion that is still very much being determined. Certainly, we are not the first to attempt an integrative move in religious terms.4
