ABSTRACT
This chapter examines methodological challenges and approaches to analysing emotional encounters in Christian missions. It explores the long history of the use of emotional rhetoric in discourses about European colonialism during the period under examination. The chapter discusses the ways in which language could shape feelings about religion and also examines how emotional practices could shape, and sometimes re-shape, emotional expressions of Catholicism. It describes the forging of emotional identities through travel and movement. The historiography of Christian missions has always been broad in geographical scope, but it is only recently that scholars have begun to consider missions as a ‘global’ phenomenon. From the twelfth century until the end of the seventeenth century, Christians were evangelizing in numerous regions of the globe. While emotions-led approaches to mission historiography are relatively new, the importance of emotions in localized European religious practices has long been recognized.
