Printing the Americas for Catholic Europe: Jesuit Knowledge, Missionary Imagination, and Identity in the German-Speaking Lands, 1546–1800

Abstract

This article examines how Jesuit and Jesuit-related printed writings about the Americas circulated in the German-speaking lands between 1546 and 1800 and how they mediated Catholic knowledge, missionary imagination, and claims to collective identity. Drawing on a representative, though not exhaustive, selection of German-language originals and translations—including letters, missionary reports, books, compilations, and periodicals—it combines diachronic textual analysis with the history of ideas. Rather than treating circulation as evidence of reception, the article examines how authors and editors represented American societies and missionary activity for their intended audiences. It identifies three overlapping phases. From the 1540s to the 1670s, narratives of suffering, martyrdom, and conversion represented the Americas as a theater of missionary sacrifice and reinforced Jesuit corporate and Catholic identity. From the 1670s to 1767, accounts of American customs, polities, and religions increasingly organized difference through hierarchies of civilization and offered a framework through which forms of German-speaking collective identity could be imagined. After 1767, and especially following the suppression of the Society in 1773, writings by former Jesuits and Jesuit-related authors became more defensive while also displaying greater internal differentiation. In this context, Creole writers defended the natural world and peoples of the Americas against claims of degeneracy, thereby giving greater visibility to their own claims to epistemic and cultural authority, whereas German-speaking former Jesuits placed greater emphasis on defending the legitimacy of the missionary enterprise. The article shows that these writings both transmitted knowledge about American realities and selectively organized that knowledge through Eurocentric assumptions. Across these phases, representations of Indigenous societies as requiring Christian and civilizational tutelage and of missionaries as agents of conversion, improvement, and social order provided a discursive framework through which missionary and colonial intervention could be presented as legitimate.

1. Introduction

From the sixteenth century onward, reports about the Americas circulated with increasing intensity throughout the German-speaking lands. The New World posed obvious challenges to inherited biblical and classical accounts of the earth and its peoples, but German-speaking writers did not simply discard these intellectual frameworks. More often, they sought to accommodate new information within them. Drawing on classical geography and natural history, together with encyclopedic traditions inherited and reworked by Christian scholarship, they incorporated reports of unfamiliar peoples, lands, plants, and animals into broader accounts of the world that remained compatible with Christian understandings of creation and human history (Davies 2011, p. 353; McLean 2007, p. 339). By the Enlightenment, the Americas were still frequently placed at an early stage of human and social development, although the terms in which this position was explained had begun to change. Interpretations once framed primarily through sacred history were increasingly supplemented, and at times displaced, by arguments concerning natural history, climate, human diversity, and social development. Enlightenment thinkers debated how the American environment might shape both human bodies and forms of social organization, often presenting such arguments as the result of empirical observation or “scientific” inquiry. Between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, German-speaking Europeans’ knowledge of the Americas can therefore be understood as taking shape through three broad and overlapping modes.

The first mode consisted of accounts of American nature, history, and societies produced by colonists, merchants, sailors, and missionaries. These works often combined firsthand observation with information obtained from Indigenous interlocutors and local traditions. Missionary writings were especially important because the production of knowledge about American peoples and environments developed alongside evangelization. German translations of such texts circulated widely, and translators frequently adapted them for a German-speaking readership. A decisive change came in 1674, when the Spanish Crown permitted Jesuits from the Upper German lands to serve in Spanish America. From that point onward, letters and reports by German-speaking missionaries themselves appeared with increasing frequency. The expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish dominions in 1767 marked a second turning point, after which exiled Jesuits continued to write about the Americas and increasingly challenged interpretations current in European learned culture.

A second mode of knowledge emerged from travel and scientific exploration. Although expeditionary accounts increasingly claimed authority from direct observation and field experience, many early eighteenth-century European observers continued to interpret the supposedly limited social development of particular peoples through inherited climatic and environmental assumptions, arguing that such conditions confined them to what Europeans regarded as a primitive stage of society (Pagden 1993, p. 28). The French geodesic mission to South America was a prominent example, and its reports subsequently circulated in the German-speaking lands (Sagredo Baeza 2012, p. m103; La Condamine 1751, pp. 179–338; Bouguer 1751, pp. 1–155; Juan y Santacilia and de Ulloa 1751; Godin 1783, pp. 97–118).

A third mode developed within Enlightenment natural history and moral philosophy. Scholars increasingly subjected earlier accounts to source criticism and sought to explain American nature and societies through climate, human diversity, and theories of social development. These debates also produced the influential theory of “American degeneracy,” associated especially with Buffon, de Pauw, and Raynal, which extended claims of deficiency from the American environment to Indigenous peoples and European settlers (Powell 1977, pp. 29–30; Robertson 1777, pp. 281–82; Buffon 1761, pp. 104–5; Raynal 1770, p. 423).

All three modes of knowing the Americas were represented in works published and circulated in the German-speaking lands, but Jesuit writings occupied a particularly important position. From the earliest encounters through the exploration of the continental interior, Jesuit letters, reports, and books remained major channels through which German readers encountered the New World. This prominence reflected in part the importance of Spanish and Portuguese America to the European production of knowledge about the New World. Access to these colonial territories was subject to strong political and confessional restrictions, although their enforcement varied, and Catholic missionaries consequently occupied an important position among those who produced accounts of American societies and environments. At the same time, Jesuit publications were not confined to Catholic regions. As González has shown, Jesuit publications circulated through book fairs and commercial centers such as Frankfurt, Leipzig, Augsburg, and Hamburg, reaching both Catholic and Protestant readers and thereby participating in a reading culture that crossed confessional boundaries (González 2011, p. 267).

Yet scholarship has devoted comparatively little attention to two related questions: how collective identities were articulated in Jesuit publications circulating in the German-speaking lands, and how these texts participated in disputes over who could speak authoritatively about the Americas. Much of the existing literature has concentrated either on bibliography and circulation or on individual publications and their social and cultural reception. John Alden, Joachim Kirchner, and others, for example, catalogued books on the Americas that circulated in the German lands from the early modern period into the nineteenth century, including a substantial body of Jesuit material. These catalogues remain valuable reference works, but they offer relatively little analysis of the ideas and identities articulated in the texts themselves (Alden 1980; Kirchner 1966; Baginsky 1942). Renate Dürr and Ulrike Strasser have approached the subject from a different direction. Their studies of Der Neue Welt-Bott (The New World Messenger), the first Jesuit periodical of its kind in the German-speaking lands, show how the Society of Jesus reinforced its corporate identity through the circulation of knowledge across cultural boundaries while simultaneously constructing often pejorative ethnographic representations of non-European peoples (Dürr 2007, pp. 441–66; Dürr and Strasser 2020, pp. 354–78). Working on a broader geographical scale, Steven Harris has shown that the Jesuits developed an intercontinental network of communication extending from Rome to missions throughout the world, within which missionary letters and reports from non-European regions served as important instruments of knowledge production and transmission (Harris 1988; Harris 1999, pp. 212–40). As studies by Safier and Van Loon have shown, recent scholarship has challenged models of missionary knowledge as a one-way transmission from European observers to European audiences, instead emphasizing the mediation and co-production of knowledge through Indigenous informants, interpreters, linguistic collaborators, and local textual and oral traditions (Safier 2010; Van Loon 2025). From this perspective, Jesuit writings are better understood as mediated products of unequal encounters in which local knowledge was translated, selected, and often anonymized before entering European print networks.

Taken together, this scholarship has greatly clarified the circulation of Jesuit knowledge and the institutional networks that sustained it. What remains less clear is how Jesuit representations of the Americas changed over time and how, in the process, they gave expression to several overlapping forms of identity—Jesuit, German-speaking, and Creole. Such representations were shaped by changing authors, audiences, political circumstances, and intellectual concerns. This article therefore adopts a diachronic approach, combining textual analysis with the history of ideas to examine how Jesuit writings articulated claims to religious and collective identities, legitimized the missionary enterprise, and participated in wider European disputes over the authority to produce knowledge about the Americas.

The primary sources constitute a representative, though not exhaustive, selection from the larger body of Jesuit writings on the Americas published or made available in the German-speaking lands. To reflect the diversity of this material, the corpus includes writings by German-speaking and non-German Jesuits, including Creole authors; both German-language originals and translations; and different forms of print, including letters, missionary reports, books, compilations, and periodicals. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this article are translated directly from the original primary sources by the authors. These sources are compared both in terms of their circulation within the German-speaking print world and the ways in which they mediated and reframed knowledge of the New World for German-speaking readers. In this article, “circulation” refers specifically to documented forms of print availability and transmission, including publication in the German-speaking lands, the publication of German translations or reprints, incorporation into periodicals or compilations, and distribution through the book trade. Evidence of actual reading or reception, where available, is treated separately and is not inferred from publication alone. The chronological boundaries used here are analytical rather than strictly bibliographical. While 1546 marks the beginning of the earliest group of Jesuit missionary reports examined in this study, 1800 serves as an endpoint encompassing the late-eighteenth-century afterlife of Jesuit missionary writing, including works published by former Jesuits in the 1790s. Where relevant, the date of the event or experience described is distinguished from the date of composition and that of publication or later edition. A further limitation lies in the nature of Jesuit sources. Although missionary writings often drew on Indigenous knowledge and local intermediaries, the surviving printed texts preserve these contributions largely through Jesuit authorship, translation, and editorial selection, making Indigenous voices difficult to recover independently.

2. Mission, Martyrdom, and Jesuit Religious Identity (1546–1674)

Emerging from the intersecting contexts of early modern Catholic renewal and confessional conflict, the Society of Jesus approached the Americas through Christian understandings of mission, conversion, and the place of non-European peoples within sacred history. Within this framework, belief in the Christian God as the one true deity provided the theological point of departure. In medieval Christianity, however, “mission” had not yet acquired the predominantly outward-looking sense that it would later assume. Religious dissent within Christendom was more commonly treated as heresy, while the defense and preservation of the faith remained paramount. In the Society’s founding bull of 1540, Regimini militantis Ecclesiae (To the Government of the Church Militant), the meaning of “mission” underwent an important reorientation, increasingly referring to the “spreading of the faith” or the “journey toward the heathen” (O’Malley 1994, pp. 3–4). Part VII of the Society’s Constitutions likewise repeatedly employs “mission” in the sense of being “sent” by the pope or the Superior General (Olin 1979, pp. 395–96). In practice, the term overlapped with such related notions as “pilgrimage” and “journey.” The Society understood its task as helping others to know and love God and thereby attain salvation. This required carrying the Gospel to peoples who had not yet received it and bringing them, as quickly as circumstances allowed, into the Christian faith.

From the 1550s onward, the condition of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas confronted Jesuit missionaries with a more difficult problem. Conversion did not necessarily entail the abandonment of earlier beliefs and customs. Indigenous converts might accept Christianity while continuing practices that missionaries regarded as incompatible with Christian teaching. Such experiences raised a troubling question: did this apparent persistence reflect inadequate instruction, or did it reveal a more fundamental inability to comprehend Christian doctrine? The problem compelled Jesuits to formulate more systematic accounts of the peoples they sought to convert. Among the most influential figures in this process was José de Acosta, who spent seventeen years in the Americas and became provincial of the Society of Jesus in Peru. His writings offer one of the clearest expressions of the early Jesuit attempt to reconcile American difference with the universal claims of Christian salvation.

Acosta summarized four principal arguments advanced by those who doubted the Indians’ capacity for conversion: God had withheld his grace from them; their nature and customs were too degraded and primitive to receive Christianity; most did not understand Spanish; and many lived in settlements beyond the effective reach of missionaries (Prieto 2011, pp. 22–23). The first two claims were particularly consequential because they raised the possibility that the peoples of the Americas were fundamentally different from Europeans and might, in effect, stand outside the providential history of human salvation.

Acosta rejected this conclusion. In De procuranda Indorum salute (On Spreading the Gospel among the Barbarians), he argued at length that God’s plan of salvation embraced the peoples of the Americas no less than other human beings. No people, however “base” or “beastly” they might appear to Europeans, could lie beyond the reach of what he described as the medicine of the Gospel. God, Acosta maintained, called no one to salvation without also granting that person the faculties and grace necessary to attain it. If the Peruvians appeared deficient in understanding, their condition could not be attributed to an inherent defect of nature, to their place of birth or climate, or to some innate difference separating them from the rest of humankind. Its cause lay instead, he argued, in custom and in what he regarded as an uncivilized way of life.

This distinction was crucial to Acosta’s missionary program. If Indigenous peoples were capable of salvation but hindered by their customs, evangelization had to be accompanied by a process of social and cultural transformation. Missionaries were therefore expected not simply to preach Christian doctrine but also to educate Indigenous communities according to European standards of civility. In Acosta’s formulation, the “barbarian” first had to be taught to live as a properly ordered human being before he could be fully formed as a Christian. Missionary work was consequently directed toward uprooting what Jesuits identified as superstition and impiety while reforming Indigenous social practices. Greater familiarity with European forms of life, they believed, would make Christian teaching more intelligible and facilitate conversion (Prieto 2011, pp. 23–24). The universalism of Jesuit soteriology thus coexisted with a pronounced hierarchy of cultures: Indigenous peoples were not excluded from salvation, but admission to Christian life was closely associated with their transformation according to European norms.

A related problem concerned the place of the peoples of the Americas within biblical history. Could they be incorporated into the Christian account of humankind without undermining the authority of Scripture? Augustine, reasoning from Genesis and the common descent of humanity from Adam, had rejected the possibility of inhabited antipodes separated from the known world by impassable distances (St. Augustine of Hippo 2008, pp. 504–5). The discovery of large populations in the western hemisphere therefore posed an obvious question for Christian scholars: how had these peoples reached lands apparently unknown to biblical and classical history?

Acosta proposed an influential solution in The Natural and Moral History of the Indies. He conjectured that Asia and the Americas were connected, or had once been connected, at their northern or southern extremities. After the Flood, humans and animals could therefore have migrated gradually from the Old World into the New, multiplying and dispersing until distinct American peoples and nations emerged (Acosta 2010b, pp. 57–64). The hypothesis allowed the inhabitants of the Americas to be incorporated into a single postdiluvian history of humankind. Their difference from Europeans could then be explained historically rather than through a separate creation or an exclusion from Adamic descent.

Yet Acosta’s universal account of human origins did not imply cultural equality. He located the historical center of civilization around the Mediterranean and understood cultural development in broadly spatial terms: the farther a people stood from this center, the more likely it was, in his view, to have lost the principal marks by which Europeans recognized civilized life, including alphabetic writing, organized political institutions, and formal religious worship. His account accordingly produced a hierarchy that ran broadly from Europe through Asia to the Americas (Acosta 2010a, pp. 396–408). In religious terms, this geographical ordering also became a graduated classification of peoples extending from Christian societies to those considered furthest removed from Christianity.

Mission followed logically from this hierarchy. In Acosta’s formulation, civility was closely associated with ordered social life, moral discipline, and the cultural conditions deemed necessary for Christian conversion. Peoples judged to occupy a lower position on the scale of civilization first had to acquire what missionaries regarded as the rudiments of civilized life and could then be brought, through evangelization, into the Christian faith. Conversion and civilization thus became mutually reinforcing projects. This conception also imposed obligations on missionaries themselves. They needed to acquire local languages, understand Indigenous customs, and embody through their conduct the Christian order they sought to establish. The missionary was not merely a preacher but was expected to serve as a living model of the religious and social transformation demanded of converts.

Spanish Jesuit interpretations of the Americas circulated well beyond the Iberian world. Through missionary reports, letters, compilations, and books, they reached readers throughout the German-speaking lands and contributed to the formation of German knowledge about the New World. Among the earliest Jesuit writings on the Americas to circulate there were missionary reports sent from Brazil between 1546 and 1562. According to González’s tabulation of John Alden’s bibliographical data, 1130 America-related titles are recorded for the period 1600–1650 and 1571 for 1651–1700 on the German book market (González 2011, p. 41).

The conditions for this circulation changed substantially after the Thirty Years’ War. The German book market gradually developed into a network that crossed both territorial and confessional boundaries, allowing information to travel more readily between Catholic and Protestant regions. By the end of the seventeenth century, comparatively permissive publishing policies in parts of northern and eastern Germany had contributed to a redistribution of the book trade away from Frankfurt toward Leipzig, Nuremberg, Augsburg, and other centers. From around 1680, Augsburg developed into a leading center for the production and distribution of Catholic literature in southern Germany (Gier 1997, pp. 489–99). According to figures cited by Wittmann, Augsburg had around 150 firms engaged in the book trade, compared with 145 in Leipzig, 99 in Nuremberg, and 98 in Frankfurt (Wittmann 1999, p. 96). The geography of German print and book distribution was thus becoming increasingly polycentric. Supported by extensive commercial networks, German booksellers traded southward with Spain and Italy and northward across the German-speaking territories, simultaneously distributing German books throughout Europe and importing foreign printed works (Wittmann 1973, p. 751).

Although Jesuit writings about the Americas originated in different regions and described widely differing missionary settings, many shared a striking rhetorical feature: suffering, and martyrdom in particular, occupied a prominent place in their representation of missionary life. The term “martyr” derives from the Greek μάρτυς, meaning “witness.” In Christian usage, martyrdom came to signify the ultimate act of witnessing to Christ: the believer remained steadfast in confession even when such fidelity demanded his or her life.

The prominence of martyrdom in Jesuit representations of the Americas was closely connected to the confessional crisis produced by the Reformation. The fragmentation of western Christianity intensified Catholic concerns about religious identity, discipline, and the visible demonstration of faith. Against this background, martyrdom offered an image of commitment tested to its furthest limit and thus a particularly powerful response to confessional instability. It was also an effective instrument of religious persuasion. In the post-Tridentine Catholic world, representations of martyrs were expected not merely to commemorate the dead but to move the living. The Jesuit theorist Antonio Possevino argued that Christian art at its highest level should make viewers perceive the martyr’s fortitude, the tears of those who mourned, the anguish of suffering, and the glory of resurrection, impressing these emotions upon the heart of the beholder (Donnelly 1991, pp. 11–12). Martyrdom therefore connected representation, emotion, and religious action while presenting overseas mission as a field in which the highest forms of Christian sacrifice might still be realized.

For German Jesuits contemplating missionary service, these representations could have a deeply personal effect. Georg Gerstlacher later recalled that the “glorious image” of the martyrs had made a powerful impression on him in childhood and inspired a desire both to suffer martyrdom and to save souls (Meier 2005, p. 89). Michael Durst expressed the aspiration even more explicitly: “If I remain in Germany, I cannot lay down my life for the friends of Christ, as I so ardently desire” (Duhr 1907, p. 595). These statements show that martyr narratives did more than describe distant missions. They shaped the devotional imagination through which prospective missionaries understood the Americas, interpreted their vocation, and imagined participation in the global Catholic mission.

In Jesuit accounts of the Americas, suffering was repeatedly linked to the effort to bring Christianity—and what the missionaries understood as civility—to the New World. Within the Society, such narratives functioned as exempla intended to edify readers and reinforce confessional commitment. The periodical Auß America, das ist, auß der Newen Welt (From America, That Is, from the New World), for example, recounted the killing of the Jesuit Gonzalo de Tapia in 1594, the deaths of missionaries during the Tepehuán uprising of 1616, and the dangers encountered by missionaries on distant frontiers in Mexico, Peru, and Paraguay (Mang 1620, pp. 2–3, 9–10). At the same time, growing numbers of German Jesuits were sent to remote missions, including stations in the Amazon and Orinoco regions, where illness, violence, and isolation figured prominently in their letters and reports (Hsia 2014, pp. 58–59). This rhetoric of missionary suffering did not disappear after 1674. As discussed below, it remained an important feature of German Jesuit print culture well into the eighteenth century. As Steven Harris has shown, the intercontinental circulation of Jesuit people and texts did more than transmit knowledge; it also helped sustain a common identity within a geographically dispersed Society (Harris 1996, pp. 287–318).

Written and visual representations of martyrdom reinforced this commemorative and didactic function (Baumgarten 2004, p. 128). The revival of devotion to Christian martyrs in the later sixteenth century gave such accounts particular force (Richter 2009, p. 154). Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti regarded the representation of martyrdom as a means of directing and motivating the Catholic faithful (Nordio 2019, pp. 50–52), while Peter Burschel has shown how accounts of missionary death became embedded in Jesuit education, spiritual formation, and collective memory (Burschel 2004, p. 230). This rhetoric of martyrdom also drew on an older Christian understanding of suffering as generative of conversion, epitomized by Tertullian’s dictum that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” (A. J. Schmidt 2004, p. 32). Later Catholic writers similarly claimed that “many pagans became Christians only after seeing the death of the martyrs,” whose deaths therefore made them “conquerors” of new believers (C. Schmidt 1889, p. 322).

In the German-speaking lands, this rhetoric acquired a more specific confessional significance. Accounts from the Americas circulated through the commercial, missionary, and print networks that connected Catholic Europe with the overseas world, and they found a receptive market among Catholic printers and readers (Becker 2017, pp. 25–48). At a time when confessional boundaries within the Holy Roman Empire remained sharply drawn, missionary literature supplied Catholic print culture with narratives of sacrifice, conversion, and spiritual heroism (Dürr 2007, p. 452). Reports of missionary victories, hardships, conversions, and deaths could therefore serve Catholic self-affirmation and present overseas mission as evidence of the vitality of Catholic Christianity in Europe itself.

This rhetoric of martyrdom was embedded in a broader Jesuit interpretation of the Americas. Biblical and classical traditions continued to shape the conceptual frameworks through which unfamiliar landscapes and peoples were understood, while missionary writing presented the continent as a vast field for Christian conversion. Many Jesuit writers, including José de Acosta, nevertheless approached Indigenous societies through a hierarchical conception of human culture that placed European Christian civility above the peoples they sought to convert (Pagden 1987, pp. 162–63). Descriptions of Indigenous communities as “barbarous” or deficient in reason, combined with the promise of Christian salvation, provided a rationale for missionary tutelage and enabled Jesuits to represent themselves as agents not only of conversion but also of “civilization” (Jennings 2010, pp. 102–4).

Yet the persuasive force of Jesuit martyr narratives derived in part from the tension between this claim to civilizational superiority and the missionaries’ own vulnerability. Those who presented themselves as bearers of a supposedly superior Christian order were simultaneously depicted as exposed to hunger, disease, violence, isolation, and death. The tension between claims to Christian civilizational superiority and the missionaries’ own vulnerability gave suffering a distinctive evidentiary force. Hunger, disease, violence, isolation, and death did not necessarily undermine Jesuit assertions of religious and civilizational authority; rather, the endurance of such hardships could serve as evidence of the missionaries’ commitment to their vocation (Nelles 2019, pp. 57–58). In the German-speaking lands, where confessional division remained especially salient, accounts of American martyrdom consequently belonged not only to the history of overseas missions but also to the continuing effort to define and defend Catholic identity in the aftermath of the Reformation.

3. Civilizational Hierarchy and German-Speaking Catholic Identity (1674–1767)

Once the Spanish Crown permitted Jesuit missionaries from the Upper German lands to enter Spanish America in 1674, writings by German missionaries themselves began to appear in print (Borges Morán 1977, p. 294). German-speaking readers thus no longer depended solely on translations of Spanish, Portuguese, and French accounts, a development that also created new opportunities for printers and booksellers. By the late seventeenth century, the earlier missionary language of Christian civility was increasingly expressed through a broader vocabulary of settled social order, cultivation, discipline, and education. Within this changing vocabulary, German-speaking Jesuits articulated claims to collective distinction through two related contrasts. The first set German missionaries against Indigenous Americans in terms of civilization, social development, and moral character. In these representations, Indigenous peoples became a civilizational “Other” against which a culturally superior German-speaking “Self” could be imagined. The second contrast was intra-European. German Jesuits distinguished themselves from missionaries of other European nations, especially Spanish Jesuits, by emphasizing what they presented as their greater aptitude for missionary work and finer moral qualities. These comparisons reveal how German-speaking Jesuits could construct a collective self-image; whether and to what extent readers adopted such distinctions must be treated separately.

Samuel Fritz and Heinrich Richter belonged to the first cohort of German-speaking Jesuits sent to the Spanish-American missions after the relaxation of restrictions on foreign missionaries in 1674. Their writings divided the Indigenous population into three broad categories: “barbarous” peoples who resisted evangelization and among whom, in the missionaries’ view, neither law nor order prevailed; converts who embodied the success of missionary work; and those who remained potential objects of conversion and therefore became a principal subject of missionary writing (Stöcklein 1726–1761, vol. 1, pt. 1, no. 20, p. 57). This classificatory scheme rested on an assumed hierarchy between European and American forms of life. The Jesuits cast themselves as bearers of civilization who, from the standpoint of a supposedly higher culture, sought to reform what they regarded as the natives’ civilizational inferiority. Repeated across missionary accounts, this hierarchy helped translate religious difference into a broader distinction between a German “Self” and an American “Other.” As the Jesuit Florian Paucke wrote, “we Jesuits, and especially we Jesuits from Germany … went voluntarily to the lands of the heathen, devoting ourselves wholly for the sake of the German nation.” Elsewhere in his account, Paucke emphasized German achievements in science, art, and technology, contrasting them not only with Indigenous societies but also with those of other European nations. In Paucke’s own self-description, missionary achievement overseas became evidence for the distinction and prestige he attributed to the “German nation” (Paucke 1959, pp. 107, 730–31).

At the end of the seventeenth century, the travel account of Anton Sepp, a Jesuit from Tyrol, appeared in print and went through at least six editions. It circulated widely and was sold at the book fairs of Frankfurt and Leipzig. Sepp recorded his journey from Spain to Paraguay and devoted particular attention to what he regarded as the difference in civilizational order between the American “New World” and the European “Old World.” The American environment itself appeared extraordinarily favorable: “the water can serve as medicine, the soil is fertile, the orchards rival paradise.” Yet natural abundance did not, in Sepp’s account, amount to civilization in its own right. Order, cultivation, and Christian social organization were presented as achievements of Jesuit intervention, while America remained largely the object upon which missionary discipline operated. Through this “civilizing tutelage,” the missionaries had supposedly transformed the Indigenous population of Paraguay into “pious good Christians” capable of governing themselves (Sepp 1697, pp. 21, 69, 135–99).

Such narratives were framed in terms likely to resonate with religious concerns in the German-speaking lands and offered a textual framework through which a transatlantic devotional community linking Jesuit missionaries, Indigenous converts, and German Catholics could be imagined. Within this space, information and moral judgment moved together. Missionaries represented Indigenous peoples as objects of Christian and civilizational tutelage, incorporating them into the European colonial order while portraying submission to missionary authority as evidence of successful transformation. The descriptions produced through this encounter then circulated back to the German-speaking lands. There, images of Indigenous passivity and primitiveness could reinforce a civilizational hierarchy in which an “inferior” American “Other” was juxtaposed with a “superior” German-speaking “Self.”

In 1747, Dominikus Mayr published an account of the state of the mission in the Mojos region, focusing chiefly on the hardships of missionary life, including disease and natural disasters (Mayr 1747). The Indigenous inhabitants of Mojos entered his narrative largely insofar as the missionary story required them. Their customs were described as “barbarous,” while their territory became the setting in which Jesuit “pilgrims” endured hardship and ultimately demonstrated the success of their evangelical work (González 2005, pp. 355–82). The narrative served several related purposes. By setting missionary suffering against missionary achievement, it reaffirmed the presumed superiority of European Christianity and civilization, casting the missionaries as agents through whom America might be placed on the path toward “civilization.” At the same time, the very possibility of conversion implied that Indigenous peoples possessed the capacity for moral and civilizational development rather than remaining permanently confined to an allegedly primitive condition. In this respect, missionary discourse differed from more rigid Enlightenment accounts associated with the theory of American “degeneracy.” Yet Mayr’s narrative remained thoroughly Eurocentric: the missionary, rather than the native, was its protagonist, while Indigenous people generally appeared as those to be converted, instructed, or redeemed. This asymmetry also points to a limitation of the missionary archive, since the local knowledge on which missionaries often depended is far less visible than the Jesuit voices through which it was recorded and transmitted. The limited presence of Indigenous people as speaking subjects should therefore not be taken as evidence of their absence from the production of missionary knowledge, but rather as a reflection of the unequal conditions under which such knowledge was selected, recorded, and published. As Galaxis González has argued, the works of Sepp and Mayr repeatedly contrasted Germans and Indigenous Americans in cultural and ethnic terms, establishing a moral and civilizational opposition between a German “Self” and an American “Other” through which an early German-speaking collective identity could be articulated (González 2012, p. 188).

The Jesuits’ first German-language missionary periodical, Der Neue Welt-Bott, offers perhaps the clearest example of how missionaries and editors sought to represent a civilizational difference between a German-speaking Christian audience and a wider non-European “Other” while at the same time locating that audience within a broader religious and cultural world. The periodical primarily published missionary letters, travel accounts, and material drawn from previously printed works on overseas missions. Its editor, Joseph Stöcklein, translated and edited these writings for a German-speaking readership, presenting distant regions in a form through which they could be encountered imaginatively in print. As its preface explained, the periodical pursued two principal aims: to commemorate Jesuit missionaries who had devoted themselves, and sometimes sacrificed their lives, to the evangelization of non-European peoples, and to stimulate readers’ curiosity about the wider world (Stöcklein 1726–1761, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. v). This commemorative function also preserved an older rhetoric of martyrdom. Each part of Der Neue Welt-Bott concluded with an appended list of “martyrs” who had suffered in the propagation of the faith, giving missionary death a recurring editorial position and incorporating individual sacrifice into the continuing history of the Society’s global mission.

A particularly revealing feature of Der Neue Welt-Bott was its deliberate use of German and its attempt to bridge regional linguistic differences. Stöcklein explained: “As regards the manner or style of writing and the orthography, I have adopted a clear and concise method, so that it may be understood throughout the Upper German, Rhenish, and Saxon regions, without being bound by any single regional tongue” (Stöcklein 1726–1761, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. xi–xii). At a time when Latin retained a strong position in learned print culture, publishing in German also widened the periodical’s potential readership. With the support of publishers such as Philipp Jakob Veith and Joseph Wolff, Der Neue Welt-Bott was produced for a geographically dispersed audience and employed a written language intended to remain intelligible across regional boundaries. Its editorial strategy can therefore be understood as an attempt to address, and potentially cultivate, a transregional German-speaking reading public rather than as evidence that such a public already possessed a unified collective identity. In this sense, the periodical participated in the broader development of a German-speaking cultural community (González 2012, p. 187), although the extent to which individual readers understood themselves in these terms cannot be inferred from the publication alone.

There is, however, some evidence that the periodical reached beyond a narrowly defined Catholic readership. Stöcklein himself noted that Der Neue Welt-Bott served as table reading among readers of different confessions (Stöcklein 1726–1761, vol. 3, Vorrede). This testimony suggests a degree of cross-confessional use, although it does not by itself establish the scale or uniformity of that reception. The periodical was nevertheless clearly designed to guide readers imaginatively through the global geography of the missions. As Stöcklein explained: “I take the reader to places quite far away, first to China, passing through Beijing, Canton, Cambodia, and Siam to Africa, then to the West Indies, New France, and finally to New Cartagena; by way of Quito and the Marañón to Pará in Brazil, awaiting an opportunity to return to Europe” (Stöcklein 1726–1761, vol. 2, Vorrede). This itinerary transformed the periodical into a textual map of the Catholic missionary world. Its chapters generally followed a comparable movement from Asia and the Americas back toward Europe, repeatedly situating distant mission fields in relation to the Christian world of its intended readers. Der Neue Welt-Bott thus offered a framework through which German-speaking readers could imagine their place within a global Christian order, even if the extent to which they adopted that framework remains difficult to determine.

The same distinction is necessary when considering the periodical’s civilizational language. Its accounts presented a layered picture of the non-European world and frequently organized peoples according to assumptions about religion, social development, and civility. Enslaved people, Indigenous peoples, and populations of European descent in the Americas were often represented as requiring the tutelage of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to overcome what missionaries regarded as deficient conditions of development. Such representations invited readers to view missionary intervention as the work of a supposedly more advanced Christian Europe and could thereby support claims for the legitimacy of the Society’s religious, social, and political activity in the Americas. They also offered German-speaking audiences a contrast through which a Christian and European “Self” might be imagined in relation to a non-European “Other.” Yet this representational structure should not be equated automatically with readers’ own beliefs. What the periodical demonstrates most clearly is the world that Jesuit editors and missionaries sought to make intelligible—and persuasive—to their audience; the degree to which readers accepted, modified, or rejected that vision requires separate evidence of reception.

The Jesuit position examined here differed markedly from several prominent Enlightenment interpretations of the New World. These writers neither idealized Indigenous peoples as “noble savages” nor explained American difference primarily through environmental determinism or the theory of “American degeneracy.” Instead, they frequently described Indigenous peoples in explicitly hierarchical moral and cultural terms, characterizing them as “lazy,” “barbarous,” or “morally base,” and associating their way of life with primitiveness and irrationality. Michael Herre, for example, wrote: “The Indians are short and stout, given to drink and idle, which is why most of them are poor … They must be compelled to pray. Moreover, they lack good ‘examples’ and always imitate what they see in the Europeans” (Herre 1725, p. 80). Yet such judgments did not imply that Indigenous peoples were incapable of improvement. What the Jesuits questioned was not their capacity for development but the stage they were believed to have reached. With proper instruction, discipline, and religious guidance, they could, in the missionaries’ view, overcome this supposed “inferiority” and become pious Christians (Cañizares-Esguerra 2001, pp. 111–13). Der Neue Welt-Bott thus offered German readers more than information about distant lands. By arranging peoples within a civilizational hierarchy, it provided a comparative framework through which the German-speaking lands could be imagined in relation to a non-European “Other,” potentially reinforcing a sense of collective distinction and superiority without allowing such effects to be assumed for readers as a whole.

Jesuit narratives, however, did not construct difference solely along a European–American axis. German missionaries also defined themselves against missionaries from other European regions, and this comparison helped articulate a more specifically German sense of collective virtue. In 1744, for example, Franz Trarbach wrote: “The officials of the province of Mexico tell me that we missionaries of the Lower Rhine province are excellent and a great comfort … Father Hermann Glandorff is the ‘pearl’ of the Lower Rhine province and the ‘glory’ of the German nation; with tireless zeal he preaches the Gospel to the savages near Mexico” (Duhr 1928, pp. 28–29). Franz Zephyris similarly maintained that German Jesuits enjoyed greater respect than their Spanish counterparts and were particularly well suited to positions of responsibility. He attributed the “special affection” shown toward German Jesuits in part to affinities of temperament produced, as he understood them, by the mountain climate of South America: “The cool air here tempers the impatient temperament innate to the native Ecuadorian Jesuits, whose character is the most similar to ours (the German) of all the peoples I have hitherto seen” (Zephyris 1725, p. 94).

Other missionaries made the comparison more explicitly. Nikolaus Schindler proudly declared that “in this ‘vineyard of the Lord’ there are none more capable than the missionaries of the German nation” (Schindler 1736, p. 83). Although his account was published only in 1794, Ignaz Pfefferkorn retrospectively described what he had observed during his missionary service in Sonora between 1756 and 1767. In recalling the pre-expulsion missionary world, he portrayed Spaniards as lacking precisely the qualities that German missionaries claimed for themselves: “The Spaniards, by contrast, are lazy and idle. However short the journey, they will not travel on foot. Even a half-hour’s walk is too arduous for them; they will not so much as set one foot outside the village” (Pfefferkorn 1794, p. 289). Ladislaus Orosz likewise reported that Spanish and colonial officials treated German missionaries with greater affection and honor than missionaries of other nations and were more willing to entrust them with missionary responsibilities (Orosz 1727, p. 93). Across these accounts, diligence, talent, discipline, and temperance emerged as distinctively German virtues. Such qualities supposedly explained both the success of German Jesuits and the respect they commanded, allowing them to present themselves as especially qualified to bring Christianity and European forms of civilization to Indigenous communities (Stöcklein 1726–1761, pt. 206, 249, 282, 328, 441).

Across these accounts, American societies were generally represented as occupying an earlier stage of development, although they were not regarded as permanently incapable of change. Mission supplied the principal mechanism through which such change was thought possible. These texts offered two related comparative frameworks through which a transregional German collective identity might be imagined. The first was vertical: by positioning American societies below Christian Europe within a hierarchy of civilization, they provided German-speaking readers with a potential basis for defining themselves in relation to a non-European “Other.” The second operated within Europe itself. By contrasting their own diligence, discipline, and missionary aptitude with the alleged shortcomings of Spanish and other European missionaries, German Jesuits fashioned themselves as particularly effective agents of Christian expansion. The resulting identity was therefore neither simply national nor exclusively confessional. In these writings, a developing sense of Germanness and the religious vocation of the Jesuit missionary reinforced one another: claims about what made German missionaries distinctive helped validate their missionary authority, while missionary success itself became evidence of German collective virtue.

4. Enlightenment Critique, Missionary Legitimacy, and Creole Identity After 1767

In the second half of the eighteenth century, German interest in the Americas intensified as news of the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution expanded the market for writings on the New World. At the same time, Enlightenment criticism altered the terms on which such writings were judged. Travel accounts were increasingly expected not merely to describe unfamiliar peoples and environments but to explain them according to standards of evidence, comparison, and causal reasoning (Bödeker 1992, pp. 276–98). Missionary testimony came under particular scrutiny. Raynal dismissed many early European observers as “ignorant religious fanatics” whose inability to distinguish among American peoples rendered their reports unreliable (Raynal 1774, p. 3). Rousseau likewise argued that missionaries, although “charged with a sublime mission,” remained constrained by “the prejudices of their station” and were therefore poorly equipped to identify the distinctive characteristics of American societies (Rousseau 2009, pp. 106–8).

De Pauw turned this criticism directly against Jesuit missionary knowledge. In the fourth letter of the sixth part of his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (Philosophical Inquiries on the Americans), he maintained that the Jesuits had achieved little either in evangelization or in the “civilizing” of Indigenous peoples. Their reports, he argued, were filled with the “natural wonders of the Americas” while neglecting “facts,” and their assumption that Indigenous Americans were capable of receiving European civilization had distorted European understanding of the New World (De Pauw 1769, Vorrede, pp. 4, 6). The issue was therefore no longer simply whether individual missionary descriptions were accurate. What was increasingly at stake was the epistemic authority of the missionary as an observer and interpreter of American nature and society.

The expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish dominions in 1767 gave this dispute a new political and intellectual setting. The measure formed part of the Bourbon monarchy’s broader effort to strengthen royal authority and restrict the autonomy of powerful corporate bodies (Mörner 1966, pp. 156–64). It also displaced many American-born Jesuits to Europe, where they entered debates in which the Americas were still largely interpreted through European intellectual categories. The theory of “American degeneracy,” most closely associated with Buffon, de Pauw, and Raynal, represented the New World as deficient in its environment, peoples, and capacity for civilization (Gerbi 1973, pp. 52–73). Exiled Jesuits responded by drawing on prolonged residence, linguistic competence, and familiarity with American societies and environments (Millones Figueroa and Ledezma 2005). Their defense of the Americas was therefore also a defense of experience-based missionary knowledge.

An institutional rupture followed in 1773, when Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus. Authors discussed below whose works appeared after this date therefore generally wrote as former Jesuits rather than as members of an active corporate Society. In this section, “Jesuit writings” consequently includes works by former Jesuits and Jesuit-related publications that preserved, defended, or reinterpreted the intellectual and missionary legacy of the pre-suppression Society.

The writings examined here may be divided broadly into two overlapping groups: works by exiled Creole authors and accounts by German-speaking former Jesuit missionaries and their defenders. The Creole authors considered here were American-born descendants of Europeans whose position combined American birth with European ancestry, education, and intellectual formation. As Mignolo has emphasized, Creole consciousness was “twofold”: being American did not require the rejection of “Europeanness” (Mignolo 2001, pp. 34–35). These writings did not, however, pursue identical polemical aims. Creole authors were often primarily concerned with challenging claims about the degeneracy of American nature and peoples and with asserting the authority of American-born knowledge; in doing so, they also contributed to the articulation of a distinct Creole cultural identity. German-speaking former missionaries and their defenders, by contrast, more often sought to vindicate the practical, moral, and religious legitimacy of missionary activity. These two objectives could overlap, but they should not be treated as identical.

A particularly revealing, though bibliographically complex, example is the 1782 Hamburg edition of Des Herrn Abts Vidaure kurzgefaßte geographische, natürliche und bürgerliche Geschichte des Königreichs Chile. The German edition appeared under the name of Felipe Gómez de Vidaurre, but it was a translation of the anonymous Compendio della storia geografica, naturale, e civile del regno del Chile published in Bologna in 1776, a work generally attributed in modern bibliography to Juan Ignacio Molina. Although the attribution has not been entirely free from dispute, the discussion below follows the conventional attribution to Molina while retaining the German edition’s original title-page attribution to Vidaurre. The 1782 German text described Chile’s natural resources through both local names and European scientific terminology and argued that the existence of Indigenous nomenclature demonstrated detailed knowledge of the natural environment. By preserving these local terms, his account also makes visible, however indirectly, the contribution of Indigenous classificatory knowledge to the production of natural history. He further portrayed the inhabitants of Chile as “strong and well-proportioned” and as possessing “lofty minds,” characterizing them as rational, hospitable, courageous, and capable of forming a political community through their own historical development (Molina 1782, pp. 108, 113).

Molina challenged contemporary European natural histories on both empirical and classificatory grounds. First, he insisted that American flora and fauna were not weaker or intrinsically inferior to their European counterparts. Second, he argued that colonial naming practices had themselves produced errors in natural history by arbitrarily applying Old World names to unfamiliar American species. He called this practice “most harmful to the natural history of the Americas” and maintained that the “abuse of nomenclature” had helped generate the idea that American quadrupeds were degenerate. The riltho, for example, had been treated as an aberrant kind of dog, while the Mexican ehegua was similarly classified through superficial resemblance rather than careful observation (Molina 1786, pp. 239–41). Molina therefore shifted the problem from American nature to European methods of classification. He likewise rejected claims of Spanish-American intellectual inferiority and argued that education could foster improvement on both sides of the Atlantic. Against de Pauw and other philosophes who generalized about regions they had never visited, he privileged empirical description, local nomenclature, and firsthand knowledge (Molina 1782, p. 23; Cañizares-Esguerra 2001, p. 253). Missionary and American experience thus became, in his hands, a basis for contesting European philosophical conjecture.

Francisco Clavijero developed the challenge to European intellectual authority still further. His Geschichte von Mexico (History of Mexico), published in Leipzig in 1789–1790, reconstructed the history of Indigenous Mexico from Spanish accounts, Indigenous manuscripts, and pictorial records (Clavijero 1789–1790). While accepting a hierarchical conception of natural order (Saine 1987, pp. 54–65), Clavijero defended the physical and moral capacities of Indigenous Mexicans, emphasized the achievements of the pre-Hispanic past, and attributed their subsequent decline largely to the violence of Spanish colonial rule. More importantly, he confronted the philosophes over the criteria of historical evidence. He argued that many sixteenth-century Spanish accounts deserved credence because they were numerous, publicly known, and broadly consistent with one another, while criticizing Buffon, de Pauw, and others for constructing speculative systems without adequate knowledge of Indigenous languages and sources.

Clavijero consequently placed particular confidence in Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries whose linguistic competence had given them access to American codices and local historical traditions (Cañizares-Esguerra 2001, p. 248). His defense of pre-colonial Mexican history was therefore inseparable from a defense of missionary scholarship. At the same time, recovering an authoritative American past supplied Creole intellectuals with a historical genealogy through which they could articulate their own position. Clavijero thus recast missionary authority in epistemic terms, grounding it in linguistic competence and access to Indigenous historical sources.

Molina and Clavijero did not simply repeat an older apologetic defense of the missions. They entered the Enlightenment debate on its own epistemic terrain, emphasizing observation, linguistic competence, historical evidence, and local knowledge. Their works frequently moved from natural history to the reconstruction of Indigenous histories, thereby asserting the authority of American-born intellectuals to interpret the continent to European audiences. At the same time, their rejection of “American degeneracy” could also intersect with questions of missionary authority, but the emphasis varied considerably from author to author. If distant philosophes had misrepresented the New World because they lacked direct experience, missionaries who had lived in the Americas, learned local languages, and worked with Indigenous sources could claim a privileged position as witnesses. The dispute over degeneracy was therefore also a dispute over who could speak authoritatively about the Americas.

Although not a Creole himself, the Italian former Jesuit Filippo Salvatore Gilij, who had been expelled from Spanish America in 1767, adopted several arguments that converged with those advanced by exiled Creole writers. In his account of the Orinoco and Río de la Plata regions, he combined natural history with descriptions of languages and customs and distinguished between a “civilized” and a “barbarous” America (Gilij 1785, p. 85). As the Creole authors discussed above, Gilij rejected stronger versions of the theory of American degeneracy, even though he continued to attribute considerable importance to climate and environment in shaping natural forms and human character. Crucially, however, he did not regard such conditions as immutable. Education and missionary instruction, he argued, could enable peoples whom Europeans classified as “savages” to overcome an allegedly “backward” condition. By accepting the possibility of American improvement while retaining a hierarchical conception of cultural difference, Gilij turned arguments also used by Creole critics of degeneracy toward a more explicit defense of missionary intervention. His position thus linked the defense of American peoples against claims of permanent inferiority with an effort to reaffirm the legitimacy of the missionary enterprise.

This contest was especially visible in the German-speaking lands, where de Pauw’s arguments had considerable intellectual currency. De Pauw belonged to the circle surrounding Frederick the Great of Prussia, and his Recherches circulated within elite learned culture. Lee Alan Dugatkin has noted that Frederick himself had received de Pauw’s “carefully prepared Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains” (Dugatkin 2009, p. 36). De Pauw’s work also provoked a Berlin-centered controversy in which Antoine-Joseph Pernety emerged as a prominent opponent. Drawing on his own travels in the Americas, Pernety appealed to eyewitness experience against philosophical speculation. He described American soil as extraordinarily fertile, its vegetation as abundant, and its inhabitants as healthy, strong, frank, and morally upright. By presenting the New World as the reverse of the deficient environment imagined by de Pauw, Pernety sought to overturn the theory of “American degeneracy” (Cañizares-Esguerra 2001, pp. 44–49; Pernety 1770, pp. 32, 48, 81–83). The controversy therefore made the relative authority of philosophical conjecture and firsthand experience itself a central issue. In this setting, the works of Creole former Jesuits and their supporters supplied German-speaking readers with competing accounts of American nature, Indigenous societies, and colonial history grounded in residence, linguistic knowledge, and direct observation.

By contrast, German-speaking Jesuit and former Jesuit authors, together with their defenders, responded from a somewhat different position. Their principal concern was less the construction of a Creole historical identity than the legitimacy of missionary activity itself. By the later eighteenth century, the language used to defend missionary legitimacy had shifted further, increasingly drawing on Enlightenment concerns with utility, improvement, good government, and stages of social development. Johann Jakob Baegert’s 1772 account of California addressed its geography, population, and the effects of Christianity on Indigenous communities, offering German readers a regionally specific description grounded in missionary experience (Baegert 1772).

Franz Niclutsch defended the missions more explicitly. He argued that Jesuit intervention had “civilized” what he described as the “wild” life of Indigenous peoples and brought them within the proper order of Christian civilization. In his account, the philosophes had misunderstood the practical effects of missionary work and therefore misjudged its legitimacy (Niclutsch 1781, pp. 75–92).

Christoph Murr likewise defended the missions in practical and social terms. He maintained that “a single missionary contributes more to the people and to good order than twenty companies of infantry.” Missionaries, he argued, did more than spread the Gospel: they taught Indigenous communities to cultivate the land and promoted education and social order (Murr 1785, Vorrede). Such arguments are significant because they translated missionary legitimacy into a vocabulary that could answer Enlightenment concerns with utility and good government. The missionary appeared not only as an evangelizer but also as an agent of social improvement. In this way, defenders of the Jesuit missionary legacy supplemented confessional claims with arguments about order, usefulness, and the material consequences of missionary activity.

Franz Veigl framed the same problem in more explicitly anthropological terms. He described Indigenous peoples as “wild ones” (Wildlinge) or “barbarians” (Barbaren) and placed them in a state of “half-humanity,” referring to “the inner structure of their bodies, their mixed humours, their keen senses” as signs of a condition suspended between rational and irrational life (Veigl 1798, p. 290). Yet it was precisely this hierarchical anthropology that allowed Veigl to portray the pre-suppression Jesuit missions as an agent of “morality” and “civilization.” Wolfgang Bayer’s account of missionary conduct during the pan-Andean uprising similarly emphasized another dimension of missionary legitimacy: missionaries were represented not only as bearers of the Gospel but also as guarantors of stability and order within colonial society (Bayer 1776, pp. 113–326). These works therefore defended the missions by linking religious authority to civilizational tutelage and political order.

These German writings reveal another dimension of the transformation of missionary authority after 1767. Faced with Enlightenment attacks on religious testimony, defenders of the missions increasingly supplemented confessional claims with arguments about empirical knowledge, social discipline, utility, and order. Yet this defense remained embedded in hierarchical assumptions about Indigenous peoples. The missionary could be represented as a reliable observer because prolonged residence and linguistic competence distinguished him from distant philosophes; at the same time, he could be represented as a legitimate “civilizing” agent because Indigenous societies continued to be placed below Christian Europe within a hierarchy of development.

The differences between Creole and German-speaking Jesuit writers are therefore as important as their shared opposition to Enlightenment criticism. Creole authors such as Molina and Clavijero mobilized American nature, history, and Indigenous sources to challenge European intellectual authority and assert the legitimacy of American-born knowledge. German-speaking authors such as Baegert, Niclutsch, and Veigl more often emphasized the practical, moral, and “civilizing” achievements of missionary work. Both groups, however, sought to relocate missionary authority within an altered intellectual landscape. Rather than relying exclusively on the traditional prestige of missionary vocation, they increasingly presented missionaries as eyewitnesses, linguists, historians, naturalists, educators, and agents of social order.

The reception of these arguments in the German-speaking lands suggests that the philosophes’ challenge did not simply displace missionary authority but forced it to be reformulated. Christian Leiste, a contributor to the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, observed that when the missionaries of Paraguay took over from the Jesuits in 1768, Paraguay had already reached a substantially higher degree of “civilization” than that which the Jesuits had encountered on their arrival (Leiste 1789, p. 225). Such judgments did not restore an uncontested pre-Enlightenment authority to the missions. Rather, they indicate that missionary experience continued to function as evidence within a more plural and contested field of knowledge about the Americas. After 1767, Jesuit writing in the German-speaking world thus became both more defensive and more differentiated: Creole authors used it to assert the epistemic and cultural authority of American-born intellectuals, while German-speaking Jesuits and their supporters used it to defend the social, moral, and civilizational claims of the missionary enterprise. The controversy therefore concerned both the nature of the Americas and the legitimacy of missionary activity, but these two objectives overlapped only partially.

5. Conclusions

The analysis of these selected sources shows that Jesuit writing about the Americas did not constitute a stable or uniform discourse. Rather, its forms of authority changed with the religious, political, and intellectual conditions in which the texts were produced and circulated. Early narratives of missions, suffering, martyrdom, and conversion made missionary sacrifice a source of Jesuit corporate and Catholic identity, while presenting the Americas as a field in which the Society could demonstrate the vitality of post-Reformation Catholicism. From the late seventeenth century onward, German-speaking missionary writings increasingly organized American difference through hierarchies of religion, civility, and social development. Comparisons with Indigenous peoples and with missionaries from other European regions also allowed German Jesuits to articulate claims about their own discipline, competence, and collective virtue. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish dominions in 1767 and the suppression of the Society in 1773, missionary authority had to be reformulated. Creole writers such as Molina and Clavijero primarily challenged claims about the degeneracy of American nature, peoples, and knowledge, whereas German-speaking former missionaries and their defenders more directly vindicated the practical, moral, and religious value of the missions. The continuity traced here after 1773 was therefore less institutional than textual and intellectual: the Society’s missionary legacy persisted through former members, publications, and continuing disputes over who possessed the authority to interpret the Americas.

By bringing these materials into a single diachronic analysis, this article extends scholarship that has primarily reconstructed bibliographical circulation, missionary communication networks, or individual publications. Its principal contribution lies in showing that Jesuit print in the German-speaking lands did more than convey information about the New World. These texts selected, ordered, translated, and reframed knowledge in ways that connected representations of American peoples to changing claims of religious, cultural, and epistemic authority. Jesuit, German-speaking, and Creole identities thus emerged as historically changing positions articulated through disputes over who could describe the Americas, classify their peoples, interpret their histories, and evaluate missionary work. The German-speaking lands therefore appear not merely as a secondary market for Iberian missionary knowledge but as a print environment in which that knowledge was translated, republished, contested, and given new confessional and cultural meanings.

These conclusions must nevertheless be qualified by the nature of the evidence. The corpus examined here is representative rather than exhaustive, bringing together German-language originals and translations, missionary letters and reports, books, compilations, and periodicals selected because they illuminate major shifts in the representation of the Americas. Publication or documented circulation does not by itself establish how individual readers understood these works. Evidence of reception is uneven, and the surviving record often reveals the intentions of authors, translators, and editors more clearly than the responses of readers. The argument therefore concerns the representational frameworks, intended audiences, and claims to authority embedded in printed works rather than assuming that German-speaking readers uniformly accepted them. This limitation is especially important for claims about collective identity: these texts could offer comparative frameworks through which a German-speaking Catholic “Self” might be imagined, but they cannot by themselves demonstrate how widely such frameworks were adopted.

The relationship between missionary knowledge and imperial power was nevertheless neither simple nor unidirectional. Jesuit missions operated within colonial structures of discipline, resettlement, and political order and could reinforce them, but missionary priorities did not always coincide with those of colonial authorities, as the expulsion of 1767 makes clear. Moreover, Jesuit writings often drew on Indigenous languages, classifications, and historical traditions, which could also provide resources for criticizing European interpretations and, as in Clavijero’s work, aspects of colonial rule. Even so, the printed works examined here reveal specific mechanisms through which missionary knowledge could legitimize colonial intervention. Jesuit authors repeatedly classified Indigenous societies as “barbarous,” deficient, or situated at an earlier stage of development while presenting Christian Europe as possessing superior religious, moral, and social forms. Such classifications established a hierarchy in which missionary tutelage could appear necessary. Missionaries were represented as agents of conversion, education, agricultural improvement, social discipline, and political order, so that intervention in Indigenous societies could be portrayed as beneficial as well as religiously justified. Even when later writers rejected stronger theories of permanent American degeneracy, many retained a developmental hierarchy in which missionary guidance remained a means through which Indigenous peoples might attain Christianity and “civilization.” The significance of Jesuit print therefore lay not simply in making the Americas intelligible to Catholic Europe but in organizing knowledge in ways that rendered unequal relations of religious and civilizational authority intelligible and defensible. This discursive function does not demonstrate that readers accepted such claims, nor does it reduce these writings to a single colonial ideology. It does, however, show how missionary knowledge could furnish a language through which overseas intervention, Christian tutelage, and elements of colonial rule were presented as legitimate while also providing a medium through which Jesuit, German-speaking, and Creole claims to identity and authority were articulated and contested.