Missionary Places, 1850-1950: Imagining, Building, Contesting Christianities

Situated at the crossroads of missionary history, imperial history and colonial architecture, this volume examines the architectural staging and spatial implications of the worldwide expansion of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on specific architectural fragments, analysing the intersection of Christian edifices in colonial and traditional urban settings or unravelling the social understanding of missionary places, each chapter strives to understand the agency of missionary spaces. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and fields, this book aims to centre those missionary spaces by approaching them not merely as décor around and within which the missionary encounter was acted, but by making them part and parcel of it.

Through its approach, Missionary Spaces provides a new paradigm for scrutinising the ’spatial turn’ for missionary histories and contributes to the increased attention across the humanities to space, place, and location since the late 1990s. Space does not occur as an historical given, but as a social construction to be analysed, while at the same time having explanatory value of its own.

This book focuses on Africa and the Chinese Region with contributions on Burundi, China, Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, and Taiwan.

Contributors: Leon Bouwmeester, Lawrence Braschi, Bram Cleys, Thomas Coomans, Céline Frémaux, Johan Lagae, Maarten Onneweer, Alexis B. Tengan

Bram Cleys studied history at KU Leuven and is education officer at the University Centre for Development Cooperation (UCOS), a Belgian NGO. Jan De Maeyer is professor emeritus with formal duties at KU Leuven, honorary director of KADOC-KU Leuven, chairman of the Advisory Commission on Cultural Heritage of the Flemish Community (2017-2022), and president of the Belgian Historical Institute in Rome (2009-2018). Bruno De Meulder studied architecture at KU Leuven where he now teaches colonial and postcolonial urbanism in the Department of Architecture. Allen M. Howard is professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin. He taught and does research in African and Atlantic history. He has written extensively on the application of spatial analysis to African history. Along with Michael Adas, he has taken a major role in developing and supervising the field of World and Comparative History.