MissNature · The Evangelizing MISSions facing the NATURE: Situated Knowledge and Environmental Impacts of Catholic Church in New France, France and Southern Italy during the Early Modern Period

This project focuses on the Catholic Church’s environmental impacts and its strategies of environmental adaptation in the context of the evangelizing missions during the first half of the 17th century. It is based on three case studies, covering the variety of missions, territories and missionized: the Jesuit mission to non-Christian population, ad gentes, of New France, the Capuchin mission against Protestantism of the Cévennes, in France, and the Jesuit so-called “popular” mission, to already Catholic people, in Southern Italy. These mission lands were remote territories, difficult to access and largely beyond the control of the Church. There, the environment became a central actor and missionaries faced many challenges. With a comparative perspective, MissNature aims to understand the relationship with nature – flora, fauna, geography – and the adaptations required for a mission to work. MissNature seeks also to understand how their encounter with new landscapes and climates redefined the missionary programs. How did these missions impact local environments? How in turn did environmental conditions reshape missionary activities and the adaptation of Catholicism to local realities? Through the challenges of travel, settlements and survival, the environment redefined Rome’s evangelizing project and its understanding of the relationship between the human and the natural—and thus, the very understanding of what the Universal Church should––and could––be. MissNature will lay the ground for a new positioning of Rome in the field of global environmental history, as one of the few truly global institutions of the early modern period, and will participate to the decentralization of the history of Catholicism by embracing the social differences of actors. This project introduces thus a radically new element: the environment seen as an historical actor, capable of influencing the directions taken by Rome in its missionary programs and, ultimately, the European expansion.