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Rival Mission, Rival Science? Jesuits and Pietists in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century South India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2019

Will Sweetman*
Affiliation:
Religion, University of Otago
Ines G. Županov
Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

Abstract

Two European missionary teams, one Catholic and the other Protestant, encountered each other in the Tamil country in the first decade of the eighteenth century. They acted as if and thought that their goals were irreconcilable, even if the Protestants in Tranquebar admitted that the Catholic Jesuit proselytism in the region had been efficient as “preparatio evangelicae” for the Protestant mission. Jesuits and Pietists were not only rivals; they also collaborated, uneasily and unequally, in collecting, processing, and disseminating knowledge. Missionary linguistic and medico-botanical expertise was considered an indispensable proselytizing tool, and it showcased their “scientific” achievements that were admired and envied in Europe. Both Pietists and Jesuits of this period were fighting the early Enlightenment atheists while feeding them the materials from the missions. Both missionary groups were also victims of Enlightenment historiography. Despite their theological differences, they were far closer in their practices than either the missionaries themselves or their historians, who have mostly written from the same denominational perspective, have been willing to acknowledge. In part this was because the Protestants, especially their mission's founders, relied on both texts and converts produced by their Catholic rivals.

Type
Politics of Piety
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2019 

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References

1 The Madurai Mission was sponsored by the Portuguese padroado (or patronage) of missions, while the Carnatic Mission was financed by the French king. This national division was a source of quarrels between the Portuguese Estado da Índia and the French king, although the Jesuits in situ never ceased to collaborate. On this troubled relationship within the Jesuit missionary community in eighteenth-century India, see Ines G. Županov, “The Historiography of the Jesuit Missions in India (1500–1800),” Jesuit Historiography Online, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2468-7723_jho_COM_192579 (accessed 27 Sept. 2018). For a recent comparison of the two missions, see Will Sweetman, “Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, the Tranquebar Mission, and ‘the Roman Horror,’” in Andreas Gross, Y. Vincent Kumaradoss, and Heike Liebau, eds., Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India, vol. 2 (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2006), 797–811.

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10 Ibid.

11 The Hanoverian succession within the new United Kingdom, and personal networks linking Halle, Copenhagen, and London, enabled evangelical agencies in England, Denmark, and Germany to form a closer strategic alliance in both the short and long runs. See Zaunstöck, Holger, Gestrich, Andreas, and Müller-Bahlke, Thomas, eds., London und das Hallesche Waisenhaus: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle, 2014)Google Scholar.

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14 Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, first prelude to the first exercise (no. 47). “The first prelude is composition seeing the place. It should be noted at this point that when the meditation or contemplation is on a visible object, for example, contemplating Christ our Lord during His life on earth, for He is visible, the composition will consist of seeing with the imagination's eye the physical place where the object that we wish to contemplate is present.” For the most recent exegesis of this important Ignatian spiritual precept, see http://spex.ignatianspirituality.com/SpiritualExercises/Puhl (accessed 27 Mar. 2019).

15 Quoted in Smith, Jeffrey Chipps, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 36Google Scholar. It is well known that during his convalescence from a canon wound in 1521 Loyola read and copied these books over and over.

16 Smith, Sensuous Worship, 36.

17 The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge was the United Kingdom's oldest Anglican mission organization and publisher of Christian books.

18 Ziegenbalg's impressive opus consists of Tamil and Portuguese grammars and dictionaries, translations of the New Testament, Luther's catechism, and European hymns into Tamil, treatises on medicine, “Malabarian” (i.e., Tamil) arithmetic, and Tamil deities, myths, and temples, and many other books and letters published or in manuscript form. All were written between 1706 and his death in 1719. For an overview of his works, see Jeyaraj, Daniel, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg: The Father of Modern Protestant Mission. An Indian Assessment (New Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

19 Ziegenbalg solicited opinions of “learned men” on Indian religion and culture. Fifty-eight letters received by the mission between October and December 1712 were translated and sent to Europe, where fifty-five of them were published in 1714. A further forty-six letters were sent at the end of 1714, of which forty-four were published in 1717. See Liebau, Kurt, “Die ‘Malabarische Korrespondenz’ von 1712/1713 und das Bild der Tamilen vom Europäer,” Asien, Afrika, Lateinamerika 25, 1 (1997): 5373Google Scholar; and Liebau, Kurt, Die Malabarische Korrespondenz: Tamilische Briefe an deutsche Missionare; eine Auswahl (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1998)Google Scholar. Some of these letters were translated by Jenkin Thomas Philipps from the texts published by Francke and published in English in London in 1717, as An Account of the Religion, Manners and Learning of the People in Malabar in Several Letters Written by some of the Most Learned Men of that Country to the Danish Missionaries (London: Printed for W. Mears, at the Lamb without Temple-Bar, 1717); and in 1719, as Thirty Four Conferences between the Danish Missionaries and the Malabarian Bramans (or Heathen Priests) in the East Indies Concerning the Truth of the Christian Religion: Together with some Letters Written by the Heathens to the Said Missionaries (London: Printed for H. Clements in St. Paul's Church-Yard…, 1719). These can be found on Google and Google Books.

20 Germann, Wilhelm, “Ziegenbalgs Bibliotheca Malabarica,” Missionsnachrichten der Ostindischen Missionsanstalt zu Halle 22 (1880): 120Google Scholar, 61–94.

21 There is no full listing of these works. For details of additional Tamil Hindu works known to Ziegenbalg, and a few others (Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim) obtained either by him, or by his colleagues after his death, see Sweetman, Will and Ilakkuvan, R., Bibliotheca Malabarica: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg's Tamil Library (Paris: Institut français de Pondichéry/École française d'Extrâme Orient, 2012), 2126Google Scholar.

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23 Luís Fróis, 30 Nov. 1557, in Documenta Indica, vol. III: 718–19.

24 Falcao, Nelson, Kristapurāṇa: A Christian-Hindu Encounter. A Study of Inculturation in the Kristapurāṇa of Thomas Stevens, S. J. (1549–1619) (Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 2003), 1213Google Scholar. See also Chakravarti, Ananya, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and the Imagination of Empire in Modern Brazil and India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

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26 See Valignano, Alessandro, Historia del principio y progresso de la Compañıá de Jesús en las Indias orientales (1542–64), Wicki, Josef, ed. (Roma: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1944), vol. 2: 3034Google Scholar; and Gonca̧lves, Sebastião, Primeira parte da História dos Religiosos da Companhia de Jesus, Wicki, Josef, ed. (1614; Coimbra: Atlântida, 1957–62), vol. 3: 3445Google Scholar, 62–65.

27 Le Gac to Souciet, 10 Oct. 1727, Archives françaises de la Compagnie de Jésus, Vanves, Hauts-de-Seine (hereafter AFCJ), fonds Brotier 88, f. 115.

28 Gargam to Souciet, 12 Sept. 1728, AFCJ, fonds Brotier 82, f. 82r.

29 Le Gac to Souciet, 28 Sept. 1732, AFCJ, fonds Brotier, 89, f. 35r. The almost total loss of Ziegenbalg's collection of Tamil texts within a decade of his death suggests that Protestants, too, were divided about the value and virtue of collecting “heathen” texts. See Sweetman and Ilakkuvan, Bibliotheca Malabarica, 21–23.

30 Matthias Frenz takes for granted that the Pietists in Halle had assimilated the modern “analytical epistemology” of the early Enlightenment. See his Reflecting Christianity in Depictions of Islam: The Representation of Muslims in the Reports of the Early Royal Danish Mission at Tarangambadi, India,” Studies in World Christianity 14, 3 (2008): 203–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 207.

31 Županov, Ines G. and Fabre, Pierre-Antoine, eds., The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Aranha, Paolo, “The Social and Physical Spaces of the Malabar Rites Controversy,” in Marcocci, Giuseppe, de Boer, Wietse, Maldavsky, Aliocha, and Pavan, Ilaria, eds., Space and Conversion in Global Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 214–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pavone, Sabina, “Tra Roma e il Malabar: Il dibattito intorno ai sacramenti ai paria nelle carte dell'Inquisizione romana (secc. XVII–XVIII),” Cristianesimo nella Storia: Ricerche storiche esegetiche teologiche 31 (2010): 647–80Google Scholar.

33 Aranha, Paolo, “Sacramenti o saṃskārāḥ? L'illusione dell'accommodatio nella controversia dei riti malabarici,” Cristianesimo nella Storia: Ricerche storiche esegetiche teologiche 31 (2010): 621–46Google Scholar.

34 Ziegenbalg, Tranquebar, 22 Sept. 1707, in Lehmann, Arno, Alte Briefe aus Indien: unveröffentlichte Briefe von Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg 1706–1719 (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1957), 59Google Scholar.

35 Germann, “Bibliotheca Malabarica,” 9–10.

36 Lehmann, Alte Briefe, 348. Ziegenbalg was also aware of the rivalry between the Jesuits and the Capuchins, and the visit of de Tournon (ibid., 351).

37 Ibid., 59.

38 Henriques's Flos Sanctorum was published in Cochin in 1586. The copy in the Royal Library in Copenhagen has the shelfmark OS-1531. Shaw, Graham W., “The Copenhagen Copy of Henriques’ Flos Sanctorum,” Fund og Forskning 32 (1993): 3950Google Scholar, 46.

39 Ziegenbalg to Joachim Lange, 22 Dec. 1710, in Lehmann, Alte Briefe, 170–73.

40 Germann, “Bibliotheca Malabarica,” 11.

41 Tiliander, Bror, Christian and Hindu Terminology: A Study in Their Mutual Relations with Special Reference to the Tamil Area (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975)Google Scholar. Sandgren, Ulla, The Tamil New Testament and Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg: A Short Study of some Tamil Translations of the New Testament (Uppsala: Svenska institutet för missionsforskning, 1991)Google Scholar; Arokiasamy, Soosai, Dharma, Hindu and Christian, According to Roberto de Nobili: Analysis of Its Meaning and Its Use in Hinduism and Christianity (Roma: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1986)Google Scholar; Israel, Hephzibah, Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation, and the Making of Protestant Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 See, Sweetman, “Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg,” 802; and Jeyaraj, Daniel, Tamil Language for Europeans: Ziegenbalg's Grammatica Damulica (1716) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 22Google Scholar.

43 Grafe, Hugald, “The Relation between the Tranquebar Lutherans and the Tanjore Catholics in the First Half of the 18th Century,” Indian Church History Review 1, 1 (1967): 4158Google Scholar, 44.

44 Fernando S.J., Leonard, “The First Encounters between Catholics and Lutherans on Indian Soil,” in Gross, Andreas, Kumaradoss, Y. Vincent, and Liebau, Heike, eds., Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India, vol. 2 (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2006), 787Google Scholar.

45 Propagation of the Gospel in the East: Being a Farther Account of the Success of the Danish Missionaries, Sent to the East-Indies, for the Conversion of the Heathens in Malabar: Extracted from the Letters of the Said Missionaries, and Brought Down to the Beginning of the Year MDCCXIII, pt. 3 (London: J. Downing, 1714), 40.

46 Ibid., 39.

47 Hallesche Berichte 8, 638. The Hallesche Berichte (henceforth HB) is a series of letters and reports, edited at first by August Hermann Francke, and published from Halle as Der Königlich Dänischen Missionarien aus Ost-Indien eingesandte ausführliche Berichte von dem Werck ihres Amts unter den Heyden. Instalments were added over many years at irregular intervals until the final work consisted of 108 instalments in nine large volumes. The first, consisting of twelve continuously paginated instalments, was complete by 1717. Later volumes, edited in part by Francke and subsequently by his son Gotthilf August Francke, are not continuously paginated, so references here are given to the instalment and page number rather than the volume.

48 Lehmann, Alte Briefe, 79.

49 Ebeling, Sascha and Trento, Margherita, “From Jesuit Missionary to Tamil Pulavar: Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi SJ (1680–1747), the ‘Great Heroic Sage,’” in Leucci, Tiziana, Markovits, Claude, and Fourcade, Marie, eds., L'Inde et l'Italie: Rencontres intellectuelles, politiques et artistiques, Collection Puruṣārtha 35 (Paris: Éditions de l'EHESS, 2018), 5389Google Scholar.

50 These communities were associated with the Portuguese at first and were called parangi (prangui), a word derived from the medieval appellation for the Crusaders (Franks). The word traveled all the way to India through Arabic, Turkish, and Persian parlance. In Tamil, the word parangi is associated phonetically with parayar and thus can be taken to mean, if one so wanted, an “untouchable.”

51 Besse, Léon, Father Beschi of the Society of Jesus: His Times and His Writings (Trichinopoly: St. Joseph's Industrial School Press, 1918), 110Google Scholar.

52 Ziegenbalg published a Tamil translation of the four Gospels and the Acts of Apostles in 1714, and the whole New Testament in 1715. After his death Benjamin Schultze completed the translation of the Old Testament (between 1723 and 1727). By that time, the Tranquebar mission had a foundry for casting types and a paper-mill. See Blackburn, Stuart H., Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 51Google Scholar. See also Shaw, Graham, The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography. Stage 1: 1556–1800 (London: The British Library, 1987), 7Google Scholar.

53 See also, Venkatachalapathy, A. R., The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012)Google Scholar; and Liebau, Heike, Cultural Encounters in India: The Local Co-Workers of the Tranquebar Mission, 18th–19th Centuries (New Delhi: Social Science Press 2013)Google Scholar.

54 HB 26: 13–14.

55 The idea, found in some eighteenth-century Protestant sources (such as Zedler's Lexicon) that Ferreira d'Almeida had been a Catholic priest, and even perhaps a Jesuit, may have first been suggested by Ziegenbalg himself (HB 13: 112). Zedler, Johann Heinrich, ed., Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste (Leipzig: Zedler, 1751)Google Scholar, vol. 65 (supplement 1), 1123, s.v. “Almeida, Joam Ferreira von”; see the digitized edition: https://www.zedler-lexikon.de/index.html?c=blaettern&seitenzahl=573&bandnummer=s1. However, as the later Tranquebar missionaries were aware (HB 26: 36), in the dedication of the Differença d'a Christandade, Ferreira d'Almeida states that he became a Reformed Christian in 1642 at the age of fourteen. The Spanish original may have circulated as an independent work, but it was published as a set of annexes to the second edition of a work by the Spanish Protestant Cipriano de Valera (1532–1602), Dos tratados, el primero es del Papa y de sv avtoridad … El segvndo es de la missa (London, 1599). See Luis Henrique Menezes Fernandes, “Diferença da Cristandade: A controvérsia religiosa nas Índias Orientais holandesas e o significado histórico da primeira tradução da Bıb́lia em português (1642–1694).” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, 2016), 123–25.

56 See Blackburn, Print, Folklore and Nationalism, 52. For Beschi's life, see Muttucāmi Piḷḷai, Elākkuricci, Tirukkāvalūr Arc. Aṭaikkalanāyakit tirustalattiṉ ārampa varalāṟum: paṇṭitarum, Ceṉṉai Kalviccaṅkattu māṉējarumakiya A. Muttucāmi Piḷḷai avarkaḷ eḻutiya Vīramāmuṉivar carittiramum, K. M Gnaninather, ed. (Tiruccirappalli: Arc. Cūcaiyappar Kaittoḻiṟcālai Accāpīs, 1933).

57 HB 37: 44f., cited in Grafe, “Tranquebar Lutherans,” 56.

58 Rajamanickam, S., “Madurai and Tranquebar,” in Bergunder, Michael, ed., Missionsberichte aus Indien im 18. Jahrhundert: Ihre Bedeutung für die europäische Geistesgeschichte und ihr wissenschaftlicher Quellenwert für Indienkunde (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 1999), 51Google Scholar.

59 Constantius Josephus Beschi, Grammatica Latino-Tamulica: Ubi de vulgari Tamulicae Linguae Idiomate … dicto, ad Usum Missionarum Soc. Iesu (Tranquebar, 1738). Bound in the same volume is Christoph Theodosius Walther's Observationes grammaticae, quibus linguae tamulicae idioma vulgare: in usum operariorum in messe Domini inter gentes vulgo malabares dictas, illustratur a Christophoro Theodosio Walthero, missionario danico (Tranquebar, 1739). See, for instance, the copies in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (shelfmark L.as. 55), and in the Library of the Francke Foundations (shelfmark 63 F 4). According to his own statement, it was the Bishop of Mylapore, José Pinheiro, who at his own initiative sent Beschi's grammar to Tranquebar to be printed (see the reverse of the title page; and HB 61: 97).

60 In the second half of the seventeenth century, this top-down method was challenged by the missionaries in Madurai, such as Baltasar da Costa who worked as a paṇṭāram priest and was able to reach out to the lowest castes. See Chakravarti, Ananya, “The Many Faces of Baltasar da Costa: Imitatio and Accommodatio in the Seventeenth-Century Madurai Mission,” Etnográfica 18, 1 (2014): 135–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 See Hudson, D. Dennis, Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706–1835 (Richmond: Curzon, 2000)Google Scholar, 37, 91; and Oluf Schönbeck, “The Legacy of Tranquebar: The ‘Ziegenbalg Myth’ and the Debates on Caste,” Review of Development and Change 14, 1–2 (Special Issue: “Cultural Encounters in Tranquebar: Past and Present”) (2009): 109–30.

62 The following discussion on Cnoll follows Niklas Thode Jensen's unpublished presentation at EHESS, 2010, “Science between Mission, Commerce and Tamil Society: The Doctor of the Danish-Halle Mission in Tranquebar, ca. 1730–1766.” See also his “Making It in Tranquebar: Science, Medicine and the Circulation of Knowledge in the Danish-Halle Mission, c. 1732–44,” in Fihl, Esther and Venkatachalapathy, A. R., eds., Beyond Tranquebar: Grappling across Cultural Borders in South India (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2014), 535–61Google Scholar.

63 Besse, Beschi, 98–99.

64 Jensen, “Making It in Tranquebar,” 332.

65 HB 3: 148.

66 Jensen, “Making It in Tranquebar,” 333.

67 In 1733, the other missionaries complained that this reduced the time he had to attend to the needs of the congregation and school community, so that the mission incurred the additional expense of having them seen to by Indian doctors (AFSt/M 1 B 11: 18. The letter is transcribed in Lehmann, “Hallesche Mediziner und Medizinen am Anfang deutsch-indischer Beziehungen,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe 5 (1955): 128–30.

68 The editor of the Hallesche Berichte, Gotthilf August Francke, does record the hope that the doctor's work would also widen the missionaries’ access to the Tamil population (HB 26: 153), perhaps because the missionaries had, on occasion, been asked to offer medical assistance.

69 As a rule, no priests were allowed to “cure with their own hand.” For the story of Giovanni Battista de Loffreda, see Županov, Ines G., Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India, 16th–17th Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 On the Statutes of the Confraternity of the Rosary founded by Henriques, see Documenta Indica, 11: 70–123.

71 See Županov's, Ines G. Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

72 See Ines G. Županov, “Conversion, Illness and Possession: Catholic Missionary Healing in Early Modern South Asia,” in Ines G. Županov and Caterina Guenzi, eds., Divins remèdes: Médecine et religion en Inde, Collection Purushartha 27 (Éditions de l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2008), 263–300.

73 Some of stories of healing scattered through the Halle reports are brought together in Johann Lucas Niekamp's history, Kurtzgefaßte Mißions-Geschichte oder historischer Auszug der Evangelischen Mißions-Berichte aus Ost-Indien von dem Jahr 1705 bis zu Ende des Jahres 1736 (Halle, 1740), 469–71.

74 HB 4: 579.

75 Philipps, Thirty Four Conferences, 3.

76 “Gott hat euch Malabaren einen feinen Verstand gegeben, daß ihr von natürlichen Dingen vernünftig zu raisoniren wisset, und gleichwohl seyd ihr so gar blind, und unverständig in geist. Dingen, daß ihr ohne Nachdencken dasjenige fest glaubet, was eure Poëten ehemals erdichtet und in zierlichen Versen aufgeschrieben haben” (HB 1: 506).

77 Aranha, Paolo, “Les meilleures causes embarassent les juges, si elles manquent de bonnes preuves: Père Norbert's Militant Historiography on the Malabar Rites Controversy,” in Wallnig, Thomas, Stockinger, Thomas, Peper, Ines, and Fiska, Patrick, eds., Europäische Geschichtskulturen um 1700 zwischen Gelehrsamkeit, Politik und Konfession (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 239–68Google Scholar.

78 On Folly, see Jensen, Niklas Thode, “The Medical Skills of the Malabar Doctors in Tranquebar, India, as Recorded by Surgeon T L F Folly, 1798.Medical History 49, 4 (2005): 489515CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 1798, Folly commented, “About ninety years ago there was a famous Jesuit college here on the coast in Pondicherry, and some old monks still live there” (ibid., 508).

79 Axel Utz, “Cultural Exchange, Imperialist Violence, and Pious Missions” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2011), 14.

80 Landry-Deron, Isabelle, “Les Mathématiciens envoyés en Chine par Louis XIV en 1685,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 55, 5 (2001): 423–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 For Lutheran responses to questions from Europe, see, for example, Klosterberg, Brigitte, “‘How many people can an elephant carry?’ Questions from Johann David Michaelis to the Missionaries in East India,” in Gross, Andreas, Kumaradoss, Y. Vincent, and Liebau, Heike, eds., Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2006), vol. 2, 1091–14Google Scholar.

82 Lettres édifiantes et curieuses concernant l'Asie, l'Afrique et l'Amérique…, Louis-Aimé Martin, ed. (Paris: A. Desrez, 1843), vol. 2, 406.

83 Ibid., 406–10.

84 Though lost for much of the period after its description by Lehmann in 1955 (“Hallesche Mediziner und Medizinen,” 124–25), the manuscript (AFSt/M 2 B 11) was recovered during an inventory of the Halle archives in preparation for the mission's tercentenary in 2006. It is available online (http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:ha33-1-70384), but water damage, which Lehmann already noted in 1955, makes parts illegible and appears to have undermined plans to publish the text.

85 The texts were translated by a Tamil doctor who was subsequently employed by the mission both to look after the mission community and to teach botany and—to the older children—medicine in its schools. He was also to collect further medical manuscripts and copy them for the mission (HB 6: 313).

86 Propagation of the Gospel, 45. On Böhme and the Tranquebar mission, see Brunner, Daniel L., Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Boehm and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 101–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Lettres édifiantes, 2, 408.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid., 2, 407.

90 The main text has in the first section ten chapters on the principles of Tamil medicine, and in the second twelve on the types of illness recognized by Tamil doctors and the medicines used to treat them. For the titles of the chapters, see the online edition (http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:ha33-1-70384); or Josef N. Neumann, “Malabaricus Medicus—eine ethnomedizinisch-historische Quelle des frü;hen 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Heike Liebau, Andreas Nehring, and Brigitte Klosterberg, eds., Mission und Forschung: translokale Wissensproduktion zwischen Indien und Europa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2010), 195–203.

91 The manuscript is divided into two sections, preceded by a long introduction and followed by a vocabulary of transliterated Tamil terms and a list of comments to be added as footnotes to the main text. The pattern of missionary annotations in footnotes to a text written by an Indian author is familiar from the Malabarische Correspondentz, which is also ascribed to Gründler (Liebau, Die malabarische Korrespondenz) and was another of the treatises sent with the Malabarische Medicus.

92 This is described also in the chapter on medicine in Ziegenbalg's Malabarisches Heidenthum, which was written in the same year and is based on the same Tamil text, named here and elsewhere in the Tranquebar sources only as Vākata cuvaṭi, or “medical book”; Ziegenbalg's Malabarisches Heidenthum, Willem Caland, ed. (Amsterdam: Uitgave van Koninklijke Akademie, 1926), 217–20.

93 Hausse, Heidi, “European Theories and Local Therapies: Mordexi and Galenism in the East Indies, 1500–1700,” Journal of Early Modern History 18, 1–2 (2014): 121–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 See chapter 3, “Natural History: Physicians, Merchants, and Missionaries,” in Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism, Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 77–112.

95 Paolino a S. Bartholomaeo, Viaggio alle Indie orientali (Rome, 1796), 367.

96 Ibid., 366–67.

97 On Matteo di San Giuseppe, see Giuseppe Olmi, “Lavorare per i libri degli altri: Padre Matteo di S. Giuseppe, medico, botanico e disegnatore di piante, ‘qui nomine suo nihil edidit,’” in Frederica Rossi and Paolo Tinti, eds., Belle le contrade della memoria: Studi su documenti e libri in onore di Maria Gioia Tavoni (Bologna: Patron, 2009). One copy of his Viridarium Orientale is preserved in the Muséum de l'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (Ms. 1764). We also consulted both Roman and Florentine manuscripts: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, “Vittorio Emanuele II,” Ms. Rari, Fondi Minori, Santa Maria della Scala, Varia, 178. The most interesting volumes, in which botanical and spiritual obsessions of the author are staged in hundreds of drawings, are preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Ms. Redi 186, and Ms. Mediceo Palatino 29 (vols. 1–8.). See Ines G. Županov, “Amateur Naturalist and Professional Orientalist: A Discalced Carmelite Missionary in Kerala and Rome (18th–19th),” in Rui Manuel Loureiro, ed., Os viajantes europeus e o mundo natural asiático (séculos 16 a 18) [European travelers and the Asian natural world (16th–18th centuries)], Revista de Cultura/Review of Culture, Macau, 20 (2006): 77–101.

98 For his short biography, see Županov, Missionary Tropic s, 259–70.

99 He was the only Indian admitted before the Suppression of the Society of Jesus. The Pietists’ informants, such as those who provided Ziegenbalg with Tamil texts, must also be understood as operating within wider familial networks. See Sweetman and Ilakkuvan, Bibliotheca Malabarica, 32–34. See further Liebau, Heike, Cultural Encounters in India: The Local Co-Workers of the Tranquebar Mission, 18th–19th Centuries (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

100 See Županov, Disputed Mission, 244. See also an excellent new study by Trento, Margherita, “Śivadharma or Bonifacio? Behind the Scenes of the Madurai Mission Controversy (1608–1619),” in Županov, Ines G. and Fabre, Pierre-Antoine, eds., The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 91120Google Scholar.

101 Sweetman, Will, “The Absent Vedas,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 139, 4 (in press, 2019)Google Scholar.

102 Chevillard, Jean-Luc, “Beschi, grammairien du tamoul, et l'origine de la notion de verbe appellatif,” Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrâme-Orient 79, 1 (1992): 7788CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Chevillard, Jean-Luc, “How Tamil Was Described Once Again: Towards an XML-Encoding of the Grammatici Tamulici,” Histoire Epistémologie Langage 39, 2 (2017): 103–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 According to Jensen, all twelve volumes of Hortus Indicus Malabaricus may not have been available in Tranquebar, since Dr. Cnoll wrote to Halle between 1733 and 1734 asking for a copy.

104 On Indian collaborators, see Grove, Richard H., “Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature,” in Grove, Richard H., Damodaran, Vinita, and Sangwan, Satpal, eds., Nature and the Orient (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 187236Google Scholar.