Alcuin of York, who ended his days at St. Martin’s, Tours, in France, after working for Charlemagne at Aachen, wrote a biography of Willibrord, an early missionary in Frisia, mentioned also in Eddi’s life of Wilfrid. Alcuin made both a prose and a verse version: excerpts from both are recorded here. Willibrord studied at Ripon and in Ireland before crossing to the Continent to work as a missionary in Frisia, as well as making a journey to Rome.

Willibald of Mainz, an Anglo-Saxon who moved to Germany, wrote a biography of Boniface around 760, tracing his life from his birth in Devon, his studies in England to his missionary work in Germany. The Latin and the structure of this work are of a high quality. Like many other missionaries, Boniface also visited Rome, to obtain the Pope’s approval.

Chapter 1 presents the historical context and the key players who called for statistics to be collected as part of the interwar public health programs presented in later chapters. Striving to promote the health of “others” – poor rural communities, or people in foreign countries – using scientific methods, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Milbank Memorial Fund provided support to statistical initiatives with the help of bacteriologists trained in laboratory methods, who aimed to extend those principles to the social world. Missionaries’ sons born in China – with knowledge both of Chinese conditions and North American public health training – made implementation of such programs possible in China. It was these driving forces that enabled these public health programs, including related statistical practices.

Discusses education, looking specifically at how religious language interacts with educational settings where a teacher’s religious identity is a key part of their motivation for their work: Christians teaching English as a second or additional language in contexts where teachers are explicitly motivated by their religious beliefs.

This chapter explores race as a prevalent theme in American puritan literature. How did puritans understand human difference in early America and how did those understandings affect the literature they produced about their interactions with black Africans and Natives? That is to say, what did puritans mean when they employed race in early America? And how might their encounters with black Africans and Natives have impeded their efforts to represent race? Despite the fact that race as an idea and social structure was not stable through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, puritans endeavored to differentiate themselves from those black Africans and Natives with whom they interacted in early America. To establish difference, they modified racialized ideas that were already circulating through Europe. This chapter highlights several of those ideas as they appear in American puritan literature. It ends with a discussion about the ways in which the material world encounters between puritans and those they deemed inferior because of their race challenged their racial notions and shaped the literature.

This chapter explores how European colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages by relying on indigenous interlocutors. European missionaries and indigenous people co-authored an extensive archive of texts in Wampanoag, Mi’kmaq, Mohawk, Abenaki, Illinois, Mahican, Cherokee, and Choctaw, to name just of few of the languages transliterated from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. This chapter argues that within this archive language proves resilient, as native interlocutors established forms of rhetorical preservation despite this historical engine of cultural erasure. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates that indigenous and colonial linguistic knowledge exchange impacted the structure of European and Euro-American intellectual history as well as the rise of a national literary culture in the 1810s and 1820s. American letters emerged through a complex engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words.

It appears clear that Mani embarked on a public career as a preacher, healer and wise man, debating with leading sages of the time and gaining adherents from varied religious communities. He travelled widely within Iran and Mesopotamia and even beyond to India, and he sought to convert kings and members of the aristocracy at the courts of the Sasanian empire. This chapter examines Mani’s missions and the community he founded within the context of the intellectual, spiritual and doctrinal traditions with which he interacted, including Mazdayasnianism and Buddhism, and the scientific lore of the time. Consideration of devotional imperatives (hagiography) and the tropes of ancient narrative and romance strip away much literary artifice for the processes of historical reconstruction.