The project examines the beginnings of the Protestant mission from a perspective of religious emotions and in terms of a cultural history of millenarian spatial practices.

This study examines the composition of the Halle mission network and looks at how the supporters of the Pietist group were recruited, their activities and the way they saw themselves. This is a subject that has rarely been researched and the focus here is on the years between 1730 and 1770, which marked the period of greatest expansion and coincided with Gotthilf August Francke’s (1696–1769) directorship. It also covers the mission’s media work in the form of the regularly published mission journal Hallesche Berichte (Halle Reports). The project shows the extent to which the Christian mission and religious emotions were interwoven and reveals how hopes for the expansion of the ‘kingdom of God’ outside Europe were connected to colonial structures.

The first permanent Protestant mission, founded in 1706 in the Danish trading post of Tranquebar (now Tharangambadi) in southern India, was sponsored by the Danish royal court, the English Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and a bourgeois and aristocratic Pietist-Lutheran network in the Holy Roman Empire. The goal of the project is to produce a monograph.

PURL: http://diglib.hab.de?link=057

Funding: Budget
Duration: January 2015 – end of 2023
Project participant: Prof. Ulrike Gleixner (team member)