How did people respond to the political campaigns of the Mao era? This chapter looks beyond the dominant images of the Hundred Flowers to explore reactions to the now national campaign among writers and cultural workers. Drawing on contemporary diaries and letters, this chapter uncovers diverse intellectual and emotional responses to the movement, in tension with the jubilant bloom visible across China’s media-sphere. It shows how individual responses to the Hundred Flowers were intwined with perceptions of Mao as a leader and with a perceived disconnect between signals from the Party center and local conditions. We find those in support of Mao and against local authorities; we find those, like Xu Chengmiao, who see the Hundred Flowers as a source of great hope; and we find those who doubt both central and regional leadership. Belying depictions of the Hundred Flowers as an outpouring of dissent against the Party, we find a tangled undergrowth of diverse and nuanced responses to the movement.

While few martyrs made it to sainthood during the early modern period, the idea of martyrdom was nevertheless revitalized and reshaped following the Reformation and New World discoveries. This chapter analyzes how martyrdom functioned across different geographical and religious frontiers – heresy, infidelity, and paganism – whose importance shifted over time in line with Catholic imperial expansion.

Chapter 6 focuses on Ottoman political reactions to the two opposition movements. Since the main means of spreading word about them was carried out by missionary activities, this chapter examines how Ottoman rulers reacted to Wahhabis and Mahdists in Ottoman lands. I examine in detail various cases through Ottoman archival materials, classifying them according to region as a means of showcasing the political measures implemented to stop the spread of the two movements in the centres (Istanbul and the Hejaz), in the core regions (Anatolia and Rumelia) and in the periphery (Arab regions, such as Damascus and Baghdad). This chapter shows that the severity of punishments decreased from the centre to the periphery, even though the main concern was maintaining public order in all the territories of the empire. The cases in the chapter also reveal how the telegraph and steamship helped in the central management of all the territories through the responses of the Ottoman rulers in Istanbul to incidents in the periphery.

This chapter traces the development of Black sanctity in early modern Catholicism, examining how Black saints were venerated within the context of European Christianity, transatlantic slavery, and African diasporic communities. By focusing on both ancient and contemporary holy Black figures, the chapter explores the rich and multifaced roles played by Black saints in both European missionary efforts and Afro-diasporic religious practices.

Chapter 3 opens with analysis of a July 1937 ICCAJ study on antisemitism at an international conference in Vienna, advanced by delegates from eighteen countries. The consultative statements on racial antisemitism delivered ten days later to the historic UCCLW Oxford conference that ushered in the World Council of Churches in Formation (WCCIF) bore significantly on ICCAJ’s increasing status as ecumenical expert on the Jewish problem. The subsequent restructuring of UCCLW into WCCIF in 1938 moved the social-issue and conversionary arms of the movement into closer proximity by way of powerful overlapping roles in leadership. Ongoing Nazi aggression increasing the refugee crisis furthered the move by bringing ICCAJ and the social-issue arm of WCCIF into collaborative proximity. Both trajectories responded by taking on new refugee-related roles that led incrementally to collaboration on other Jewish issues. Beginning with Germany’s Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 and increasing after Kristallnacht in November, joint efforts led to a spring 1939 launch of an ecumenical office for non-Aryan Christian refugees in London. The directorship, which was slated for the ICCAJ director, was inadvertently altered by the sudden onset of war and the subsequent relocation of the refugee office to Geneva. Against these backdrops and woven throughout were the ongoing efforts of UCCLW, and then WCCIF, to advance ecumenical unity through maintenance of relations with all parts of the German Protestant church, including the Reich church aligned with the Nazi state.

This chapter examines bishops both as saint-makers and as saints in their own right from the end of the Council of Trent through the eighteenth century. Bishops promoted the cult of existing saints in their communities, worked as arbiters in formal canonization procedures to create new saints, and sometimes became saints themselves through their efforts to live like the model bishop saints they admired.

This book brings into focus a set of ardently held transnational beliefs about the place, role and world destiny of the Jewish people. In that process it reveals a wave of conversionist responses to movements of Jews in western society between 1925 and 1948: post-World War I fears about Jews moving into the domains of societal influence; the flight of Jews from Hitler’s Germany; forced migration and deportation from all of occupied Europe; and for the one-third who survived killing squads, gas chambers and death marches, the heavy trudging of displaced persons in search of rest and solace. The final chapter looks back at the historical complexities, intrigues, contradictions, ambivalences and incongruities in and around those responses, asking difficult questions about the conversionary benevolence at the core of certitudes held by one group about the place, role and destiny of another. Can the beneficently intended actions of one people for another become unintended malfeasance? Can the aims and goals of perpetrators be furthered by the benevolent intentions of others? Is everything that ensues within the context of declared benevolence really ‘benevolent’?

Chapter 4 interrogates the voices and silences of both trajectories by placing under a spotlight the back-room dynamics and politics of arriving at official organisational responses as Nazi aggression spread across Europe between 1940 and 1944. It examines the many-dimensioned role of refugee information pouring into the ecumenical network through Geneva, and it does so in the light of WCCIF attempts to stir a course of neutral silence on divisive issues, while advancing ecumenical unification of the churches. The strategic location of WCCIF on the crossroads of neutral Switzerland, along with London connections to the League of Nations High Commission, allowed for a continuous flow of privileged information through the ecumenical channels of Geneva, London and New York. Information flowed into WCCIF from constituency sources in Germany and all occupied and satellite countries, as well as unoccupied France, neutral Spain, Portugal and Sweden, World YMCA, International Red Cross, British Ministry of Information, World Jewish Congress, Jewish Agency and the Emergency Committee of Christian Organizations, known as ECCO. For ICCAJ, beyond work for the WCCIF refugee office by soliciting material and spiritual aid for non-Aryan Christians, the predominant response was the theoretical management of geographic mission fields for postwar reoccupation. Jewish refugee populations were tracked to determine redistribution figures; conferences were convened on the just division of the global mission field; and restoration of human rights for Jews was studied in the context of ensuring that Christianity retained the rights to postwar evangelisation of surviving Jews.

Using the Iberian Peninsula as a case study, this chapter examines the evolution of female sanctity away from the late medieval visionary model pioneered by Catherine of Siena toward a new paradigm of enclosed, contemplative mysticism exemplified by Teresa of Ávila. Analysis of the post-Tridentine lives and hagiographies of late medieval and early sixteenth-century visionary Castilian women reveals the existence and surprising vitality of an “intermediate” model, which shows that Teresa’s triumph was by no means inevitable.

This chapter focuses on the Chinese volunteers who fought in Korea during the Korean War. It looks at the interactions between the Chinese volunteers and North Korean civilians. It shows how the CCP strove to shape the emotions of the volunteers and inspire feelings of empathy toward North Korean civilians. Through using new North Korean source materials, it shows how the North Korean government sought to shape popular perceptions of the volunteers.

Hagiography played a seminal role within early modern Catholicism, with the writing and dissemination of the lives of saints – ancient, medieval, and contemporary – essential to countering Protestant attacks and reinforcing Catholic identities. This chapter investigates how printed lives, epics, and dramatic performances contributed to a multisensory experience of sanctity that connected local religious communities with the broader aims of early modern Roman Catholic Reform.

This study has approached the Ottoman nineteenth century with three basic schemes – namely, a quadruple, triple and binary composition. It examined the impact of the quadruplet of the steamship–railway–printing press–telegraph on the binary of centre–periphery relations through the trinity of Caliphate–Wahhabism–Mahdism. In that way, it has addressed the political and intellectual histories of the era in light of global developments.