The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa . Edited by Patrick Harries and David Maxwell. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012. xvi + 342 pp. $45.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa . Edited by Patrick Harries and David Maxwell . Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich. : Eerdmans , 2012. xvi + 342 pp. $45.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesChristian missionaries always sought to make church history global, but only within the last quarter century has this end been substantially achieved, in many ways unimagined by the pioneers of evangelization before World War I and the institution-builders of the interwar and post-1945 colonial decades. In the recent literature of imperial and global history, missionaries have to a degree come into their own as complex actors, their thoughts and deeds undergoing renewed scrutiny, or at the very least being exposed in the course of scholarly rummaging of the archives of now moribund mission societies.This addition to the Eerdmans series, now twenty-two volumes published since 2000, brings the number of edited volumes to eleven. The early strength of the series rested on studies of missions to China and India, with Africa figuring more fully rather later on, as might be explained by its relatively recent decolonization and the unfolding of circumstances including the intensification of religious activity since the 1980s manifested in proliferating Pentecostalism and the sustained following of older Christian denominations now under African leadership. The collection, while it assays many times, places and currents of thought and understanding, is consistently strong, well documented, and engaging. It is muted in mood, compared with the hinge volume in the series, Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (edited by Brian Stanley, 2003) which was bookended by a sharp critique of field missionaries by Adrian Hastings and a discussion of the post-colonial decades in Africa (1955-1975) by Ogbu Kalu, who noted the historiographical shift from attention to agency to that of popular reception of Christianity. The Spiritual in the Secular inhabits both historiographies as it traverses the intellectual history of discrete missionaries who brought knowledge to the metropole through publication in journals and books and by depositing data and artifacts in museums and universities.Each of the editors is at a highpoint in his career, Harries as Professor of African History at the University of Basel and Maxwell newly installed as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University. They share a special interest in Southern Africa; Harries has been more committed to the theoretical and thematic thrust of this volume, displayed so richly in his monograph, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). Maxwell, on the other hand, concentrated on Zimbabwe, most recently publishing African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.) Maxwell's chapter in the present collection, reflecting his current research, takes up the case of W. F. P. Burton, a British missionary who co-founded a Pentecostal faith mission in the Belgian Congo where he served from 1914 to 1960, passing through a series of accommodations with specifically Luba culture and moving him, as the chapter title says, "From Iconoclasm to Preservation." When paired with the other chapter set in the Congo (1937-2007) by Honore Vinck, a former Flemish missionary priest associated with the Aequatoria Center, a hub of Catholic research and publication concentrating upon its surrounding people, the Mongo, one obtains a remarkable picture of the dynamic contexts and processes of accruing knowledge and the shaping of ethnicities in the southeastern part of the country. …