| Summary: | Throughout the nineteenth century, hundreds of men and women from Europe, Britain and America joined mission organisations to go to countries where Christianity was either unknown or not the dominant religion, to attempt to convert citizens to Christianity. In recent years, historians have highlighted how the discourse of mission societies and the ways in which missionaries lived their lives was profoundly influenced by ideas of gender. While missionary women have frequently been the focus of analysis, the study of missionary masculinity is only beginning to come to the fore. This thesis provides the first exploration of Irish Protestant missionary masculinity. It uses the letters and diaries of six Irish missionaries in India, China and Nigeria during the period 1840-1905 to explore how men described their everyday experiences on the mission fields, and how this related to constructions of missionary masculinity in published missionary literature. This thesis suggests that exploring aspects of male experience and identity, such as marital status, fatherhood, age, class, race and health, sheds new light onto scholarly understanding of missionary masculinity. The different mission fields in this study enables an exploration of how missionary masculinity varied between geographical locations, and whether it changed over time. Tying these strands of investigation together is a consideration of how ideas of masculinity were held in tension with missionary men’s devout Christian faith.
|
|---|
