Objects and Archives in Global Catholic Cultures – Movement and Materiality

Breaking new ground in the growing field of global Catholicism, this unique volume explores the various ways in which objects facilitated, impeded, and sometimes rerouted Catholicism’s movement across geographic space and through historical time.

Objects and Archives in Global Catholic Cultures examines the cultural and physical mobility of Catholicism through the media of objects and archives. Bringing together fifteen essays from a range of disciplines, including art history, history, museum studies, religious studies, and sociology, the volume explores the pivotal role of material things—ranging from refined artworks, relics, and books to everyday items—in shaping encounters between Catholicism and diverse local cultures from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe from the Middle Ages to the present.

Resisting linear narratives of Catholicism’s expansion from a Roman center to global peripheries, the essays foreground the ways local communities appropriated, transformed, resisted, and reimagined Catholicism within their own cultural frameworks. As objects move, they translate meanings, disrupt boundaries, and generate new forms of religious life. By attending to the agency of objects and the afterlives of archives, this volume offers a richly textured account of global Catholicism as a network of exchanges shaped by movement, materiality, and local adaptation.