Ulrike Strasser wins the 2021 Book Award by the SSEMWG!

Every year the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender (SSEMWG) seek nominations for scholarly work on women and gender in the early modern period (ca. 1450-1750) published/completed in the past year. For this year's Book Award, Ulrike Strasser's book Missionary Men in the Early Modern World: German Jesuits and Pacific Journeys was selected amongst all nominated publications!

The prize includes a certificate and a one-year membership to the SSEMWG. From all of us at Amsterdam University Press, we congratulate Ulrike Strasser on this fantastic achievement.

What the awards committee say

The awards committee praised Ulrike Strasser's book for deftly exploring the intersection of gender and global histories, using the Jesuits’ journeys from Europe into the Pacific. The German Jesuits seeking martyrdom across the globe brought their concepts of religion, sexuality, and gender into their interactions with indigenous cultures. While the study of men and Jesuits would seem to be nothing new, Strasser's book complicates our assumptions about the performance of gender in the patriarchal systems of early modern Europe, arguing that Jesuits crafted an alternative masculinity to that of laymen, combining aspects of the feminine and masculine. This new masculinity relied upon the exclusion of women and enforced ideas of proper femininity on the indigenous populations the Jesuits attempted to convert. Strasser's work then highlights the complex interactions between the multiple embodiments of both male and female genders across European and global lines.

Download for free in Open Access

Download the whole book via OAPEN or download per chapter via JSTOR.