This is the first book-length study of the reception of Christianity and the epistemic outcomes of contact between Protestant and Catholic missionaries and Indigenous Austronesians in the contact zone of seventeenth-century colonial Taiwan.



In the Age of European Expansion, Dutch Reformed and Spanish Catholic missionaries attempted to win the souls of Indigenous Austronesian people in Taiwan. Christopher Joby answers the question of how the missionaries tried to overcome the gap between their own cultures and languages and those of the Indigenous Austronesians or Formosans to communicate their versions of the Christian Gospel in the contact zone of seventeenth-century Taiwan, and he analyses the consequences of these encounters. As such, this book is a reception history of the texts, beliefs, and practices that Reformed Protestant and Catholic missionaries introduced to convert the Formosans to their mode of Christianity. Using many linguistic and non-linguistic examples, this approach allows for a ‘complementary colour perspective’ by comparing the epistemic outcomes of the Dutch Reformed and Catholic missions.