Category: Mission Studies

New article on Book Sales and Literary Migration

New article on Book Sales and Literary Migration

My article “The Decrees of the First Mexican Council (1555): Confiscations, Collectors, and Literary Migration” was published in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 117, no. 2 (June 2023), pp. 143-171.

Abstract: This piece studies the decrees of the First Mexican Council, gathered in 1555 to establish legal norms for the newly founded Church province. Apart from some notes on the conciliar context, the article focuses entirely on the original manuscript (1555) and the first print edition (1556). It explains how the manuscript moved from the cathedral archives in Mexico City into the collections of Bancroft Library, where it is found today. The article also traces the provenance of all known copies of the first print edition. Many of them passed through the bookshelves of Mexican collectors, and today the majority are held by libraries outside Mexico. To understand this particular case, I identify members of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century networks involved in book and manuscript trade. I also explain how dramatic events in Mexican history allowed them to acquire early colonial documents and imprints. Combining provenance research with an analysis of the broader historical and political context, I provide a case study of the close relationship between historical developments, book collecting, and book sales, which led to the veritable exodus of written material from Latin America to Europe and North America.

The article is available here

Det excentriska är centralt

Det excentriska är centralt

Magnus Lundbergs installationsföreläsning som professor i kyrko- och missionsstudier vid Uppsala universitet, 15 november 2016.

 

Är detta inte själva sinnebilden av excentricitet? En engelsk gentleman i tredelad kostym som har kommit på idén att använda 17 meter exklusiv harristweed för att klä en häst på samma sätt. Här betecknar excentriskt det lätt bisarra, men acceptabla, som företrädesvis görs av brittiska män med gamla pengar. Det är kanske framförallt familjenamnet som skiljer excentrikern från byfånen. Personer–mänskliga eller icke-mänskliga–i tredelad kostym ska dock inte lägga beslag på ordet. Tweed är inget nödvändigt eller tillräckligt kriterium för excentricitet.

Continue reading “Det excentriska är centralt” →

Mission Sudies in Sweden, 1910s-1930s

Mission Sudies in Sweden, 1910s-1930s

Gustaf Lindeberg and the Place of Academic Mission Sudies in Sweden, 1910s-1930s

Magnus Lundberg

Chapter published in: Carine Dujardin & Claude Prudhomme (eds.), Mission & Science: Missiology Revisited/Missiologie revisitée, 1850-1940, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015.

Academic interest in missions increased in many parts of the world following the 1910 Edinburgh Conference. Scandinavia and Sweden were no exceptions. At that time, there were only two major universities in Sweden: Lund and Uppsala. Both universities had their own theological faculty and to some extent they formed two separate worlds without much cross-fertilization. In this article, I focus on the place and role of academic mission studies at Lund University in the early decades of the twentieth century, which was more or less equivalent to the work of Gustaf Lindeberg (1878-1961). He will thus be at the centre of our attention.

In 1918, Lindeberg became the first Swede to defend a doctoral dissertation on a purely missiological subject. After completing his doctorate, he became a lecturer in mission history at Lund University. A prolific, if perhaps not very original author, Lindeberg published a dozen monographs and several hundred articles on mission-related subjects, all of them written in Swedish. Most of his publications were not intended for an academic audience, but a more general public. In this article, I shall therefore emphasize Lindeberg’s role as an active populariser of academic mission studies.

The full text is available here

Extracts of the whole book is found here