Chapter 5 studies the life of the Dominican friars on the English Mission from 1661 to 1850, in London where they were at first welcome at court or attached to embassy chapels, at their family seats, or as chaplains attached to recusant families on rural estates. It shows their normally good relations with patrons, but also their insecurity for most of the period in the absence of sufficient residences with a guaranteed income where one friar could succeed another in the local mission. The friars maintained their Dominican idenity through their liturgy, their spiritual reading, their letters, and meetings. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, they were able to gain more support from ordinary lay Catholics in urban parishes, but also required to fund the construction of new churches and schools, while the lack of recuits required them to withdraw from many missions.

One consequence of the increased enumeration of disabled people and their constitution as pitiable, was the imperative to ‘save’ them from physical destitution and spiritual damnation. Co-currently, from the late eighteenth century onwards a series of intellectual and pedagogical developments meant that helping or ‘civilising’ certain disabled populations, started to be seen as possible. Philanthropists, educationalists, religious figures and, later, government officials, declared they could ‘save’ disabled people and advocated new techniques and instruments to do so. Like the racialised others of empire, disabled people were deemed incapable of helping themselves and dependent on white, non-disabled people. Taking different geographical frames, this chapter tracks these developments in thinking about the development of ‘special’ education, the development of philanthropic work and the increasing role of the state. I make several arguments. First that developments in education were linked to the wider ‘civilising project’. Secondly, that the opening of schools and institutions, whilst uneven and sporadic were based on networks of knowledge that facilitated the transcolonial exchange of information. And thirdly that the discrepant development of institutions across different colonial locations also reflected racialised forms of knowledge about the people who lived there.

This chapter explores the relationship between religion and “the novel” by focusing on a cross-section of religious questions having to do with belonging (domestic, national, global) and identity. It begins with a consideration the Evangelical Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), moves to a cluster of novels that contemplated domestic religious differences in the form of Catholics and Jews, and concludes with a shift outside the geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom and Ireland to examine early novelistic responses to overseas missionary movements, which raised challenging questions about empire, race, and religious community.

The Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, established themselves in the Holy Land because it represented an opportunity to fulfil two of the aims of the Order: missionary activity and aiding in parochial ministry. Most of the evidence for Dominican activity in the Crusader States comes from the former, where the Order was particularly active in trying to negotiate the acceptance of the primacy of the papacy among eastern Christians. In Cyprus, where the Order also founded houses after the Latin Conquest of the 1190s, the Dominicans also fulfilled their role as monitors of Christian doctrine through acting as inquisitors, notably in relation to the Greek Orthodox Church.

New visible and infrared data of minor bodies, including minor planet 1 Ceres, asteroids 4 Vesta, 21 Lutetia, 2867 Steins and comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (hereafter 67P/CG) have been collected in the last years by remote sensing instruments aboard NASA-Dawn and ESA-Rosetta missions. These minor bodies are among the most primitive bodies in the Solar System, and the understanding of their composition, surface morphology and evolution history is a fundamental step to shed light on the processes that occurred during planetary formation.By merging spatial and spectral information retrieved from the surfaces of these objects it is possible to infer their composition and physical properties and to correlate them with local morphology and geological processes. A discussion about spectral indicators, modeling, and mapping is given for both asteroids and comet 67P/CG. Given that the remote sensing observation techniques are very similar between Dawn and Rosetta missions, a comparative approach is used for the entire chapter and methods and interpretation for the results of these different objects are given together.

The chapter examines the systems of taxation, tributes, and donations that maintained the mission enterprise.In modern scholarship, studies continue to recycle old tropes of mendicant poverty and development projects. Departing from these analyses, this chapter examines the mission’s economic dependence on native tributes and forced labor systems.Arrangements between native rulers and missionaries constituted a colonial economy that sharply contradicted the mendicants’ self-image as ascetic hermits.The chapter begins by contrasting Spanish claims that the mission was financed through royal patronage with colonial records that demonstrate the myriad ways in which indigenous communities supported it with finances, goods, and labor.The chapter then examines the consequences of the missionaries’ dependence on native economies. Far from their imagined lives as desert hermits in a pagan land, friars lived in close proximity to indigenous towns and faced a plethora of temptations.This section examines numerous reports of misconduct by friars, as well as efforts by mendicant Orders to regulate material wealth.The missionaries’ material dependence on indigenous communities challenged ideals of poverty and chastity at the core of their identity.Thus, while indigenous people paid dearly for the mission with their labor, friars paid for it with their racked consciences.