Uit de missiegebieden van Sumatra: Atjeh in de 16e en 17e eeuw (Wessels, 1939)

Properties2
tagsdocument, article, colonial, religious, atjeh, catholic, mission, 16th-century, 17th-century, wessels, 1939, historisch-tijdschrift
aliasesWessels 1939, Atjeh in de 16e en 17e eeuw, Atjeh in the 16th and 17th centuries, Wessels Atjeh missiegebieden, C. Wessels Atjeh, Atjeh mission fields Wessels, Jesuit Atjeh Wessels

5 min read

Uit de missiegebieden van Sumatra: Atjeh in de 16e en 17e eeuw — “From the mission fields of Sumatra: Atjeh in the 16th and 17th centuries” — is an article by C. Wessels, published in 1939 in Historisch Tijdschrift (Historical Journal), vol. XVIII, p. 5 e.v., surveying the history of the Catholic mission field of Atjeh in the 16th and 17th centuries. The article is recorded as No. 652 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter.

Subject

The article’s subject, as recorded by Van Meurs, is the history of Atjeh in the 16th and 17th centuries, treated from the perspective of the missiegebieden — the mission fields — of Sumatra. The 16th and 17th centuries were the period of the greatest power of the Atjehnese sultanate — the period of Sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–1636) and of the Atjeh bloeitijdperk (golden age) — and they were also the period of the principal early Catholic missionary efforts in Atjeh, conducted by Portuguese and Spanish Jesuits and Franciscans working from the Portuguese base at Malaka. The article surveys this mission field, drawing on the records of the religious orders and on the contemporary European accounts of Atjeh.

The article is the broader historical counterpart to the Luc. van der Linden commemoration of the third centenary of the Atjeh martyrs (Nos. 581, 1059 of the same survey) — where van der Linden’s article commemorates the martyrs, Wessels’s article surveys the mission field from which the martyrdoms are drawn. The two articles together — the Wessels historical survey and the Linden martyrological commemoration — mark 1939 as a year in which the Catholic missionary history of Atjeh was, in several registers, being memorialised in Dutch colonial scholarship.

Author and venue

Wessels — C. Wessels, S.J. — was a Dutch Jesuit historian, the principal Dutch Catholic historian of the early Jesuit missions to the East Indies. His work on the 16th- and 17th-century mission fields of the Netherlands Indies drew on the archives of the Society of Jesus and on the published accounts of the early Jesuit missionaries, and his survey of Atjeh in the 16th and 17th centuries is a contribution to the historiography of the Atjehnese sultanate from the perspective of the Catholic mission. The identification of Wessels as a Jesuit is established by his other publications — including his work on the Jesuit missions to the Moluccas and to the Batak lands — and by the venue.

The article appeared in Historisch Tijdschrift (Historical Journal), vol. XVIII, p. 5 e.v. — a Dutch historical review that carried scholarly articles on the history of the Netherlands and of the Netherlands Indies. The choice of venue — a historical journal rather than a missionary one — signals that Wessels was presenting his survey as a contribution to the historical scholarship on Atjeh, not merely as a contribution to the missionary historiography. The placement of the article at the head of the volume (p. 5 e.v.) indicates its prominence in the issue.

Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht

The article is No. 652 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) of Van Meurs’s survey, where it stands among the W-letter entries of the Sumatra chapter, near the end of the chapter. Its placement there, alongside the van der Linden commemoration of the Atjeh martyrs (No. 581) and the Jongejans survey of Land en volk van Atjeh vroeger en nu (No. 571), marks it as one of the principal historical surveys of Atjeh published in 1939.

Significance

For AcehWiki, the article is significant as a 1939 survey of the Catholic mission field of Atjeh in the 16th and 17th centuries — the period of the greatest power of the Atjehnese sultanate and of the principal early Catholic missionary efforts in Atjeh. The article furnishes an independent source for the Catholic missionary history of Atjeh, and it complements the corpus’s existing entries on the Catholic mission in Aceh, on the Atjeh bloeitijdperk, and on Sultan Iskandar Muda. The article is the broader historical counterpart to the van der Linden commemoration of the Atjeh martyrs (Nos. 581, 1059), and the two together mark 1939 as a year of Catholic missionary-historical memorialisation of Atjeh.

See Also

Source

Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 652. Citing: C. Wessels, “Uit de missiegebieden van Sumatra: Atjeh in de 16e en 17e eeuw,” Historisch Tijdschrift, vol. XVIII (1939), p. 5 e.v.

Graph View