'Painting of the First Fruits', Johann Valentin Haidt (1747)

Professor Philippa Levine

Among the strongest and earliest of missionary impulses as Christian proselytisation spread across the globe was the urge to clothe peoples understood as naked. Bodies were central to, and always, contentious, in religous practice and in the West, nakedness has long been a site of ferocious theological debate. But the struggles of the missionary movement illuminate not only theological anxieties but critically, too, those of gender, race, sexuality and imperial power.  

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