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Abstract This chapter tells the story of the Counter-Reformation in a non-Eurocentric fashion. It begins in Goa rather than Wittenberg and continues to the Philippines and then Spain before crossing the Atlantic to Mexico, and recrossing the Pacific to Japan and China before returning to where it begins: India. The thread linking all these places is the art produced by non-European artists that was inspired by European prototypes. Important vectors of influence here were prints made in Europe of such important images as the Madonna of the Snows or Salus populi Romani, whose prototype is venerated in Rome, but which circulated globally as copied by artists from Mexico to Ming China and Mughal India. In each case, the style of representation was adapted to its viewers, just as the Roman Catholic missionaries had to adapt their message to their various audiences. In so doing they revealed their weakness beyond the Old World, where they only achieved success where local rulers were either displaced (as in Central and Latin America) or adopted Christianity, as happened spectacularly in the Kongo and to briefer but no less effect in sixteenth-century Japan. Elsewhere, Christianity was barely tolerated, as in India and, especially, mainland China. However, if Christianity failed to become a world religion at this time, the idea was seductive. Moreover, the numerous hagiographical accounts of New World missionary heroism inspired the Old World so that one might say that the New World converted the Old, a process that is still continuing.
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