The Empire of Apostles: Jesuits in Brazil and India, 16th–17th c
- Format:
- Dissertation
- Year:
- 2012
- University:
- University of Chicago
- Thesis type:
- Doctoral Dissertation
- Place published:
- Chicago
- Language:
- Abstract:
The European (re)discovery of the Old World and the New which inaugurated the early modern era begins with two iconic, almost slapstick moments of confusion: Christopher Columbus' insistence that he had landed on the shores of India in 1492, and Vasco da Gama's Christian thanksgiving at a Hindu temple in India in 1498. These moments encapsulate the provenance of the confused geography of the "Indies." In the next few decades, the term would multiply in meaning and usage. Notably, amongst Catholic missionaries and the Jesuit order in particular, in the atmosphere of religious revival and reformism of the sixteenth century, the term would come to encompass all those remote and benighted regions of rural Europe where men were Christians in name only. In this cartography of the "Indies," China or for that matter, India, Brazil, southern Italy and other areas of a provincial Europe occupied the same plane. While there was undoubtedly an implicit hierarchy operating here & mdash;Christian, civilized versus pagan, barbaric space -- there was as yet no imperial geography, no clear distinction between metropole and colony, no "Europe" in fact. Nonetheless, by the seventeenth century, this dispersive geography had given way to an imaginaire of empire, where "Europe" as imperial metropole became the fulcrum upon which the world turned.
This dissertation traces this evolution through the lives of six Jesuit missionaries -- Francis Xavier, Thomas Stephens and Baltasar da Costa in India and Manuel da Nóbrega, José de Anchieta and António Vieira in Brazil. The careers of these Jesuits, spanning the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, frame two key moments of crisis in the Catholic notion of universal Christian empire: the dissolution of the unity of the Church, and the end of Iberian hence Catholic domination of the enterprise of European empire, in the face of Dutch and English imperial ambition. The careers of these six Jesuits thus parallel and reflect the arc of the first phase of European imperial enterprise, one in which the Roman notion of imperium was adapted to include the profession of Christianity as a mark of civility, a project in which the Jesuits played a crucial role.
More pertinently for the purposes of this project, the careers of these men demonstrate precisely the evolution of the imaginaire of empire described above. Francis Xavier and Manuel da Nóbrega found in India and Brazil of the 1540s particular mission fields, a series of local contexts to which they had to tailor their missionary strategies. While they were undoubtedly aware of the relationship of these mission fields to the wider realm of the Portuguese crown and aspired wholeheartedly for their absorption into universal Christendom, their point of reference was not a metropolitan Europe. A century later, by contrast, Baltasar da Costa and António Vieira, who inhabited very different roles as imperial missionaries from their pioneering forbearers, visualized these far-flung and completely different colonies in one frame, simultaneously and in a relationship of subordination to Europe -- in other words, as an empire, albeit one in peril. From specific and strikingly disparate mission fields, Portuguese India and Brazil had come to function as colonies, interchangeable in as far as they bore a relationship of possession with Portugal, which thus emerges as the center to the imperial periphery.
- Who (Jesuits):
- What (Subjects):
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- Other link:
- Number of Pages:
- 501
- ISBN:
- 9781267601339