In 1583, five Jesuit brothers set out with the intention of founding a new church and mission in India. Their dream was almost immediately, and brutally, terminated by local opposition. When their massacre was announced in Rome, it was treated as martyrdom. Francesco Benci, professor of rhetoric at the Collegium Romanum, immediately set about celebrating their deaths in a new type of epic, distinct from, yet dependent upon, the classical tradition: Quinque martyres e Societate Iesu in India. This is the first critical edition and translation of this important text. The commentary highlights both the classical sources and the historical and religious context of the mission. The introduction outlines Benci’s career and stresses his role as the founder of this vibrant new genre. This volume is the first one for a new subseries in the 'Jesuit Studies' series: 'Jesuit Neo-Latin Library'.

Making Martyrs focuses on both artistic and textual representations to investigate the making of martyrs in the fourth- and fifth-century Latin West. It shows that this 'making' of martyrs played a crucial role in the process of Christianisation during the post-Constantinian period. The writings of some of the most important figures in late antique Christianity - Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome - are considered, along with a number of anonymous, marginal and marginalised texts. The book covers such major subjects as the history of martyrdom and martyr texts and the role of images and relics in cult and representation. It also examines a number of key themes including the role of spectacle in martyr representation, the importance of suffering in the construction of Christian identity, and the interaction of text and image in the process of representation. Between the chapters proper are 'inserts' focusing on individual martyrs (such as the African martyr bishop Cyprian, and the virgin martyr par excellence, Agnes).These sections provide close readings of the textual and material testimony, and show how politics (textual, sexual and ecclesiastical) were bound up in the making of martyrs. The power of the martyrs in Late Antiquity, and beyond, is clearly demonstrated.

A provocative contribution to the history of early modern Euro-Asian interactions that provides new perspectives on the encounter between Catholicism and Hinduism in India

Employing a blend of historical, philological, literary and linguistic methods, Richard Rowlands Verstegan: A Versatile Man in an Age of Turmoil paints a full-bodied portrait of Richard Rowlands Verstegan (or Verstegen, 1550?-1640) - a man whose multiple and variously spelled name reflects a multifaceted public personality. English by birth and upbringing, Dutch by fatherly descent, Verstegan spent most of his life on the Continent, employed intermittently as a Catholic spy, poet, religious translator, polemicist, and philologist. While this many-sidedness is typical of the Renaissance period, some of Verstegan's interests and positions were innovative or extravagant - witness his familiarization of the epigram in the Netherlands (1617), or his description of Teutonic England in the Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605). In this collection of essays, Verstegan's life and works are both explored in themselves and as mirrors of his times. As each contributor investigates one or more aspects of Verstegan's careers, a wider perspective is created of English and Dutch religious politics, of the prevailing literary modes and fashions of the period, and of the picture that Europe was beginning to paint for itself. Conversely, this all-encompassing view demonstrates the centrality of a figure who has long been relegated to the margins of English, Dutch, and European history.

The story of how the Aeneid has been approached by various postclassical authors - including Shakespeare and Milton - not as an endorsement of the ideals of their societies, but as a model for poems that probed and challenged dominant values, just as Virgil himself had done centuries before.