Refashioning the Heroic:

Abstract

In the late sixteenth century, five Jesuit brothers led by Rodolfo Acquaviva (1550–84) set out for the court of the Mughal emperor Julāl-ud-Dīn Muhammad Akbar (1556–1605). Unfortunately, their dream of founding a mission in India was brutally terminated by local opposition in July 1584. When their martyrdom was announced in Rome, it was immediately celebrated by Francesco Benci (1542–94), professor of rhetoric at the Collegium Romanum, in a six-book epic, Quinque martyres e Societate Iesu in India (Venice: Muschius, 1591). The poem was the first of a new type of epic, distinct from yet dependent upon the Classical tradition. This paper emphasises Benci’s innovation by analysing his transformation of the language and ethos of Classical epic into a new form, Jesuit neo-Latin epic. The Paciecidos (Coimbra: Universitatis Typographus, 1640), written by Bartholomeu Pereira (1588–1650), professor of Scripture at the Jesuit college in Coimbra, continues in the same tradition. This twelve-book epic extols the missionary exploits of his cousin Francisco Pacheco (1566–1626), Provincial of the Society of Jesus in Japan, chronicling Pacheco’s voyage from Macau, his covert missionary work during the Christian persecutions under the Shogun, and his eventual arrest. The poem culminates in horrific scenes of the martyrdom of Pacheco and eight companions at Nagasaki in June 1626.