The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia - Rilegato

Brockey, Liam Matthew

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674416686 ISBN 13: 9780674416680

Casa editrice: Belknap Pr, 2014

Riassunto

In an age when few people ventured beyond their place of birth, André Palmeiro left Portugal on a journey to the far side of the world. Bearing the title “Father Visitor,” he was entrusted with the daunting task of inspecting Jesuit missions spanning from Mozambique to Japan. A global history in the guise of a biography, The Visitor tells the story of a theologian whose extraordinary travels bore witness to the fruitful contact—and violent collision—of East and West in the early modern era.

In India, Palmeiro was thrust into a controversy over the missionary tactics of Roberto Nobili, who insisted on dressing the part of an indigenous ascetic. Palmeiro walked across Southern India to inspect Nobili’s mission, recording fascinating observations along the way. As the highest-ranking Jesuit in India, he also coordinated missions to the Mughal Emperors and the Ethiopian Christians, as well as the first European explorations of the East African interior and the highlands of Tibet.

Orders from Rome sent Palmeiro farther afield in 1626, to Macau, where he oversaw Jesuit affairs in East Asia. He played a crucial role in creating missions in Vietnam and seized the opportunity to visit the Chinese mission, trekking thousands of miles to Beijing as one of China’s first Western tourists. When the Tokugawa Shogunate brutally cracked down on Christians in Japan—where neither he nor any Westerner had power to intervene—Palmeiro died from anxiety over the possibility that the last Jesuits still alive would apostatize under torture.

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Recensione:

Liam Brockey does what an excellent scholar should in a pioneering work. He helps us understand Palmeiro s work and its importance for the history of the world. He also achieves what seemed impossible from the evidence available: vividly and convincingly, he evokes much of Palmeiro s spiritual and intellectual life. --Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of "Our America""

Palmeiro is an unlikely hero of globalization, though Brockey makes a good case for rescuing him from broader historical oblivion. [...] Brockey s pursuit of the last eighteen years of Palmeiro s life is a blizzard of intense scholarly advice. [...] Brockey is clearly a talented scholar who has written distinguished academic books on the Jesuits and Portugese colonial cities . -- Literary Review

[I]t is Palmeiro s own letters and his lively accounts of his journeys along with other sources, that Brockey puts to excellent use in his account of Jesuit enterprise in the Portuguese empire in maritime Asia.[...] This well-written and enjoyable book illustrates how Palmeiro s final days until his death marked the end of a generation of Jesuits whose dreams materialised in the expansion of Christianity in Asia." -- Times Higher Education

Liam Brockey s major interpretative biography deserves to achieve a reversal of this neglect [...] In his extended discussion of the principle of accommodation in the Chinese context, Brockey is at his most original and controversial [...] this is a book with the potential to redraw the historical map of Christian missions in Asia. It is the product of exhaustive archival and library research in Rome and Lisbon. It is also beautifully illustrated and engagingly written. Liam Brockey has reminded us that the most significant Christian missionary enterprise of early modern times depended for its stability and survival on ecclesiastical bureaucrats. Andre Palmeiro, God s mandarin, deserves his place in historical memory alongside the more charismatic figures of Xavier, de Nobili and Ricci. -- Times Literary Supplement

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• Editore: Belknap Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0674416686
• ISBN 13: 9780674416680
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 515