Set in stone: Jesuit martyrdom at land and sea in sixteenth-century Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT Among the many unprecedented challenges that Brazil presented to the Jesuits, perhaps the most surprising was its resistance to making viable martyrs. The two places most likely to provide them a violent death were the sertão (backlands) and the sea. Jesuits in the Portuguese colony wanted adversaries to slay them in odium fidei (in hatred of the faith), a traditional requirement for martyrdom. Yet the Jesuits’ rhetorical construction of Indigenous peoples in the sertão, combined with its complex social dynamics, proved incompatible with this requirement. During the first decades of the province of Brazil, the Soldiers of Christ found that while their evangelical work remained on land, the sea’s narrative tropes suited the requirements for martyrdom best. To build their case for Jesuit martyrs in Brazil, José de Anchieta and his Jesuit companions subverted an age-old poetic landscape and constructed a fluid literary cartography.