HJH Online Version Published

Jesuit Humanism and Indigenous-Language Philology in the Americas and
Asia
Oxford Handbooks Online

Jesuit Humanism and Indigenous-Language Philology
in the Americas and Asia
Stuart M. McManus
The Oxford Handbook of Jesuits
Edited by Ines G. Županov
Subject: Religion, Roman Catholic Christianity, Christianity

Online Publication Date: Apr 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190639631.013.26
Abstract and Keywords
As part of their missionary projects in the Americas and Asia, the Society of Jesus
undertook the systematic study of many native languages. In codifying and applying these
languages, the Jesuits relied heavily on their humanistic training, mapping non-European
grammars and rhetorics onto humanist models, which in turn had to be adjusted for these
new contexts. In this way, Jesuit humanism became something akin a “world philology,”
not in its universality but in its ability to interact with learned traditions from Asia, Africa,
and the Americas, producing hybrid textual cultures that became naturalized in the
Christian societies that grew up in the wake of Iberian expansion and Jesuit missions.
This chapter will look in particular at the cases of Guaraní from Paraguay and Konkani
from western India.
Keywords: Jesuits, philology, humanism, indigenous languages, Guaraní, Brazil, Goa, Konkani
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Asia
In the fall of 1579, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the future apostle to the Wanli emperor of
China, began teaching Greek to around a dozen students at the Jesuit College in Goa in
western India. Unfortunately for him (although perhaps fortunately for the students), the
course had to be cut short when Ricci suddenly fell ill just at the moment when they were
about to begin reading the First Philippic of the Athenian orator Demosthenes. This
unknown illness, however, did not sound the death knell for either Ricci or his career as
the foremost Jesuit humanist in Asia. Sent to the healthier climes of Cochin to convalesce,
he soon regained his strength and within a few months was teaching Latin rhetoric at
Cochin’s Jesuit College.1
Although Ricci admitted in a letter to Giovanni Pietro Maffei (1533–1603) that knowledge
of the ancient languages was not all that common in India, we should not be surprised
that the young missionary spent much of his time there teaching Greek and Latin
rhetoric, since in the Society of Jesus the language arts grounded in the humanist
tradition served as a basis for eloquence, morality, and real knowledge of the world, both
historical and contemporary. This was no less the case in the missionary fields of India
than anywhere else in the Jesuit world. As Antonio Fernandes (1558–1628) put it in an
oration delivered a few years later in the Jesuit colégio de Santo Antão-o-Novo in Lisbon,
the search for truth and salvation for an aspiring Jesuit and mankind as a whole was akin
to the voyages of Vasco da Gama, in which students set out on a sea of ignorance in a
fleet of ships named for grammar, poetry, history, and rhetoric, with this final vessel, he
took pains to highlight, under the joint command of Cicero and Demosthenes.2 These
were the crafts (in both senses of the word) that allowed a Jesuit to understand and
influence the world, and would eventually allow Ricci to traverse the linguistic and
cultural distance between himself and potential converts in his famous Chinese treatises
on memory (drawn from classical rhetorical theory) and friendship (based largely
although not exclusively on Cicero’s dialogue On Friendship).3 In a word, the language
arts inherited from Greece and Rome, usually collectively referred to as “humanism” in
the early modern context, were at the heart of the Jesuit enterprise in every corner of the
globe.
This humanist culture so carefully cultivated by Ricci was a set of scholarly practices
centered on the rhetorical-philological skills of attentive reading, interpretation,
composition, and translation that were applied to texts in both European and non-
European languages on a wide range of topics, although always with an eye ad maiorem
Dei gloriam. These were the language arts as part of the liberal arts that overlapped with
the professional study of scholastic philosophy and theology, as well as medicine, law, and
mathematics. In this sense, Jesuit humanism was, of course, not unique. Other religious
orders, the secular clergy, and the laity in the Americas, Europe, and colonial Asia were
not without their own scholarly, and specifically humanist, cultures. Even drawing the
boundary lines of Jesuit humanism is difficult, when we consider that Jesuit rhetorical
manuals found their way into such bastions of Protestantism as Harvard College in the
age of the Mathers.4 Yet for a number of reasons the humanist culture of the Society of
Jesus may be considered to some extent discrete and in some important ways exceptional.
The Jesuits perfected and institutionalized humanist learning to an unprecedented extent.
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They industrialized and globalized a one-time European cottage industry, founding
colleges, seminaries, and professed houses from Bahia to Beijing, where their version of
the Greco-Roman language arts were cultivated in situ. Furthermore, as the Society of
Jesus spread out across the globe, Jesuit humanism served as a starting point for
codifying and Christianizing other linguistic and textual traditions.
As such, Jesuit humanism became something akin to a “world philology” (to borrow the
words of Sheldon Pollock and his collaborators), not in its universality, but in its ability to
interact with learned traditions from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This included
multiple hybrid textual cultures, which we might call “Indo-humanisms” (borrowing the
Iberian meta-geographical idea of the “Indies”), that became naturalized in the Christian
societies that grew up in the wake of Iberian expansion and Jesuit missions.5 It was thus a
single, coherent phenomenon that can be understood on a variety of scales. It was
polycentric and reflexive, with developments in Europe influencing other contexts and
vice versa. At the same time, it did not lack influential centers that set trends through the
production of texts and students, such as the Collegio Romano or the colleges of Mexico
City, Coimbra, and Goa. In short, humanist culture was a defining feature of the life and
works of the members of the Society of Jesus, whose earliest years spent studying and
teaching in humanist classrooms were profoundly formative as the case of Ricci teaches
us.
Given the imposing length and breadth of the topic, this chapter can only offer a
thumbnail sketch of Jesuit humanism, in this case with a particular focus on the
geographical areas of greatest interest to contemporary scholarship, the Americas and
Asia. Beginning with an overview of some of the core texts and scholarly practices that
characterized Jesuit humanism, it argues that in the process of codifying, translating, and
using languages as diverse as Konkani and Guaraní, Jesuits succeeded in understanding
and applying the conventions of these languages and contexts in their own terms, while
also inadvertently imposing Greco-Roman and wider European norms on them, creating a
connected, if colonial, world philology. This was the inevitable result of Jesuits applying
the linguistic tools at their disposal, which were inherited from Greece and Rome via the
Italian Renaissance. The resulting humanistic cultures showed many features that we
today would describe as “hybrid,” although we must remember that the desire to parse
its European and non-European elements is a modern scholarly endeavor that may
obscure its organic nature for contemporaries born or brought up in these missionary
contexts.6 It is also worth remembering that these American and Asian cultures of
humanism would later have important effects on intellectual life in Europe, as scholars
began to place European languages and textual traditions in a wider context, as the late
humanist scholarship of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) and Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro
(1735–1809) shows. In short, whether or not the great Jesuit historian John W. O’Malley
was correct in asserting that Jesuit humanism with its emphasis on crafting texts and
speech to fit the intended audience provided the intellectual impetus behind the Jesuits’
famous openness to “accommodating” Christianity to local contexts, Jesuit humanism was
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without a doubt one of the most diffused and significant intellectual currents in the early
modern world.7
The Core Texts and Practices of Jesuit

Humanism
Jesuit humanism was grounded in certain texts and practices that crystallized in the
second half of the sixteenth century, and that were reproduced by a global educational
system codified in the famous Ratio Studiorum.8 As a result, it was in Jesuit classrooms
across the early modern world that the foundations of Jesuit world philology were built.
Although we are only now beginning to understand the strikingly different lived
experiences of students who attended these Jesuit colleges, certain common features
emerge. Students learned to read, interpret, compose, and translate texts in Latin and
local vernaculars, and occasionally in Greek and Hebrew, moving step by step through a
curriculum that emphasized first the correct use of language as defined by normative
grammatical texts (classis grammaticae), followed by the study and imitation of the best
possible models, both ancient and modern (classis humanitatis and classis rhetoricae).9 It
was through a process characterized by both rote memorization and exercises in creative
imitation that students were groomed to write and speak grammatical and eloquent Latin
across a variety of genres and given a set of transferrable skills that allowed them to
approach other textual traditions.
From this humanist foundation, students who were set on joining the Society of Jesus
then graduated to the study of scholastic philosophy and finally theology, and in some
cases took professional degrees in subjects such as canon law or medicine from a local
(by definition non-Jesuit) university. To undertake these more advanced studies,
ambitious, talented, or wealthy students often transferred from their local college to
larger institutions in Jesuit strongholds like Rome, Ingolstadt, or Mexico City. If a
European Jesuit was chosen to serve in an extra-European mission, this could also mean
relocating to colleges in the Americas or Asia, as in the case of Ricci, who left Macerata
for Rome and then Coimbra, eventually finishing his theological training in Goa. This
constant to-ing and fro-ing also ensured that Jesuit intellectual life was being constantly
cross-pollinated, not only vertically through the advancement of students through the
curriculum, but also horizontally by students and teachers moving through the Society’s
educational empire.
Once basic reading and writing had been mastered, a student’s earliest years in a Jesuit
college consisted of a slow march through Latin grammar. As a guide on his way, the
student might have used any of the hundreds of available textbooks, which varied in
popularity from region to region. This said, chances were that either the student or his
teacher was using Manuel Álvares’s De institutione grammatica libri III (Lisbon, 1472,
etc.), a text that enjoyed the blessing of the authors of the Ratio itself, having won out in a
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long consultation process in the 1580s.10 Álvares’s grammar, which would eventually go
into over five hundred editions, was of course particularly popular in Portugal and the
American and Asian provinces that sourced its missionaries from the Lusophone world,
and so for our purposes is worth describing in detail.11
Across its printing history, Álvares’s grammar took on many forms, from epitomes to
extended editions for teachers that included additional explanations and examples of
idiomatic Latin usage. Probably the most notable edition was the one printed in 1594 in
the Jesuit college on the island of Amakusa near Nagasaki, in which the Latin
conjugations were supplemented, as the preface noted, by “translations into Japanese and
other glosses so that the meaning of the Latin and Japanese expressions can be more
easily discerned.”12 Within this diversity, there was also significant uniformity in what
was in many ways a very conventional Latin grammar in the tradition of Donatus and
Priscian. The three books that make up the grammar were of increasing difficulty, and
corresponded roughly to the three years of required grammar in a Jesuit college. The first
book dealt with the declensions of nouns and adjectives and the verb conjugations
(regular, irregular, impersonal), offering explanations alongside tables of the sort that will
be familiar to the modern learner. The second book, which was published separately in
1570, addressed each of the parts of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, participle, preposition,
adverb, interjection, and conjunction) in more detail, as well as general issues of syntax.
Finally, the third book treated the quantity of syllables and other features relevant to
Latin poetics. Within these, each section began by stating a rule, giving a few examples
from canonical authors (e.g., Cicero, Seneca, Terence, etc.) before highlighting any
subtleties or exceptions. For contemporary Jesuit pedagogues, the main virtue of
Álvares’s textbook was that it offered a thorough and methodical outline of the rudiments
of Latin grammar that prepared students to read and write correct Latin. In so doing,
however, it also offered a structure and a set of valuable terminology for the systematic
study of language more generally.13 This too was imparted to every student who attended
a Jesuit college, who was provided with a latent apparatus that could be applied in the
building of a world philology.
To this understanding of language in general and Latin in particular as a set of normative

rules was added the ability to read and interpret ancient and modern Latin texts within
their relevant contexts (historical, literary, etymological, etc.). This was cultivated
through exposure to a range of authors, carefully selected, excerpted, and (in some
cases) expurgated.14 Students rarely if ever read the whole oeuvre or even complete
works by a single author. Instead, they encountered passages of Cicero, Ovid, and Livy in
collections of extracts from ancient, late antique, and contemporary Renaissance authors
arranged by topic, such as Christiani Pueri Institutio (Salamanca, 1575, etc.) of Juan de
Bonifacio (c. 1538–1606), a text that was famously also reprinted in Macau for use by the
Jesuit colleges of Japan and China.15 As mandated by the Ratio, when interpreting these
authors, students could rely on oral explanations on the part of the teacher, who relied on
his pre-existing knowledge or referred to scholarly editions of the texts in his own
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possession or in the college library.16 Larger colleges, such as those in Mexico City or
Lima, it is worth noting, possessed libraries that held tens of thousands of books,
including multivolume European editions of classical texts with extensive introductions
and commentaries.17
In the end, these skills in parsing and interpreting ancient and modern Latin works were
geared toward the active production of texts, both written and oral. Students, of course,
did not rush into this. Instead, they began by producing translations from local
vernaculars into Latin and vice versa, a skill that itself was not unuseful. Indeed,
translation, although not a stated aim of Jesuit education, was a prominent scholarly
practice in the order, whose members were responsible for the translation of over six
hundred works from Latin into European vernaculars during the early modern period, to
count only those that reached the press. These translation efforts included not only
religious works like Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises but also schoolroom texts, such
as Álvares’s grammar, which was translated into eight European languages, and it was
likely that a student at a Jesuit college would have had some exposure to a number of
such texts in the course of his education.18
After their early efforts at translation, students were then trained to compose Latin texts
across a variety of genres in both prose and (during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries at least) verse. This included not only texts that were meant to be read but also
those for oral performance. Indeed, influenced by the needs of the Society of Jesus for
preachers and the prominence of public speaking in the Neo-Roman educational system
that the Jesuits had played such a significant role in reviving, one of the core aims of
Jesuit education was to produce students skilled in oratory. In the first instance, training
in composition was grounded in the study of rhetorical theory that provided a structure
and a meta-language for the study of the art of persuasion, both written and oral.
Although described in the Ratio as an elementary textbook, De arte rhetorica libri tres
(Coimbra, 1562, etc.) by Cipriano Soáres (1524–1593) seems to have gained the
ascendency as the main guide to rhetoric and oratory. Indeed, such was its popularity
that the vibrant trans-Atlantic book trade could not keep up with demand for Southern
Europe’s most widely reprinted rhetorical handbook, leading to editions being produced
in Mexico City in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To supplement this
theoretical training, examples for imitation were provided in the form of the canonical
orations of the Roman orator Cicero, which were reprinted for school use across Europe,
the Americas, and Asia.19 Editions of the collected works of the Church Fathers (in
particular their Latin sermons), as well as the works of leading Jesuit orators, also
circulated widely, and we know that libraries across the Americas held editions of
orations by professors of rhetoric at the Collegio Romano, including Pedro Juan Perpiñán
(1530–1566), Marc-Antoine Muret or Muretus (1526–1585), and Stefano Tucci (1540–
1597). Such pious but highly wrought orations offered models for composition and public
speaking that suited contemporary needs much more than those of ancient orators,
whose influence, nevertheless, remained pervasive.20 Armed with theoretical knowledge
and practical examples, at least some students in the upper-level classes composed and
delivered practice orations, known as declamations, although this aspect of Jesuit
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classroom practice is much more difficult to reconstruct.21 This, then, was the
culmination of a humanist program that trained generations of students to express
themselves in elegant Latin both orally and in written form, and provided them with the
skills and a meta-language to be persuasive in other languages.
Jesuit World Philology in South Asia: Konkani-

Marathi
While Latin was not presented as the Ursprache per se either in the Ratio Studiorum or
elsewhere, its unassailable position as the language of education and scholarship meant
its grammar provided a terminology and a point of reference for Jesuits seeking to codify
other languages that would be readily understood by their fellow humanist missionaries.
As is well known, these methods were applied to European languages, such as Croatian,
which was first codified by the Jesuit grammarian Bartol Kašić (1575–1650) according to
the norms set out by Álvares.22 Yet it is, of course, the application of these methods
beyond Europe that have drawn the most attention. In some instances, this could even
produce relatively felicitous results, as in the case of Marathi and Konkani, two closely
related groups of Indian vernacular dialects spoken in the area around the Portuguese
strongholds of Goa and Salcete that as Indo-European languages shared a common
linguistic ancestor with the tongues of the ancient Mediterranean.
While unaware of the underlying reasons behind the close affinities between Latin and
Greek and these Indo-European languages, Jesuits in the region quickly recognized the
similarities. Writing to his brother, the English Jesuit Thomas Stephens (1549–1619), who
spent much of his career as a missionary in Salcete, described them in this way:
This region has so many languages. Their pronunciation is not disagreeable, and
their structure is not dissimilar to Latin and Greek. The phrases and constructions
are of a wonderful kind. The letters represent syllables, and have as many forms
as there are consonants that can be combined with the vowels or mutes with
liquids.23
Here, as elsewhere, the European classical languages were the point of reference for
Stephens, who was struck by the structural similarities between them and Konkani and
Marathi, which in turn he described using the meta-language of Greco-Roman phonetics.
Indeed, there was no other option available for missionaries like Stephens seeking to
codify these Indian vernaculars. In this sense, they differed from Sanskrit, which had a
highly developed native grammatical tradition and associated meta-language, which
Heinrich Roth (1620–1668) relied on when composing his missionary grammar of the
language that included references to Sanskrit terminology, including sandhi, the euphonic
combination of sounds that takes place in compound nouns.24
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How exactly Jesuit missionaries like Stephens and his predecessors in the mid-sixteenth
century divined the grammars of these coastal Indian vernaculars is not known, but it
was certainly a long and highly collaborative process, involving the constant questioning
of local converts, whose insights the Jesuit missionary grammarian then inserted into the
framework offered by Latin and Greek. We get a sense of what this might have involved
from an account by Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), a Jesuit missionary in South India
who produced a grammar of the non-Indo-European language Tamil:
I decided to learn the language, and so day and night I did nothing else without
abandoning my duties in other places, and Our Lord God was pleased to help me
very much. I used a grammatical method (arte) to learn the language. Just as
students learn Latin conjugations, so to learn this language I conjugated the
verbs. Finding the preterits, futures, infinitives, subjunctives, etc. cost me much
labor. It was the same with learning the accusatives, genitives, datives, and the
other cases. I also had to learn which to put first, whether it is the verb, noun,
pronoun, etc…. Since the pronunciation is really quite difficult and very different
from ours, they do not always understand everything I say. Therefore, in most
cases, when I preach in the churches, I say the words in Malabar [i.e., in Tamil]
and have someone else repeat it after me like an interpreter of sorts, so that the
people can understand it better. However, with the help of God, I will only need an
interpreter for a few more months, when I will be able to speak to them and they
will all understand.25
Similarly, Latin grammar probably also served as a torch to light the way for Jesuit
missionaries like Stephens codifying Konkani and Marathi with the assistance of local
converts.26
Taking contemporary Latin textbooks as his model, Stephens structured his Arte very
much like a traditional humanist grammar, dividing it into sections that treated native
“alphabets,” Konkani orthography in the Roman script, pronunciation and accents, the
eight parts of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, postpositions, adjectives,
conjunctions, interjections), and finally syntax. In each case, he used the familiar Latin
terminology, describing the different “declensions” of nouns, the “conjugations” of verbs,
and a “case system.” For instance, building on the Latin grammatical convention of
arranging the declensions according to the genitive form, he arranged Konkani nouns
according to what he described as the “genitive,” in reality the oblique, a second form of
a noun in addition to the direct form (roughly equivalent to the nominative and
accusative), to which postpositions were added to form syntactically discrete forms.
Despite its obvious advantages for getting students up to speed with Konkani grammar,
leaning so heavily on the humanist tradition did of course lead Jesuit and other
missionary linguists and students astray at times. This was especially true with regards to
the “case system,” which is a less useful way for understanding Konkani than Latin or
Greek. For instance, in introducing the nominal system, Stephens made a direct
comparison between the stem changes that take place in Latin nouns (e.g., sermo
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sermonis), where the genitive form of the stem becomes the basis for the other forms
(accusative, genitive, dative, and ablative). He then argued that a similar process takes
place in Konkani, where the “genitive” is the basis of the others. This is not quite true, as
what Stephens identified as the “genitive” stem is really just one usage of the oblique
form.27 The upshot of Stephens’s adherence to an idea of a case system rooted in the
Greco-Roman tradition was an unnecessarily complicated, although familiar, vision of the
Konkani nominal system, which he sets out like traditional Latin declensions. For
instance, he sets out the fourth declension noun combo, combea (“rooster”) in this way:
Singular Plural
Nominative combo combe
Vocative combea combeã
Accusative combo combe
Genitive combea combeã
Dative combea combeã
Ablative combea combeã28
This results in considerable redundancy with large numbers of identical forms, and
obscures the fact that the so-called dative form (i.e., “to the rooster”) is not really combea
(dative) with the postposition ca (“to”) added only in case of confusion. Rather, the
postposition ca, which signals grammatical function, is added to a generic oblique stem
(combea in the singular, and combeã in the plural).29 This misunderstanding of the
oblique then causes him to omit any discussion of accusative pronouns for the first and
second persons, and in the case of the third person (to, ti, tẽ) to list both identical
nominative and accusative forms, which again are better understood as different uses of
the direct form.30 Finally, Stephens’s humanist training also caused him to misidentify the
subessive (meaning “below”) as an ablative, and to miss a whole category of pronouns,
namely, the instrumental, which only appeared very briefly at the end of the grammar in
the section on syntax.31 Indo-humanism was a powerful tool, but it had its limitations.
The result of Stephens’s use of Latin grammar as a framework for codifying Konkani was
an Arte that was very similar to the familiar genre of the Jesuit classroom in terms of both
structure and terminology. Despite its intellectual drawbacks, this created certain
efficiencies for Jesuit missionaries seeking to learn the language. Rather than having to
familiarize themselves with a new linguistic genre and grammatical terminology,
missionaries arriving at colleges in India were met by a very familiar text that they could
quickly begin to use. Students were further helped by a feature of missionary education
whereby if an Indian language showed considerable similarities with Latin and Greek,
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they seem to have been encouraged to learn any differences and move quickly on, rather
than spending excessive amounts of time memorizing structures that were analogous to
those they already knew. For instance, in his discussion of Konkani and Marathi syntax in
a manuscript that was probably used in the college at Rachol near Goa, Ignazio Arcamone
(1615–1683), a Jesuit missionary originally from Bari, noted that “Konkani syntax hardly
differs from that of Latin, but for a few additions.”32 This allowed Arcamone to treat
Konkani syntax in a very brief manner, encouraging the students to graft Konkani onto
their pre-existing knowledge of Latin. Only later in the education of a missionary were
basic grammars like those of Stephens and Arcamone supplemented by more advanced
texts, the only surviving example of which, Sintaxis copiozissima na lingoa Bramana e
pollida, is actually by a Franciscan, Gaspar de São Miguel (c. 1595–1647). This offered a
more detailed treatment of word order and usage than missionaries would need in the
first instance.33
Once the missionaries were able to communicate in fairly natural Konkani, the next step
was to produce a body of Christian texts that could be read to or by the faithful. One
approach was to translate pious texts in Latin or European vernaculars into local
languages, which the Jesuits undertook in every missionary context, including in coastal
western India. This usually included catechisms, prayers, and other simple texts of day-to-
day religious practice, as well as more sophisticated texts of devotion, such as the Divine
Soliloquies of the Jesuit theologian Bernardino Villegas, which were translated into
Konkani by Ioão de Pedrosa and printed in Goa in 1660.34 In parallel to these efforts to
codify the grammar of Indian languages and produce translations of Christian texts, there
was also a strong desire to record and interpret local textual traditions so that they could
be repurposed for Christian ends. Under the influence of their humanist training, Jesuit
missionaries undertook this daunting task through a systematic process of identifying and
studying a corpus of canonical texts, which they used to create their own texts in a
process of creative imitation. Particular attention was paid to religious texts of the sort
held in high esteem by upper-caste Hindus, whom the Jesuits were particularly keen to
convince of the truth of Christianity in the belief that if they succeeded in converting
them, the rest of the society would follow. Evidence for this process of collection and
reverse engineering can be found in a series of codices now held in the public library in
Braga, Portugal. These contain Konkani prose versions of the Mahābhārata and the
Rāmāyaṇa and a variety of other works in Marathi, all in Roman script. These show
evidence of having been mined for passages that could be used for Christian ends, most
notably in the form of marginal annotations in both Portuguese and Latin that highlight
particular passages, phrases, or individual words that might be useful for creating
Christian texts.35 This is, of course, a repurposing of a humanist practice usually applied
to texts in Latin or European vernaculars, which were mined for facts, themes, and turns
of phrase (known as “commonplaces”) for the purpose of preparing original
compositions.36 These phrases were most likely collected in Indo-humanist “commonplace
books” that unfortunately have not come down to us.
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Out of this culture of Indo-humanism arose a number of texts, the most well known of
which is Thomas Stephens’s Kristapurāṇa, a poem on the life of Christ, which was
regularly recited among Indian Catholics well into the nineteenth century. Although much
basic philological and historical work remains to be done on this towering monument of
Jesuit hybrid humanism, a few preliminary observations are possible. It describes the life
of Christ according to the standard biblical narrative. Structurally and stylistically, it
displays a very careful use of the bhakti tradition of south Indian Hindu vernacular
literature, examples of which Stephens no doubt transcribed and studied with the help of
local converts, just as the missionaries responsible for the Braga codices did for the
Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. In particular, the text mirrors the works of the
sixteenth-century Marathi scholar-saint Eknath, whose account of the birth and life of
Krishna finds considerable parallels in Stephens’s purāṇa, as Hugh van Skyhawk has
shown. This, then, was not just a Hindu–Christian hybrid text naturalized in this
missionary context, as it is often described, but an example of Indo-humanism, which
drew equally on the textual worlds of the humanist schoolmaster and the Brahmin guru.37
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Jesuit World Philology in the Americas: Tupi-

Guaraní Family
In contrast to western coastal India, Jesuit humanists faced additional challenges when
attempting to codify and apply local languages and textual traditions in the Americas. In
the first instance there was, of course, no familial relationship between the Amerindian
languages and the European classical languages, making the Latinate schema much less
helpful as a starting point. At the same time, unlike in large parts of Asia, there did not
exist developed textual traditions already arranged into a written canon that could be
readily studied and imitated. Despite these challenges, believing that Amerindian
languages, like all languages, had an order that could be discerned by reason and
reduced to rules akin, if not identical, to those for Latin, Jesuit missionary humanists
applied their usual toolbox of techniques on languages across the Americas. In this way,
the indigenous languages of the Americas too were brought into the fold of Jesuit world
philology, at the same time contributing to the creation of a distinctly local culture of
Indo-humanism.38
As part of these efforts to communicate with and persuade the indigenous peoples of the
Americas, Jesuit humanists produced formal grammars and dictionaries of a large
number of languages, including Guaraní, Huron, Aymara, and a Bolivian language that is
still today called ignaciano after Ignatius Loyola.39 Many of these were in fact the first
such normative texts produced, and as such, they provide essential information for both
historical linguists and indigenous activists attempting to revive these languages. A case
in point is the Miami-Illinois language, the earliest and most extensive attestation of
which is the manuscript dictionary and collection of devotional texts produced by the
French Jesuit Jean Baptiste Antoine Robert Le Boulanger (1685–1740), which has recently
been used by the Miami Tribe to build a lexicon for the language.40 Perhaps unexpectedly,
the Americas were also the site of the codification of the West African language
Kimbundu. Eager to evangelize this population of enslaved and free Africans in Salvador
de Bahia, a Jesuit missionary, Pedro Dias (c. 1622–1700), produced a grammar of the
language, entitled Arte da Lingua de Angola following the structure set by Álvares, which
was printed in Lisbon (Figure 1).41 The Americas were thus the site of an extraordinarily
wide range of Jesuit philological projects involving languages from both sides of the
Atlantic.
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This said, it was South
America, the linguistically
richest region in the
hemisphere, that saw the
application of Jesuit
humanism to an especially
wide variety of local
languages. Particular
attention was paid to one
of the largest language
families, Tupi-Guaraní,
which included lingua
francas (línguas gerais)
used by Europeans and
indigenous peoples across
Click to view larger
Brazil and Paraguay, and
Figure 1. Pedro Dias, Arte da Lingua de Angola
(Lisbon, 1697). more specifically local
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown varieties, which Jesuit
University. missionaries codified and
applied depending on the
42
needs of their missions. Of these, the most well known is probably Guaraní, a catchall
term for a variety of dialects spoken in Paraguay.
Jesuits were present in this region from the last decade of the sixteenth century, and
whereas some acquired the language through sustained contact with the indigenous
people, it was not for several decades that a grammar and vocabulary were produced for
use by missionaries. In this long process of trial and error, a humanistic background was
both a help and a hindrance. One missionary recorded in 1610 being inspired by the
tendency of ancient Greek vowels in hiatus to contract. Recalling the contraction of
consecutive vowels in the Greek verb “to shout” (βοάω), he suddenly understood
mysterious compound words in Guaraní like ogete (= oga “house” + ete “true”). However,
the differences between the basic structures of Guaraní and the European classical
languages did cause problems.43 For instance, in Guaraní there are no noun inflections,
with syntactic relationships being marked by the use of postpositions. This, of course,
made the Latin system of declensions and cases highly problematic, even more so than in
Konkani. Some missionaries took this to heart, such as José de Anchieta, who in his
grammar of a closely related member of the Tupi-Guaraní family had rejected case as a
category, preferring to deal with the syntactic relationship between nouns in a section on
postpositions. However, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585–1652), the author of the most
significant Guaraní Arte of the seventeenth century (Figure 2), who today is perhaps more
famous for his evacuation of ten thousand Guaraní from the Reductions of San Loreto and
Ignacio Miní to escape the clutches of slave traders from São Paulo, chose the more
familiar path.44
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Following the standard
model of humanist
grammars, Montoya set
out the noun plus
postposition combinations
as if they were part of a
case paradigm, noting only
that singular and plural
forms were not marked.
This may have had certain
Click to view larger pedagogical advantages
Figure 2. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Arte y for neophytes used to
Bocabulario de la lengua Guarani (Madrid: Juan seeing Latin noun tables.
Sánchez, 1640).
However, its limitations
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown
quickly became apparent
University.
when one considered the
repetition of forms across
the “nominative,” “accusative,” and “vocative,” and the large number of suffixes for the
so-called ablative case (-gui, -pîpe, pe rehe, pîri), the individual functions of which do not
overlap perfectly with the Latin ablative.45 Where there was no equivalent in Greek or
Latin to get in the way, greater clarity could be possible, such as in the case of “inclusive”
and “exclusive” pronouns (e.g., “we including you” and “we excluding you”). Here,
Montoya noted simply that “in the plural of the pronoun che [“I”] the first person ore
[“we”] excludes the person with whom you are speaking, ñânde [“we”] includes them.”46
The Guaraní verbal system too presented considerable challenges for a Jesuit humanist,
although these were not necessarily insuperable. There was nothing in Latin, Greek, or
even the Romance vernaculars akin to transnumerality, the marking of distinctions
between singular and plural verbs and nouns only where necessary. This existed
alongside another feature not found in Indo-European languages, namely, “nominal
tense,” the addition of tense markers to nouns, adverbs, and adjectives to describe former
and future status. This could take a number of forms, as Montoya describes: “Each noun
has three tenses: cuê, preterite; râmâ, future; rangue, a mixture of the past and future.
For the present tense, only the noun itself is used, and if there are suffixes that end in a
vowel, these are retained. For example, abá (‘man’), abá cuê (‘the former man/man who
was’); abá râmâ (‘the future man/man who will be’), abá rangue (‘the man who should
have been’).” Here, Latin did not provide any sort of model, but it did offer a useful meta-
language especially in the case of the rather odd final example (rangue), which Montoya
described as a suffix formed through the combination of the future (râmâ) and the
preterit (cuê) that forms what “in a Latin grammar would be called a ‘future mixed with a
preterit’ [futurum praeterito mixtum].”47 This he took directly from the section on the
“circumlocution that mixes the preterit and the future” (circuitio ex praeterito et futuro
misto) in Álvares’s grammar, which dealt with the infinitive form of the unreal
conditional, for example, “that it would have been” (futurum fuisse), which combines
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precisely the future and preterit infinitive.48 Although at times a straightjacket, a
humanist background could also allow a form of meta-linguistic creative imitation that
could make unfamiliar linguistic structures legible and create a new local culture of Indo-
humanism within the larger world of Jesuit world philology.
Once the grammar had been codified and made available in an Arte, newly arrived
missionaries could more quickly learn Guaraní and begin adding to the body of Christian
texts. The process of composing works in Guaraní differed, of course, from that in Asia.
Unlike in India, where Jesuits mined canonical works in local languages, in the Americas
there existed no textual tradition analogous to the Christian humanist corpus in Latin and
Greek. However, this problem was not insuperable. One way to ensure that the texts
missionaries were creating were in keeping with linguistic and cultural norms was
through collaboration with indigenous converts, whose role as arbiters took on particular
significance in this context. Unfortunately, the input of the latter is generally difficult to
reconstruct. The exception to the rule is the catechism and collections of sermons and
moralizing examples (ejemplos) by the Guaraní casique Nicolás Yapuguay (b. c. 1680)
published on the mission press in the pueblo of St. Francis Xavier in the late 1720s. These
texts, which follow the typical structure of the Baroque sermons used by Jesuit preachers
like António Vieira (1608–1697), were initially delivered orally by an Italian Jesuit, Paulo
Restivo (1658–1740). These were then copied down and turned into more idiomatic
Guaraní by Yapuguay, whose name appears on the title page with the comment that they
were produced under the watchful eye (dirección) of Restivo, who also added occasional
glosses in Spanish and Latin.49 By increasing the involvement of a literate native
Christian in Jesuit world philology, Restivo was ensuring that suitably high rhetorical
standards were achieved. Once again, it is clear that we cannot speak merely of the
transfer of European rhetorical-philological traditions to other parts of the world but of
the creation of new cultures of Indo-humanism that existed within a larger Jesuit world
philology.
The Effect of Jesuit World Philology in Europe

Jesuit reports about their activities around the world flooded back into Europe and were
quickly published in laudatory collected volumes to garner support for further missionary
activities. The more popular of these were then republished by enterprising bookmen to
satisfy a reading public eager to learn not just about the activities of the missionaries, but
also about the societies, cultures, and languages that they had encountered. Of course,
alongside accounts of an ethnographic and historical nature, the linguistic traditions
encountered by Jesuit missionaries also made their way back to Europe. Indeed, we might
say that Jesuit world philology not only tied together disparate philological traditions
across the globe with a humanist thread but also facilitated multidirectional intellectual
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cross-pollination that meant that the syncretic Jesuit humanisms that grew up in Asia and
the Americas came to influence Jesuit scholarship produced in Europe.
Foremost among the Jesuit scholars who benefited from the order’s world philology was
the famous polymath Athanasius Kircher, who dominated intellectual life at the Collegio
Romano in the mid-seventeenth century. Kircher relied on both the wide range of Jesuit
texts arriving in Rome and his personal correspondence with missionaries in the
Americas, China, and India to build a sweeping vision of the languages and cultures of
the early modern world. He then inserted this linguistic and cultural knowledge into a
providential narrative and harmonized it with his view that ancient Egypt had provided
the seedbed for the world’s religions and textual traditions. For instance, when describing
the Devanagari script taught to him by Heinrich Roth, whom he met in person on his
return from India, he argued that it had been taught to the Brahmins by the Hebrews,
who were in turn the cultural heirs of the Egyptians. Such a conclusion was also due, he
thought, to the similarities in religious practice between ancient Egypt and contemporary
India, a topic to which he devoted a large part of a chapter of his famous China
Illustrata.50
Of course, the Society of Jesus was not a self-contained intellectual world, and the effects
of Jesuit world philology were felt far beyond the colleges and professed houses that were
dotted across Catholic Europe. For instance, the famous German polymath Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716) relied heavily on his personal and epistolary contacts with
Jesuit missionaries in Rome and China and supported publication of a Latin translation of
three of the Confucian “Four Books” by a team of Jesuit missionaries in China, entitled
Confucius Sinarum philosophus (Paris, 1687).51 This exposure to Chinese texts through
Jesuit world philology in turn had a substantial effect on his philosophy, leading him to a
theory of cultural exchange as an essential means for understanding the unity of God’s
creation.52 Another German philosopher, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), had a similarly
formative encounter with Chinese philosophical texts mediated by Jesuit world philology,
although their long-term effects were less positive than for Leibniz. Inspired by his
reading of a translation of the Confucian classics by the Flandrian Jesuit François Noël
(1651–1729), published in 1711 in Prague as Sinensis imperii libri classici sex, Wolff
delivered a lecture in Latin at the University of Halle on the “practical philosophy of the
Chinese.” In this now-infamous lecture, he argued that the Chinese could practice a high
degree of virtue without revelation, and criticized many in Halle for falling well below this
standard, despite the advantages of living in the Christendom. This did not go down well
with the pietist faction at the university, who also accused him of currying favor with the
hated Jesuits, who in fact offered to print the text of the lecture, when the University of
Halle refused to do so. The dispute eventually led to Wolff’s expulsion from the university
town, evidence that not all the fruits of Jesuit world philology were welcome in Europe.53
Beyond translation, other elements of the Jesuits’ humanistic endeavors in Asia and the
Americas also had important effects on intellectual life in Europe, especially as regards
the growing understanding of the place of Europe’s languages and textual traditions in
the world. Of the scholars who attempted this, the most famous is probably the one-time
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Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809), who spent his career in Cesena and then
Rome following the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767. Despite its disastrous
impact on intellectual life throughout the Hispanic monarchy, the suppression of the
Society of Jesus was an intellectual boom for Hervás, who could now enjoy the
companionship of expelled Jesuit philologists from all over the world who gathered in
Italy, enriching an already vibrant milieu inhabited by scholars like the discalced
Carmelite Orientalist Ivan Filip Vezdin, better known as Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo
(1748–1806), who had returned to Rome after serving as a missionary in South India.54
Being in Rome also gave Hervás access to the important texts of Jesuit world philology,
such as the grammars of Heinrich Roth and Thomas Stephens, as well as an anonymous
Konkani vocabulary, all of which were held in libraries in the Eternal City.55
After carefully studying Jesuit grammars, vocabularies, and texts in languages from Asia,
Oceania, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Hervás published his initial interpretation of
the relationship between the languages of the world as part of his monumental
encyclopedia L’idea del universo (1778–1787). After a further decade or so of careful
scholarship, he then published a multivolume treatment of the same topic as a Catalago
de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas (1800–1805). In this more detailed later work,
the heir to a tradition that predated the work of the British Orientalist William Jones by
several centuries, Hervás gave a detailed account of the Indian vernaculars (including, in
retrospect incorrectly, Tamil) as dialects (dialectos) of Sanskrit, which he noted showed
considerable similarities with Latin and Greek, as he demonstrated in a comparative list
of Sanskrit and ancient Greek words.56
Ancient Greek Sanskrit Translation
eimi asmi “I am”
eis asi “You are”
esti asti “It is”
emon mama “my”
kamelos kramelaga “camel”
naus nau “ship”
naukleros naviga “ship’s pilot”
neos naoa “new”
on on “being”
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Asia
trias tritua “trinity”57
These very clear similarities, he argued, were the result of borrowings from Sanskrit into
Greek. These had taken place when Greeks went to India in antiquity and picked up both
distinct lexical units, such as the numbers and the word for God (devi, theos), and
syntactic features, such as adjective endings, which were similar in two languages.
Modern historical linguistics tells us that this is not quite what happened. In fact, the
classical languages of Europe and South Asia had a common ancestor, the speakers of
which migrated both west and east from the Eurasian Steppes or some other location in
central western Eurasia.58 Whether or not Hervás came upon the explanation currently
accepted today is of course immaterial. For our purposes, what really matters is that
Jesuit world philology had the effect of beginning a fundamental reassessment of how
Europeans thought about the place of their continent’s languages and peoples in the
world. Jesuit world philology may have been closely tied to European imperial,
demographic, and cultural expansion, but it ended up having as wide-ranging an impact
in Europe as it did in Asia and the Americas.
Conclusion
Thanks to a common educational program rooted in the texts and scholarly practices of
the Renaissance classroom, Jesuits trained in Europe, the Americas, and Asia shared a
common set of rhetorical-philological skills focused on reading, interpreting, composing,
and translating texts. This was a revived version of the Roman educational program
percolated through medieval Christian scholarship that aimed to create eloquent and
learned preachers, authors, and translators who could advance the mission of the
Catholic Church. As Jesuit missions spread out across the early modern world, this
common humanist formation served as a starting point for codifying and Christianizing
other linguistic and textual traditions. This resulted in Jesuit world philology that
connected large parts of the early modern world, and produced hybrid Indo-humanisms
that combined elements from traditions originating both within and outside the homeland
of Renaissance humanism, which in turn caused scholars in Europe to reconsider the
place of their local languages and textual traditions within this new global panorama.
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Notes:
(1) Josef Wicki, ed., Documenta Indica (hereafter DI), vol. 4 (Rome: Apud “Monumenta
Historica Societatis Iesu,” 1948–), 296. DI, 12, 152.
(2) Evora, Public Library, Cod CVIII, 2–8, fols. 12v–18v, fols. 14v–15r.
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(3) On Ricci, see Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–
1610 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
(4) Porter Gale Perrin, “The Teaching of Rhetoric in the American Colleges before
1750” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1936), 85.
(5) Sheldon I. Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang, World Philology
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Of course, Pollock does not tend to
include missionary traditions in his discussions either of world philological traditions or of
the expansion of the “Sanskrit cosmpolis.” A remedy for this is to be found in Ângela
Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov. Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian
Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015). I discuss
the idea of “Indo-humanism” in more depth in my forthcoming monograph, Empire of
Eloquence. On missionary linguistics, see Allison Margaret Bigelow, “Imperial
Translations: New World Missionary Linguistics, Indigenous Interpreters, and Universal
Languages in the Early Modern Era” (forthcoming).
(6) Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual
Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003):
5–35.
(7) Stephen Schloesser, “Accommodation as a Rhetorical Principle,” Journal of Jesuit

Studies 1, no. 3 (2014): 347–372. On Jesuit accommodation see the chapter by Stefania
Tutino in this volume.
(8) On the Ratio Studiorum, see the chapter by Cristiano Casalini in this volume.
(9) “Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu [1599],” in Monumenta Paedagogica
Societatis Iesu, vol. 5 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1986), 355–454.
(10) “Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu [1599],” 319–332.
(11) “Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu [1599],” 363.
(12) Manuel Álvares, De Institutione Grammatica libri tres. Coniugationibus accessit

interpretatio Iapponica, ed. Carlos Assunção and Masayuki Toyoshima (Tokyo: Yagi
Bookstore, 2012), fol. 3v.
(13) Paul F. Gehl, “BSA ANNUAL ADDRESS: Religion and Politics in the Market for Books:
The Jesuits and Their Rivals,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97, no. 4
(2003): 435–460, at 440–446.
(14) On the expurgation of Jesuit school books, see Pierre Antoine Fabre, “L’expurgation
des auteurs latins dans les collèges,” in Les jésuites à la Renaissance. Production du
savoir et système d’éducation, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1995).
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(15) On Juan de Bonifacio, see Jacques Delbrel, Les Jésuites et la pédagogie au XVIe siècle
(Paris: A. Picard et Fils, 1894).
(16) “Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu [1599],” 426, 432.
(17) For an introduction to the Jesuit libraries in New Spain, see Ignacio Osorio Romero,
Historia de las bibliotecas en Puebla (Mexico City: SEP, Dirección General de Bibliotecas),
1988.
(18) “Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu [1599],” 355–454 (441); Peter Burke,
“The Jesuits and the Art of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in The Jesuits: Cultures,
Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2006), vol. 2 24–32. On Spiritual Exercises see the chapter by Silvia
Mostaccio in this volume.
(19) “Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu [1599],” 355–454, at 430. Ignacio
Osorio Romero, Floresta de gramática, poética y retórica en Nueva España (1521–1767)
(Mexico City: UNAM Instituto de investigaciones filológicas, 1980), 99. Peter Mack, A
History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),
177–183.
(20) On Perpiñán, see Robert A. Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits: The Influence of the
Liberal Arts on the Adoption of Moral Probabalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 101–106.
(21) “Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu [1599],” 424–430.
(22) Bartol Kašić and Reinhold Olesch, Institutiones Linguae Illyricae (Köln/Wien: Böhlau,
1977).
(23) DI, 12, 825: “Linguae harum regionum sunt permultae. Pronunciationem habent non
invenustam, et compositionem latinae graecaeque similem; phrases et constructiones
plane mirabiles. Literae syllabarum vim habent, quae toties variantur, quoties
consonantes cum vocalibus, vel mutae cum liquidis combinari possunt.”
(24) Otto Zwartjes, Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa and Brazil, 1550–
1800 (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2011), 27–28. Heinrich Roth,
The Sanskrit Grammar and Manuscripts of Father Heinrich Roth, S.J. (1620–1668), ed.
Arnulf Camps and Jean-Claude Muller (Leiden/New York: Brill, 1988).
(25) DI, 1, 285–287: “Determiné de aprender la lengua, y así de día y de noche no hazía
otra cosa, no dexando con todo de visitar los lugares que tenía a cargo, y quísome Dios
N.S. ayudar mucho. Tuve una manera de arte para aprenderla, porque así como en el
latín aprenden conjugaciones, así trabaje yo de aprender esta lengua, conjugava los
verbos; y allar yo los pretéritos, futuros, infinitivo, subjuntivo, etc., me custó muy grande
trabajo; también aprender el acusativo, genitivo, dativo, y así los otros casos; y así
aprender quál se ha de poner primero, si el verbo, si el nombre o pronombre, etc…. y
porque la pronunciación della es muy dificultosa y muy diferente de la nuestra, a las
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vezes no me entienden todos, y por lo tanto las más de las vezes, quando les hago platicas
en la iglesia, digo las palabras en la misma lengua malavar y hago que las torne a dezir
otro, que es como topaz, para que todos las entiendan mejor; pero daquí algunos meses
con la ayuda del Señor no avrá necesidad dello, mas hablarles he que todos entiendan.”
On his Tamil grammar, see Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in
India, 16th–17th Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 232–258and
Jeanne Hein and V. S. Rajam, The Earliest Missionary Grammar of Tamil: Fr. Henriques’
Arte Da Lingua Malabar: Translation, History and Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Dept. of
South Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 2013).
(26) Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire,
Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015),
212–221.
(27) Thomas Stephens, Grammatica Da Lingua Concani, ed. Joaquim Heliodora Da Cunha
Rivara (Nova-Goa: Na Imprensa Nacional, 1857), 8; also discussed in Zwartjes,
Portuguese Missionary Grammars, 67.
(28) Stephens, Grammatica Da Lingua Concani, 15.
(29) Stephens, Grammatica Da Lingua Concani, 9.
(30) Stephens, Grammatica Da Lingua Concani, 26–28. Zwartjes, Portuguese Missionary

Grammars, 53.
(31) Stephens, Grammatica Da Lingua Concani, 139–140.
(32) Ignazio Arcamone, Ianua Indica (ms), Naples, National Library, ms I.F.60, fol. 50v–
51r: “Syntaxis concannica fere non differt a latina nonnullis tamen apponendis.”
(33) Jose Pereira, “Gaspar de S. Miguel’s Arte da Lingoa Canarim, parte 2a, Sintaxis
copiossisima na lingoa Bramana e pollida,” Journal of the University of Bombay, 36
(1967): 1–155.
(34) Manohararāya Saradesāya, A History of Konkani Literature: From 1500 to 1992 (New
Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2000), 56–57. I have examined the copy in the Goa Central
Library in Panjim.
(35) Rocky V. Miranda and B. Shantaram Baliga, The Old Konkani Bhārata (Mysore:
Central Institute of Indian Languages, 2011), 5–10, 31–33.
(36) On Jesuit commonplacing, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-books and the
Structuring of Renaissance Thought (New York: Clarendon Press, 1996), 170–182; Ann
Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 72–73.
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(37) Hugh Van Skyhawk, “… in this bushy land of Salsette …’: Father Thomas Stephens
and the Kristapurāṇa,” in Studies in Early Modern Indo-Aryan Languages, Literature and
Culture, ed. A. Entwistle, C. Salomon, H. Pauweis, and M. Shapiro (New Delhi: Manohar,
1999), 363–378. Nelson M. Falcao, Kristapurāṇa, a Christian-Hindu Encounter: A Study of
Inculturation in the Kristapurāṇa of Thomas Stephens, S.J. (1549–1619) (Pune: Gujarat
Sahitya Prakash; Snehasadan Studies, 2003). See also Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic
Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2014), 65–82, and Ananya Chakravarti, The Empire of Apostles: Jesuits
in Brazil and India, 16th–17th C. (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2012).
(38) Sabine MacCormack, “Grammar and Virtue: The Formulation of a Cultural and
Missionary Program by the Jesuits in Early Colonial Peru,” in The Jesuits II, ed. John
O’Malley and Frank Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 576–601, at
586–587.
(39) Lyle Campbell, American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
(40) “Inokaatawaakani Project,” accessed May 1, 2016, http://myaamiacenter.org/

ilaatawaakani-project/.
(41) Pedro Dias, Arte da Lingua de Angola (Lisbon, 1697).
(42) Lyle Campbell and Verónica María Grondona, The Indigenous Languages of South
America: A Comprehensive Guide (Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012), 61–62.
Zwartjes, Portuguese Missionary Grammars, 144–146.
(43) Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Arte y bocabulario de la lengua Guarani (Madrid: Juan
Sánchez, 1640).
(44) Julia Sarreal, The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).
(45) Zwartjes, Portuguese Missionary Grammars, 155–157.
(46) Montoya, Arte, 1640, 5: “En el plural del Pronombre (che) la primera persona (ore)
excluye la persona con quien se habla, el (ñânde) la incluye.” Discussed in Georg
Bossong, “The Typology of Tupi-Guarani as Reflected in the Grammars of Four Jesuit
Missionaries Anchieta (1595), Aragona (c.1625), Montoya (1640) and Restivo (1729),”
Historiographia Linguistica 36 (2009): 225–258, at 229–231.
(47) Montoya, Arte, 29–30. Bossong, “The Typology of Tupi-Guarani,” 231–239.
(48) Otto Zwartjes, “Modo, tiempo y aspecto en las gramáticas de las lenguas mapuche,
millcayac y guaraní de Luis de Valdivia y Antonio Ruiz de Montoya: la categoría de los
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‘tiempos mixtos,’” in Las gramáticas misioneras de tradición hispánica (siglos XVI–XVII),
ed. Otto Zwartjes (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 205–256, at 240.
(49) Nicolás Yapuguay, Sermones y exemplos en lengua Guarani, facsimile edition (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Guarania, 1953).
(50) Michelle Molina, “True Lies: Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata and the Life Story
of a Mexican Mystic,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed.
Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 365–382. Luís Miguel Carolino, “Lux ex
occidente—un regard Européen sur l’Inde au XVIIᵉ siècle: Anthanase Kircher et les récits
des missionnaires jésuites sur science et religion indiennes,” Archives Internationales
d’Histoire des Sciences 52 (2002): 102–121.
(51) David E. Mungello, “Die Quellen für das Chinabild Leibnizens,” Studia Leibnitiana 14,
no. 2 (1982): 233–243.
(52) Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge/New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
(53) Donald F. Lach, “The Sinophilism of Christian Wolff (1679–1754),” Journal of the
History of Ideas 14, no. 4 (1953): 561–574.
(54) Mara Fuertes Gutierrez, “El papel de los misioneros en la descripción de lenguas
asiáticas por Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809),” in Missionary Linguistics =
Lingüística Misionera: Selected Papers from the First International Conference on
Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March, 2003, ed. Otto Zwartjes and Even
Hovdhaugen (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub., 2004), 233–252. See also
Ines G. Županov, “Orientalist Museum; Roman Missionary Collections and Prints (18th
c.),” in Ancient and Modern, Religion, Power and Community, ed. Ishita Banerjee-Dube et
Saurabh Dube (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 207–235 and Xavier and
Županov, Catholic Orientalism, chapters 6 and 8.
(55) José Ignacio Moreno Iturralde, Hervás y Panduro, ilustrado español (Cuenca: Excma.
Diputación Provincial De Cuenca, 1992).
(56) Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, xxvii–xxviii.
(57) Lorenzo Hervás, Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, y numeracion,
division, y clases de estas segun la diversidad de sus idiomas y dialectos, 6 vols., (Madrid:
Ranz, 1800), 2:119–196.
(58) Benjamin W. Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (Malden,

MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
Stuart M. McManus
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Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago
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Jesuit Humanism and Indigenous-Language Philology in the Americas and

Oxford Handbooks Online

Subject: Religion, Roman Catholic Christianity, Christianity

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 April 2018

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The Core Texts and Practices of Jesuit

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To this understanding of language in general and Latin in particular as a set of normative

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Jesuit World Philology in South Asia: Konkani-

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Nominative combo combe

Vocative combea combeã

Accusative combo combe

Genitive combea combeã

Dative combea combeã

Ablative combea combeã28

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 April 2018

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Jesuit World Philology in the Americas: Tupi-

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The Effect of Jesuit World Philology in Europe

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Ancient Greek Sanskrit Translation

eimi asmi “I am”

eis asi “You are”

esti asti “It is”

emon mama “my”

kamelos kramelaga “camel”

naus nau “ship”

naukleros naviga “ship’s pilot”

neos naoa “new”

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trias tritua “trinity”57

Primary Sources—Archival and Manuscript

Evora, Public Library, Cod. CVIII, 2–8.

Naples, National Library, ms I.F.60.

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 April 2018

Álvares, Manuel. De Institutione Grammatica libri tres. Coniugationibus accessit

Dias, Pedro. Arte da Lingua de Angola. Lisbon, 1697.

Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo. Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, y

“Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu [1599].” In Monumenta Paedagogica

Stephens, Thomas. Grammatica Da Lingua Concani, ed. Joaquim Heliodora Da Cunha

Yapuguay, Nicolás. Sermones y exemplos en lengua Guarani. Facsimile edition. Buenos

Bossong, Georg. “The Typology of Tupi-Guarani as Reflected in the Grammars of Four

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 April 2018

Campbell, Lyle. American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native

Falcao, Nelson M. Kristapurāṇa, a Christian-Hindu Encounter: A Study of Inculturation in

Fortson, Benjamin W. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. Malden,

Fuertes Gutierrez, Mara. “El papel de los misioneros en la descripción de lenguas

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 April 2018