Early Modern Martyrdom and the Society of Jesus in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (original) (raw)

2020, Narratives and Representations of Suffering, Failure, and Martyrdom: Early Modern Catholicism Confronting the Adversities of History, ed. Leonardo Cohen (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de História Religiosa: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 2020), 67–99

https://doi.org/10.34632/9789728361938

This chapter explores the subject of Christian martyrdom in the early modern world, with particular reference to the Society of Jesus. It investigates the historical and contemporary contexts in which the Jesuits made their own appearance as martyrs and as contributors to the revived martyrological discourse of the early modern Catholic sphere. The study is concerned with how the Society as a whole, and Jesuits as individuals, accounted for the reality of violent deaths among their confreres, and how they elaborated a variety of responses, conceptions, and representations concerning the subject during the Society's first century. This chapter places these findings within the frame of the shifting meanings of martyrdom in the early modern period.