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List of contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Sermon for the Success of the Arms of Portugal against those of Holland
- Chapter 2: Sermon of St. Anthony
- Chapter 3: The Sexagesima Sermon
- Chapter 4: Sermon of the Good Thief
- Chapter 5: Sermon XXVII of the cycle called Maria Rosa Mística
- Chapter 6: Arm, Sermon IX of the cycle called Xavier Acordado
- Index
About the author
Mónica Leal da Silva is an instructor in Portuguese at Michigan State University.
Liam Brocket is a Professor of History at Michigan State University.
Summary
António Vieira was a Jesuit born in Lisbon in 1608 who lived and worked in both Europe and Brazil in the service of the church and the Portuguese crown. His sermons are among the most renowned pieces of baroque oratory in the Portuguese language. This volume translates six of them into English, fully annotated, for the first time. Viera was an outspoken critic of both religious and political practices and institutions. He defended the Brazilian Indians from the abuses of colonists, the New Christians from the persecution of the Inquisition, and the poor and vulnerable in general from the oppression of the powerful. He was both a man of words and a man of action, a prolific writer and a tireless diplomat.
These texts offer insight into Vieira's visionary thought on social and spiritual matters. In the Sermon for the Success of Portuguese Arms against the Dutch, Vieira inveighs against God for His apparent abandonment of the Portuguese and begs for divine intervention. His Sermon of St. Anthony is an allegory that addresses the inequities that he witnessed in Brazil. The Sexagesima Sermon parodies literary clichés from his time while prescribing a more effective, if harsher, style of preaching. The Sermon of the Good Thief is a rebuke to the imperial officials who used their positions for personal enrichment and a warning to kings against complicity with corruption. Vieira's Sermon XXVII addresses African slaves and their Brazilian masters, attempting to comfort the first group in their trials and to admonish the second for their brutality. Finally, the Sermon Arm tells the story of the relic of Francis Xavier's arm sent from India to Italy in 1614, and pays tribute to the obedience of Viera's Jesuit predecessor.
Additional text
The sermons Monica Leal da Silva and Liam Brockey have edited, translated, and introduced-a small fragment of Vieira's corpus of sermons, delivered over the course of several decades and originally published in twelve volumes between 1679 and 1699-consistently seduce and shock, affect, surprise, and edify, bringing more of the work of this renowned diplomat and orator into English for the first time... Da Silva and Brockey's edition would be perfect for an undergraduate history course on colonial Latin America or Brazil or religious history surveys of various temporal and spatial configurations. Who knows, it might offer some coveted lessons and needed inspiration to orators-preachers, teachers, and politicians-of our own day as well.
