Yasmin Haskel

Pagan powers, passions and their proxies: the gods in Jesuit Latin epic

The early modern Jesuits were heirs to the Latin humanism of the Renaissance and not immune to the cult of Virgil. In this talk I will focus on three Jesuit ‘Virgilian’ epics from the beginning, middle and end of the ‘Old’ Society: Francesco Benci’s Five Martyrs (1591), on the Jesuit martyrs of Cuncolim, southern India and Bartolomeu Pereira’s Paceicis (1640), on the life and martyrdom in Nagasaki in 1626 of the poet’s cousin, Francisco Pacheco; and the Heroum libri iv of Emmanuel de Azevedo (1789), on the exile of American Jesuits in Europe during the Suppression. How did these poets, writing at critical moments in the Society’s history, mobilise the traditional epic machinery of supernatural apparitions, interventions, and motivation of human passions? And how did they treat the ‘new’ gods encountered in their overseas missions?

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The Department of Classics and Ancient History hosts a lively departmental research seminar series. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Where
On Zoom

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When
17 September, 4:00-5:00pm

Seminar Series convenors:
Louise Pryke and Emma Barlow
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The Department of Classics and Ancient History is part of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry (SOPHI).

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