This chapter explores the survival of a Portuguese presence in Mylapore (today a suburb of Chennai, South India) after the loss of its political and military autonomy. Notions of sovereignty and the boundaries between a pre-colonial and a fully colonial dimension are here questioned on the basis of a little known case study.

Norbert Bar-Le-Duc (1697- 1769), also known as Abbé Jacques Platel, Pierre Parisot, Pierre Curel, traversed identities and continents, making a career out of controversy, becoming knowns as “le fameux Père Norbert”. He worked in South India as a missionary in 1736-1739 and thereafter played a pivotal role in the Malabar Rites controversy. Back…[Read more]

This chapter challenges the idea tha Roberto Nobili was a pioneer of interreligious dialogue and inculturation. On the contrary, it suggests that his interest for our times is rather his theology of religions. A man of the Counter-Reformation, Nobili made propositions as daring as the ones of today’s “Asian theology”.

This article is an archival contribution to the reassessment of the concrete phases of Roberto Nobili’s education. Here I demonstrate that, contrary to what previous historians repeated, Nobili’s involvement with the College Romano was very short. Moreover, I have discovered that, before joining the Society of Jesus, he studied at the Seminario…[Read more]

The Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano, praised for adapting Christianity to the cultures of Japan and China, did not support a similar strategy for India and Africa. He theorized racial hierarchies in which a darker skin was associated with ignorance and vice, whereas the similarity to European physical features implied a higher degree of…[Read more]

Fra il 1704 ed il 1744 la Santa Sede mise al bando i riti malabarici, una particolare forma di adattamento del cattolicesimo alla società dell’India meridionale.
In una prospettiva eurocentrica essi hanno potuto essere considerati come un’anticipazione dell’odierna categoria di inculturazione. Da un punto di vista specificamente indiano tali…[Read more]

At the beginning of the Eighteenth century the Holy See was called to solve the controversy on the Malabar Rites. The Jesuits that were working in the missions of Madurai, Mysore and «Carnate» were blamed for their tolerance of pagan practices and caste discriminations against the pariahs. This article proposes a category of «glocal», syn…[Read more]

The history of the early modern Catholic missions to Asia provides an excellent vantage point to asses the relation between evangelization and colonialism. If the European expansion was an essential pre-condition for the creation of substantial Catholic communities in
that continent, nonetheless the neophytes did not coincide for most of the…[Read more]

In this article I analyse the Malabar Rites controversy in terms of spatial integration and exclusion of the subaltern castes of early modern South India. I argue that the morphology of the churches built by the Jesuits in the Madurai mission express a coherent vision of how the neophyte communities should be socially structured.

Missionary history has been acknowledged in recent years as a fundamental context for the emergence of European Orientalism. In particular, it is becoming clearer the specific cultural relevance of the Catholic missionaries to India, working under the Portuguese Royal Patronage (Padroado Real), depending from the Roman Congregation De Propaganda…[Read more]

The persistence of caste hierarchies and discrimination among the Christian faithful is one of the challenges that churches still face in India. While several studies have been devoted to the relation between caste and Christianity since the nineteenth century, the early modern period has attracted very limited attention. This article proposes…[Read more]

Scheda di approfondimento sul martirio di quattro francescani in India. Thāṇe è una citta oggi compresa nell’area metropolitana di Mumbai (Bombay). Questo martirio è particolarmente interessante sia per la sua rappresentazione da parte di Ambrogio Lorenzetti, sia per l’attestazione di una presenza cristiana siro-orientale nella costa nord…[Read more]

This article compares two figures that were involved in the 18th century Rites controversies, namely the Franciscan Carlo Horatii da Castorano and the Capuchin Norbert Bar-le-Duc, who respectively fought against the Chinese and the Malabar Rites. While both religious are considered crucial actors in the process that led to the issue of the Papal…[Read more]