Oxford University Press has published English translations of six sermons by Jesuit missionary António Vieira. Mónica Leal da Silva and Liam Brockey edited and translated António Vieira: Six Sermons.
Vieira was born in Portugal in 1608 and worked in both Europe and Brazil as a Jesuit, long remembered for his sermons on “social and spiritual matters.” According to the publisher, the new publication provides the “first English translation and annotations” of “Vieira’s sermons on slavery, colonial society, and the art of preaching.”
The six sermons profiled in this new book are
- Sermon for the Success of the Arms of Portugal against those of Holland (on God’s “apparent abandonment of the Portuguese”)
- Sermon of St. Anthony (on the “inequities he witnessed in Brazil”)
- The Sexagesima Sermon (on a “more effective, if harsher, style of preaching”)
- Sermon of the Good Thief (a rebuke of imperial officials seeking personal enrichment)
- Sermon XXVII of the cycle called Maria Rosa Mística (an attempt to comfort African slaves and to admonish the brutality of their Brazilian masters)
- Arm, Sermon IX of the cycle called Xavier Acordado (a tribute to Francis Xavier that recounts “the story of the relic of Francis Xavier’s arm sent from India to Italy in 1614”)
More details about António Vieira: Six Sermons are available at Oxford University Press.