ABSTRACT

This chapter is premised on the idea that Jesuits circulating in the Indian Ocean world during the sixteenth century interspersed this space with “signs of wonder”1 to sanctify both the land and sea as well as their larger civilizing mission; they also circulated these stories of (re)enchantment to a wider public. To this end, I examine the multiple “translations” in death of the corpse of Francis Xavier (1506-1552), a Spanish (Basque) Jesuit who died after ten years of missionizing with the sanction of the Portuguese crown in the East Indies. That his body increasingly exhibited multiple “signs of wonder” throughout its postmortem travels suggests their value for understanding early modern networks of religion, colonialism, and trade in the Indian Ocean. A set of Jesuit hagiographic biographies of this saint-in-the-making are my point of entry to access the details of Xavier’s biography in both life and death.