ABSTRACT
Histories by Županov and Saulieeère and translations by Clooney and Amaldass have already reconstructed the contentious application of Jesuit accommodation to Madurai, India, beginning with Goncçalo Fernandes censure of Roberto de Nobili’s mission to Brahmans in 1610. These histories hinge upon bounded notions of text and context that reinforce the distance between India and Europe, in particular, their differing rhetorical traditions. This chapter uses the international scope of this controversy to instead consider how texts and contexts evolve. It investigates how it is that Jesuit rhetoric changed as it traveled by documenting its recontextualization. Studying recontextualization means studying meaning-making across space and time, in this case, “tracing the flow of events over time” in such a way that captures exactly how the issues at stake in Fernandes’s initial complaint were “mediated across” places (Kell, “Literacy Practices, Text/s and Meaning Making” 82). This approach builds on work in sociolinguistics to challenges not only the way in which we approach comparative rhetoric but also what it is that we choose to study. Documenting recontextualization in this instance reveals how Jesuit rhetoric depended upon travel yet did not sublimate the local to the global despite scripted Jesuit institutional hierarchies. Looking at the movement of texts in such a way uncovers the diversity of rhetorical practices present within the early modern period and their international scope.
