ABSTRACT
Miguel Navarro’s 1575 letter to the Society of Jesus’ fourth Superior General, Everard Mercurian, presents a striking example of how one Jesuit missionary viewed southern Italy as an ideal locus for the Jesuits’ Christianizing efforts. By invoking the Indies, Navarro repeats what had by then become a common analogy between a missionary project in the New World (or, just as often, the recently colonized parts of East Asia) and an equally urgent call for civilizing the ‘Indies down here.’ Just as the urban missions in Naples sought to promote moral reform among the citizenry, rural missions might confront a parallel ‘savagery’ that supposedly dominated the more remote reaches of the Kingdom.
