In the present work, Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India Antony Mecherry SJ explores the underlying dynamics of the accommodation experiments led by Francisco Ros SJ (1559–1624)—a Catalonian from the Jesuit province of Aragón—in the cultural and religious terrain of Malabar, where he worked principally among the region’s Christian communities. Mecherry’s historical analysis becomes an interpretative key to understanding the later mission launched by Roberto de Nobili SJ (1577–1656), the main proponent of accommodation in the non-Christian context of Madurai in South India. Most importantly, the study underscores the Jesuit mission in early modern India as the crucial intersecting point for some of the most prominent promoters of accommodation in the first century of the Society of Jesus, including Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). 

English Catholic voices, once disregarded as merely confessional, are now acknowledged to provide important perspectives on Elizabethan society. Based on extensive archival research, this book builds on previous studies for the first thorough investigation of the Jesuit mission to England during a critical period between the unsuccessful armadas of 1588 and 1597, a period during which the mission was threatened as much by internal Catholic conflict as it was by the crown. To address properly events in England, the study engages with the situation in Ireland, Scotland and the continent so as to contextualize the ambitions, methods and effects of the Jesuit mission. For England felt threatened not only by the military might of Spain but also by any assistance King Philip II might provide to Catholics earis and a vindictive James VI in Scotland, powerful nobles in Ireland, and English Catholics at home and abroad. However, it is the particular role of the Jesuits that occupies central place in the narrative, highlighting the way in which the Society of Jesus typified all that Elizabethan England feared about the Church of Rome. Through an exhaustive study of the many facets of the Jesuit mission to England between 1589 and 1597, this book provides a fascinating insight not only into Catholic efforts to bring England back into the Roman Church, but also the simmering tensions, and disagreements on how this should be achieved, as well as debates concerning the very nature and structure of English Catholicism.