XAVIER, Francis - TORSELLINO, Orazio.

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Vita del B[eato]. Francesco Saverio. Second edition in Italian of the first book-length biography of Francis Xavier, by the Italian Jesuit Torsellino. Based on original sources and chiefly on the manuscript biography written in 1580 by Manuel Texeira, who had worked alongside Xavier in India, Torsellino's work is a key source of information on the early Jesuit relations with Asia.The first Italian edition, translated by Lodovico Serguglielmi, was published by Giunti in Florence in 1605, and it is unrecorded in commerce. The present copy is the only example of the second edition traced in auction records, and an online institutional search returns eleven locations.Co-founder of the Society of Jesus with Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier (1506-1552) left Europe in 1541 and remained in Asia until his death. He visited Mozambique, India (he resided in Goa, but also travelled through Southern India), Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the Moluccas; he later travelled to Japan and China, becoming the first Jesuit missionary to do so. Xavier was in Japan between 1549 and 1551: Torsellino reports the missionary's impressions of the country (book IV), including geography and climate, customs, language, religion, and its commercial relations with China and the Portuguese (Torsellino notes that the Japanese "used to lack some resources because the Chinese don't want to trade with them; but they don't lack them anymore because they now trade with the Portuguese", trans. from p. 146). Xavier decide

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