In early June 2025, Brill released a new edited volume dedicated to the College of Santo Antão, one of the most emblematic educational institutions of the Society of Jesus in early modern Portugal. Edited by David Salomoni, Luana Giurgevich, and Henrique Leitão, this much-anticipated collection brings together eleven chapters exploring the college’s history, including its political significance, its teachings in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, and its role within the global Jesuit order.
As I await contributions for a different volume I am editing on Francisco Rodrigues (c. 1515–1573), a Jesuit theologian who taught at Santo Antão from 1553 before departing for India in 1556, I couldn’t resist searching for his name in this new publication. In Asia, Rodrigues taught and served as rector of the College of São Paulo in Goa, and later acted as supervisor and provincial of the Jesuit Province of India. He is notable not only as Santo Antão’s first professor of theology and mathematics but also as a transitional figure in the Society’s intellectual history.
My curiosity led me to the inevitable Command+F. The result? Twenty-nine matches for “Francisco Rodrigues”. But, alas, only five of these referred to the sixteenth-century Jesuit I am researching. The remaining references pointed to a modern historian sharing his name. Three of the five mentions reiterate his role as the first mathematics professor, based on a document listing his course on the Sphere. More intriguingly, two references stood out.
In the conclusion to her chapter on the teaching of philosophy, Paula Oliveira e Silva draws attention to the first: a recently digitised manuscript from the library of the University of Coimbra. The manuscript, titled Compendium philosophicum, De metheoris, Parvis naturalibus, De coelo, item de Generatione et corruptione, De anima coniuncta materiae et ab illa separata denique De ethicis [Philosophical Compendium, On Meteors, On the Short Treatises on Nature, On the Heavens, also On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul Both Conjoined with Matter and Separated from It, and Finally On Ethics] is a collection of commentaries on several Aristotelian works. According to the title page, the volume is a copy of texts by Francisco Rodrigues, transcribed by his disciple, one Diego Pérez de Arellano.
Secondly, Oliveira e Silva cites a handwritten note preserved together with the manuscript that attributes the original texts to the same Francisco Rodrigues identified as the first professor of the Sphere at Santo Antão, who later went on to teach in Goa. However, she cautions that no Jesuit named Diego Pérez de Arellano appears in the 1629 Lisbon catalogs, the year inscribed on the manuscript. This is not unusual, as there were students who attended the College of Santo Antão who were not seminarians or novices. A notable example is the chronicler Diogo do Couto, who studied under the Goa Francisco Rodrigues before he left Portugal.
But there is more. If indeed this manuscript can be attributed to Rodrigues, it may offer a valuable key for interpreting one of the most enigmatic works credited to him: a now-lost report on his observation of a solar eclipse in Goa in 1566, of which no extant copies have been found.[1] The nature of this missing work remains uncertain: was the account a scientific report grounded in precise astronomical and mathematical calculation, or was it a more speculative, perhaps even prophetic, reading of celestial signs? If the Compendium philosophicum reflects Rodrigues’s intellectual method, it could shed light on how he straddled the line between empirical observation and theological interpretation, an enduring tension in early Jesuit science.
Let’s take a look at the manuscript. Bound in full calf leather, decorated in gold tooling over a blind-tooled ground, in a typical Portuguese binding technique of the early seventeenth century. Catalogued among the Apostilas de Filosofia (student notebooks from the three-year philosophy cycle taught at the Jesuit college in Coimbra), this volume covers a range of Aristotelian topics central to the studia philosophiae as taught across the Iberian world.
Yet, the manuscript’s contents indicate it was written after the time of the Goa Rodrigues. On folio 29r, there is a reference to a new star first observed in 1572 in the constellation Cassiopeia, also known as Brahe’s supernova. This event, first documented by the Danish astronomer in that year, was one of the most significant astronomical observations of the sixteenth century. The star was so bright that it remained visible during the day for several weeks and to the naked eye for approximately 15 months. By this time, however, Rodrigues had already been away from Lisbon for fifteen years, and there is no evidence he recorded the event anywhere.
The manuscript also cites (f. 88r) Francisco de Toledo’s commentaries on Aristotle’s works on the soul. This book, whose editio princeps was published in Venice in 1575, appeared after the lifetime of the rector of the College of São Paulo in Goa. Similarly, Domingo Báñez’s works, a name cited on f. 81v, began to be published in the 1580s, also after Rodrigues’ death.
The evidence was mounting. This manuscript was not penned by the Rodrigues of Goa. It belonged to another Francisco Rodrigues, likely active a generation later. The misattribution, while disappointing, is hardly surprising. “Francisco Rodrigues” was a common name. Jesuit catalogues list several. But in this instance, the confusion wasn’t merely clerical; it spoke to something deeper.
That another author’s work could be linked, however tenuously, to Rodrigues testifies to the enduring gravity of his intellectual presence. Was he on the cusp of becoming an auctor—not merely an author, but a name that conferred credibility, a citation that could stabilize arguments in a shifting world of ideas? The misattribution, far from meaningless, becomes a case study in how authority is constructed, diffused, and occasionally projected onto others.
So, while this manuscript does not bring us closer to the lost eclipse report or to a newly identified work by the Goa Rodrigues, it does something else. It brings into focus the precariousness of intellectual memory and the ways in which names, more than texts, can become vessels of legitimacy. In the Jesuit world, where scholarship traveled alongside missions and manuscripts across continents, a name could be both a map and a mirage.
The story of Francisco Rodrigues, a story of onomastic overlaps, vanishing eclipses, and manuscripts that almost matter, is a reminder that history is as much about what we find as what we fail to recover. Misattribution is more than archival oversight. It reveals the layered and often fragile nature of historical memory, and the meticulous care required to reconstruct intellectual lineages. And sometimes, in the slippage between the two, we glimpse the very mechanisms by which authority is made, remembered, and remade. Perhaps this is not a dead end, but a signal flare: pointing us toward the fragile afterlives of early modern knowledge and the eclipses we are still chasing.
References
Ehalt, R. (Ed.). (forthcoming) Evidences of Truth: Francisco Rodrigues SJ (c. 1515–1573) and normative knowledge production in early modern Portuguese Asia. Leiden: Brill.
Salomoni, D., Giurgevich, L., & Leitão, H. (Eds.). (13 Jun. 2025). Santo Antão: The Jesuit College in Lisbon and its History. Leiden: Brill.
Universidade de Coimbra, Biblioteca Geral, Ms. 2316.
Wicki, J. (Ed.). (1962). Documenta Indica VII (1566-1569). Rome: Apud “Monumenta Historica Soc. Iesu.”
[1] The only mention of this manuscript is in a 1566 letter written by the young Gomes Vaz, SJ (1542–1610) to Pedro da Fonseca, SJ (1528–1599). Wicki, J. (Ed.), Documenta Indica VII (1566-1569). Rome: Apud “Monumenta Historica Soc. Iesu”, 1962, p. 175-176.
Cite as: Ehalt, Rômulo da Silva: Lost Eclipses and Found Manuscripts: Onomastic Overlaps or an Instance of the Making of Jesuit Intellectual Authority?, legalhistoryinsights.com, 01.07.2025, https://doi.org/10.17176/20250703-084842-0
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