I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Instituto Português de Santo António em Roma (Portuguese institute of St. Anthony in Rome) for providing me with the opportunity to carry out my research for this project in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu and many other archives and libraries in Italy.
I am also grateful to the Center for Classical and Humanistic Studies and to Delfim Leão for his faith in this project, as well as to my anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions.
I also wish to thank Nair Soares, Sebastião Pinho, José Barata, Belmiro Pereira, and Augusto Bernardes, whose suggestions and keen criticism have contributed greatly to the development of this work.
In addition, I wish to acknowledge my special gratitude to my husband, Isaías Hipólito, who has supported me in many ways throughout the various stages of this book.
My thanks are also due to my brothers, José Carlos and Pedro, and to the Musical Ançãble group for the opportunity to perform the choruses for tragedies and sing the words of Venegas’s more tragico in public, almost five hundred years after they were first composed.
Above all, I wish to express my deep gratitude to Américo Costa Ramalho (d.2013), my supervisor, for introducing me to Miguel Venegas and encouraging me to study Jesuit theater and the history of the Society of Jesus. I will never forget his valuable guidance in helping me to understand neo-Latin texts.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to another Jesuit, a Jesuit from the twentieth century, João Abranches (Alvoco da Serra, 1912–Porto, 2000). Although this book does not owe anything directly to him, I undoubtedly do.