This is the first volume of a projected Jesuit Neo-Latin Library, which promises to open up the vast range of such works to English readers. The present text, a six-book Virgilian epic on the martyrdom of five Jesuits near Goa in 1583, certainly deserves to be better known, both as a record of early Jesuit missionary endeavour and as a poem in its own right. The author, Francesco Benci, was professor of rhetoric at the Roman College (now the Gregorian), and clearly intended not only to celebrate the martyrs’ heroic sacrifice but also to inspire current students to emulate them. We are invited to read his poem, first published in 1591, as a counterpart to the martyr frescoes painted in the English College, Rome, in 1583. Indeed, it refers at least three times to the martyrdom of the English Jesuit Edmund Campion on 1 December 1581. The poem exhibits stylistic features associated with Jesuit art and architecture, such as the lavish descriptions of the funeral rites and entry into heaven. It tells how a group of five Jesuits, led by Rudolf Acquaviva, was ambushed on the way to evangelise the city of Cuncolim. The narrative of their deaths is suitably prolonged and embellished, with space for carefully composed prayers and intricate descriptions of injuries and death blows, presented in slow motion. A remarkable Virgilian element is Acquaviva's narration of his unsuccessful mission to the Mughal emperor Akbar, in which is embedded a lengthy exposition of the salvation story from Eden to the Ascension. This affords Benci the opportunity of rivalling other neo-Latin Christian epics such as Marco Girolamo Vida's Christiad (1535). The editor and translator, Paul Gwynne, has worked extensively in the field of neo-Latin poetry and devotes much of the introduction and commentary to Virgilian techniques and linguistic echoes. The somewhat literal prose translation has the merit of allowing the reader to turn to the Latin text with confidence and curiosity, to form an impression of the way a late sixteenth-century Jesuit professor commemorated a particularly violent and – to us – morally ambiguous clash of religious forces in early modern India. It is intriguing, from this point of view, to read of the imagined response of the Cuncolim elders, who saw the missionaries as wolves threatening their flock. Protestant divines and politicians in Elizabethan England felt much the same about Campion and his fellow Jesuit missionaries.