Rather than offering a narrative history of the Society of Jesus in Spain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Patricia Manning proposes “to tease out the complicated relationship between the Society and the home country of many notable Jesuits,” with reference to “conflicts with authorities, including Spanish monarchs and the Spanish Inquisition” (6–7). In keeping with this objective, we encounter Jesuit institutions, writings, and missionary activities in connection with those who supported, challenged, or opposed them. The end of this story is right there in the title: during Holy Week in 1766, an anti-government street protest that came to be known as the motín de Esquilache provided the pretext for the Bourbon monarch Charles III to expel the Society from Spain and eventually from its overseas territories. Drawing on a wide array of theological writings, inquisitorial documents, chronicles, and secondary sources, Manning makes a convincing case that this expulsion was not inevitable. Over more than two hundred years, the Jesuits in Spain withstood inquisitorial scrutiny, accusations of heresy, conflicts with the Dominican order, and Habsburg efforts to assert royal control over the regular clergy. Even if these tensions were present all along, only a particular set of religious and political circumstances led to the wholesale removal of the Society from the Spanish empire in the age of lights.

Given its theme, An Overview of the Pre-Suppression Society operates at the intersection of two historiographies, Jesuit history and research on the Inquisition. Ignatius of Loyola hailed from a noble Basque family, and altogether five of the seven cofounders of the Jesuits were from Spain. Manning argues that despite this inner circle, the Society sparked suspicion and resistance from its earliest days. Loyola himself underwent questioning by the Spanish Inquisition on account of parallels between his Spiritual Exercises and the practices of the alumbrados (enlightened ones), a group of lesser clerics and laypeople who worshipped outside the institutions and liturgies of the Church. In a similar vein, Loyola's ties to beatas and other women, as well as the Jewish ancestry of several early Jesuits, led to accusations of impropriety and converso apostasy. Manning deftly traces the means by which the Jesuits weathered this resistance, by defending themselves and by adjusting their policies over time. The General Mercurian distanced the order from the mysticism of Teresa of Avila's Discalced Carmelites and emphasized missionary work over pure contemplation. And whereas the early Jesuit leaders had quietly advised novices with Jewish ancestors to enter the Society in Italy rather than Iberia, after the 1590s, the order took a stronger stance against conversos. In the 1600s, Jesuits also began to serve in greater numbers as assessors for the Inquisition, granting them some purchase in the institution responsible for approving books and sermons.

Through these shifts in policy, which Manning demonstrates often resulted from internal debates among Jesuit leaders, the Society endured the criticisms of older, established orders such as the Dominicans. The decades-long de auxiliis debate—in which the Jesuits’ position favoring free will enjoyed more public support than the Dominicans’ emphasis on grace—ended not in defeat, but with both king and pope discouraging the orders from debating these matters publicly. Likewise, Jesuit schools for children and for future missionaries arose and expanded despite the opposition of entrenched educational authorities. The fault line that ultimately crumbled beneath the Jesuits’ feet lay not between ecclesiastical institutions, but between the Society and the monarchy. Philip II had chafed at the Jesuits’ autonomy from the Church and the Inquisition and “advocated for the appointment of an external assessor to evaluate the Society” (43). During the diplomatic crises of the 1630s and the ensuing revolt of the Catalans, Philip IV increasingly doubted the loyalty of the Jesuits, appointing far fewer of them as royal preachers in the last decades of his reign. In the 1760s, the campaign to beatify the regalist bishop Juan de Palafox (d. 1659) drove a wedge between Charles III and the Jesuits, who vehemently opposed this process. The ensuing controversy emboldened the king to expel the Society, which he regarded as out of step with his enlightened monarchy. This royal pragmatic brought to a close more than two centuries of adaptation by which an international, universalist order built a home in a rising nation-state. Further research will integrate art, music, and science into the theological and political analysis of this concise study. Manning's carefully researched and clearly written overview, which includes a bibliography and a glossary of key terms, captures well the internal and external forces that contributed to the Society's survival and banishment from early modern Spain.