The author of this volume had earlier published The Eagle and the Cross: Jesuits in Late Baroque Prague (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2002). In his more recent study, Shore turns further east and examines Jesuit goals, accomplishments, and failures over an eighty-year period in a principality at the intersection of the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires. With abundant research in many languages, in archives and in a wide array of printed sources, the author sheds light on the complex relations between religion, culture, and politics in an era when Baroque sensibilities overlapped with Enlightenment ideals, in a region where the ethnic mix included Hungarians, Romanians, Germans, Armenians, Gypsies, and others, and in which religious diversity encompassed, among others, Orthodox, Uniate Catholics, Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans, Unitarians, and Muslims.
In the 1680s and 1690s the Habsburgs won a series of victories over the Turks and managed to considerably expand the territories claimed for the House of Austria. Transylvania was one such territory; in 1692 the Uniate church was established there by imperial decree. A point to which Shore returns frequently is how the Habsburgs viewed the Jesuits as extremely useful agents for promotion of loyalty on the part of Transylvanians: political loyalty to Vienna, and religious loyalty to Rome. Shore's more specific focus is Cluj, a town of some 8,000 people in the eighteenth century, and one where the Jesuits were particularly active from 1693 until the papal suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773.
The Jesuits in Cluj, though of multiple national origins and a long way from Vienna, were under the authority of the Austrian Jesuit province. This administrative arrangement would have helped to encourage Habsburg confidence in the Jesuits, and Shore shows how the Jesuits pleased the imperial authorities in various ways, perhaps especially in their role as educators. More than one Jesuit school was founded in Cluj, and in their curriculum and activities these institutions taught a version of history that highlighted Transylvanian connections with Rome and the west, from the Roman empire on. Science also played an important role; the most significant Jesuit scientist to work in Cluj was Maximilianus Hell, an astronomer for whom a lunar crater is named. The students who attended the Jesuit schools in Cluj were of various religious affiliations, but the Jesuits encouraged conversions to Catholicism, at least Uniate, and better yet Roman. Shore's meticulous research has turned up some evidence for a female student (a Gypsy) housed in a Jesuit-sponsored residence for new converts, as well as other evidence for Jesuit promotion of female literacy. It would surely be interesting to know more about this; is it in Transylvania that women first gained access to Jesuit education?
Theatrical productions in the Jesuit schools drove home a political, cultural, and religious message; they celebrated, often in classical Latin, a triumphalistic Catholicism in which the Habsburgs served as champions. Indeed, the schools themselves “functioned as stages from which dramatic and symbolic representations of the authority and legitimacy of the Habsburgs were enacted” (101). Local, European, and imperial themes were complemented by those with more exotic venues, and tales of Catholic martyrdom in places such as Japan were acted out on stage.
The Jesuits of the Austrian province served the Habsburgs not only as school teachers but also as preachers who lauded the dynasty, as military chaplains, and as diplomats who acted on behalf of the House of Austria. Especially in the countryside, Jesuits sought to stamp out what they perceived as superstition. With their building programs, Jesuits promoted, through architecture, an agenda like that promoted in schools and plays. In Cluj, the Jesuits built a church modeled in large part on the Gesù, the mother church of the Society of Jesus in Rome, and on the Jesuitenkirche in Vienna. Consecrated in 1725, the Cluj church “functioned as … an emblem of the new educational ideal and the new political order” (117). Shore notes that the one major concession to local styles and tradition was an icon of the Virgin Mary that would have been at home in an Orthodox church. The Jesuits promoted devotion to this icon and paraded it through the streets in times of plague.
Shore suggests that the Jesuits in Cluj, unlike Jesuit missionaries in China and other far-flung places (distant from a European point of view), made little effort at inculturation or at accommodation of diverse cultures. Was this because of their close relationship with the ruling dynasty, based in Vienna? Or because of the difficulty of mastering multiple languages and cultures? Or because a large percentage of the Jesuits sent to Transylvania were brothers, not priests, and some of them may barely have been literate in one language, let alone several? In addition to these possibilities, Shore includes yet another, asserting a kind of incompatibility between two Jesuit ideals: mobility and adaptation to local cultures. Frequent changes of venue meant that Jesuits tended to “fall back on the strategies that they already knew” (172) rather than making an effort to adapt to local cultures.
This is a superb case study of the successes and failures of a Jesuit enterprise in the early modern era. In Transylvania, though Jesuit schools were full, there were in fact few converts to Catholicism. Many Jesuits may have been too lazy or too ethnocentric to ever be much more than foreign visitors. The Jesuits may have impressed the inhabitants of Cluj with their schools, their theater, and their architecture, but they may not have persuaded them of much in politics or religion. This book is well worth the attention of a wide range of historians, not only those of the Jesuits, but of those of culture, politics, and religion, and especially of the interplay between them.
