As its title indicates, this volume is the second of two on Jesuits, culture, science, and arts, in the period from the 1540 creation of the Society of Jesus to its suppression in 1773. Both volumes are the fruit of international, interdisciplinary conferences held at Boston College: the first conference took place in 1997, with publication by the University of Toronto Press in 2000. The second conference was convened in 2002. Under the leadership of John W. O’Malley, S.J., its appearance in print both reflects and develops the recent proliferation of high-quality work on Jesuit history. O’Malley’s concise introduction to The Jesuits II makes clear how this volume further examines not just normative Jesuit documents, but what Jesuits actually did, and how flexibility and adjustment to circumstances became central to the Jesuits’ way of proceeding. In the Jesuits’ very positive view of created reality, O’Malley finds foundations for an approach to ministry that privileged a civic and cultural mission, not solely a spiritual one. Thirty-seven essays follow this excellent introduction. By a wide array of scholars, most not Jesuits themselves, the essays illuminate the complexity of successes and failures of the Society of Jesus. For a conclusion, T. Frank Kennedy presents a Jesuit opera — on the passion of Christ — from late seventeenth-century Vienna: a DVD of a 2002 performance is included inside the back cover, making this book’s price actually quite reasonable. An additional bonus is the superb index to the volume.
Several essays are especially interesting. Olwen Hufton examines ways in which the 500 to 600 Jesuits schools in early modern Europe were funded, and suggests ways in which many of them survived, even when on the edge of insolvency. Peter Burke looks at how Jesuit works were translated into multiple languages, and finds that even Protestant libraries collected many Jesuit books. Judi Loach explores the function of a Jesuit education in France as a means to upward social mobility. Anna Knapp examines the art that Peter Paul Rubens created for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, art largely destroyed in an eighteenth-century fire. She finds that Rubens’s pictorial program systematically promoted Jesuit priorities such as the centrality of the Eucharist in Catholic life and, above all, the importance of the frequent reception of communion — a frequency that was criticized by Jesuit opponents. David Crook considers ways in which Jesuits used music to teach, move, and delight audiences, even though Jesuits were exempt from chanting the Divine Office in choir. Haruko Ward presents the practice, in Japan, of female catechists acting as coadjutors to Jesuits. Sabine MacCormack sheds light on the deep-seated tensions between the Spanish colonial state and the Jesuits in Peru. Marc Fumaroli explains how the way to the 1763 expulsion of Jesuits from France was prepared by the anti-Jesuit polemics of two groups otherwise largely opposed to each other: Deists and Jansenists.
In focusing on the eighteenth century, and on what prepared the way for the 1773 suppression of the Jesuits by Clement XIV, several essays go well beyond topics treated in the first conference and volume. Yet this does not at all mean that the subject of Jesuit history to the suppression has now been exhausted. One essay in The Jesuits II raises a particularly intriguing question that could well be the focus of much more research. Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile considers Francisco Pinto, a Jesuit whose unusual missionary strategy in Brazil embarrassed his confrères. Pinto went exceptionally far in accommodating local religious culture, presenting himself as a kind of shaman able, among other things, to make it rain. Castelnau-L’Estoile calls for more studies of individual, maverick, and marginal Jesuits, to complement studies that focus on Jesuit corporate culture. She suggests that by “remembering those who were meant to be forgotten,” historians could shed new and surprising light on Jesuit history (631).
The editors and authors of this volume merit congratulations and gratitude. They provide an excellent model of interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship, in service of a burgeoning field in early modern studies. Will specialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries follow their example, and devote comparable attention to the relatively neglected field of the history of the post-1814 restored Society of Jesus?
