In recent years scholars in a range of disciplines have begun to re-evaluate the history of the Society of Jesus. Approaching the subject with new questions and methods, they have reconsidered the importance of the Society in many sectors, including those related to the sciences and the arts. They have also looked at the Jesuits as emblematic of certain traits of early modern Europeans, especially as those Europeans interacted with 'the Other' in Asia and the Americas.
Originating in an international conference held at Boston College in 1997, the thirty-five essays here reflect this new historiographical trend. Focusing on the Old Society- the Society before its suppression in 1773 by papal edict- they examine the worldwide Jesuit undertaking in such fields as music, art, architecture, devotional writing, mathematics, physics, astronomy, natural history, public performance, and education, and they give special attention to the Jesuits' interaction with non-European cultures, in North and South America, China, India, and the Philippines. A picture emerges not only of the individual Jesuit, who might be missionary, diplomat, architect, and playwright over the course of his life in the Society, but also of the immense and many-faceted Jesuit enterprise as forming a kind of 'cultural ecosystem'.
The Jesuits of the Old Society liked to think they had a way of proceeding special to themselves. The question, Was there a Jesuit style, a Jesuit corporate culture? is the thread that runs through this interdisciplinary collection of studies.
Table of Contents:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CONTRIBUTORS
INTRODUCTION
ABBREVIATIONS
PART ONE
Refraining Jesuit History 1 1 / The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand Today?
JOHN W. O'MALLEY, S.J.
2 / 'Le style jésuite n'existe pas': Jesuit Corporate Culture and the Visual Arts
GAUVIN ALEXANDER BAILEY
3 / The Fertility and the Shortcomings of Renaissance Rhetoric: The Jesuit Case
MARC FUMAROLI
4 / The Cultural Field of Jesuit Science
RIVKA FELDHAY
PART TWO
The Roman Scene
5 / Two Farnese Cardinals and the Question of Jesuit Taste
CLARE ROBERTSON
6 / Jesuit Thesis Prints and the Festive Academic Defence at the Collegio Romano
LOUISE RICE
7 / From The Eyes of All' to 'Usefull Quarries in phihlosophy and good literature': Consuming Jesuit Science, 1600-1665
MICHAEL JOHN GORMAN
8 / Music History in the Musurgia univer-salts of Athanasius Kircher
MARGARET MURATA
PART THREE
Mobility: Overseas Missions and the Circulation of Culture
9 / Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge
STEVEN J. HARRIS
10 / Jesuits, Jupiter's Satellites, and the Académie Royale des Sciences
FLORENCE HSIA
11 / Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits' Missionary World
DOMINIQUE DESLANDRES
12 / East and West: Jesuit Art and Artists in Central Europe, and Central European Art in the Americas
THOMAS DACOSTA KAUFMANN
13 / The Role of the Jesuits in the Transfer of Secular Baroque Culture to the Río de la Plata Region
MAGNUS MöRNER
14 / Candide and a Boat
T. FRANK KENNEDY, S.J.
PART FOUR
Encounters with the Other: Between Assimilation and Domination
15 / Alessandro Valignano: The Jesuits and Culture in the East
ANDREW C. ROSS
16 / Jesuit Corporate Culture As Shaped by the Chinese
NICOLAS STANDAERT, S.J.
17 /Translation as Cultural Reform: Jesuit Scholastic Psychology in the Transformation of the Confucian Discourse on Human Nature
QIONG ZHANG
18 / The Truth-Showing Mirror: Jesuit Catechism and the Arts in Mughal India
GAUVIN ALEXANDER BAILEY
19 / Roberto de Nobili's Dialogue on Eternal Life and an Early Jesuit Evaluation of Religion in South India
FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, S.J.
20 / The Jesuits and the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines
REN£ B. JAVELLANA, S.J.
PART FIVE
Tradition, Innovation, Accommodation
21 / Bernini's Image of the Ideal Christian Monarch
IRVING LAVIN
22 / Innovation and Assimilation: The Jesuit Contribution to Architectural Development in Portuguese India
DAVID M. KOWAL
23 / God's Good Taste: The Jesuit Aesthetics of Juan Bautista Villalpando in the Sixth and Tenth Centuries B.C.E.
JAIME LARA
24 / Jesuit Aristotelian Education: The De anima Commentaries
ALISON SIMMONS
25 / Jesuit Physics in Eighteenth-Century Germany: Some Important Continuities
MARCUS HELLYER
26 / The Jesuits and Polish Sarmatianism
STANISLAW OBIREK, S.J.
PART SIX
Conversion and Confirmation through Devotion and the Arts
27 / The Art of Salvation in Bavaria
JEFFREY CHIPPS SMITH
28 / Henry Hawkins: A Jesuit Writer and Emblematist in Stuart England
KARL JOSEF HOLTGEN
29 / Jesuit Casuistry or Jesuit Spirituality? The Roots of Seventeenth-Century British Puritan Practical Divinity
JAMES F. KEENAN, S.J.
30 / The Use of Music by the Jesuits in the Conversion of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil
PAULO CASTAGNA
31 /The Jesuits in Manila, 1581-1621: The Role of Music in Rite, Ritual, and Spectacle
WILLIAM J. SUMMERS
32 / Jesuit Devotions and Retablos in New Spain
CLARA BARGELLINI
PART SEVEN
Reflections: What Have We Learned? Where Do We Go from Here?
JOSEPH CONNORS
LUCE GIARD
MICHAEL J. BUCKLEY, S.J.
INDEX
