The Jesuits

by O'Malley, John W.; Bailey, Gauvin Alexander; Harris, Steve J.; Kennedy, T. Frank

• ISBN13: 9780802042873
• ISBN10: 0802042872
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

JOHN W. O'MALLEY, S.J., is professor in the Department of Church History at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. Gauvin Alexander Bailey is an associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Clark University. STEVEN J. HARRIS is professor in the Jesuit Institute, Boston College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Contributors	xi
Introduction	xiii
Abbreviations	xvii
PART ONE Reframing Jesuit History	1	(130)
The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand Today?	3	(35)
John W. O'Malley
`Le style jesuite n'existe pas': Jesuit Corporate Culture and the Visual Arts	38	(52)
Gauvin Alexander Bailey
The Fertility and the Shortcomings of Renaissance Rhetoric: The Jesuit Case	90	(17)
Marc Fumaroli
The Cultural Field of Jesuit Science	107	(24)
Rivka Feldhay
PART TWO The Roman Scene	131	(78)
Two Farnese Cardinals and the Question of Jesuit Taste	134	(14)
Clare Robertson
Jesuit Thesis Prints and the Festive Academic Defence at the Collegio Romano	148	(22)
Louise Rice
From `The Eyes of All' to `Usefull Quarries in philosophy and good literature': Consuming Jesuit Science, 1600--1665	170	(20)
Michael John Gorman
Music History in the Musurgia universalis of Athanasius Kircher	190	(19)
Margaret Murata
PART THREE Mobility: Overseas Missions and the Circulation of Culture	209	(124)
Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge	212	(29)
Steven J. Harris
Jesuits, Jupiter's Satellites, and the Academie Royale des Sciences	241	(17)
Florence Hsia
Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits' Missionary World	258	(16)
Dominique Deslandres
East and West: Jesuit Art and Artists in Central Europe, and Central European Art in the Americas	274	(31)
Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann
The Role of the Jesuits in the Transfer of Secular Baroque Culture to the Rio de la Plata Region	305	(12)
Magnus Morner
Candide and a Boat	317	(16)
T. Frank Kennedy
PART FOUR Encounters with the Other: Between Assimilation and Domination	333	(106)
Alessandro Valignano: The Jesuits and Culture in the East	336	(16)
Andrew C. Ross
Jesuit Corporate Culture As Shaped by the Chinese	352	(12)
Nicholas Standaert
Translation as Cultural Reform: Jesuit Scholastic Psychology in the Transformation of the Confucian Discourse on Human Nature	364	(16)
Qiong Zhang
The Truth-Showing Mirror: Jesuit Catechism and the Arts in Mughal India	380	(22)
Gauvin Alexander Bailey
Roberto de Nobili's Dialogue on Eternal Life and an Early Jesuit Evaluation of Religion in South India	402	(16)
Francis X. Clooney
The Jesuits and the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines	418	(21)
Rene B. Javellana
PART FIVE Tradition, Innovation, Accommodation	439	(126)
Bernini's Image of the Ideal Christian Monarch	442	(38)
Irving Lavin
Innovation and Assimilation: The Jesuit Contribution to Architectural Development in Portuguese India	480	(25)
David M. Kowal
God's Good Taste: The Jesuit Aesthetics of Juan Bautista Villalpando in the Sixth and Tenth Centuries B.C.E.	505	(17)
Jaime Lara
Jesuit Aristotelian Education: The De anima Commentaries	522	(16)
Alison Simmons
Jesuit Physics in Eighteenth-Century Germany: Some Important Continuities	538	(17)
Marcus Hellyer
The Jesuits and Polish Sarmatianism	555	(10)
Stanislaw Obirek
PART SIX Conversion and Confirmation through Devotion and the Arts	565	(134)
The Art of Salvation in Bavaria	568	(32)
Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Henry Hawkins: A Jesuit Writer and Emblematist in Stuart England	600	(27)
Karl Josef Holtgen
Jesuit Casuistry or Jesuit Spirituality? The Roots of Seventeenth-Century British Puritan Practical Divinity	627	(14)
James F. Keenan
The Use of Music by the Jesuits in the Conversion of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil	641	(18)
Paulo Castagna
The Jesuits in Manila, 1581-1621: The Role of Music in Rite, Ritual, and Spectacle	659	(21)
William J. Summers
Jesuit Devotions and Retablos in New Spain	680	(19)
Clara Bargellini
PART SEVEN Reflections: What Have We Learned? Where Do We Go from Here?	699	(18)
Joseph Connors	700	(7)
Luce Giard	707	(6)
Michael J. Buckley	713	(4)
Index	717