Recent Studies in Jesuit History

The past two decades have witnessed an important shift in the historiography of the Society of Jesus. The older style of Jesuit history, flavoured with confessional polemics, and so often dependent on the work of Jesuit scholars isolated from the more secularly oriented academic community, had already ceased to dominate when John O'Malley's magisterial The First Jesuits appeared in 1993. ¹ 1 John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Since then, the partnering of Jesuit and non‐Jesuit scholars has produced scholarship that is generally sympathetic to the Society's aims and methods while avoiding neither criticism of the Jesuits nor thorough, judicious use of archival materials. The significance of this trend is heightened by the declining numbers of Jesuits in North America and Europe, creating a situation where the advancement of Jesuit studies will, at least in these venues, increasingly become the responsibility of non‐Jesuits. With the passing of the Jesuit scholar of Jesuits, something is lost and gained; potentially greater objectivity towards the Society is offset by the loss of insight into the individual and corporate experience of being a Jesuit. The four books reviewed here illustrate in varying degrees these developments in the field.     

Natural theology and ancient theology in the Jesuit China mission

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the proselytical use of ancient theology that developed in the environment of the Jesuit China Mission in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This period is roughly coeval with the European diffusion of deistic doctrines based on a secularized interpretation of natural theology. I argue that the threat posed by the spread of such doctrines produced a significant effect on the philosophy that Jesuits developed in order to relate to Confucianism. In particular, in the late seventeenth century, Jesuits belonging to the China Mission gradually abandoned Matteo Ricci’s natural theology and espoused an approach grounded in ancient theology. The situation changed, however, after the turn of the eighteenth century. Deism continued to spread, and even ancient theology came to be perceived as dangerously close the libertinism. The increasing suspicion towards ancient theology was reflected, in the China Mission, by the reception of the doctrines advanced by the so-called “Figurists”, a group of French Jesuits who proposed an interpretation of certain characters of the Chinese Five Classics as figurae of the Bible.     

Some observations on theObservations the decline of the French Jesuit scientific mission in China

In the late seventeenth century, French Jesuit missionaries in China transplanted a distinctively French and distinctively academic brand of scientific work from Paris to Beijing. This auspicious inauguration has obscured the later trajectory of the mission’s scientific ambitions within Old Regime arenas of scientific activity. In this paper, I argue that significant differences distinguish the French Jesuit scientific mission in its late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century incarnations. By examining the various Parisian editions of French Jesuit scientific work carried out on the China mission, theObservations (1688, 1692, 1729), I trace the declining fortunes of the French Jesuit scientific mission to the dissolution of its alliance with the Académie des sciences and to its difficulties in sustaining a corporate identity and collective vision as investigators of natural phenomena.     

Travel Writing,Ethnography, and the Colony-Centric Voyage of the Jesuit Relations from New France

This article argues that the Jesuit Relations, commonly read as the accounts of daring French travelers to the New World in the seventeenth century, must also be understood in light of the colony-centric circulation of the texts. In a step that has never before been considered part of the process through which the Relations collected and circulated information, some—and perhaps all—of the texts were sent back to Canada after being edited and published in Paris, giving Jesuits in the colony an opportunity to consult the published texts to see how they had been changed in France. This article focuses on two related areas of scholarship on the Relations that need re-evaluation in light of the colony-centric circulation of the texts: the status of the texts as travel writing, and as the premiere source of ethnographic data on the Amerindian groups that the missionaries encountered in Eastern Canada.     

明清传教士对《山海经》的解读

晚明前清时期在华耶稣会士作品中有关《山海经》的零星内容反映出这些欧洲传教士与时代变局相关的心态变化。从16世纪到18世纪,欧洲的地理类作品随着其世界观念的更新而从传说与实证并存向实证性内容居主导转变,礼仪之争使在华传教士对中国文化的态度从针对中国人的迎合向针对欧洲人的特别宣传转变。受这两种变化驱使,传教士看待《山海经》时从认可和吸收变为轻蔑与排斥。     

Sorcery and publicity: the Cadiere Girard scandal of 1730 1731

The Cadière–Girard trial of 1730–1731 isan early example of a sensational, nationally publicized Frenchtrial in which the major parties were private individuals. Cadière,a female penitent, accused Girard, her Jesuit confessor, ofbewitching and raping her; Girard claimed that Cadièrewas guilty of slander. It was to be the last witchcraft trialin the francophone world. Another notable feature of the trialwas its publicity, in which the contesting parties almost immediatelybecame stand-ins for the Society of Jesus and for its Jansenistadversaries. This paper argues that certain anti-Jesuits, particularlyCadière's defence team and in the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence,acted to prolong the trial with the aim of creating as muchbad publicity as possible for the Society of Jesus; it alsoshows how Jansenist publicists took advantage of the lengthyprocess, creating literature that ‘burned Girard in spirit’,and with him, the Jesuits as a whole.     

路易十四派遣“皇家数学家”传教士来华的背景

17世纪,葡萄牙国力日渐衰败,令其无法再从经济上支持传教士的东方拓展之旅,这不仅让罗马教廷颇为不满,而且让欧洲新崛起的法国看到了一个取而代之的机会。当时法国遇到的障碍主要有两个,一是葡萄牙所拥有的保教权;二是罗马教廷所要求的宣誓问题。但是,法国政治、科学和宗教的发展需求,加之暹罗使团的突然来访,让路易十四最终决定派遣有皇家科学院通讯院士之称的耶稣会士跟随暹罗使团前往东方。这些耶稣会士便是在中法交流史上赫赫有名的"皇家数学家"。     

‘In carcere; ad dupplicium’: Jesuit encounters in prison and in places of execution. Reflections on the early-modern period

Jesuits of the early-modern period had, as a major aspect of their missions and ministry, encounters with prisoners and with those condemned to execution. The Jesuit experience of these encounters was profoundly influenced by the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, undertaken by every Jesuit. In these exercises the retreatant is required to visualise the physical sufferings of Christ. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were closely connected, from several perspectives, with the imprisonment and execution of scores of individuals. While many of the leading Jesuit theoreticians of the time, such as Roberto Bellarmino, supported the right of the secular state to exercise capital punishment, a tension persisted between the idea of common humanity expounded in the Spiritual Exercises and the role of the Jesuits as supporters of the Habsburg dynasty that conducted these public executions. This essay explores the Jesuit encounter along the eastern and northern Habsburg peripheries and on the ‘frontiers of faith’ with prisoners and the condemned, utilising archival materials, as a contribution to the intellectual history of the Jesuits and to the cultural history of the region.     

明末奉教天文學家鄔明著事迹鈎沉

鄔明著是徐光啓所組建之曆局中的骨幹成員,對修成《崇禎曆書》發揮了重要作用。領洗入教後,信仰虔誠,並將天主教傳入其家鄉武昌,促成湖廣開教。然因相關文獻甚少,致其事迹不顯。本文通過現存中文及葡萄牙文文獻,勾勒鄔明著修曆與奉教事迹,進而凸顯曆局成員所構成的天主教人脈網絡及其對天主教在華傳播的作用。     

Lights and Shadows: The Inquisitorial Process Against the Jesuit Congregation of Nuestra Señora de la Luz on the Mariana Islands (1758–1776)

This article focuses on the controversy over the charges of sexual impropriety made against Father Franz Reittemberger within the context of worship of Nuestra Señora de la Luz (Our Lady of Light) in the mid‐eighteenth century Mariana Islands. As is well known, this cult began to spread around the Americas and the Philippines (via New Spain) starting in 1740, and it became a cohesive force in a multiethnic society perched on the outskirts of Spain's overseas empire. The Society of Jesus arrived in the Marianas' archipelago in 1668 to found a mission with the economic support of Queen Mariana de Austria, Philip IV's widow and regent of Spain. In 1758 Father Reittemberger founded the Marian devotion to Our Lady of Light. After the expulsion of the Jesuit order from the Spanish islands of the Pacific (1769), the Augustinian commissaries of the Holy Office accused the congregation's founder of the crime of sollicitatio ad turpia. In examining this Inquisition trial Jesuit and Augustinian rivalries come to the fore, revealing the larger anti‐Jesuit sentiments that drove public censure of the colonial church in the Spanish overseas possessions.     

Des carêmes après le Carâme stratégies de conversion et fonctions politiques des missions intérieures en Espagne et au Portugal (1540–1650)

The paucity of works on internal Jesuit missions in Spain and Portugal does not correspond to the abundance of accounts that attest to a strong activity from the second half ofxvith century. The fundamentally quadragesimal character of the initial activity in this field would determine the penitential sense of the Iberian missions, and, as a consequence, the missionary strategies themselves. The «self-presentation» of Jesuits and the type of preaching that they made to the faithful are examples of such strategies, devoted to the ultimate objective of the penitential missions to lead the people to «conversion». In any case, this idea of conversion takes on a political sense, which is demonstrated most evidently in their peace-making activity. In this regard, the action undertaken by Jesuits in theAlmadrabas of Conil and Zahara demonstrates the role played by internal missions with regard to the means of articulation of society, according to the patterns of behaviour and the models of political organization of this period.     

Cartographical evidence of efforts to develop Acre during the last decades of Ottoman rule: did the Ottomans neglect the city?

Using dozens of Ottoman maps from the Central Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, the article challenges the prevailing standpoint regarding the historical-geographic process that took place on both sides of the Bay of Acre/haifa during the last decades of the Ottoman period, and led to Haifa’s emergence as one of the most important port towns in the eastern Mediterranean, and concomitantly to Acre’s demise and negligence. To date, the few researchers who have dealt with this process, especially from the viewpoint of Haifa’s local history, have viewed the Ottoman regime as a passive force that did not act to preserve the status or economic strength of Acre, the regional headquarters, the province’s capital city and the region’s most important town for many years. We argue that the central Ottoman government in Istanbul did not perceive the process of Acre’s demise and Haifa’s rise as a deterministic process. Official Ottoman maps drawn at the request of the imperial centre as early as the 1880s show that plans existed to develop Acre and its region. These plans, even if only partially implemented, would have clearly contributed to preserving Acre’s status over Haifa. The Ottomans attempted to preserve the geo-strategic status of Acre and its importance and made plans to upgrade various infrastructures in the town’s vicinity, which might have changed processes related to physical conditions and powerful technological advances. This approach, which is based on the belief in the human ability to confront and deal with deterministic geographic and physical conditions, seems to have been the foundation of Ottoman planning in the case of Acre. The Ottomans’ capacity to implement these plans was very limited, however, and they eventually had to acknowledge this reality. Thus, Acre was reduced to its formal status as the capital of an Ottoman administrative district until the end of the Ottoman rule in Palestine. In a way, its fate was not very different from that of other traditional centres of Ottoman rule along the eastern Mediterranean coast, whose importance diminished at that time, while new centres that were more cosmopolitan and connected to developments overseas came to power.     

Restituting Church Buildings and Negotiating Church Factions： Missionary Mapmakers and the Making of Local Networks （1712-1716）

At the turn of the 18th century, the Kangxi emperor initiated a large project to map the vast territories of the Qing. The land surveys that ensued were executed by teams of Qing officials and European missionaries, most of them French Jesuits first sent to China in 1685 and actively supported by the French crown. Early 18th century Jesuit publications foster a much-heralded claim that these missionary-mapmakers drew on their status of imperial envoys during the surveys to locally advance the position of the Catholic church. This article strives to explore the format/on of such local networks by these missionaries as they passed through the cities and towns of the Chinese provinces. On the basis of archival material, details emerge of contacts with local Qing administrators and Chinese Christians, and of attempts to purchase and recover local churches. This is then discussed against the background of the Rites Controversy, in an attempt to evaluate how such local networks relate to the rivalry between missionaries of different orders. The article emphasizes that there was （and perhaps is） no such thing as ＂pure science＂ by underscoring that important technical achievements such as the Qing mapping project are often shaped by complex networks and historical contingencies.     

Transatlantic Catholic responses to Fascist anti-Semitism: the Racial Laws of 1938 in the Jesuit press of America and Civiltà Cattolica

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Catholic responses to the Fascist Racial Laws in a transatlantic and comparative perspective. It looks specifically at two foremost publications of the Jesuit press in Rome and New York: Civiltà Cattolica and America, respectively. The comparative approach helps to comprehend the variety of factors behind editorial choices: readership, political context, Vatican directions, censorship, and silence. Jesuits on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted the anti-Semitic turn of the Fascist regime as an imitation of Nazi Germany and with the persistent hope that Italian policies would be milder and more ‘civilized’. The shaping of the myth of the ‘good Italian’ was an early process in which Church voices, including the Pope himself, took a significant part. This article argues that despite contextual differences, both Jesuit publications demonstrated a transnational pattern of Catholic relation to the Jews: endorsing Pius XI’s statements, they spoke out against racism but did not extend their condemnations to a full rejection of anti-Semitism in its religious and secular components. The disapproval of Italy’s Racial Laws was not a defense of the Jews of Italy.     

The Laurentian world map with special reference to its portrayal of Africa

When the Jesuit missionaries began to work in China, they attracted the attention of the Chinese by introducing European knowledge. This is the context in which Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni, Francesco Sambiasi and Ferdinand Verbiest made their Chinese‐language world maps. Sambiasi was a man of many talents. He was a tactful diplomat and a learned scientist. His world map shows him to be a skilful adapter of earlier knowledge, which he passed on to future generations. The six known copies of his map are in two versions, printed from two sets of wood blocks (c. 1639). A text at the top of one version explains why the world must be seen as a sphere, which demonstrates how these maps were meant to convince the Chinese public of European scientific findings.     

Dominican and Jesuit Formal Education in the First Years of Spanish Manila (c. 1571–1621)

In the sixteenth‐century explorations of the Far East, the Dominicans and the Jesuits had different attitudes to the indigenous peoples they encountered, while the peoples of China and the Philippines also had very different cultures. In this article I consider three pairs: Dominicans and Jesuits and their approaches to education, their attitudes to China and the Philippines, and to indigenous and non‐indigenous students in the earliest years of Spanish Manila.     

Who Sank the Battleship Bouvet on 18 March 1915? The Problems of Imported Historiography in Turkey*

This article traces how differing perspectives on the sinking of the French battleship Bouvet ultimately denied the Ottoman artillery credit for the success. The official British account would attribute the defeat to ‘floating mines’ and to the ‘luck’ of the Turks in March 1915 first, and later to the Nusret’s minefield when they published their official history in 1921. Following the Great War and the occupation of Istanbul, the Ottoman officers who participated in the naval operations revised their own accounts and imported the British official narrative of the event. In understanding this overlooked case using newly disclosed Ottoman and German accounts, we can analyse how the losers’ historiography is vulnerable to overt influence from the victors’ hegemonic official historiography.     

The Holy War in Syria: Cemal Pasha and the Ottoman Plan to conquer Egypt in the First World War

This article aims to analyse the importance of the Egyptian campaign to Ottoman policy in the First World War. It seeks to add to our knowledge of the Ottoman war experience by putting the focus on the empire’s preparations for conquering Egypt and by giving priority to understand the aims of the expedition. The expedition itself is placed within the context of the jihad policy adopted at the beginning of the war and which sought to put an end to the Entente’s colonial domination of Muslim countries. The Ottomans’ propaganda initiatives in support of the measures were meant to motivate support among the Syrian population through the idea of holy war.     

Between science and empire: the diplomatic struggle over Mesopotamian antiquities in Lisbon (1914–1926)

A powerful curiosity to discover the ancient world – reaching its peak in the nineteenth century – led to British, French, and German museums to enhance their collections with a great number of Mesopotamian antiquities. Most of these were the product of excavation work, which took years, followed by a shipping process fraught with hurdles and delays – much as when Babylonian and Assyrian antiquities were stranded in Portugal over the period 1914–26. In that case Portuguese officials seized the hoard of Babylonian and Assyrian items due to be sent to Germany at the beginning of the First World War by the German Oriental Society, which had carried out excavation works in Ottoman territories in the name of Kaiser II Wilhelm. The extensive British efforts and diplomatic exchanges aimed at bringing the pieces to London after the war, presents us with important clues regarding ownership disputes over antiquities, and the imperial struggle to acquire the cultural heritage of the near east. This study reveals that, under the existing legal framework, the items eventually taken to Berlin actually belonged to the Imperial Museum in Istanbul, and analyzes the discourse of ‘scientific concern’ constructed by British diplomacy.     

A nineteenth-century Mediterranean union: Michel Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée

This article examines one of the nineteenth-century’s most revolutionary schemes for establishing a union of Mediterranean states. In 1832, Michel Chevalier set out a startling scheme that would bring to an end armed conflict in Europe through a confederation of European states and a subsequent alliance between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. His plan envisaged a vast infrastructure network of railways, canals, roads and shipping lanes that would link the major ports of the Mediterranean with Europe’s capital cities and those of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The infrastructure network at the heart of Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée was conceived by him as the basis for a system of economic integration that would foster political harmony throughout Europe – anticipating by over one hundred years Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s plans for a European Union – but also between Europe and the Ottoman world. Harboured within Chevalier’s infrastructure scheme for the Mediterranean was one of the earliest and most complex nineteenth-century theories of networks ever devised. This article examines the centrality of the Mediterranean to Chevalier’s theory of networks, and explores the multiple dimensions of this complex theory, including the intimate connection he identified between networks as expressions of human creativity and the kind of unalienated human relations that would result in the end of conflict both between and within nations.