The Portal to Jesuit Studies

The Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies has announced the hosts and themes for the Spring 2021 Jesuit Studies Cafés. The series of informal, remote discussions with the world’s preeminent scholars working on the history, spirituality, and educational heritage of the Society of Jesus presents unique opportunities to learn more about the newest and most interesting scholarship in Jesuit Studies. The spring schedule appears below.

The series is organized in collaboration with the University of Lisbon and the Italian German Historical Institute.

Additional details are available at: https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/centers/iajs/programs/jesuit-studies-cafe.html

January 21
“Western Jesuit Scholars in India: Tracing Their Paths, Reassessing Their Goals”
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University

Zoom | 9:20 a.m. (Eastern, GMT-5)

Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, is a scholar of classical theological texts in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hinduism, and a pioneer in the field of Catholic comparative theology. But in the course of his nearly 50 years of visits to India for teaching, study, and research, he has explored instances of the work of Jesuit scholars from the West — from Roberto de Nobili to the famed Calcutta Indologists of the early 20th century — who encountered Hindu traditions in some depth. As both a Jesuit and an Indologist, his goal has been to look deeply into these Jesuit accomplishments, but also into the Hindu materials studied, to assess the successes and limitations of this distinctive Jesuit scholarship. In 2020 he published in the Brill Jesuit Studies series the volume entitled Western Jesuit Scholars in India, which collects in one place 15 of his pertinent essays and book chapters, from the 1980s to 2016. In this Café, he will propose several main insights he has gleaned in his decades of study, with an eye also to what this tells us about the nature of Jesuit scholarship more generally in today’s increasingly pluralistic world.

February 18
“The Society of Jesus between Suppression and Restoration: A discussion of the volume, La Compagnie de Jésus des Anciens Régimes au Monde Contemporain (XVIIIe-XXe siècles), Eds. Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Patrick Goujon SJ, Martín Morales SJ (Rome: IHSI-EFR, 2020)”
Camilla Russell, Ph.D.
Publications Editor, Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu (IHSI) at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI)

Zoom | 9:20 a.m. (Eastern, GMT-5)

This Jesuit Café provides a forum for exploring the new collection of essays encompassing the worldwide papal suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 and subsequent restoration in 1814. The volume, La Compagnie de Jésus des Anciens Régimes au Monde Contemporain (XVIIIe-XXe siècles), is edited by Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Patrick Goujon SJ and Martín Morales SJ, and is the result of a collaboration between three institutions in Rome: co-publishers Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu (IHSI, at ARSI) and the École française de Rome, as well as the Pontifical Gregorian University, where, in 2014, the essays were first presented at a conference to mark the bicentenary year of the Society’s restoration.

Camilla Russell, the publications editor of IHSI, will take us through the main contents, themes, and historiographical questions raised by this large multi-lingual volume of thirty-seven essays, which cover a wide geographical, chronological, and disciplinary terrain. The aim of this Café, additionally, is to stimulate discussion of the main historiographical frame in which this book appears – that of the New Society – to explore together the current directions that this publication points to in Jesuit historical studies today.

March 18
“Jesuits and Renaissance Histories of the World”
Giuseppe Marcocci, Ph.D.
University of Oxford
Zoom | 9:20 a.m. (Eastern, GMT-4)

The age of exploration encouraged the production of a set of creative and experimental histories of the world. Their composition responded to the challenge that the interaction with cultures and societies around the globe posed to traditional knowledge about the past. Some of these works, nonetheless, aroused suspicion for their narratives clashed with the official justification of overseas empires and missions of evangelization. As the Jesuit father Antonio Possevino remarked in his bibliography of historical writings about all the peoples of the world, published in Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, “those who have encompassed the events of our age with an almost universal history can be found in no small number,” but not all of them “should be easily approved.” At a time when the corpus of histories of the world was rapidly growing, Jesuit authors stand out for their absence from Possevino’s selection.

Building on his recent book The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas, Giuseppe Marcocci, Associate Professor in Iberian History at the University of Oxford, will discuss the reasons for which there were no Renaissance histories of the world written by Jesuits. His focus will be on successful works by Jesuit authors that were often used as sources of information by contemporary world historians but were not histories of the world themselves, such as Giampietro Maffei’s Histories of the Indies (1588) and José de Acosta’s Moral and Natural History of the Indies (1590). The particular place that the Universal Relations (1591-1596) by the former Jesuit, Giovanni Botero, had in this context will also be considered. Ultimately, the aim of this Café is to explore the relationship between Jesuit mission and historiography in the early modern world.

April 15
“Science, Empires, and the Jesuits in the Early Modern World: Research Trends and Open Questions”
Maria Pia Donato, Ph.D.
Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, France
Sabina Pavone, Ph.D.
University of Macerata, Italy
Zoom | 9:20 a.m. (Eastern, GMT-4)

Since their foundation in 1540, and well after their first suppression by pope Clement XIV in 1773, Jesuits were key actors in the intertwined goals of the competing Catholic empires: colonization and evangelization. Both goals implied a momentous effort in collecting, producing, and transmitting knowledge to which the Jesuits contributed in several regions of the globe.

The peculiar place of Jesuits in the historiography of early modern science and empires have been established for more than a century, as scholarly interest in Jesuit science has been fueled by the Society itself for a very long time. Recently, it has grown into a full-fledged subfield of research in global perspectives. This presentation seeks to outline some trends in recent historiography, while highlighting a few underlying ambivalences in the ways scholars of different disciplines have dealt with the topic over time.

It suggest that one productive approach for revisiting the place of Jesuits in doing science in the early modern world is a situational approach; that is, looking at Jesuits within intra- and trans-imperial configurations and interconnected structures of governance. Such an approach might help avoid the pitfalls of treating science, empire, and the Jesuits as obvious and unitary entities conjoined with one another, as is still common in both the history of science and global history.

The Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau and the Centre for Sino-European Studies at Shanghai University are collaborating to host a virtual workshop entitled “China-Europe Relations in Late Imperial Times.”

The event takes place on December 19, 2020 — Beijing time, 20:30-22:00; Lisbon time, 12:30-14:00; and Boston time, 7:30-9:00.

The workshop features presentations by five scholars and another five discussants from the two host institutions.

The presenters are

• João Paulo Oliveira e Costa, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, “The Jesuits, the Cape Route and the new Silk Roads”

• Dong Shaoxin, Fudan University, “Jesuits and the Southern Ming”

• Li Qiang, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, “The ‘Matteo Ricci Method’ and Intercultural Dialogue: The Understanding and Practice of Western Missionaries in Modern China”

• Eugenio Menegon, Boston University, “Invisible City: Europeans and their Networks in Late Imperial Beijing”

• Xu Jinhua, Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei of Shanghai Library, “A Glimpse of Early Western Language Collection of the Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei of Shanghai Library”

More details on the virtual workshop appear at the CCCM website: https://www.cccm.gov.pt/noticias/

The organizing committee of “Hopkins and His Environments,” a virtual conference to be held in June 2021, has released a call for papers on the environments in which Gerard Manley Hopkins worked: “natural, textual, aesthetic, political, theological, Jesuitical, and social.”

The deadline for proposals is January 25, 2021.

The full call for the 2021 international Hopkins conference appears below

“Hopkins and His Environments”
A virtual international conference, 24‒26 June 2021

From the Cliffs of Moher to the Valley of the Elwy, from leafy countrysides to city centres “smeared: with everyday life, Gerard Manley Hopkins was acutely attuned to environmental conditions. The 2021 international Hopkins conference, to be held virtually 24 to 26 June 2021, will consider the many environments in which he worked: natural, textual, aesthetic, political, theological, Jesuitical, and social.

Topics for 20-minute presentations might include: Hopkins and Victorian science; Victorian eco-systems and environmentalism; the literary and aesthetic environments of his poetry and prose (including Pre-Raphaelite, Aestheticist, or Decadent art); the intersections of his works and those of his contemporaries; and the political and cultural “surroundings” of Hopkins’s life in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

As a popular term, “environment” came into its own in the nineteenth century, featured in works by the likes of Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick. “Hopkins and His Environments” will be a three-day exploration of its literary, scientific, social, political, and cultural implications in relation to a remarkable poet.

The deadline for submissions is 25 January 2021.

Please send your 300-word proposal to:
Lesley Higgins
19higgins55@gmail.com

Organising Committee: Paul Kelly (Chair), Noel Barber S.J., Lesley Higgins, Jude Nixon, Frank Fennell