News in Jesuit Studies
The following are notices of significant events related to the field of Jesuit Studies.
The notices appear chronologically, and all entries are indexed into the Portal’s search capabilities.
To contribute news of significant publications and events, both recent and forthcoming, please contact the Portal’s editors (jesuitportal@bc.edu)
FBK Press in Trento has published a new source, the annotated history of the the Jesuit college in Gorizia, Italy. The publication is the result of a collaboration between the Bruno Kessler Foundation and the Istituto di Storia Sociale e Religiosa di Gorizia.
Historia Collegii Goritiensis: Gli Annali del collegio dei gesuiti di Gorizia (1615-1772) is edited by Claudio Ferlan, a researcher at the Italian-German Historical Institute of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, and Marco Plesnicar, the director of the Gorizia State Archive. Together, Ferlan and Plesnicar transcribed the annual reports of the Jesuit college of Gorizia issued between 1615 and 1772. This period saw the establishment of the Austrian province of the Society of Jesus, of which Gorizia was a part.
The annual reports provide unique views of the city’s social, political and religious life. The editors provide indices of names and places as well as biographical notes of people mentioned, both Jesuits and others. There is also an introductory chapter on the history of the Jesuit in Gorizia, written by Ferlan in Italian.
Ferlan is a former research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies. More information about the edited volume, as well as copy available in open access, can be found at the FBK website (https://books.fbk.eu/pubblicazioni/titoli/historia-collegii-goritiensis/).
The indipetae were letters written by Jesuits to their Superior General in application for the extra-European missions, usually called the “Indies.” In Latin, applying for the Indies was petere Indias; from this are derived the expressions indipetae (the letters) and indipeti (the applicants). After the Suppression (1773) and the Restoration (1814) of the Society of Jesus, the tradition of writing these petitions continued.
Now available as an open access resource, the Digital Indipetae Database collects the indipetae of both the Old and the New Society. Users can search the letters by a number of facets — the full text, a sender’s name or location, the date a letter was sent, the destination desired, and the names of saints quoted among the others. The database also hosts scans of the original letters that are housed at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu and other Jesuit archives. The public launch of the database took place at a Jesuit Studies Café on March 26, 2020.
The Portal to Jesuit Studies aggregates the contents of the indipetae database and includes them within its search capabilities.
The database is an initiative of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies. It developed at Boston College Libraries in partnership with the Institute and Emanuele Colombo of DePaul University. Colombo serves as the database’s editor. He is supported by members of an editorial board and a scientific board. The project leads during the development were Seth Meehan, associate director of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, and Kimberly Kowal, the associate university librarian for digital initiatives and services at Boston College. Learn more about the development process–including how to access the database’s coding–at https://indipetae.bc.edu/team.
The Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies is pleased to announce that the peer-reviewed articles on the Coimbra Jesuit Aristotelian tradition are now included with the search capabilities of the Portal to Jesuit Studies.
Conimbricenses.org facilitates the exploration of the unique educational influence of the Coimbra Jesuit Aristotelian instruction that stretched from Portugal to Asia and South America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
As the first digital project on the Coimbra Jesuit Aristotelian tradition, Conimbricenses.org publishes peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries and provides free, worldwide access to digitized versions of the most important documents related to the topic. The project was launched in 2018 by the University of Coimbra’s Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos (IEF), under the direction of Prof. Mário Santiago de Carvalho and the coordination of Dr. Simone Guidi.
Collaborating with the project’s director and editor, the Portal to Jesuit Studies indexes the encyclopedia articles published at http://www.conimbricenses.org/contents/ and aggregates them within the portal’s search capabilities.