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)
The Istituto Sangalli in Florence welcomes applications for a weeklong seminar on the central archives of religious orders in Rome. Held in June 2020, this workshop will “focus on the archives of some important religious orders and on their materials, providing especially, but non only, to young scholars in Humanities a new perspective on global Catholicism from the early-modern period until the contemporary age.” It will offer a multi-disciplinary examination of “the role played by the religious orders and their impact from an historical, ethno-anthropological and art historical point of view, and on a global scale.”
The workshop takes place from June 22-26 in Rome. It will visit the following archives
1) Historical Archives of the Franciscan Friars
2) General Archives of the Capuchin Friars
3) Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu
4) General Archives of the Missionaries of saint Charles Borromeo (Scalabrinians)
5) Central Archives of the Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus (Combonians)
It will feature lectures on the following topics — Introduction to Archival Research in Rome; The Historical Archives of the Franciscan Friars: Brief History and Structure; Archival Research in the General Archives of the Capuchin Friars; The Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu: Brief History and Structure; Archival Research in the General Archives of the Missionaries of saint Charles Borromeo (Scalabrinians); Archival Research in the Central Archives of the Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus (Combonians); Laboratories on Manuscripts & Documents: Language, Scripts, Conventions, Dating & Documentary Typologies.
Applications are due March 31, 2020. More information is available at the institute’s website and at https://www.istitutosangalli.it/wp-content/uploads/sites/124/2020/02/Summer-workshop-archives-religious-orders.pdf
Jesuit Sources has published a new collection of essays examining the legacies of the Jesuits’ introduction of Aristotelian logic to China in 17th century. That legacy began with the collaboration between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese literati “to translate a specific part of the Cursus Conimbricensis, a set of commentaries on Aristotle’s philosophy developed by Jesuit philosophers in Coimbra, Portugal, which had become a popular manual of philosophy used throughout the world.” According to the publisher, Jesuit Logic and Late Ming China features five essays on “the relation between logic and the teaching of mathematics, the philological issues of translating western concepts in Chinese culture, and the opportunities that Aristotelian logic represented for a mutual understanding shed new light on the challenges, successes, and failures of the dialogue on the art of reasoning between China and the West in the early modern period.”
The volume is edited by Cristiano Casalini, of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies and the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Essays are contributed by Bernardo Machado Mota, Mário Santiago de Carvalho, Simone Guidi, Lu Jiang, and Casalini. Thierry Meynard, S.J., provides a foreword to the volume.
Jesuit Logic and Late Ming China is the second title in IJS Studies–Research on Jesuits and the Society of Jesus, a new imprint at Jesuit Sources is dedicated to publishing peer-reviewed secondary scholarship examining Jesuit history, spirituality, pedagogy, and other themes. The first volume in the imprint was In the School of Ignatius by Claude Pavur, S.J., as announced on the Portal to Jesuit Studies in October 2019.
Patrick Goujon, SJ, a theology professor at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Centre Sèvres in Paris, has a written a new history of the changes to French Jesuits’ spiritual direction in the 17th century. Les politiques de l’âme: direction spirituelle et jésuites français à l’époque moderne has been published by Classiques Garnier as part the 57th title in its “Lire le xviie siècle” collection.
Goujoin argues that the Jesuits’ introduction of devotional reading into spiritual conversations de-emphasized the subjectivity then inherent to the existing process in favor of a “more passive spiritual practice aimed at obedience to a guide.”
The title is available at the publisher’s website. The book has a citation, with additional information, at the Jesuit Online Bibliography.