The Portal to Jesuit Studies

The Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies is very pleased to welcome its three in-residence fellows for the 2018-19 academic year.

Aislinn Muller, from the University of Cambridge, is the yearlong Institute Fellow. Muller wrote her doctoral dissertation on the papal excommunication and deposition of Queen Elizabeth I in 1570. While at the Institute, Muller will develop part of her doctoral research into an essay on the political and religious implications of Queen Elizabeth’s excommunication for the Jesuit missions who were sent into England during her reign. Muller will also be working on a new project that examines the role of material culture in the Jesuit missions to early modern England. She is particularly interested in objects of devotion – rosaries, relics, books of prayer, etc. – and how missionaries used these objects in their ministry to English Catholic communities, in light of the restrictions placed on Catholic worship by the English government during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because many of these objects were outlawed, and priests in the mission were themselves hunted and prosecuted by the government, the continued popularity of these objects can tell us much about the scope and nature of Catholic religious dissent England.

In residence for the fall semester as a Research Fellow, Emanuele Colombo, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Catholic Studies at DePaul University, focuses his research on religious history in early modern Europe: theology and politics, Jesuit missions, and Christian-Muslim encounters in the Mediterranean. At the Institute, Colombo will work on a digital database of the indipetae, letters written by Jesuits to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus to apply for the missions overseas. A tradition of the Society of Jesus for more than four centuries, the indipetae include information about the missionary selection process, the spirituality of the Society of Jesus, the circulation of information on the mission lands, and the ways in which the candidates described themselves. Because of their number, their extremely rich content, and the stability of their structure over four centuries, the indipetae represent a unique and unparalleled resource in studying the history of the Catholic Church and beg to be studied from different perspectives and through the lenses of various disciplines.

In the spring, the Institute will welcome Laura Madella, from Università degli Studi di Parma, as a Research Fellow.

Learn more about their research and about the application process for the 2019-20 fellowships at the Institute’s website.

The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago has released a new website dedicated to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the famed 19th-century Jesuit poet.

Sponsored by the International Hopkins Association, the Official Gerard Manley Hopkins Website seeks to “serve the needs of students, scholars, and Hopkins enthusiasts, especially those who for a long time have loved this poet and his works.”

The website provides free access to a variety of materials:

— news about related conferences and publications;

— a biography and chronology of Hopkins and his works;

— the full text of 28 poems;

— study guides for classroom use;

— and a selection of photographs and videos.

Frank Fennell, Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago, is the project director. Kyle Roberts serves as the director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. Project funding came from Loyola’s College of Arts and Sciences, its Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, and its Jesuit Community.

The website is available at http://hopkinspoetry.com/.

Dominic Sachsenmaier, Chair Professor of Modern China with an Emphasis on Global Historical Perspectives at the Department of East Asian Studies and History at the University of Göttingen, visits the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies to speak about his latest publication. The discussion takes place on October 5 at the Institute’s Library at Boston College.

In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds, Sachsenmaier examines the life of Zhu Zongyuan. The child of a low-level literati family, the seventeenth-century Chinese Christian convert “likely never left his home province. Yet,” according to Sachsenmaier, “Zhu nonetheless led a remarkably globally connected life. His relations with the outside world, ranging from scholarly activities to involvement with globalizing Catholicism, put him in contact with a complex and contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces.” Zhu was converted by the Jesuits, and he lived seeking to balance “a local life and his border-crossing faith.”

To attend the discussion of the book or to learn more about similar events, please contact the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies (iajs@bc.edu; bc.edu/iajs)

More information about Sachsenmaier’s book is available at Columbia University Press.