The Portal to Jesuit Studies

Harvard University Press has published Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet, edited and written by Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and Thupten Jinpa.

The book focuses on Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit priest who worked as a missionary in Tibet in the 1720s. Desideri, according to the publisher, undertook an “ambitious project” while in Tibet: “a treatise, written in classical Tibetan, that would refute key Buddhist doctrines.” The priest believed that, having convinced “Buddhist monks that these doctrines were false,” he could “dispel the darkness of idolatry from Tibet.”

Dispelling Darkness contains extended excerpts from Desideri’s writings (including Inquiry concerning the Doctrines of Previous Lives and Emptiness and Essence of the Christian Religion). Lopez, of the University of Michigan, and Jinpa, of McGill University, also provide extended comment to demonstrate “how Desideri deftly used Tibetan literary conventions and passages from Buddhist scriptures to make his case.”

More information about Dispelling Darkness is available at the website of Harvard University Press: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674659704

Loyola University Chicago hosted a Jesuit Studies Roundtable in advance of the annual Renaissance Society of America conference. Organized by Emanuele Colombo (Depaul University) and Stephen Schloesser (Loyola), the workshop consisted of presentations of current and future scholarly and digital projects.

Presenting were:

• • Scott Hendrickson, SJ, on “Continued Research on Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, SJ (1595-1658)”;

• • Paul Grendler, on “The Jesuits and Italian Universities 1548-1773” and “Jesuit Schools in Italy 1548-1773”;

• • Bob Scully, SJ, on “The Jesuits, the Spanish Habsburgs, and Church/State Tensions”;

• • Maria Giulia Genghini, on “Ancient Tales New Told: Jesuit Preaching in Latin America”;

• • Michelle Molina, on “Jesuits (and a Protestant) at Sea: An Intimate Encounter Between Early Modern Global Catholicism and the Late Eighteenth Century”;

• • Kathleen Comerford and Kyle Roberts, on the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project;

• • Thomas Worcester, SJ, and Alison C. Fleming, on the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits;

• • Christopher Parsons, on Jesuit Relations: A Digital Edition;

• • Robert Maryks, on Brill’s Jesuit e-Shelf;

• • Seth Meehan, on the Portal to Jesuit Studies;

• • Emanuele Colombo, on the litterae indipetae Project.

Spencer Weinreich has published a new translation of the Pedro de Ridabeneira’s “Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England” as part of Brill’s Jesuit Studies book series. Weinreich’s is the first English translation of the text that Ribadeneira began in 1588 and continued to edit until his death in 1611. With this volume, according to Brill, “the History, long derided as mere propaganda, emerges as remarkable evidence of the centrality of historiography to the intellectual, theological, and political battles of early modern Europe.”