The Portal to Jesuit Studies

The Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies welcomes Jeffrey Muller to Boston College as a Senior Research Fellow for the fall semester. Muller, professor of Art and Architecture at Brown University, is working on a new project about the Jesuit global strategy of accommodation. In this project he asks: How did the Jesuits fashion their interactions with the diverse peoples from China to Peru whose souls they wished to save? He is also working on an historiographical essay on Jesuit art, an essay that will be part of the forthcoming Jesuit Historiography Online project hosted by Brill.

To learn more about Muller and the fellowship program, please visit the Institute’s website.

Between June 28 and July 1, the Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa and the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College co-host the International Symposium on Jesuit Studies in Nairobi, Kenya. The topic of the symposium, “Encounters Between Jesuits and Protestants in Africa,” uses the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation as “an ideal opportunity to reflect in a deeper and new way on the history of the relationship between the Protestants and the Jesuits who were founded twenty-three years later.” Selected presented papers and delivered remarks will be published in the Jesuit Studies book series by Brill.

To learn more about the 2016 symposium, please visit the Institute’s website.

Brill has published Jesuit Image Theory, edited by Wietse de Boer, Karl A.E. Enenkel and Walter S. Melion. The volume (including 97 color images) looks at “Jesuit investment in images, whether verbal or visual, virtual or actual, pictorial or poetic, rhetorical or exegetical.” Contributions to the volume include:

• The Jesuit Engagement with the Status and Functions of the Visual Image, by Walter S. Melion;

• The Early Jesuits and the Catholic Debate about Sacred Images, by Wietse De Boer;

• The Jesuit Ars and Scientia Symbolica: From Richeome and Sandaeus to Masen and Ménestrier, by Ralph Dekoninck;

• The Theory of Figurative Language in Maximillian ver der Sandt’s Writings, by Agnès Guiderdoni;

• Writing on the Body and Looking Through its Wounds: The Mnemonic Metaphor of the Stigmata in Emanuele Tesauro’s Rhetoric, by Andrea Torre;

• Claude-François Ménestrier: the Founder of “Early Modern Ground Theory,” by David Graham;

• Enargeia Fireworks: Jesuit Image Theory in Franciscus Neumayr’s Rhetorical Manual (Idea Rhetoricae, 1748) and His Tragedies, by Karl A.E. Enenkel;

• Libellus Piarum Precum (1575): Iterations of the Five Holy Wounds in an Early Jesuit Prayerbook, , by Walter S. Melion;

• Interior Sight in Peter Canisius’ Meditations on Advent, by Hilmar Pabel;

• Le Pacte Précaire de l’Image et de l’ecrit dans le Livre Illustrate d’epoque Moderne: Le Cas de la Peinture Spirituelle (1611) de Louis Richeome, by Pierre Antoine Fabre;

• A Variety of Spiritual Pleasures: Anthonis Sallaert’s Glorification of the Name of Jesus, by James Clifton;

• Marvels and Marbles in the Antwerp Jesuit Church: Hendrick van Balen’s Stone Paintings of the Life of the Virgin (1621), by Anna C. Knaap;

• The Simularcra Avorum in Jesuit Latin Poems by Wallius and Carrara: From Vergilian Imitation to Scholastic Philosophy and Art Theory, by Aline Smeesters;

• “To Make Yourself Present”: Jesuit Sacred Space as Enargetic Space, by Steffen Zierholz;

• The Jesuit Strategy of Accommodation, by Jeffrey Muller.