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)
On April 13, the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies welcomes Eugenio Menegon, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute, and Jorge Flores, professor of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute in Florence, to Boston College as they present papers on the “‘Global Courts’ of Early Modern India and China: Jesuit Accounts of Imperial Life.” Flores’ presentation, “Jesuit Missionary Surveys the Mughal Court: On the Treatise of the Court and Household of Jahangir Padshah (1610-11),” is based on his recent publication The Mughal Padshah, by Brill. The book “reveals intriguing insights on Jahangir and his family, the Mughal court and its political rituals, as well as the imperial elite and its military and economic strength.” Menegon looks at the European missionaries in Beijing’s court, between 1700 and 1838, and how their work as “scientists, artists and technical personnel” helped them gain access to the court’s elites.
Eugenio Menegon, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, delivers a talk at Boston College entitled “The Man and His Image: Art & Propaganda at the Court of the Qianlong Emperor of China and the Jesuits’ Role.” The talk, co-sponsored by the Department for Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures and the Asian Studies Program, takes place on March 22. Menegon looks that how Jesuit artists decorated the private retirement apartments of the Qianlong emperor in way that not long helped Qianlong manufacture his own image as a ruler but allow insights into emperor’s daily life as well.
On March 1, Daniel Greenberg, lecturer in Asian Art and East Asian Studies at Smith College, visits the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies to present on “Landscapes of Power: Mongol Ritual, Jesuit Painting, and the Construction of Eighteenth-Century Chinese Empire.” Greenberg’s remarks at Boston College consider the meaning behind paintings completed by the Jesuit missionary artists representing the annual birthday celebration of the Qinalong emperor, especially how the paintings help to “make individual historical moments emblematic of greater cosmological truths.”