Il volume, a cura di Marina Massimi e Alcir Pecora, presenta l’edizione critica di un manoscritto didattico del 1751, proveniente da due collegi gesuiti di Bahia (Brasile) e attualmente conservato presso la Biblioteca Comunale di Urbania (Marche). Offre il testo originale latino di In Studiosos Adolescentes, insieme a un’analisi storico-letterario del contesto della sua produzione nonché del “viaggio inaspettato” e intercontinentale del manoscritto tra l’America del Sud e l’Europa. Il libro è arricchito da quattro saggi introduttivi scritti da studiosi del settore, da inediti documenti ad esso collegati e da un accurato apparato critico. La presente edizione fornisce un contributo fondamentale alla storia dell’educazione, della retorica e della poetica gesuita in epoca moderna. Rivela inoltre le circostanze e conseguenze globali dell’espulsione dei gesuiti dai territori dell’impero portoghese, che costituì il primo passo verso la soppressione papale della Compagnia di Gesù tra 1773 e 1814.

Coeditado con la Universidad Loyola Analucia, se trata de un recopilatorio de los estudios inéditos de Francisco de Borja Medina Rojas, jesuita sevillano e historiador de la Compañía de Jesús, sobre la figura del que fuera el cuarto prepósito general de la Compañía, el jesuita flamenco Everardo Mercurián, también conocido como Everardo Mercuriano.

La figura de Everardo Mercurián es clave para entender cómo se va configurando la primera Compañía de Jesús en su identidad. Fue uno de los generales que más impulsó el estudio de las fuentes de la espiritualidad ignaciana para superar los debates que se habían ido dando antes de su generalato sobre la forma concreta que debía seguir esta espiritualidad. Estos debates estuvieron particularmente presentes en la Compañía española.

In this volume, Festo Mkenda, SJ, a leading voice in studies on the Society of Jesus in Africa, turns his attention to the little-known history of the Jesuit presence in modern Ethiopia. Marking the recent seventy-fifth anniversary of the arrival of a small group of Canadian Jesuits in 1945—the first sustained presence in over three hundred years—the book outlines the origins and modern history of the Jesuits in Ethiopia. Bringing to life their story in vivid detail, it will be of interest both inside Ethiopia and its diaspora, as well as to all of those interested in Africa and the Church today. 

This volume, edited by Girolamo Imbruglia, Pierre-Antoine Fabre, and Guido Mongini, presents the first comprehensive treatment of the Litterae indipetae – letters of petition that Jesuits sent from all over Europe to the Superior General seeking appointment to the “Indies”. Unique to the Society of Jesus, over 22,000 Litterae indipetae are preserved at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu spanning five centuries, giving voice to thousands of individual Jesuits and their collective desire for the missions. Despite their remarkable longevity, the Litterae indipetae have been little known or understood until recent times. Yet like no other source, these petitions testify to the scope and depth of the Society’s missionary identity. The book offers a timely survey of the subject through thirty short chapters in Italian, English, and French, organised both chronologically and thematically, and written by leading and emerging specialists. The volume is intended as an introduction to the source as well as a showcase of the latest scholarship in the field. 

This volume is the critical edition of a seventeenth-century manuscript about youth and education in Italy, Memoirs of Seventeen Boarders at the College of Nobles in Parma (1670), preserved at the Biblioteca Comunale “Passerini Landi”, Piacenza. A later manuscript at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu was part of a publication project that never went ahead in the 1820s, shortly after the papal restoration of the Society of Jesus. Memoirs of Seventeen Boarders is filled with insights into college life, seen through the eyes of the author: its operations; the Jesuit educational method; the relationship between the Jesuits and boarders, and their families; the conduct of the students, and the recorded affective and spiritual experiences of these youths. Edited by Miriam Turrini, the book includes the full transcribed text of the Memoirs in the original Italian language, with extensive annotations and a substantial Introduction in English that places the work and its author in context and traces the manuscripts’ fortunes between the Old and New Society.

This volume, edited by Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Patrick Goujon SJ and Martín M. Morales SJ, presents thirty-seven essays on the modern history of the Society of Jesus, spanning the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The essays are multilingual, multidisciplinary and range across a wide chronological, geographical and thematic landscape within the field of modern history, while the papal Suppression (1773) and Restoration (1814) of the worldwide Society provide the volume’s main orientation. Until recently, modern Jesuit history has received relatively limited scholarly attention. This volume aims to guide researchers in the riches of this period in the Society’s history and demonstrate its importance for modern historical studies more broadly. A novelty of the volume is that it brings together the later history of the “Old Society”, the interim period of the Suppression (1773–1814), and the “New Society” (from the Restoration). The book’s broad frame provides a window onto the great ruptures of European history, the main events of modern Catholic history, and early globalization. While the well-known upheavals of this period come into view, the persistent continuities of these centuries also emerge, exemplified most potently by the Society’s own partial survival during the forty-one years of its papal suppression. 

The Jesuit mission in Japan began in 1549. A century later, Christianity had been formally eradicated through a series of state persecutions and prohibitions that had effect into modern times. One of the most important witnesses of the so-called “Christian century” in Japan was the Portuguese Jesuit, João Rodrigues “Tsûzu” (c.1561-1633), known by his Japanese moniker, “the Interpreter”. Among his extant writings is an incomplete work about Japan. Of this projected multi-volume História da Igreja do Japão, only the first three books in two parts have come down to the present day. This edition presents book three of the second part, published here for the first time in the Portuguese language and titled, Segunda parte da História Eclesiástica de Japão. The Rodrigues manuscript was written from exile in Macao. It provides an important account of the early history of Christianity in Asia and the first Jesuit efforts to Christianize Japan in the mid-sixteenth century under the leadership of Francis Xavier. It is reproduced in this volume with a number of pertinent letters and papers by Rodrigues.

An extensive Introduction and critical apparatus in the Spanish language accompany the Portuguese-language texts. The edition, further, contains a helpful English-language Preface, while each of the twenty-eight chapters of Rodrigues’ text – together with his papers – contain comprehensive summaries in English. 

This study is the first examination of Jesuit prison ministry in the Holy Roman Empire during the period of witch trials. It provides new insights into the prisons where the persons detained for witchcraft were incarcerated as well as their trials and the applied torture and executions, as seen through the Jesuits’ eyes. In the context of these trials, the Cautio Criminalis appeared, written by the noble Jesuit Friedrich Spee SJ (1591–1635), dealing with the question of the legality of the trials and the related prison ministry, and printed pseudonymously by a Lutheran printer in 1631 and again in 1632. For the first time, the study offers a complete biography of Spee, who was nearly forced to leave the Society of Jesus; it traces the book’s publication, and provides a detailed analysis of the prison visits of his confreres. The book also details Spee’s criticism of prison ministers and questions about the guilt or innocence of the imprisoned, tortured and executed women and men of this tragic period in European history. 

In the present work, Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India Antony Mecherry SJ explores the underlying dynamics of the accommodation experiments led by Francisco Ros SJ (1559–1624)—a Catalonian from the Jesuit province of Aragón—in the cultural and religious terrain of Malabar, where he worked principally among the region’s Christian communities. Mecherry’s historical analysis becomes an interpretative key to understanding the later mission launched by Roberto de Nobili SJ (1577–1656), the main proponent of accommodation in the non-Christian context of Madurai in South India. Most importantly, the study underscores the Jesuit mission in early modern India as the crucial intersecting point for some of the most prominent promoters of accommodation in the first century of the Society of Jesus, including Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610).

This calendar is a comprehensive research tool and finding aid, listing for the first time in one volume over 2,600 documents exchanged between the Jesuit Curia and superiors of the Jesuit Irish missions between 1566 and 1752, now preserved in Rome and Dublin. The detailed summaries of these documents provide a window onto life in Ireland and onto Irish connections with the continent in the dramatic religious and political environments of early-modern Europe. 

Jesuit missions in Ireland, Scotland, and England were either suspended, undermanned, or under attack. With the Elizabethan government’s collusion, secular clerics hostile to Robert Persons and his tactics campaigned in Rome for the Society’s removal from the administration of continental English seminaries and from the mission itself. Continental Jesuits alarmed by the English mission’s idiosyncratic status within the Society, sought to restrict the mission’s privileges and curb its independence. Meanwhile the succession of Queen Elizabeth I, the subject that dared not speak its name, had become a more pressing concern. One candidate, King James VI of Scotland, courted Catholic support with promises of conversion. His peaceful accession in 1603 raised expectations, but as the royal promises went unfufillled, anger replaced hope. 

Includes critical editions of three 16th-century source documents: a letter from Antonio Possevino to Francesco Sacchini, a letter from Lainez to Catherine de Medici, and a text entitled Qua ratione scribendi uti debeant qui extra urbem in societate nostra versantur. 

The visit to China of the Papal Legate, Charles Thomas Maillard de Tournon (1705-1710), marked a decisive turning point, both for the Society of Jesus, and for the history of the Christian missions in China. The legate succeeded in imposing his negative views about Chinese rituals for ancestors and Confucius, thus consolidating the vilification that led to the Society’s suppression later in the century. The German Jesuit Kilian Stumpf was a privileged observer of these events principally in the Chinese capital, Beijing, and through his extensive correspondence in the rest of China. In addition to working for the Chinese Emperor Kangxi as director of the imperial glassworks, during the Legate’s visit, Stumpf was designated Jesuit procurator (negotiator) and papal notary, for which role he kept a daily record of events and documents destined for Rome: the Acta Pekinensia. Here, for the first time, this neglected text is provided in an annotated English translation, covering the initial phase of the Legation. The volume and accompanying CD-Rom (with images of the original manuscript) will be of interest to historians of the Catholic Church, sinologists and students of religion, as well as offering a lively story full of fascinating personalities and events.

Includes a selection of 131 letters written by Gagarin or members of his family. Includes, in French translation, the article written on Gagarin by Paul Pierling for the Biographical Dictionary of Russia (1896-1918). Also includes, in French translation, a biographical essay on Gagarin by the Polish historian Wiktoria S´liwowska. 

Includes facsimile reproductions of a selection of Chinese and Latin documents written between 1701 and 1704; the documents are held by the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu. 

English Catholic voices, once disregarded as merely confessional, are now acknowledged to provide important perspectives on Elizabethan society. Based on extensive archival research, this book builds on previous studies for the first thorough investigation of the Jesuit mission to England during a critical period between the unsuccessful armadas of 1588 and 1597, a period during which the mission was threatened as much by internal Catholic conflict as it was by the crown. To address properly events in England, the study engages with the situation in Ireland, Scotland and the continent so as to contextualize the ambitions, methods and effects of the Jesuit mission. For England felt threatened not only by the military might of Spain but also by any assistance King Philip II might provide to Catholics earis and a vindictive James VI in Scotland, powerful nobles in Ireland, and English Catholics at home and abroad. However, it is the particular role of the Jesuits that occupies central place in the narrative, highlighting the way in which the Society of Jesus typified all that Elizabethan England feared about the Church of Rome. Through an exhaustive study of the many facets of the Jesuit mission to England between 1589 and 1597, this book provides a fascinating insight not only into Catholic efforts to bring England back into the Roman Church, but also the simmering tensions, and disagreements on how this should be achieved, as well as debates concerning the very nature and structure of English Catholicism.

Scholarship of the past few decades has succeeded in questioning the wholly objective status typically attributed to the terms of religious affiliation common in early modern England. This is not to say that expressions such as puritan, Arminian, or Calvinist are without meaning. But it is equally clear that religious identities have to be reconstructed by interrogating what those terms meant for contemporaries, and by analyzing how their attitudes toward particular styles of liturgy, worship, and conformity to the law that governed the national Church shaped their own awareness of religious identity.

Established in 2005, the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu Nova (MHSI Nova) series principally publishes primary source material, but, unlike the MHSI, includes critical editions, reprints, and translations. 

Papers presented at an international colloquium held Apr. 7-9, 2010, at the Universidad Cardenal Herrera-CEU, Valencia, Spain, in commemoration of the fifth centenary of the birth of Saint Francisco de Borja. 

Established in 1941, the Bibliotheca Instituti Societatis Iesu (BIHSI) series is devoted to monographs on the history and culture of the Society of Jesus.