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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

A través de la edición crítica de 855 cartas de los superiores generales de la Compañía de Jesús pueden seguirse los acontecimientos de la antigua provincia del Paraguay entre los años 1608 y 1639. Son los hilos de una trama en la que se advierte un esfuerzo misionero que aún hoy sigue despertando asombro e interrogantes. La vida cotidiana, el heroísmo, las contradicciones, llegan a manos del lector y lo convierten en el último destinatario de esta correspondencia. El volumen se abre con una introducción en la que se explica el plan de la obra y se da al lector una serie de elementos para poner en el debido contexto la documentación. Las cartas están acompañadas de un doble aparato crítico, paleográfico e histórico. El volumen se cierra con dos índices, uno temático y otro onomástico.