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.

 

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. 

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). 

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.

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.