In Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814-2014: Crossings and Dwellings, Kyle Roberts and Stephen Schloesser, S.J., bring together essays by eighteen scholars in one of the first volumes to explore the work and experiences of Jesuits and their women religious collaborators in North America over two centuries following the Jesuit Restoration. Long dismissed as anti-liberal, anti-nationalist, and ultramontanist, restored Jesuits and their women religious collaborators are revealed to provide a useful prism for looking at some of the most important topics in modern...

In 1583, five Jesuit brothers set out with the intention of founding a new church and mission in India. Their dream was almost immediately, and brutally, terminated by local opposition. When their massacre was announced in Rome, it was treated as martyrdom. Francesco Benci, professor of rhetoric at the Collegium Romanum, immediately set about celebrating their deaths in a new type of epic, distinct from, yet dependent upon, the classical tradition: Quinque martyres e Societate Iesu in India. This is the first critical edition and translation of this important text. The commentary highlights...

This volume of essays contributes to our understanding of the ways in which the Jesuits employed emotions to “change hearts”—that is, convert or reform—both in Europe and in the overseas missions. The early modern Society of Jesus excited and channeled emotion through sacred oratory, Latin poetry, plays, operas, art, and architecture; it inflamed young men with holy desire to die for their faith in foreign lands; its missionaries initiated dialogue with and ‘accommodated’ to non-European cultural and emotional regimes. The early modern Jesuits conducted, in all senses of the word,...

In Natural and Political Conceptions of Community, Christoph Haar examines the role of the household community in Jesuit political thought. Introducing a fresh perspective on the early modern Jesuit academic discourse, the book explores how leading Jesuit thinkers drew on their theologically inspired conceptions of the family community to determine the usefulness as well as the limitations of the political realm. Natural and Political Conceptions of Community is about the place of the household in Scholastic theoretical works. The book demonstrates that Jesuits considered the human being as...

Winner of the 2021 Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize for Historical Astronomy In Decoding the Stars, Ileana Chinnici offers an account of the life of the Jesuit scientist Angelo Secchi (1818-1878). In addition to providing an invaluable account of Secchi’s life and work—something that has been sorely lacking in the English-language scholarship—this biography will be especially stimulating for those interested in the evolution of astrophysics as a discipline from the nineteenth century onward. Despite his eclecticism, reminiscent of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and...

The French mystic Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–65) was the chief exorcist during the infamous demonic possession in Loudun in 1634–37. During the exorcism, a demon entered Surin’s own soul, and the exorcist became demoniac. He spent the following eighteen years of his life mute and paralyzed. All the while his troubled mind conversed with God, and he composed hymns and poems that tried to comprehend his agony. Surin left detailed descriptions of the dramatic events that shaped his life and fascinated his fellow Jesuits. But Surin was also an author of spiritual texts, a spiritual director of...

Jesuit Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity, edited by Cristiano Casalini, is the first comprehensive volume to trace the origins and development of Jesuit philosophy during the first century of the Society of Jesus (1540–c.1640). Filling a gap in the history of philosophy, the volume seeks to identify and examine the limits of the “distinctiveness” of Jesuit philosophers during an age of dramatic turbulence in Western thought. The eighteen contributions by some of the leading specialists in various fields are divided into four sections, which guide the reader through cultural milieus,...