In Between Tradition and Innovation, Ad Meskens traces the profound influence of a group of Flemish Jesuits on the course of mathematics in the seventeenth century. Using manuscript evidence, this book argues that one of the Flemish mathematics school’s professors, Gregorio a San Vicente (1584–1667), had developed a logically sound integration method more than a decade before the Italian mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri. Although San Vincente’s superiors refused to grant him permission to publish his results, his methods went on to influence numerous other mathematicians through his...

The catechisms of Peter Canisius reveal the contours of the struggle within the Catholic Church to reframe Christian identity in response to the Protestant Reformation. Canisius published his first catechism in 1555, and immediately achieved phenomenal publishing success. Yet his catechisms received neither endorsement nor approbation from Rome. Canisius’s catechesis proposed a confident vision of Christian identity grounded in the practice of Catholic piety. The Roman Curia increasingly conceived of catechesis as a defensive bulwark against Protestant assault. Although Canisius’s...

During the early modern period, thousands of Jesuits across Europe wrote individual applications for appointments in the “Indies” directly to the superior general of the Society of Jesus in Rome. Known today as litterae indipetae (from Indias petere, that is, applying for the missions in the Eastern and Western territories), these letters encompassed the most personal desires, hopes, and dreams of young Jesuits who sought to become missionaries. This book is the first English monograph on litterae indipetae and studies their style and structure, the background of their authors and the...

This critical edition and translation of the Relaçam do Equebar, Rey dos Mogores (1582) and the Commentarius Mongolicae Legationis (1591), the first detailed European accounts on Mughal India written by Antoni de Montserrat, offers an updated and renewed reappraisal of the first Jesuit mission to the Mughal court (1580-1583). It also includes a reassessment of Montserrat’s career, highlighting his role both as a missionary and a diplomatic agent at the Mughal court

Spanish Jesuits such as Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), José de Acosta (1540–1600), Pedro de Ribadeneira (1526-1611) and Juan de Mariana (1536-1624) had a powerful impact on English thinkers of the magnitude of John Locke (1632–1704), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Robert Persons (1546-1610), Algernon Sidney (1623-1683), and, later, William Robertson (1721–1793), Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) and Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953). An influence that was sometimes hidden and always controversial. This work highlights the importance of this influence regarding thought on politics, law and...

Established in 1638 in a vast Amazonian territory that today encompasses border areas of Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, the missions of Maynas were one of the Society of Jesus’s main enterprises in Spanish America. Jesuit writings provide a unique insight into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples. In effect, they shed light on how native Amazonians appropriated elements of Christian religiosity and Iberian urban culture. This book is not only about how indigenous populations experienced life in missions. It is above all a study of...