Jesuit Studies in the Age of a Jesuit Pope
NOT EVEN THE Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuit missionary par excellence Francis Xavier, nor any other Jesuits, have ever had the kind of worldwide audience and influence that Pope Francis clearly has. He is, by far, the best-known Jesuit ever, and yet like many Jesuits over the centuries he has not only enthusiastic supporters, but also no shortage of critics. A question that informs this review essay is what effect his papacy may have on how Jesuit history is henceforth imagined, researched, and written, not only for recent history of the Society of Jesus, but for its entire history, from the founding of the Jesuits to the present. Yet even before the election of Pope Francis, the quantity of scholarly work on Jesuit history, especially concerning the period from approval of the society by Pope Paul III in 1540 to its suppression by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, had been growing exponentially. Jesuits and the complexities of European cultural encounters with the rest of the world have become a particularly prominent topic in research on the Society of Jesus. A flood of recent publications explores the Jesuits as lauded and contested intermediaries not only between cultures in different parts of the world, but also between religion andmore secular concerns, between tradition and innovation, between a late Renaissance veneration of antiquity and various post-Renaissance modernities, between community and individual initiative and self-fashioning, and between obedience to civil and ecclesial authorities and a radical openness to direct experience of the divine. Once a rather specialized niche topic, the Jesuits in recent decades have become a hot topic for a wide array of doctoral dissertations, most of them undertaken not by Jesuits or other clergy or religious, but by laypersons and others professing no religious beliefs. Top university presses along with trade presses and other publishers have become eager to publish more and more books on the Jesuits, including single-authored works as well as edited volumes of essays. Some of these volumes are lavishly illustrated and explore especially the visual dimension of Jesuit history and culture. Scholars have come to realize that the available primary sources for such research— archival/manuscript, print, and other— are a cornucopia that will not be exhausted for generations to come. In this review essay, I consider seven recent books on Jesuit history published between 2013