Narratives of Adversity: Jesuits on the Eastern Peripheries of the Habsburg Realms (1640-1773) by Paul Shore (review)

Paul Shore examines the role played by Jesuits on the periphery of the Habsburg monarchy during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has examined an impressive range of archival sources to construct a series of related essays about the Jesuit center at Trnava, as well as Jesuit residences in Košice, Prešov, and Levoča in eastern Slovakia and at Sárospatak in northeastern Hungary. Efforts to revive the Catholic cause faced entrenched opposition from Evangelical and Reformed communities in this region. Jesuits were heavily reliant on the political support and patronage offered by the Habsburg court. Their center of activity was established at Trnava, where a Jesuit college and then university from 1635 was the key institution for training clergy (including Ruthenian Greek Catholic priests). Shore's work makes clear that the 1670s proved to be a crucial turning point in Catholic fortunes in Habsburg Hungary. Responding to an ill-conceived plot by some leading aristocrats, the court took the opportunity to centralize governance of Hungary and to repress non-Catholic religion. Jesuits were witnesses to, and beneficiaries of, the violence that followed. Shore highlights, for example, the events witnessed by Jesuits at Košice in September 1673. The diary entry for the community detailed the execution of some rebels, including a Calvinist who was impaled while still alive. The diary entry then calmly proceeded to list the guests invited to the Jesuit residence for lunch that day. Meanwhile, earlier Jesuit victims of violence were promoted as martyrs for the Catholic cause. In 1619 three Jesuits had been killed at Košice by soldiers of the Calvinist prince of Transylvania, György I Rákóczi. Rákóczi's daughter-in-law, Zsófia Báthory, had been forced to convert to Calvinism at her wedding. After her husband's death, Báthory reverted to Catholicism and provided funds during the 1670s to build a Jesuit church to commemorate the Košice martyrs. Báthory's support also was critical at Sárospatak, where the Calvinist college was forcibly closed in 1671 and the buildings handed over to the Jesuits for use as their new residence. That same year Habsburg forces were on hand at Prešov when the Evangelical college was seized and then turned over to the Jesuits. Shore explains that Jesuits often served as chaplains for Habsburg armies. He follows this close relationship as far as Belgrade in the 1720s, where the state paid for a school to be run by Jesuits. The school was initially located, perhaps understandably, near the army barracks in the city.

Although the Jesuits directly benefited from state support, this also endangered their mission. Repeated revolts against Habsburg rule in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought violence and disruption to the region. Protestant bitterness was frequently directed against the Jesuits during these revolts. In the wake of success for anti-Habsburg forces in 1706, Ferenc II Rákóczi (Zsófia Báthory's grandson) announced that the Jesuits had two weeks to leave Hungary. In the midst of all these challenges, Shore argues that the Jesuits found comfort in a shared narrative of triumph in the face of adversity. This Jesuit perspective offered the prospect of victory over all obstacles, whether that meant silencing obstinate heretical preachers, exorcising troubled souls, or educating people in true doctrine. After the Rákóczi rebellion was suppressed, the physical dangers for Jesuits in Hungary diminished. However, Shore is rather unimpressed by the lack of ambition and creative energy that followed during the mid-eighteenth century. He concludes with the damning verdict that, although the Jesuits themselves did not realize it, their project was well on the way "to outliving its usefulness when external forces put an end to the Jesuit presence in Hungary" (p. 279).