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  • Dentro e fuori le aule: la Compagnia di Gesù a Gorizia e nell’Austria interna (secoli XVI–XVII) by Claudio Ferlan
  • Robert A. Maryks
Dentro e fuori le aule: la Compagnia di Gesù a Gorizia e nell’Austria interna (secoli XVI–XVII). By Claudio Ferlan. [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, Monografie, 61.] (Bologna: Società editrice Il Mulino. 2012. Pp. 390. €29,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-15-24190-0.)

This well-researched and -structured book tells a story of the Jesuit mission in Gorizia (today’s northeastern Italy) and in the interior of Austria (so-called Innerösterreich) in the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century. The first part of the title indicates immediately that the focus of this study is twofold: not just the Jesuit educational enterprise but also the Jesuit broader activities that included the ordinary ministry, Marian congregations, theater, and pacification efforts. The study fills a gap in scholarship on the presence of the Society of Jesus in the Habsburg empire, and it places itself critically within the older historiographical panorama, characterized by an excessive highlighting the Counter-Reformation spirit of every single activity of the Jesuits in a Protestant-threatened area.

The historical period discussed is divided in two distinct parts: 1558–1618 (long negotiations for the foundation of the college in Gorizia that began with the arrival of the first Jesuits in Vienna in the year of the election of Diego Laínez as superior general until the establishment of the college in 1615 and the subsequent Uskok War) and 1619–50 (the development of the college and the presence of the Jesuits in the city’s affairs up to the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War).

The study is characterized by a comparative approach (Gorizia vis-à-vis other Austrian cities: consider, for example, the foundation of the Jesuit college in Graz already in 1573) and by a critical consideration of various elements that impacted the presence of the Society in the region: secular powers of the Austrian Empire, the larger Catholic Church, the General Curia of the Jesuits and the local superiors, and the Republic of Venice. It is based on a critical reading of a vast number of primary sources, most of which come from the central archives of the Jesuits in Rome, such as chronicles of other Jesuit colleges (Ljubljana and Klagenfurt), the Litterae Annuae, and various catalogs of the Jesuit Austrian province.

Ferlan’s book is a welcome monograph in the field of Jesuit studies. Wishfully, this micro-history is only a prelude to a broader history of the impact of the Society of Jesus in the Austrian Empire before it was suppressed in the eighteenth century. [End Page 351]

Robert A. Maryks
Boston College
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