Loyola's Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (review)

Until their suppression in 1773, the Jesuits occupied a unique place in the educational culture of Europe. Not only did they operate hundreds of schools and colleges, but they were indefatigable writers, composing plays, sermons, scientific and devotional works, and poetry. Much of the didactic poetry of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuits has been forgotten by all except a small number of specialists. Yasmin Annabel Haskell endeavors in her carefully documented study to bring the genre of didactic poetry, as undertaken by Jesuits steeped in the classics, to a wider audience. Central to her inquiry is the paradox of a Catholic order committed to the propagation of the faith devoting so much energy to secular, even mundane topics. These topics might be purely scientific, as undertaken by Benedict Stay, or could focus on the practical, such as mine construction, which Gilles Anne Xavier de La Sante and François Antoine LeFebvre wrote about, or chocolate production, a theme of Tommaso Strozzi.

Not surprisingly, the resulting poetry seldom has a close relationship to either familiar lyric traditions in English. Haskell reminds us that Jesuits often adapted classical models such as Virgil's Georgics and placed emphasis in their poetry (as they did in pedagogy and curriculum design) on experience, usefulness, and orderliness. These poets, therefore, should not be judged by the standards of their secular contemporaries, but are instead the unique product of a band of savant-priests laboring in an environment that saw the fusion of theological, scientific, and didactic concerns as normal and desirable.

Readers looking for connections between the political and social conditions of the day and this Jesuit poetry will find one significant instance in Haskell's careful analysis. José Rodrigues de Melo's poem "On Brazilian Country Matters" contains descriptions of African slaves and Native Americans, but Melo disappoints us when he shows little sympathy for the suffering experienced by either population. Herein lies both the broadest possible significance of Haskell's scholarly contribution, but also the greatest challenge it faces. The greatest value of a study such as Haskell's may be in the light it sheds on the corporate culture of the pre-Suppression Society. Haskell explores the ways that individual Jesuits found to express themselves creatively when she comments on the poetry itself, which she describes in turn as "satirical," "purple," or at times "masterful." Although addressing these problems may not have been the author's principal goal, her thorough examination of the influences shaping these poems rounds out our understanding of the way Jesuits saw their mission at a point when the sixteenth-century, pre-Baconian worldview in which the Society had been born was attacked from many sides. In exposing the weaknesses and limitations of Jesuit poetry, Haskell also provides another clue in understanding the sudden fall of the Society after 1750 from a position of privilege to exile and expulsion a few decades later. In doing so, she has not only contributed a rigorous analysis of a little-known art form, but has added to the historiography of the Jesuits.