The Jesuits: Culture, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (review)

Reviews 261 date of his death! Sometimes the brief introductions to authors and their works can be misleading - as in the case of Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, which is described as written in 1510 and published in 1531. A particular version was certainly written in 1510, and Book I of the three-book work ultimately published in 1533 wasfirstpublished in 1531; but this was a quite different version to that written in 1510. It is almost inevitable that in such a vast enterprise some small errors will creep in. It is far more important to acknowledge the fundamental contribution which this collection will make to thepositioning ofthe occult at the centre of Early Modern European culture. Charles Zika Department ofHistory University of Melbourne O'Malley, John W, ed., The Jesuits: Culture, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1999; cloth; pp. xix, 772; illustrated; RRP US$80.00, £45.00; ISBN 0802042872. This book recalls the unsettling fact that very often the historical questions ask reflect our present history. Amidst the seeming dominance of globalised corporate culture, in 1997, the organisers of a conference at Boston College asked participants to consider two questions about the Society of Jesus, perhaps the f i r s t truly global corporation. W a s there a 'Jesuit way of proceeding', and was there such a thing as 'Jesuit corporate culture'? The overall argument of the papers collected in this sumptuous book, that Jesuit 'style' evolved over time and through interaction with local conditions, should cause us to question our glib generalisations not only about the Jesuits but about recent 'globalisation'. The 35 essays are grouped into seven unequal sections. Thefirstsets the Society in historiographical context, the others examine its R o m a n context, the cultural freight ofits overseas missions, Jesuit interaction with indigenous cultural agency, the transformation of Jesuit intellectual culture over three centuries, and the impact of prose, music and art on conversion, while the last draws some conclusions while suggesting further inquiry. The overall tone of revisionist assault upon c o m m o n assumptions about the Jesuits makes this an important book about some ofthe core issues of early modern cultural and intellectual history. John O'Malley opens splendidly by surveying historiographical traditions about the Jesuits, particularly the transformation ofhistorical questions in the last 262 Reviews 20 years as research on the origins of Protestantism has perforce brought more attention to the Catholicism which encouraged it and the Catholicism which opposed it. Ironically his emphasis on the Jesuits as missionaries and educators for the Christian life, especially the Spiritual Exercises, the Constitutions, and their schools, highlights the one glaring absence from this collection, theology. The Society's 'substance' in saving souls thus appears neglected by comparison with the 'accidents' of the visual arts, including architecture, music, science, literature and casuistry which embellished that soteriological core. Gauvin Alexander Bailey surveys and attacks received arguments for an identifiable Jesuit style in the visual arts. H e argues rather that the Jesuits adapted to circumstances and integrated much from local cultures, which Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Clare Robertson exemplify in subsequent essays. Marc Fumaroli describes Jesuit rhetorical education, emphasising its flexibility in framing all forms ofknowledge, which explains the enormous Jesuit contribution to knowledge of geography and natural history in the absence ofspecific training in these areas. Humanist education also explains the diversity ofJesuit interest in indigenous languages and cultures as less the automatic response of an 'intellectual' Society than a structured way oflooking at the world. This very adaptability ofJesuit education undermines the notion ofa monolithic Jesuit culture, as Nicolas Standaert points out in discussing their nuanced adaptations to different regional cultures within China and in Japan. Qiong Zhang also shows h o w translators melded Confucian beliefs about human nature with very alien Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophical concepts. Rivka Feldhay's introduction to the political, religious and institutional 'culturalfields'of Jesuit science, rather than setting the scene for subsequent papers, emphasises Christoph Clavius's impact in structuring Jesuit astronomy and Paul Guldin's strategic textual control over Jesuit mathematical knowledge. More valuable are Michael John Gorman's survey of Jesuit responses to the...