Biblioteca jesuítico-española (1759–1799): Estudio introductorio, edición crítica y notas (review)

Although many studies have been done on the 6100 exiled Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Jesuits, up to now a complete, or nearly complete, list of the exiles who wrote and published has not been easily available. In fact, such a list was compiled by one of the exiled Spanish Jesuits, Lorenzo Hervas, famous for his studies on world languages. Between 1773 and 1799 Hervas compiled 495 short biographies of his fellow exiles with a commentary on the nearly 2,000 letters, poems, treatises, or histories written by them, but his compilation was never published. Thanks to Antonio Astorgano, a member of the Xavier María de Munibe Institute of the Basque Country, Hervas’s original work, Biblioteca jesuítico-española, has now seen the light of day.

Hervas’s original manuscript consists of four catalogs located in the historical archive of Loyola. The first catalog lists exiled Spanish and Latin American Jesuits who wrote and published. The second lists authors who wrote but whose works were not published. The third lists Portuguese authors who wrote and published, and the fourth covers foreign (Central European or Italian) Jesuits who wrote and published during their exile. The manuscript also contains two appendices that list manuscripts of the exiled Jesuits found in Roman libraries.

Hervas himself was a most prodigious writer. He wrote his own encyclopedia in Italian, Idea del Universo, in twenty-one volumes. This seminal work was the basis of most of his later publications. His most famous work, Storia delle Lingue, on the languages of the world, is based on volumes 17–21 of his encyclopedia. Hervas drew most of his information on languages from exiled Jesuit missionaries who had lived and worked in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. At the same time he saw the importance of compiling a list of his fellow Jesuits and their publications. He began that task shortly after the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 and finished the bulk of his work in 1793, although he added new items up until 1799. Astorgano notes that certain modern works also list many of the exiled Jesuits and their works, but they do not come close to Hervas’s list. In his work on the exiled Jesuits in Italy, La cultura hispano-italiana de los jesuitas expulsos españoles, hispanoamericanos y filipinos, 1767–1814 (Madrid, 1966), Miguel Batllori cites only 155 of the exiled Jesuits. The more recent Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús in four volumes (2001), edited by Charles E. O’Neil and Joaquín María Domínguez, covers only 140 of the 495 Jesuits in Hervas’s list.

In his exhaustive preliminary study on Hervas and his Biblioteca jesuítico-española, Astorgano places Hervas and the other exiled Jesuits in the context of their times. He also provides tables that list the national origin of the authors, where they lived in exile, the genre of the works (poetry, essays, and so forth) they produced, and the quantity of their writings. Astorgano also points out certain limitations. Hervas, for example, devotes a mere paragraph to describe Rafael Landívar’s Rusticatio Mexicana, for which Landívar became Guatemala’s national poet. Also, since the work concludes in 1799, it does not contain references to Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán and his Carta a los españoles americanos, anonymously published in 1799 in French. All in all, however, this newly published edition of Hervas’s Biblioteca jesuítico-española, with Astorgano’s excellent preliminary study, greatly enhances the body of works on the exiled Jesuits.