Francisco de Borja y su tiempo: Política, religión y cultura en la Edad Moderna by Enrique García Hernán and María del Pilar Ryan (review)

As the editor of the Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu notes in his prologue to this collection of Spanish, English, and Italian essays, Francisco de Borja's historical image has suffered since Otto Karrer's biography (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1921).Although Borja's life (1510-72) did not constitute the main focus of the papers presented at the 2010 Valencia commemorative conference, it forms the analytical touchstone of almost all the papers delivered, here published almost in their entirely (forty-two out of forty-three, plus one not presented). The principal theme emerging from the book is that a socioeconomic nexus with various elites was critical to the first century of the Society of Jesus.

Some articles encompass Borja's legacy. Paul Begheyn explains the creation and reception (until 1976) of Karrer's controversial biography, whereas Jodi Bilinkoff argues that Pedro de Ribadeneyra's 1592 biography portrayed Borja's secular and ecclesiastical lives as complementary, the pursuit of "both Christian renunciation and masculine honor . . . balanc[ing] saintly virtue and noble duty" (p. 455). Manuel Ruiz Jurado's sketch of Borja's personality as consistent throughout his life resonates with Miguel Navarro Sorní's depiction of Valencian spiritualism, out of which Borgia arose, as a deep-rooted, smoothly-evolving phenomenon (against Marcel Bataillon's Erasmist thesis); Elizabeth Rhodes, in contrast, suggests Borja's "intimacy with God" remains a poorly understood "transcendental history" (pp. 685-86).

Most of the articles focus more narrowly on a specific facet. Francisco Pons Fuster contrasts the Christian humanism of Borja's father to Borja's Counter-Reformation ascetic ritualism, and Rafael García Mahíques examines the importance given by Borja to images as tools for mental prayer. Francisco Fernández Izquierdo argues that Borja's stint in the Military Order of Santiago (1539-49) only stimulated an already highly developed spirituality but was not responsible for his entrance into the Jesuit Order in 1546; this decision was not motivated by his actions as viceroy of Catalonia (1539-43), according to Ricardo García Cárcel. The editors' own contribution ("Ignacio de Loyola y Francisco de Borja, frente a frente [1539-1552]") highlights how Borja's evolution toward the Jesuits resulted from a highly articulated and personal aristocratic network supporting them that predated the death of his wife in 1546 and his official entrance into the society. This process was effaced by Jesuit propaganda after 1550, which gambled correctly that depicting Borja's entrance as surprising had an "amazing . . . impact on the nobility" (p. 744), with ample recruitment and philanthropic possibilities. Eduardo Javier Alonso Romo explores how Borja's own eremitical instincts, so "clearly divergent from the Ignatian institution"—but similar to Simão Rodrigues's, S.J., in Coimbra—relate to the crisis in the 1550s within Rodrigues's Province of Portugal, part of a larger crisis in the Society at Rome whose financial resolution is attributed by Francisco de Borja Medina Rojas to Borja's international courtly-philanthropic networking. According to Robert Maryks, Borja played a key role in continuing the policy of the first two Jesuit generals of accepting conversos into the Society against widespread opposition (the policy was rescinded in 1596). Philip Endean de-emphasizes debates about Borja altering Loyola's policies, arguing instead for the importance of how his joining the "new, small and suspect Society of Jesus was . . . a notable milestone in the process by which that Society established itself" through "an alliance with the highest echelons of civil society, in a way that pious Jesuit rhetoric of poverty and humiliations can all too...