Narratives of Adversity: Jesuits on the Eastern Peripheries of the Habsburg Realms (1640–1773)

IX In Pursuit of History

IX In Pursuit of History History is the narrative of great actions with praise or blame. Attributed to Cotton Mather The link between Jesuits and historical scholarship is a deep and unbroken one: Jesuit scholars have shaped our understanding of distant times and places, and scholars who study the history of the Jesuits (some of them Jesuits themselves) have given us much of our understanding of the Society.1 Historical scholarship was a key element of Jesuit literary culture in the seventeenth century, accompanying (and interwoven with) both the polemics that staked out the Society’s position on the confessional and political landscape, and with the beginnings of Jesuit geographical and ethnographical reporting.2 During the first two centuries of its existence, the histories composed and compiled by Jesuits defined the narrative of the Society offered to outsiders, cultivated a vocabulary among Jesuits for expressing the Jesuit experience , responded to the charges of the Society’s opponents, and provided a model to future Jesuits for the writing of future Jesuit histories.3 1 Harney, “Jesuit Writers of History.” 2 The academic disciplinary category of ethnography of course did not exist in the early modern period, reportage that has been identified later as potentially “ethnographic” being undertaken by Jesuits specifically for the promotion of apostolic work. The same could be said about much of Jesuit historical writing in the seventeenth century. Forsythe, “The Beginnings of Brazilian Anthropology.” 3 A published representative of this literature is Julius Caesar Cordara, Collegii Germanici et Hungarici Historia (Rome: Salomoni, 1770), which reproduces 212 Narratives of Adversity Jesuits also played a central role in the composition of more general histories of various geographical regions. As the House of Austria extended its influence eastward, Jesuit historians were engaged in the retelling of the history of the region and elaborating on the relationship of the dynasty to that history, a project that was part of the Society’s larger project of advancing the writing of history as both a scholarly and a polemical enterprise, as well as a way of demonstrating loyalty to a dynasty that was usually the Jesuits’ champion.4 Ultimately this undertaking would prove one of the most lasting contributions of the Jesuits to Hungarian cultural history, and even observers highly critical of the Society’s impact on Hungarian cultural history have conceded the key role Jesuits played in laying the foundations of historical scholarship .5 Simultaneously, however, pre-Suppression Jesuit historical writing retained an at times distinctly uncritical approach to sources, especially when these related to the allegedly miraculous, a trait is shared with other contemporaneous historical traditions and with much of the Society’s own internal record-keeping. As the seventeenth century wore on, the reinterpretation of Hungarian regal history and the implications of this interpretation for contemporary policy increasingly claimed the attention of Jesuits of the Austrian Province. Melchior [Menyhért] Inchoffer (1584–1648), a Jesuit of Hungarian birth (if possibly not ancestry) working in Rome, original documents but without significant analysis or commentary. Largely neglected (owing to their unsystematic production and preservation), but key in the development of the Society’s own historiography were the histories and biographies of Jesuits that circulated among communities and promoted the sense of collective identity while offering examples of self-sacrificing conduct and piety. Representative here is the unique eighteenth-century copy of Luis de Valdevia, Libro de algunos varones ilustres que ha havido en la Compañia de Jesus cuyas santas vidas y gloriosas muertes padecidas por la fee… In such collections the identities of specific individuals served collectively to create a composite picture of the Society as a whole. BRBC, 114 MS2007-16. 4 “What began as a stress on the continuity of Catholic virtue broadened into a whole interpretation of Hungarian history, incorporating notions of hierarchy, order, and discipline freely adapted from the neo-stoics.” Evans, The Making, 257. 5 Czigány, The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature, 66. 213 In Pursuit of History is the outstanding example of this tendency.6 In 1644 Inchoffer published the Annales ecclesiastici regni Hungariae, in which he claimed to have located the original papal bull bestowed on St. Stephen by Sylvester II that granted the king apostolic rights then being claimed by the Habsburg rulers of Royal Hungary.7 Inchoffer—who also examined the early history of the Danube Basin, and is perhaps best remembered for his opposition to Galileo during the latter...