5 Via a series of case studies of Jesuit writers anticipating or living through the long era of the suppression, mainly in Italy, but also in Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe, we aim to build up a much more comprehensive picture than hitherto available of their literary works and networks, and of the emotional freight these conveyed in different times and places. 4 In the larger team project of which this paper represents a tentative first step, we hope to consider the twilight of the Old Society of Jesus through a unique and highly revealing prism: that of the Jesuits’ literary production, especially in Latin, over the period leading up to, during, and immediately after the suppression. While there has been an efflorescence of historical studies of the suppression in recent years, especially from national and/or colonial perspectives, 3there has been relatively little work devoted systematically and synoptically to the emotional impact on Jesuits living through these turbulent times, and to how they managed, individually and collectively, their changing religious identities, scholarly careers, and mental health. More sympathetic engravings show groups of humiliated, distraught, sometimes frail and elderly, priests, assembling at ports before embarking for exile. 1 In French pamphlets of the period, Jesuits were portrayed as conspirators and regicides (later, ironically, counter-revolutionaries), profiteering hypocrites, devil-worshippers and corrupters of youth, who get their comeuppance falling off towers, passing through sieves of true piety, and tumbling to hell to be welcomed by demons. Jesuits had been the target of satire and opprobrium from their inception, of course, and not exclusively in Protestant countries, but the avalanche of anti- Jesuitica that gathered momentum over the second half of the eighteenth century was unprecedented.
Along with the order, the Latin humanist education that had prevailed in Europe since the Renaissance took a serious body blow in the final decades of the eighteenth century. For the two centuries leading up to the suppression, the Society of Jesus had contributed conspicuously to European science, art, music, literature, and theatre.
0 kommentar(er)
