The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context: Causes, Events, and Consequences ed. by Jeffrey D. Burson, Jonathan Wright

Abstract

The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context: Causes, Events, and Consequences. Edited by Jeffrey D. Burson and Jonathan Wright. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 297. $99.95. ISBN 978-1-107-03058-9.)At first glance, this book appears to be a publication stemming from a conference, yet it is not. Rather, the editors explain in the book's first pages that it is fruit of an initiative that experienced delays.The volume certainly enters in the dynamic of two complementary movements coexisting in the Jesuit historiography since the second half of the last century. On the one hand, the time when only the members of the order (but also its enemies) were protagonists of the writing of its history is definitively over; more and more authors are examining it, as shown by the rich bibliography of Jesuitrelated topics published each year (c. 1500-2000 titles most recently). On the other hand, only very few of these authors dare to propose overviews, whereas the variety of particular, sometimes very limited, topics continues to surprise. Would the time of all kinds of Historia Societatis, as those published in the past, also be over? Such valuable exceptions as the works of Spanish Jesuit Manuel Revuelta Gonzalez, La Compania de Jesus en la Espana Contemporanea (3 vols., Madrid, 1984-2008), or his German confrere Klaus Schatz, Geschichte der deutschen Jesuiten (1814-1983) (5 vols., Munster, 2013), make the answer less easy, although the tendency shown by the contemporary bibliography seems to confirm such a hypothesis, as this book does as well.In conformity with this dominant tendency of the Jesuit historiography of the last decades, its aim is to contribute to further research on the themes faced here as belonging to the universal and not just the Jesuit history of the eighteenth century. Thus, the editors identify the specific perspective that guided the contributors in the transnational and global dimension of the suppression of the Society ofJesus. Such an approach is also visible in the international range of the authors: besides both editors, thirteen other scholars contributed to the book (four of them are Jesuits).Fourteen essays that compose the volume are organized in three parts as the title indicates; they correspond to causes (three articles), events (six articles), and consequences (five articles) of the suppression. In the first part, in chapter 1, Dale K. Van Kley discusses one of the most classical themes of Jesuit history: the conspiracy, recalling that both the enemies of the Society as well as its members used this pattern of interpretation in diverse contexts and with often changing political and theological implications. …