‘To provide for the edifice of learning’: Researching 450 Years of Jesuit Educational and Cultural History, with Particular Reference to the British Jesuits1

Abstract

Jesuit education provided the first rigorous educational ‘system’ in the Western world from the 1540s onwards. By 1773 more than 700 Jesuit colleges and universities educating some 250,000 students worldwide constituted the largest educational network in existence up to that time. At the present day, in 68 countries worldwide, the Society of Jesus is responsible for 848 educational institutions serving an estimated 2.5 million lay students. This article examines the extensive historiography of Jesuit education and the educational archives that the Society of Jesus has generated since 1540. Particular attention is paid to the foundational Ratio Studiorum of 1599, a key educational document drawing on earlier traditions, and a source of later reformulations and scholarship in many parts of the world. The scope of Jesuit archives around the globe is examined and an assessment made of their significance for educational and cultural historians. There are few religious institutions in the Roman Catholic Church that have aroused more fascination, during its four and a half centuries of existence, than the Society of Jesus, few that have inspired such curiosity and misunderstanding, such attraction and repulsion.2 2 Woodrow, Alain. The Jesuits: A Story of Power. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995: 10. 1 Research for this article was made possible in part through a Major Grant from the Spencer Foundation in Chicago. The author would like to thank the Foundation; Father Thomas Reddy, director of the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus; Brothers Alan Harrison and James Hodkinson in London, and Brother Kenneth Vance in Liverpool; and Paolo Bianchini, of the Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy, Goran Proot, of the Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium, Paul Shore, of Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA, and Father Thomas M. McCoog, editor of Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, and archivist of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, for their helpful comments on a draft version of this text. Any errors or omissions are the author’s own responsibility.