English Jesuit Research Articles

“Of Divels in Sarmatia Honored”

The persistence of Paganism in the Baltic region (especially Lithuania) long after its official conversion to Christianity in 1387–1413 was a matter of widespread concern in early modern Europe, including England, challenging the narrative of Christianity’s triumph in northern Europe. England had a long history of engagement in the Baltic, and early modern English authors displayed an interest in surviving Baltic Pagans, while English Jesuits labored in Lithuania to bring Pagans to Catholicism. This article examines the language used to portray Baltic Paganism by English authors and translators, arguing that Poland-Lithuania’s status as a European power meant Lithuanian Pagans received a somewhat more sympathetic treatment than other indigenous Pagans, such as the Sámi of Scandinavia and Native Americans. Early modern English responses to Lithuanian Paganism thus illuminate the complexity of European Christian attitudes to living Pagan religion in northern and eastern Europe.

Avant la lettre: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

<i>Avant la lettre</i>: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

O Magnum Mysterium? Eco-theology at the foot of the Cross

AbstractIn Laudato Si’, Pope Francis urges not just a renewal of respect for creation but also a metanoia in our attitude to the created world. This article is a response to the Pontiff's challenge, exploring how a distinctively ‘modern’ approach to creation arose in the late nineteenth century which still influences our attitudes today. As those attitudes arose, however, the article argues that Christian thinkers were able to articulate other approaches, which are referred to as ‘doing eco-theology at the foot of the Cross’. The article explores these views and their implications in shaping a Christian response to the present ecological crisis within which we find ourselves. In particular, it concentrates on the interpretations of ‘nature’ in the writings of the German atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and his exact English Jesuit contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) who were bothworking at the dawn of the ‘modern’ view of ‘nature’ and creation.

Disputes in the Irish college, Douai (1594–1614)

By the late sixteenth century, Irish demand for seminary places was sufficient to warrant the establishment of a dedicated Irish college in Lisbon (1590). This was followed by foundations in Salamanca (1592), Douai (1594) and elsewhere. The great majority were administered by the Society of Jesus, whose Irish members were generally Old English, a term denoting descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman settlers. Old English Jesuit domination of Irish colleges occasioned accusations of discrimination against students of Gaelic family backgrounds, with the students seeking redress from the secular authorities. The Irish college in Douai was not formally administered by the Jesuits, but its founder, Christopher Cusack, collaborated closely with the Society. Accusations against him of anti-Gaelic bias emerged in the 1600s, coincidental with the arrival of large numbers of Gaelic Irish refugees in Flanders at the end of the Nine Years War (1594–1603). Ethnic tensions and financial difficulties all but put paid to the college in the 1620s.

The Materiality of Catholic Resistance in Sources for the English Jesuit Mission

The Materiality of Catholic Resistance in Sources for the English Jesuit Mission

At Once What Christ Is: The Deifying Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

At Once What Christ IsThe Deifying Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins David Meconi SJ (bio) I. Introduction A robust theology of Christian deification can be found throughout the poetry of the English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Informing much of Hopkins's theistic imagery is his exhortation to his readers to become another Christ. What may sound like a daunting, if not heretical, claim has always been at the heart of the Christian faith in general and the core of Hopkins's spirituality in particular. Embedded in his most memorable pieces is a two-act drama wherein the Son of God becomes human as the curtain is raised, so that in the second act, we humans might become the sons and daughters of God. This is precisely what the best of the Christian Tradition taught to be the end and goal of the Christian life: not only to embrace God-made-flesh, but actually to continue his enfleshed presence in the world. If this were not somehow true, as St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) put it, so much of sacred Scripture would be thrown into question: Now, however, I wonder if we shouldn't have a look at ourselves, if we shouldn't think about his body, because he is [End Page 116] also us (quia et nos ipse est). After all, if we weren't him, this wouldn't be true: When you did it for one of the least of mine, you did it for me (Mt 25:40). If we weren't him, this wouldn't be true: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4). So we too are him, because we are his organs, because we are his body, because he is our head, because the whole Christ is both head and body.1 There is no other way to makes sense of Christ's admonition to be "perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:48).2 This theology of deification was not only a consistent strand of thought running from the Fathers through the medieval doctors and into such contemporaries of Hopkins himself, such as Cardinal Newman (d. 1890) in his own beloved England or Matthias Scheeben (d. 1898) in Germany, it was a key evangelical principle embedded in Hopkins's own Jesuit training, evident most clearly in the Spiritual Exercises which he made every year of his religious life. The following article will therefore show how Hopkins drew from this ancient Christian soteriology of the "great exchange"—that God became human, so humans could become God—to inform his poetry's most central Christian imagery. Divided into two main sections, I first set out to appreciate the theology of divinization Hopkins would have been trained in through his post-Tridentine, Jesuit formation. Deification is not something normally associated with the Council of Trent (1545–63) and subsequent catechesis, nor is it readily found in the writings of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus. Yet, thanks to a more concentrated academic focus today, scholars have uncovered how the reality of "becoming god" does in fact run through these centuries of the post-Reformation period. The second half of this study will then turn to Hopkins's own writings and lay out where and how he draws from this ancient theme in composing some of his more memorable lines. [End Page 117] II. Brief Biography Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford in Essex on July 28, 1844 and was the oldest of nine children. The Hopkins family was intellectually refined. His father was a London shipping insurer who also published poetry, and his mother enjoyed the best education her physician father (who himself was educated in poetry by John Keats as a young man) in London could have provided. The home was by all evidence full of literature, music, and a deep appreciation for art, especially the sketches and woodcarvings of Gerard's aunts Annie and Maria. At primary school Hopkins became friends with Ernest Hartley ("E.H." in his letters) Coleridge, the grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before going up to Balliol College (1863–67), where he would take first...

A Dayspring to the Dimness of Us: The Symbolic Reality of Edith Stein, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Marie-Dominique Chenu

This article explores the ‘symbolic reality’ of two twentieth century theologians inspired by the works of Dionysius the Areopagite: Edith Stein/Teresia Benedicta a Cruce ocd (1891-1942) and Marie-Dominique Chenu op (1895-1990). To illustrate their arguments about the role of the symbolic in Christian life, the author takes as his text the great narrative poem of the English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-889), The Wreck of the Deutschland. The article argues that the symbolic theology provides resilience to those undergoing psychological and physical trauma as they enter into what Stein called ‘the Science of the Cross’.

Japan Dramas and Shakespeare at St. Omers English Jesuit College

This essay examines how Catholics at the English Jesuit College at Saint-Omer reflected on Japanese religious politics during the 1620s and 1630s, both through translated mission reports and drama. This analysis expands scholars’ view of English encounters with Japan; it also decenters predominantly Eurocentric approaches to early modern Jesuit education and theater. The essay concludes with a discussion of Shakespeare and George Wilkins's “Pericles,” a quarto playbook of which was possessed by St. Omers and which, through the generic elements of romance it shared with the Japan material, provided further opportunities for the college's Catholics to consider transcontinental religious politics.

Hopkins and Lanier: A Transatlantic Note

Hopkins and Lanier: A Transatlantic Note Gerald Roberts ‘I know scarcely anything of American literature’1 At the time in April 1884 when he became (briefly) acquainted with the name of the American poet Sidney Lanier some three years after the latter’s death, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s knowledge of his transatlantic contemporaries was certainly very limited. Although American writing, especially in the novel, was beginning to make an impact on a wider British public, his personal reading remained stubbornly English. He knew a little Poe and rather more – but not much – of Whitman, and still less of Sidney Lanier, whose name he came across when reading an American periodical in a Jesuit establishment outside Dublin. Hopkins’s personal circumstances as a fully occupied Jesuit priest at University College Dublin, with teaching, examining and professional study occupying much of his time, hardly lent itself to a wide knowledge of the American scene, and the time when Hopkins came across Lanier’s name in the American review The Century Magazine2 coincided with a particularly unsettling period for the English poet. Plunged in the depths of despondency, as testified in his letters, Hopkins was spending time in what seems to have been a personal retreat3 at the prestigious Jesuit boarding school of Clongowes Wood, not many miles west of the Irish capital. Recently (and unwillingly) transferred from the relatively comfortable Jesuit atmosphere of Stonyhurst College in his English homeland (‘I shall be sorry to leave Stonyhurst’4 ) to the unfamiliar, even hostile environment of the Irish capital where he was virtually friendless, Hopkins’s depression led to his heartfelt ‘What does anything at all matter?’ and the confession to Bridges: ‘I am, I believe, recovering from a deep fit of nervous prostration (I suppose I ought to call it): I did not know but I was dying’.5 It was in these low spirits that he came upon a review of the life and work of the ill-starred American poet, whose early death in 1881 was a tragic witness to his failed literary (and musical) ambitions, and might well have suggested a parallel to Hopkins’s own experience. Born in 1841 (making Studies • volume 109 • number 433 48 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 48 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 48 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 him almost a contemporary of the English Jesuit), the son of a middle-class Georgia family, Lanier had been caught up in the Confederate War, and as a result spent five months of that time in captivity. The sporadic writing of poems that followed his eventual release, a tedious period of work in the law firm of his father, followed by private teaching and public lectures to Johns Hopkins University students, were not enough to ensure financial stability for an ambitious writer. With a young wife and a family of three children to look after, he eventually succumbed to the tuberculosis which he had been fighting since his experiences as a prisoner of war, and died in September 1881, at the age of thirty-nine. His opus of poems and miscellaneous works (which included a study of English poetics) were still uncollected when he died, with his name hardly known across the Atlantic. Lanier’s life experience was therefore a tragic story of a cultured and civilised family background that clashed with a hard and ultimately unsuccessful struggle, in the years of Reconstruction after the Civil War, to achieve literary and musical independence. As well as his writing ambitions, he also took an interest in musical theory and played in the local symphony orchestra at Baltimore (with rather more success than Hopkins’s musical dabblings in Ireland). The latter’s interest in Lanier was raised by the memoir of the latter’s life which appeared in The Century in April 1884, leading Hopkins, with perhaps a touch of fellow-feeling, to describe the critique as ‘the saddening account of a young American poet … who had good notions about poetical form ... and died young, in struggling circumstances’.6 This reaction was sent to Bridges in the same month and is the sole reference to Lanier’s name in Hopkins’s writing (‘I know scarcely anything of...

Puzzles and posts: Reconstructing Robert Persons’ correspondence with Claudio Acquaviva, 1589–1592

The early English Jesuit leader Robert Persons (1546–1610) was sent to Spain in 1588 by the superior general of the Society, Claudio Acquaviva. His commission was to negotiate with King Philip II over the authority structures of the Jesuits in Spain. Besides conducting these negotiations, Persons founded English seminaries in Valladolid (1589) and Seville (1592). This article examines the extant correspondence between Persons and Acquaviva during this period, reconstructing the missing letters as far as possible. In the process, we learn a great deal about the correspondence network, the use of posts, the dating and confidentiality of letters, and the choice of language.

Resisting National Sentiment: Friction between Irish and English Jesuits in the Old Society

Pedro de Ribadeneyra, first official biographer of Ignatius of Loyola, showered praise upon him and his companions for abandoning immoderate sentiment “for particular lands or places” in their quest for “the glory of God and the salvation of their neighbors.” Superior General Goswin Nickel praised a Society conceived in Spain, born in France, approved in Italy, and propagated in Germany and elsewhere. Out of diversity Ignatius had forged unity. Ribadeneyra prayed that nothing would ever threaten this union. His prayers were not heard: the Society’s internal unity was often endangered by national sentiment despite congregational attempts to curtail and eliminate it. This article does not purport to be an exhaustive study of localism versus internationalism—although such a study is needed—but an investigation of relations between Irish and English Jesuits principally in the seventeenth century. Individual Jesuits did in fact cooperate, but there were limits. A proposal in 1652 that the independent Irish mission become part of the English mission was that limit.

Jesuit and gentleman planter: Ingle’s rebellion and the litigation of Thomas Copley S.J.

Father Thomas Copley S.J. (d. 1652) was born in Madrid in 1595/6 to an exiled English Catholic family. He joined the Maryland mission in 1637 under the alias Philip Fisher. In 1645 in the midst of the English Civil War, Richard Ingle, captain of the Reformation and under the authority of a Parliamentary Letter of Marque, plundered Maryland. Ingle, who mostly pursued wealthy Catholics, brought to England under arrest the Jesuit priests Thomas Copley and Andrew White on charges related to the legislation, An Act Against Jesuits, Seminary Priests and Other Such Disobedient Persons (1585). This article examines the proceedings of the High Court of Admiralty and the High Court of Chancery that relate to Ingle’s Rebellion (1645-1646). In particular, it examines the methods employed by Fr. Copley not only to escape execution but also to pursue Richard Ingle for damages to property and person. It therefore delineates the intersections between national allegiance, civil rights, and confessional adherence in Catholic and non-Catholic imaginations in both England and her empire. Importantly, this case study illustrates how English Jesuits navigated and used an immature English imperial jurisprudence to their advantage.

The origins of the Catholic Social Guild in Scotland: ‘We have not attacked the Socialists professedly’

The activities of John Wheatley's Catholic Socialist Society have been analysed in terms of liberating Catholics from clerical dictation in political matters. Yet, beyond the much-discussed clerical backlash against Wheatley, there has been little scholarly attention paid to a more constructive response offered by progressive elements within the Catholic Church. The discussion that follows explores the development of the Catholic social movement from 1906, when the Catholic Socialist Society was formed, up until 1918 when the Catholic Social Guild, an organisation founded by the English Jesuit Charles Plater, had firmly established its local presence in the west of Scotland. This organisation played an important role in the realignment of Catholic politics in this period, and its main activity was the dissemination of the Church's social message among the working-class laity. The Scottish Catholic Church, meanwhile, thanks in large part to Archbishop John Aloysius Maguire of Glasgow, became more amenable to social reform and democracy.

The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606. "Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished." by Thomas M. McCoog

Reviewed by: The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606. "Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished." by Thomas M. McCoog Freddy C. Dominguez The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606. "Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished." By Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700; Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu, Volume 78.] (Leiden and Rome: Brill and Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu. 2017. Pp. xiv, 612. $160.00. ISBN: 978-90-04-33044-3.) Thomas McCoog, S.J., has achieved two historical feats in his books on Elizabethan Jesuits. First, he has provided the most thoroughly researched, even-handed account of early modern English Jesuit activities to date. Second, and just as importantly, his work hearkens back to (unfortunately) bygone days of history-writing that was meticulous, exhaustive, and confident in its ability to describe events as they were, or better put, as the sources suggest they were. His "trilogy" on Elizabethan Catholicism is a testament to McCoog's exemplary scholarship steeped in a rich mix of secondary sources and an unmatched intimacy with Jesuit primary sources, especially those at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu. The third installment of his magnum opus under review here only confirms that his work should be essential reading for anyone interested in early modern (English) Catholicism, Jesuits, and Elizabethan political culture. Here McCoog starts where he left off in a previous volume, in 1598, when Philip II of Spain died, and describes Jesuit activities in Ireland, England, and Scotland through the third year of James I's reign in 1606. Eight years are covered in over five hundred pages of lucid prose and leisurely summary of (mostly) Jesuit letters, memorials, and printed polemic. The book focuses on two large themes. First, it tells of the many and varied tensions within the English Catholic community centering on arguments for and against Jesuit efforts in England. These tensions [End Page 551] were not new to the period in question, but they reached a fever pitch during the so-called Appellant Controversy, a moment of polemical viciousness between secular priests and Jesuits that spread in print, manuscript, rumor, and face-to-face quarrels throughout England, Flanders, and Rome among several different English Catholic factions. Second, the book studies in great detail the politics of succession leading up to James I's accession to the English throne and the ways in which a range of wary Catholics dealt with that reality after years of wrangling over whom to support when Elizabeth died. A prominent thread used to tie these two themes comes in the form of the indefatigable and perennially controversial figure of Robert Parsons, whose various historical personae as inveterate politico and man of solid faith inspired awe and disdain in equal measure from different quarters. McCoog's contribution is essential amid a historiography that until recently has been confessionally motivated. A thorough reading of the sources has revealed just how lacking black and white portraits (or caricatures) of the past have been. Just as scholarship on Jesuits in general has moved away from a simplified corporate or even military model of the Society, McCoog has shown that British members of the order often disagreed among themselves and that their responses to British questions were varied. In describing this, the author takes issue with one of the great historians of English Catholicism: John Bossy. While Bossy ultimately emphasized the stagnation of "Elizabethan Catholicism," McCoog emphasizes dynamism. Throughout, McCoog ably shows that instead, the sources on Jesuits reveals "flexibility and adaptability more than inertia" (p. 542). There is no greater example of this than Parsons who, though knee deep in political contrivances of all sorts, was nevertheless quite malleable and far from the monochromatic schemer of legend. Each subsequent volume in McCoog's (mostly) Elizabethan trilogy has been bigger than the last. What each has gained in rich description and scholarly rigor has, however, been at the expense of other elements. McCoog, from the first volume of this series, has admitted that there would be an English focus to his work, as demanded by the sources and the importance of the English story for a broader British one. Here, however, sections...

‘The strictest, orderlyest, and best bredd in the world’

The English Jesuit college, founded in 1593 at Saint-Omer because of increasing Elizabethan penal legislation against Catholics, soon became the largest post-Reformation Catholic school in the English-speaking world. This article analyses the organization of the school, with particular emphasis on education in drama and music. It was in the environment of this institution that the recently discovered Saint-Omer First Folio almost certainly had its first home, probably left behind following the flight of the English Jesuits and their students to Bruges in 1762, immediately prior to the expulsion of all members of the Society of Jesus from France.

English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762-1803. By Maurice Whitehead. Pp. xviii, 266, Farnham, Ashgate Publishing, 2013, £70.00.

English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762-1803. By Maurice Whitehead. Pp. xviii, 266, Farnham, Ashgate Publishing, 2013, £70.00.

The Saint-Omer Folio in its library

Ever since the discovery of a First Folio in the Saint-Omer library in northern France (on the premises of the former English Jesuit College of St Omers), the academic world has been abuzz with speculation about Jesuit interest in Shakespeare. Based on a thorough investigation of the material context of the Folio in the Saint-Omer library, this essay shows that the Folio belonged to two sets of books in its original milieu: books signed ‘Nevill’ and donated in 1736, and books stamped with the letters ‘P S’, which were presumably included in a reserve. This article analyses the new findings.

New Discoveries about the Saint-Omer Folio: The Signification of the PS Stamp

Since the discovery of a Shakespeare First Folio in Saint-Omer (in northern France), in a city library that had integrated the library of the former English Jesuit College of St Omers at the French Revolution, scholars have been speculating about Catholic interest in Shakespeare. In an article published in May 2015 in Études Épistémè, Line Cottegnies and Gisèle Venet studied the annotations in the Folio and described, among other things, the curious marking of the book, the letters PS hand-pressed repeatedly throughout at regular intervals. Since then, other similarly-marked books, six in total to date, have emerged in the Saint-Omer rare books collection, and allow us to suggest that the letters PS stand for “Praefectus/i Studiorum”, and that the marked books were placed in a Prefect of Studies’ reserve. This short article mainly aims at describing the PS-marked books that have been identified. We suggest that the marking indicates that PS-marked books were kept separate from the main communal library. This raises in turn some interesting questions about the juxtaposition of the Folio with the other PS-marked books, and this note offers some tentative suggestions to try and explain why it was thus withdrawn from circulation and placed in a reserve or special collection of a Prefect of Studies.

“Musk among Perfumes”

The complexities of scriptural translation intensify in colonial, multilingual societies. In this study, we examine Thomas Stephens’s Kristapurana (1616) as a significant moment of cross-cultural encounters in the history of Bible translation in India. Stephens (1549–1619) was an English Jesuit, who worked in Goa, India. The Kristapurana is written in the Marathi language, in Roman script. Stephens’s Purana can be considered the first attempt to bring the biblical story into an Indian language, although in poetic form. This study aims to bring out the significance of this early Christian work in the Marathi language by analyzing Stephens’s translation of the biblical story into Marathi. The Kristapurana is studied as a site where Christianity and indigenous Hindu practices come together to form a “creative” expression of Christianity strongly reminiscent of the region that it was produced in.

Missioners on the Margins? The Territorial Headquarters of the Welsh Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at The Cwm, c.1600–1679

This paper will discuss the history of the College of St Francis Xavier, the Welsh territorial district of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, and the history of Jesuit association with its headquarters, the Cwm farms at Llanrothal, near Hereford. One of 12 territorial divisions created by the Society of Jesus upon the creation of the English Province by 1623, the College of St Francis Xavier and its extensive surviving library, now housed at Hereford Cathedral, is being analysed as part of a three-year project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC]. The article argues for a re-evaluation of the Welsh District and its importance to the successes of the English Jesuit Province, concluding that, far from being a small, local missionary outpost of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, the College of St Francis Xavier, or the Welsh District, was in fact a diverse, vibrant and crucially important lynchpin in the successes of the Jesuits in England and Wales.