Jesuits & Globalization

What books did Jesuit Institutions Own?

IHS (emblem of the Jesuits)

The Society of Jesus (Latin: Societas Iesu), a religious order of the Catholic Church headquartered in Rome. was founded by Ignatius of Loyola and six companions with the approval of Pope Paul III in 1540.

Messina, Sicily (1548) was site of the first Jesuit college. Before the end of the sixteenth century, this first Jesuit college was to have several hundred successors in Europe, South America, and India. These colleges had libraries.¹

For many reasons (political, economic) the order was suppressed in many countries of western Europe and their colonies from 1759-1814. The Jesuits were serially expelled from the Portuguese Empire (1759), France (1764), the Two Sicilies, Malta, Parma, and the Spanish Empire (1767). and Austria and Hungary (1782). ²

Dominus ac Redemptor is the papal brief promulgated on 21 July 1773 by which Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus.

The suppression lasted until 1814, when Pope Pius VII restored the Society.

The European Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project is the largest census of books owned by European Jesuit institutions prior to the suppression.  It includes both texts currently held in libraries and information from pre-1773 inventories, and is an ongoing project. ³

The suppression of the Society of Jesus led to the dispersal of its books, and the European Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project uses both manuscript inventories and searches in modern libraries to locate the volumes once associated with the Society of Jesus. It is a multimedia, digital humanities endeavor. ⁴

José Casanova⁵ argues that the Jesuits were the first corporate group in history to think and to act globally. In the early modern era, Jesuits functioned as pioneer globalizers, making substantial contributions to the growth of connectivity and global consciousness around the world. This lecture examined the external and internal opportunity structures which made it possible for a Catholic missionary and teaching order such as the Society of Jesus to play such a prominent role as cultural brokers between East and West and North and South in the first phase of globalization. Their global "way of proceeding," however, became so controversial that at the end, enemies and friends conspired in their eventual suppression. Looking at the Jesuits through the prism of globalization and at globalization through a Jesuit prism offers the opportunity to rethink some of the origins and characteristics of our contemporary global age. ⁶

1. Brendan Connolly. "Jesuit Library Beginnings." The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 30, no. 4 (1960): 243-52. 

2. Robert Danieluk, S.J. (2015). “Some Remarks on Jesuit Historiography 1773–1814.” In Jesuit Survival and Restoration, ed. Maryks, Robert Aleksander, and Jonathan Wright. Brill. pp: 34–48..

Van Kley, Dale K. (2018). Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Wright, Jonathan, and Jeffrey D Burson. The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context: Causes, Events, and Consequences. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

3. The European Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project created by Prof.Kathleen Comerford (Georgia Southern University).

4. Comerford, Kathleen M. “The European Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project.” Journal of Jesuit Studies 7, no. 2 (2020): 299–310; Comerford, Kathleen M. “Jesuits and Their Books.” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2015, no. 2 (2015): 179–88.

5. José Casanova is professor in the department of sociology at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs focusing on globalization, religion and the secular.

6. José Casanova (August 18, 2017). “Early Modern Globalization Through a Jesuit Prism” John W. Kluge Center. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-7953/.