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News
19/10/20

New Book by Visiting Fellow Patrick Goujon

Visiting Fellow Patrick Goujon, SJ is the author of a new publication, which is the fruit of an international programme involving 40 scholars and seminars in Paris, Mexico, Rome, Brussels, and Louvain, culminating in a collection of essays in French, English, Italian, and Spanish.

book coverThe book presents thirty-seven essays on the modern history of the Society of Jesus. While the papal Suppression (1773) and Restoration (1814) of the worldwide Society constitute the principal events with which this volume is concerned, they are explored in a wide chronological, geographical and thematic frame. With the aim to interrogate the complexities and nuances of these key events in Jesuit history, the studies in this book cover a considerable period – the so-called long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (roughly the second half of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century). An overriding feature of this book is that it reveals how the Society of Jesus at this time was as diverse and contested as it was at the time of its foundation in the mid-sixteenth century.

The essays that follow embrace strands of research in Jesuit history that until recently have received considerably less attention than has early Jesuit history. These strands, further, tend to be treated separately : in a single volume, this work brings together the later history of the “Old Society” (the years immediately prior to and including 1773); the interim period of the Suppression; and the “New Society” (from the Restoration in 1814, through the early twentieth century). Through the book’s broad frame, the great ruptures of European history come into view (the situation in France provides a particular focus), along with institutional religious history, and early globalization (with special attention to the Americas, but not only). Despite the well-known realities and assumptions associated with this age of upheaval, the persistent continuities of the period also emerge, exemplified most potently in this volume by the Society’s own partial survival during the forty-one years of its papal suppression.