Jesuit Polymath Of Madrid

In Jesuit Polymath of Madrid D. Scott Hendrickson offers the first English-language account of the life and work of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658), a leading intellectual in Spain during the turbulent decades of the mid-seventeenth century. Most remembered as a prominent ascetic in the neo-Platonic tradition, Nieremberg emerges here as a writer deeply indebted to the legacy of Ignatius Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises. Hendrickson convincingly shows how Nieremberg drew from his formation in the Jesuit order at the time of its first centenary to engage the cultural and intellectual currents of the Spanish Golden Age. As an author of some seventy-five works, which represent several genres and were translated throughout Europe and abroad, Nieremberg’s literary enterprise demands attention.

In An Overview of the Pre-suppression Society of Jesus in Spain, Patricia W. Manning offers a survey of the Society of Jesus in Spain from its origins in Ignatius of Loyola’s early preaching to the aftereffects of its expulsion. Rather than nurture the nascent order, Loyola’s homeland was often ambivalent. His pre-Jesuit freelance sermonizing prompted investigations. The young Society confronted indifference and interference from the Spanish monarchy and outright opposition from other religious orders. This essay outlines the order’s ministerial and pedagogical activities, its relationship with women and with royal institutions, including the Spanish Inquisition, and Spanish members’ roles in theological debates concerning casuistry, free will, and the immaculate conception. It also considers the impact of Jesuits’ non-religious writings.

The volume theme is the distinctiveness of Jesuits and their ministries that was discussed at the first International Symposium on Jesuit Studies held at Boston College’s Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies in June 2015. It explores the quidditas Jesuitica, or the specifically Jesuit way(s) of proceeding in which Jesuits and their colleagues operated from historical, geographical, social, and cultural perspectives. The collection poses a question whether there was an essential core of distinctive elements that characterized the way in which Jesuits lived their religious vocation and conducted their various works and how these ways of proceeding were lived out in the various epochs and cultures in which Jesuits worked over four and a half centuries; what changed and adapted itself to different times and situations, and what remained constant, transcending time and place, infusing the apostolic works and lives of Jesuits with the charism at the source of the Society of Jesus’s foundation and development. Thanks to generous support of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, this volume is available in Open Access.

Explore new approaches to the Psalms of Solomon The Psalms of Solomon: Texts, Contexts, and Intertexts explores a unique pseudepigraphal document that bears witness to the 63 BCE Roman conquest of Jerusalem. Essays address a variety of themes, notably their political, social, religious, and historical contexts, through the lens of anthropology of religion, cognitive science, socioeconomic theory, and more. Contributors include Kenneth Atkinson, Eberhard Bons, Johanna Erzberger, Angela Kim Harkins, G. Anthony Keddie, Patrick Pouchelle, Stefan Schreiber, Shani Tzoref, and Rodney A. Werline.

"Since its founding by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus ("The Jesuits") has been intimately involved in the unfolding of the modern world. The young Jesuit order played a crucial role in the Counter Reformation, especially in Poland, southern Germany, and several other parts of Europe. The Jesuits were also participants in the establishment and spread of European empires, engaging in missionary activity in east and south Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries, and becoming central to the spreading of Christianity in the New World. At the same time, Jesuits often tangled with the Roman curia and the Pope, leading to the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. After the subsequent restoration of the order in 1814, the Jesuits continued to be leaders in Catholic education and theology. In 2013 Jorge Bergoglio became the first Jesuit Pope, taking the name Pope Francis I. In this book, Markus Friedrich presents the first comprehensive account of the Jesuits from a non-Catholic perspective. Drawing on his expertise as a historian of the early modern world, Friedrich situates the Jesuit order within the wider perspective of European history. In particular, he places the Jesuits in the context of social, cultural, and imperial history, showing that the Jesuits were not monolithic but rather were very sensitive to local context and that the order's core texts, especially Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, were templates to engage with, rather than instructions manuals to be followed slavishly"--

This volume explores the concept of magnificence as a social construction in seventeenth-century Europe.

A much-needed survey of the entire field of early modern Spanish scholastic thought. Each chapter is grounded in primary sources and the relevant historiography, includes a useful bibliography, and serves as a point of departure for future research.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) was the most significant literary figure of the colonial period in Spanish America.The autos sacramentales, or Eucharistic plays are some of her least studied, and most perplexing works. While one of them, El divino Narciso, has received substantial scholarly attention, the other two, El cetro de José and El mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo, have been critically neglected in Sor Juana studies. This study presents a full-length analysis of all three plays, along with their loas, or the introductory pieces alongside which they were intended to be performed. Furthermore, the study seeks to place these works in their philosophical and cultural context by exploring their engagement both with orthodox Catholic sacramental theology, and the emergence of empiricism and the New Philosophy across the Hispanic world. The three sections of this book each present significant new readings of the three plays. The study of El divino Narciso employs a previously little-known source to illuminate its Christological readings, as well as Sor Juana's engagement with notions of wit and conceptism. The analysis of El cetro de José explores her presentation of different approaches to perception to emphasise the importance of both the material and the transcendent to a holistic understanding of the Sacraments. The final section, on San Hermenegildo, explores the influence on the play of the Christianised Stoicism of Justus Lipsius, and demonstrates how Sor Juana used the work to attempt her most ambitious reconciliation of an empirical approach to natural philosophy and the material world with a Neostoic approach to Christian morality and orthodox Catholic sacramental theology.

Known as a time of revolutions in science, the early modern era in Europe was characterized by the emergence of new disciplines and ways of thinking. Taking this conceit a step further, Sacred Habitat shows how Spanish friars and missionaries used new scholarly approaches, methods, and empirical data from their studies of ecology to promote Catholic goals and incorporate American nature into centuries-old church traditions. Ran Segev examines the interrelated connections between Catholicism and geography, cosmography, and natural history—fields of study that gained particular prominence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and shows how these new bodies of knowledge provided innovative ways of conceptualizing and transmitting religious ideologies in the post-Reformation era. Weaving together historical narratives on Spain and its colonies with scholarship on the Catholic Reformation, Atlantic science, and environmental history, Segev contends that knowledge about American nature allowed pious Catholics to reconnect with their religious traditions and enabled them to apply their beliefs to a foreign land. Sacred Habitat presents a fresh perspective on Catholic renewal. Scholars of religion and historians of Spain, colonial Latin America, and early modern science will welcome this provocative intervention in the history of empire, science, knowledge, and early modern Catholicism.

This fast-paced survey of Western civilization’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years’ War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world. A book created with students and nonspecialists in mind, Reformations is an inspiring, provocative volume for any reader who is curious about the role of ideas and beliefs in history.