The Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies opens its fifth season of virtual Jesuit Studies Cafés on September 17 with a presentation on a new translation of Jouvancy’s The Way to Learn and the Way to Teach. The text was recently published by Jesuit Sources. Later presentations examine the scientific activities of the Jesuits in the Portuguese Assistancy, the production and the uses of the history of the Society, and the history of media from a global perspective.
All of these events are free and open to the public. Register for any or all of the events using this form. More information is available at the Institute’s website: https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/centers/iajs/programs/jesuit-studies-cafe.html
September 17
“Joseph de Jouvancy and The Way to Learn and the Way to Teach”
Cristiano Casalini, Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies
Claude Pavur, S.J., Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies
Zoom | 9:20 a.m. (Eastern, GMT-4)
Joseph de Jouvancy (1643–1719) was a French Jesuit poet, pedagogue, philologist, and historian. He has been called “one of the greatest authorities on education of his age.” A classical humanist and scholar known for his plays, biographies, histories, orations, and translations of various works into Latin, Jouvancy left behind no work more influential than his De discendi et docendi ratione (The Way to Learn and the Way to Teach, 1703). The Jesuit order found his work so important for maintaining quality in the Society’s schools that it made it a companion piece for the great charter of Jesuit education known as the Ratio studiorum (1599). In this book, Jouvancy first describes how young instructors might effectively pursue their own studies during their years of teaching; secondly, he details the essentials of good teaching. The considerable historical interest of this book is matched by its pedagogical insights and perennial relevance.
October 22
“Jesuit Science in the Portuguese Assistancy (1540–1759)”
Henrique Leitão, University of Lisbon
Zoom | 9:20 a.m. (Eastern, GMT-4)
Henrique Leitão will present an overview of his works regarding the scientific activities of the Jesuits in the Portuguese Assistancy, between 1540 and 1759. The topics of this talk will include the teaching of mathematics and natural philosophy in Portugal, the activities of the Italian, German, and Portuguese astronomers at the Astronomical Bureau in Beijing, and the sustained efforts to describe the new species of animals and plants discovered in South America.
November 19
“Filling the Memory Gap. French Jesuit Historians between the Pre-Suppression and the Restored Society of Jesus”
Adina Ruiu, University of Montreal
Zoom | 9:20 a.m. (Eastern, GMT-4)
This café aims to promote reflection on the production and the uses of the history of the Society, such as they may be reconstituted from the publications and correspondences of French Jesuit historians, in particular Jean-Marie Prat (1809-1891), Félix Martin (1804-1886), Auguste Carayon (1813-1874), Élesban de Guilhermy (1818-1884), and Léonard Joseph Marie Cros (1813-1913). The intense collaborative effort of identifying and collecting the sources, of establishing and developing editorial projects, took the form, for the historians involved, of an “apostolate”. For on the one hand it was perceived as a necessary task in the aim of reestablishing vital links with the “old” Society, and on the other hand as an activity that fit well within a “new” Society defined, in Jean-Marie Prat’s words – familiar to the nineteenth century – as “a society that is religious and literary at once.”
December 17
“Exiled and Returned Jesuits between Utopian Societies and the Republic of Peru. A transnational history of media (1767-1855)”
Sarah Barthélemy, Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles
Zoom | 9:20 a.m. (Eastern, GMT-4)
This café is intended as a presentation and discussion of an ongoing research project on the history of media from a global perspective, analyzing the multiple expulsions, restorations and suppressions of the Society of Jesus, in the 18th and 19th centuries, and its cultural reach beyond Europe. Despite a world-wide scope, the anti-Jesuit discourse and the construction of the Jesuit as a repulsive figure responds to national dynamics, usually only studied until their expulsion from South American territories. Which media materials are re-used or created at the moments preceding and following national independences in South America? How were narratives, conveyed by texts and images, used by both the Society of Jesus and Peruvian elites to legitimize a specific societal model and the place of religion and religious orders in it?