Exhibition:  Portugal, Jesuits, and Japan: Spiritual Beliefs and Earthly Goods
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Feb. 16 - June 2, 2013

The exhibition examines cultural exchanges from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries through the movement of goods on Portuguese ships that took over four years to travel roundtrip from Portugal to Japan, with extended stopovers in India and China. Central to the narrative are seven magnificent folding screens depicting Japanese encounters with the so-called nanban-jin (“southern barbarians”), who were mainly Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries. Examples of the many types of objects depicted on the screens are also on display, including elaborately decorated Japanese furniture, lacquerware, and military equipment; Indian and Chinese ceramics, textiles, and furniture; and paintings by Jesuit-trained Japanese artists. Along with rare European and Japanese maps, the artifacts and screens tell a fuller story than that documented in contemporary texts. Portugal, Jesuits, and Japan highlights a period of internationalism that gave way to Japanese insularity following the expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan in 1639. The viewer travels through the complex landscape of religious ideas, customs, and artistic styles that typified the nanban period as an age of exploration—when merchants and missionaries alike, both European and Japanese, saw spiritual beliefs and earthly goods as inextricably bound.

The seventy works in the exhibition have been drawn from institutions and private collections in the United States, Portugal, Great Britain, and Brazil. An accompanying publication comprised of essays by art historians and historians, edited by Victoria Weston, includes color reproductions of all works in the exhibition.

Organized by the McMullen Museum, Portugal, Jesuits, and Japan has been curated by Victoria Weston and Alexandra Curvelo in consultation with Pedro Moura Carvalho. The exhibition has been underwritten by Boston College, the Patrons of the McMullen Museum, Leslie and Peter Ciampi, the Camões Institute of Cooperation and Language/Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Portugal, the Consulate General of Portugal in Boston, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, with additional support from the Luso-American Development Foundation and the Japan Foundation, NY.

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Mission and Frontiers : Perspectives on Early Modern Missionary Catholicism
National University of Ireland, Galway
4-5 June 2013

If interested in attending the symposium and/or in offering a paper, please contact the event organisers by 22nd May :

Dr Alison Forrestal
alison.forrestal@nuigalway.ie

Dr Sean Smith
s.smith12@nuigalway.ie
 

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The J. Paul Getty Museum organizes an exhibition
Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia
March 5- June 9, 2013

 

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Workshop
Teaching and Publishing Mathematics and Science in the Society of Jesus in Early Modern Europe
Wuppertal, 12-13 June, 2013

The workshop "Teaching and Publishing Mathematics and Science in the Society of Jesus in Early Modern Europe" is being organized by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies (IZWT) at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. The Society of Jesus was a key player in the systematic dissemination of up-to-date knowledge of science and mathematics during the early modern period. The aim of the workshop is to take stock of the scope and impact of Jesuit mathematical and scientific teaching and publishing in early modern Europe. Special attention will be paid to the question of how to assess the Jesuit’s influence in these fields in ways that go beyond the study of particular Jesuit authors or colleges. For further information on the topic, please get in touch with Volker Remmert: remmert@uni-wuppertal.de.
The workshop’s ambit invites interdisciplinary collaboration. 

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Genèse et postérité des Evangelicae Historiae Imagines de Jérôme Nadal
19 June 2013
Université catholique de Louvain

With participation of Walter S. Melion (Emory), Pierre-Antoine Fabre (EHESS) and Guy Lazure (Windsor).

Practical information
From 14h till 17h00
Université catholique de Louvain
Location not yet known
1348 Louvain-la-Neuve

Contact

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What is Early Modern English Catholicism?

An international and interdisciplinary conference to celebrate the work of Eamon Duffy,

hosted by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University
28 June – 1 July 2013
Ushaw College, Durham



Of interest to jesuitica researchers (programme still subject to change):

• Janet Graffius (Stonyhurst) – ‘The Place of Relics in the Mission of the Jesuit Sodality at St Omers’
• Thomas McCoog SJ (Fordham) – ‘An Identity Crisis? The Vicars Apostolic and the suppressed/restored English province of the Society of Jesus’
• Devori Kimbro (Arizona State) – ‘English Enemies and Enemies to England: Polemical Protestant Definitions of Catholicism in the Wake of the 1580 Jesuit “Invasion”’
• Hannah Thomas (Swansea) – ‘The Society of Jesus in Wales, c.1600–1679: reconstructing and analyzing the Cwm Jesuit library at Hereford Cathedral’
• Victor Houliston (Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) – ‘Contingency and Exigency in the Shaping of Elizabethan Catholic Resistance: the precarious correspondence of Robert Persons’
• Gerard Kilroy (University College, London) – ‘Edmund Campion: his troubles in Ireland’
• Clarinda Calma (Tischner European University, Krakow) – ‘Gaspar Wilkowski’s Polish Translation of Edmund Campion’s Rationes Decem’
• Maurice Whitehead and Peter Leech (Swansea) – ‘The mysterious Thomas Kingsley (1650−1695): from Anglican cathedral chorister to English Jesuit composer’

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Appropriations and Constructions of Identity

The Ignatian Model in Female and Male Congregations after 1773.

Europe and the Americas

Programme

Workshop’s languages: French, English, Spanish and Italian. 

Information: Silvia Mostaccio and Alessandro Serra

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University of Münster
32nd German Oriental Studies Conference
Interdisciplinary panel
Image, Artifact and Visual Object: New Perspectives on Jesuit Artistic Legacy in China, 1600-1800
23-27 September 2013

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"The Council of Trent: Reform and Controversy in Europe and Beyond (1545-1700)"

to be held in Leuven, Belgium

4 to 6 December 2013 

 details

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"Jesuit Survival and Restoration: 200th Anniversary Perspectives"

Boston College

11-15 June 2014

&

Macau

October 2014

organiser: Robert Maryks

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Africa and the Suppression and Restoration of the Jesuits - Call for Papers

On 7th August 2014 the Society of Jesus will mark 200 years since its restoration in 1814. The restoration was an experience of rebirth for a Society that had lived under suppression by the highest authority of the Church since July 1773. As such, this bicentenary is a fitting opportunity for celebration and, above all, critical reflection on the experiences of suppression and restoration and on the lessons contained therein.
The Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa (JHIA) is inviting scholarly contributions to a special publication on the topic Africa and the Suppression and Restoration of the Jesuits. The publication is envisioned to address three main areas:

• Part I: The Society of Jesus in Africa Immediately Before the Suppression

Where were the Jesuits in Africa and Madagascar? Where did they come from? What was their relationship to political authorities? What were they doing? What did they own? What were their achievements at the point of the Suppression?

• Part II: The Suppression

When and how did the Jesuits in a particular location in Africa and Madagascar know about the suppression? What was the local reaction of Jesuits, Church officials and political authorities to the suppression? Where did the Jesuits go after the suppression? What happened to their works and properties?

• Part III: Restoration and Return to Africa

When were the earliest returns to Africa and Madagascar after the restoration (limited to the 19th century)? How did they return (invitation, back to old works, completely new initiatives)? From where did they come? How did they start? What works did they assume? What were their relationship to Church officials and political authorities? What were their achievements in the early years? Contributions will be limited to between 4000 and 4500 words (including notes and bibliography) and will be expected to address a clearly specified topic in an identified location in Africa and Madagascar. One or two relevant illustrations may accompany the text. Interested contributors are invited to submit a proposal each. The proposal should be in the form of a focused topic accompanied by an abstract of not more than 500 words. Proposals have to reach the editors by the end of December 2012. Successful proposals will be identified and selected contributors informed by the end of January 2013.

The following will be expected of contributors: they will be made aware of the topics treated by other contributors and will be invited to offer suggestions, especially with regard to sources they might be aware of; they will take into consideration suggestions given to them by the editors and/or the other contributors; they will correspond with the editors and will give a progress report by the end of June 2013; they will submit a soft copy of their written text in English or French (texts in Portuguese could be considered with prior arrangement with the editors) before end of September 2013; and they will be available to give general comments on parts or the whole of the edited manuscript before its publication.

All correspondence to

Festo Mkenda, S.J.
Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa
Hekima College
P. O. Box 21215, 00505 Nairobi KENYA
Email: jhiafrica.director@jesuits.net Mobile: +254 719 695633

Anicet N’Teba, S.J.
Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa
OR Hekima College
P. O. Box 21215, 00505 Nairobi KENYA
Email: anicetnteba@gmail.com Mobile: +254 739 482197

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Restored Jesuits and the American Experience

On October 16-19, 2014, Loyola University Chicago will hold a major conference marking the bicentennial of the Restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814. The conference aims at locating works–of both restored Jesuits and their colleagues from women’s religious orders–within the specific experiential context of building an American nation. The stories of these men and women provide studies in what Thomas Tweed has termed Crossing and Dwelling (2006): refugees from European exclusions; transatlantic immigrants; multilingual and transnational identities; settlers in ethnic urban cores; boundary-dwellers in frontier peripheries.

A call for papers will be forthcoming later in Fall 2013. In order to give examples of new historiographical approaches the conference hopes to foster, a Tumblr has been set up: http://jesuitrestoration2014.tumblr.com/ . Scholars are invited to post reports of research in progress, forthcoming dissertations, archival possibilities, and other emerging resources.

Approaches being sought include:

- emotions
- ethnicity
- frontier
- gender
- immigration
- intellectual
- libraries/book history
- lived religion
- material religion
- migration
- space
- sports
- transatlantic
- trauma
- urban

For more information, please visit the conference website at http://blogs.lib.luc.edu/jesuitrestoration2014/

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Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia
The Macau Ricci Institute, 9-11 November 2016
Call for Papers

The approaching 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation (1517) provides an ideal opportunity to reflect in a deeper and new way on the history of the relationship between the Protestants and the Jesuits who were founded twenty-three years later (1540). For better or worse, much ink has been used to write about their animosity, especially in the European context. While this important historical chapter will be explored in other venues, the international conference in Macau aims to re-examine the encounters between the Jesuits and the Protestants and their respective traditions in the context of Asia.

Supported by the Catholic monarchies of Portugal, Spain, and France, the Jesuit Order played a significant role in bringing Christianity and European culture, sciences, and the arts to Asia from the sixteenth through to the late eighteenth century, when a Franciscan pope suppressed the Jesuits. After the Restoration of the Order by another pope (1814), the Jesuits returned to several Asian countries at various historical moments and they found more
Protestant missionaries than they left a few decades earlier. Indeed, the latter intensified their missionary efforts through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the rise of the imperial powers of Great Britain, France, and the US in the region.

This historical development lends itself to an obvious comparison between the Jesuit and Protestant methods of presenting Christianity to Asian societies, in which—with the exception of the Philippines that followed the path of Latin America—Christians never became a majority. The Jesuits themselves, however, used different strategies in different
cultural circumstances. Francis Xavier who was among the first Europeans to approach Japan employed different methods than did Matteo Ricci who was allowed to enter the Forbidden City. Roberto de Nobili’s missionary style in the caste-divided society of Madurai was different from that of Alexandre de Rhodes who penetrated the Kingdom of Annam. In spite of this variety of approaches within the Society of Jesus itself, accommodation became a trademark of Jesuit missions. Knowing that charges of syncretism were a mainstay of Protestant anti-Jesuit polemic, a question that comes to mind, then, is what was the extent to which the generations of Protestant missionaries in Asia adopted Jesuit approaches to cultural accommodation. What were their approaches to studying and codifying local languages, to transmitting Western science? What was the relationship between missionaries and political/commercial elites on both sides of the confessional divide?
When the Jesuits themselves began rebuilding their missions after the Restoration, did they continue their pre-Suppression traditions?

The cooperation and conflict between the Dutch merchants and the Jesuit missionaries in Japan appears to be better studied but can the same be said about the encounters between the Jesuits and the Protestant Dutch missionaries in Taiwan and Malacca, or between the Jesuits and the German Pietist missions in China and India? How did the
Jesuits relate to their Protestant colleagues in the competition to gain Asian souls, say, in late nineteenth-century Korea?

These are just a few examples of complex questions about the encounters between the Jesuits and the Protestants, and their traditions, that this international conference hopes to explore in an interdisciplinary academic conversation in Macau—a city that lay at the crossroads of European explorations of Asia.

Please email a short (200-250 words) abstract of a proposed paper to both Dr. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (rxh46@psu.edu) and Dr. Robert A. Maryks (robert.maryks@me.com) before 31 May 2013. The abstract must be written in standard academic English. If accepted, the author will be expected to deliver his/her paper in standard academic English. Selected papers will be published either in a dedicated volume or in the Journal of Jesuit Studies (Brill).

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Several panels and paper regarding jesuitica in the making. See facebook of Journal of Jesuit Studies

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Rob Faesen, Leo Kenis (eds.), The Jesuits of the Low Countries: Identity and Impact (1540-1773). Proceedings of the International Congress at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven (3-5 December 2009). Leuven-Paris-Walpole: Peeters, 2012.

ISBN 978-90-429-2698-1

For separate articles, see Research pages. For the articles not contained in the book, see Web Publishing pages.

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Fr. Robert Hermans SJ has coordinated the production of several timelines for his history classes. Two of these seem to us of particular interest to jesuitica researchers and may  even prove to be indispensable, once you have come to discover them. Click on to the Info pages to see more details and to see snapshots of each of them.

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Click through to the Info pages

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Journal of Jesuit Studies. Modernity through the Prism of Jesuit History (JJS)

more information

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Follow link to Info section to read latest updates on 2009 Conference

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