The Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies and its collaborating partners at the University of Lisbon and the Italian German Historical Institute, invite you to join informal conversations with the world's preeminent scholars working on the history, spirituality, and educational heritage of the Society of Jesus. These discussions – hosted by the Institute over coffee and available via Zoom videoconference on the third Thursday of the month – are unique opportunities to learn more about the newest and most interesting scholarship in Jesuit Studies.
 

Maria Pia Donato, Ph.D. (Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, France) and Sabina Pavone, Ph.D (University of Macerata, Italy) will present on "Science, Empires, and the Jesuits in the Early Modern World: Research Trends and Open Questions" followed by an open discussion. 

Since their foundation in 1540, and well after their first suppression by pope Clement XIV in 1773, Jesuits were key actors in the intertwined goals of the competing Catholic empires: colonization and evangelization. Both goals implied a momentous effort in collecting, producing, and transmitting knowledge to which the Jesuits contributed in several regions of the globe.

The peculiar place of Jesuits in the historiography of early modern science and empires have been established for more than a century, as scholarly interest in Jesuit science has been fueled by the Society itself for a very long time. Recently, it has grown into a full-fledged subfield of research in global perspectives. This presentation seeks to outline some trends in recent historiography, while highlighting a few underlying ambivalences in the ways scholars of different disciplines have dealt with the topic over time.

It suggest that one productive approach for revisiting the place of Jesuits in doing science in the early modern world is a situational approach; that is, looking at Jesuits within intra- and trans-imperial configurations and interconnected structures of governance. Such an approach might help avoid the pitfalls of treating science, empire, and the Jesuits as obvious and unitary entities conjoined with one another, as is still common in both the history of science and global history.

If you have any questions, please contact the Institute (iajs@bc.edu).