"A Global Earth in the Classroom: Jesuit Education and Geographic Literacy at the Dawn of Globalization"

Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries two processes of great importance for world history came to an end. The first was the impulse given by the Iberian monarchies to the exploration of the earth. In 1522, the expedition started by Ferdinand Magellan had completed the first circumnavigation of the world, but it was only from the second half of the century that a series of stable colonies between Asia, Africa, and America gave birth to an actual global system. The process was completed in 1565 when a stable maritime route from East Asia to West America was established thanks to the Manila Galleon. In an apparently different domain, in 1599 the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, the most important rule of study in Catholic Europe, was completed. Following the Jesuit example, other religious teaching orders developed their rules of study. What was the connection between these two phenomena? Did the process of exploration of the world—and the emergence in this process of new scientific concepts—influence the way in which knowledge was produced and transmitted? This talk aims at deepening the reflection whether the process of the first globalization influenced the making of the epistemological foundations underlying modern science through Jesuit pre-university schools.

David Salomoni holds a PhD in history from the University of Avignon, and a PhD in pedagogy and history of education from the University of Rome III. In 2017 he started research on the educational institutions of religious teaching orders in early modern Italy and in 2019 he was awarded an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the University of Oklahoma History of Science Collections. At present, he holds a post-doctoral position at the History of Science Department of the University of Lisbon in the framework of the ERC funded project: RUTTER Making the Earth Global, under the direction of Prof. Henrique Leitão. The project studies early modern Iberian nautical rutters as the oldest sources on the emergence of the idea of a global earth. Dr. Salomoni has published several articles and books. In 2017 he was awarded  the Galileo Galilei Prize for young scholars by the Rotary International.

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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 at the Institute over coffee and also available via Zoom videoconference – are unique opportunities to learn more about the newest and most interesting scholarship in Jesuit Studies.