Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu vol. lxxxix, fasc. 177 (2020-I)

Book Reviews

Thomas M. McCoog, ed., With Eyes and Ears Open: The Role of Visitors in the Society of Jesus. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2019. 315 pp. $179.00. ISBN 978-90-04-39484-1.

This edited volume investigates an office of utmost importance in the Society of Jesus, which only recently became of interest for scholars: visitors (visitatores). As the volume’s editor Thomas M. McCoog SJ rightly observes, a particularly important stimulus to the field is Liam Brockey’s study of the life and works of André Palmeiro (1569—1635), one of the first and most influential visitors of Asia (The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2014). This volume is different in that, rather than focusing on one individual, it considers several visitors throughout the history of the Society of Jesus, paying particular attention to the office itself from a theoretical and practical point of view. In 12 chapters, the authors (6 Jesuits and 6 lay scholars) follow the lives and work of different visitors and the historical figures closely related to them, from the early modern age until the twentieth century. In his thorough Introduction, McCoog points out how other religious orders employed visitors, but only in the Society of Jesus they became so important, and mainly for two reasons: “the centralized government of the Society, and its rapid expansion” (p. 1). Visitors were directly appointed by the superior general, “for difficult situations where a resolution has proved elusive” (p. 2). The “powers and nature” of their role were “defined according to the circumstances”, as Wiktor Gramatowski SJ explained in Glossario Gesuitico (p. 2). Representing the general, a visitor had to be his “eyes and ears”: not simply and not only a “policeman but a formulator of policy, and adaptor of the general principles of the Society” (p. 3). The first chapter is a detailed and essential introduction on the office of visitor. Robert Danieluk SJ shows how itcould consistently vary depending on the generals’ needs. Visitors were needed for periodic ‘visits’, indeed, to every Jesuit province. As external members, they came into direct contact with Jesuits of every age and importance, listening to complaints, doubts and issues—and trying to solve them as fast (and painlessly) as they could. The general’s comprehensive trust allowed them to act based on their own judgment. This was even more in the case for 260 Book Reviews visitors of the missions in the Eastern and Western Indies: even if the corporate network of the Society of Jesus was remarkable, the inevitable problems of communications led visitors to act very autonomously. Jesuit visitors had to deal with every kind of geographical, political and religious situation. The book covers all the years of the Jesuit endeavour, from the sixteenth century until contemporaneity, recognizing successes and limits of visitors on four continents: Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australia. The chapters dedicated to early modern Europe focus on what is today France (Eric Nelson), the Low Countries (McCoog), Ireland (Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin), the Czech Republic (Paul Shore) and Portugal (Francisco Malta Romeiras). As for the twentieth century, Klaus Schatz SJ and Oliver P. Rafferty SJ’s contributions underline the challenges and complexities of the German and British provinces. The Jesuit policies in the Americas are at the core of the essays written by Andrés I. Prieto and Robert Emmett Curran, respectively the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in Peru and Maryland (where former Jesuits were able to survive and thrive until the official restoration of the order in 1814). Finally, Africa and Australia respectively are the focus of Festo Mkenda SJ and David Strong SJ’s contributions. During the last fifty years, the office of visitor ceased tobe necessary. As Danieluk well explains, visitors were “intended to bridge the gap between Rome and the peripheries, between the superior general and his men distributed throughout the world” (p. 46). Thanks to technological innovations, Jesuits are constantly connected and able to communicate and, if needed, generals (or their assistants) can promptly and easily travel everywhere. This melancholic note closes the book: such an important Jesuit office belongs to the past more than it does to the present or future. This collection hopefully will inspire scholars to pay more attention to these high ranked Jesuits whose role was essential not only in the overseas missions, but in Europe as well. Visitors had to deal with ordinary as well as extraordinary issues, with religious brothers or ‘rivals’ and with political powers. Since their mission was to act, as well as take note of what they did and saw, they left a documentary trail which certainly deserves to be studied, and not only by historians of the Society of Jesus.

Boston College, USA – University of York, UK Elisa Frei Book Reviews Book Reviews 261

Victor Houliston, Ginevra Crosignani and Thomas M.McCoog SJ, eds, The Correspondence and Unpublished Papaers of Robert Persons, SJ, Volume 1: 1574-1588. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2017. 729 pp. $115.00. ISBN 9780888442079.

In a splendidly comprehensive introduction to this volume, the first of three, Victor Houliston asserts “the need for a scholarly edition of [Robert] Persons’s correspondence” to supersede “the tendentious historiography of his career”. He and his fellow editors have succeeded magnificently in this first volume, which carries the story to the eve of the 1588 Spanish Armada. Each letter is prefaced by a meticulous short introduction. The Latin texts are accompanied by English translations enriched by succinct and informative footnotes. This first volume constitutes not only a brilliant introduction to the impact on the Counter Reformation to the Atlantic Isles, but also an illuminating re-setting of the story in a European perspective through the lens of the Jesuit archives. Houliston recounts how Persons saw “the Protestant establishment” in England as “a temporary aberration, alien to the true religious heart of the nation”. He was wrong. His letters disclose expectations of restoration which were “doubtless unrealistic, the more so as time went on”. As a Catholic and a Jesuit, Persons understood his pastoral and missionary objectives to be “the recovery of the connection with Rome and the cultivation of true devotion” which he described in The Christian Directory (1582) as “ ‘a joyful promptness to the diligent execution of all things that appertayne to the honour of God’ ”. What is remarkable in Persons (and not only in Persons) is the disjoinder between pastoral wisdom and political incompetence. Houlston’s appreciation of the unrealism informing Person’s understanding of England is borne out not least in the pages concerning preparations for the Armada. If it is the great merit of this edition that “in these letters we are invited to view Elizabethan England afresh” from a continental and Scottish perspective in “helpful corrective to Anglocentric accounts of Reformation-era religion and politics”, there is yet further richness. Through Houlston’s Introduction we find something balancing the disjunction between religion and politics, which is found on every page of these letters: a more realistic understanding, at once religious and political, of the need for mutual coexistence. 262 Book Reviews

In a luminous page Houliston remarks on the emergence of “a measure of loyalism in the Huguenot camp, which both mirrored and shaped Catholic loyalism in England.” It was found in “those Catholic nobles, known as the politiques who believed that civil war was too high a price to pay for religious conformity.” Aquinas had thought the same. In 1580 Edmund Campion and Parsons had sought, “rebus sic stantibus” the suspension of the 1570 excommunication against Queen Elizabeth I of England. Following the arrest of Campion in 1582, the significance of the phrase inserted by Pope Gregory XIII into the faculties granted to Campion and Parsons in 1580 “rebus sic stantibus” became a matter of contention. For Cecil the phrase signified the postponement of the bull until such time as an invasion force could be mounted. For Persons and William Allen it meant the same. For the politiques of both France and England it offered the alternative of peace talks and mutual coexistence. In the reign of King Henri III of France (r. 1574–89) this possibility attained a new level of support within Rome, Paris and the English Court. It died with Henri III. The politics of invasion, urged by Persons and the Guise, prevailed. The civil wars in France raged on until the accession of Henri IV finally opened a road to the alternative: peace and Catholic Reform. Supported from 1592 by St Philip Neri in the Rome of Pope Clement VIII, the spiritual renewal introduced by St Teresa of Avila and developed by St Francis de Sales in his Introduction to the Devout Life (1604) gained ground. The writings of St Francis de Sales expanded on the theme of True Devotion earlier advanced by the Spiritual Directory. But whereas in Persons, (and not only in Persons) the pastoral dimensions of the work were undermined by the illusions of commitments best explored in the pages of Don Quixote, the effect of the Salesian Reformation, selectively assimilated within the Church of England, was to admit a place of influence to the healing power promoted in the Spiritual Directory. Herein lies the great importance of this three-volume project. The contents of the first volume are well delineated on the flyleaf: documents and letters, from and to Persons:

notably from the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Claudio Acquaviva. Letters in Latin, Italian, and Spanish are presented both in the original language and spelling. All letters have been collated with the extant manuscript witnesses. The Introduction comprises Person’s biography, relevant aspects of early Jesuit history, and the Book Reviews Book Reviews 263

Jesuit mission to England, and overviews of the papacy and the political situation in England and Scotland, France, the Netherlands, and Spain for the period 1574–88 covered by the letters in this volume.

It is a breathtaking achievement. An appendix on Anti Catholic legislation, and another on Currency, is completed by an Index of Persons, and another on Places and Subjects. The editors are to be congratulated on this volume, and the publishers commended for a major contribution to European history, and to our understanding of the complex personality and historical significance of Robert Persons.

Cobh (Ireland) Dermot Fenlon

Brian Mac Cuarta SJ, ed., Henry Piers’s Continental Travels, 1595– 1598. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2018. 238 pp. ISBN 978-1108496773

Brian Mac Cuarta SJ has produced a meticulous edition of the manuscript of a curious and instructive work from the late sixteenth century. Henry Piers (1567–1623) was a Protestant Irish gentleman who, after encountering Catholic lay people and priests in County Westmeath, decided to make a journey to Rome in 1595 the occasion and means of his conversion. The retrospective of his travels, part pilgrimage, part study tour, describes the confirmation of his new religious convictions and his sojourns in the English colleges in Rome and Seville. It has particular relevance to Jesuit historical research because of his exchanges with Robert Persons, in Rome, Joseph Creswell in Valladolid and Madrid, and Richard Walpole in Seville. This was a time of increasing tension amongst the Catholic exiles, when the Jesuits were under attack both on the mission and in their management of the seminaries: Piers’s narrative may be partisan, but it is a valuable witness to a layman’s perspective. A discourse of HP his travelles written by him selfe (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson MS D 83) is not altogether an original work. Much of the portrayal of Rome’s churches, monuments, processions and antiquities, which takes up a large part of the text, derives from Girolamo Francini’s Le cose miravigliose dell’alma città di Roma (Venice, 1588), itself drawing heavily on Palladio. The 264 Book Reviews extensive accounts of the naval battle of Lepanto (pp. 145–153) and the origins of the shrine of Loreto (pp. 173–83) are also heavily dependent on sources Piers consulted after his return to Ireland: Richard Knolles’s Generall historie of the Turkes (London, 1603/1604) and the Jesuit Orazio Torsellini’s Lauretanae historiae (Rome, 1597/1598). But much of the story is fresh and compelling, from the travellers’ tales of wonders and curiosities such as the monstrous double child and perpetually dancing man in Rome (pp. 170–01), the rhinoceros in Madrid (p. 203) and a special dish prepared for ploughmen in the kitchen of a farmer's house where he stayed on his way back from Sanlucar de Barrameda to Seville (p. 212), to the frightening storm on his way back from Spain (pp. 214–15). His brushes with suspicious authorities, the kindnesses he received from other Britishers, as well as his own interventions on behalf of Irishmen abroad, the appellations he gives to Italian cities such as Padua the Learned, Bologna the Plentiful and Ferrara the Strong, all contribute to a sense of lived experience invaluable to the social historian. Every scholar of early modern religion, politics and culture will find something of interest, readily accessible and documented, in this text. A good example is Piers’s presentation of travel and postal conditions. He gives exact details of times and distances of overland travel, and the various ports of call from Genoa to Alicante. He notes that his vessel almost missed the tide when setting off from Dublin, because they had to wait for the post from the lord deputy (p. 53). In Florence, they joined the post for Rome (p. 75). Piers admired the Jesuits’ reliable and efficient postal network, so that “there is noe matter of Reckninge wch c[an] happen in all Christendum, but father generall wthin fewe dayes is certified thereof” (p. 103) – stretching the point, since in reality, the post from Spain or Flanders would take about three weeks. Claudio Acquaviva, as superior general of the Society, was not only the recipient of news, but in Piers’s view, lived up to his name as the source and wellspring of living water flowing to all regions of its operations. It is as a foil to Anthony Munday’s description of life at the English college, Rome, The English Romayne lyfe (London, 1582), that Piers’s Discourse will have particularly widespread appeal. Piers was a lay student there from 1595 to 1597, at exactly the time when a majority of the students were in revolt against Jesuit government, as described in Anthony Kenny’s “The Inglorious Revolution” (The Venerabile, 1954–1955). Piers unhesitatingly takes the Jesuits’ side, chiefly because of his friendship with Richard Haddock Book Reviews Book Reviews 265

(Haydock), a former student, whom he may have met previously in Ireland. Haddock obtained places for Piers and his manservant, Philip Draycott, at the college and assisted them in negotiating the attentions of the inquisition. Haddock’s association with Robert Persons guaranteed that Piers would welcome Persons’s intervention in the college in 1597. It was also through Persons’s good offices that Piers subsequently made the journey to Spain and joined the English college in Seville, where Richard Walpole assisted him in much the same way as Haddock had done in Rome. As a convert, Piers responded readily to the wealth of Catholic relics, monuments and festivals in Rome and the other great cathedral cities of Italy and Spain. The text registers a growing sense of recovery of Christian tradition, of connection with the church of the apostles and martyrs. This modulates into polemics, rehearsing and reinforcing the arguments that contributed to conversion: the indispensability of the doctrine of merit, the insufficiency of sola scriptura, the reasonableness of transubstantiation. In all this there may be some credulity, as in the unquestioning acceptance of the authenticity of the legends surrounding Loreto, but there is very little superstition. Instead, Piers recurs to the Christocentric themes of devotion and discipleship, reserving special praise for Pope Gregory XIII as the founder of colleges and supporter of missions, and the current pope, Clement VIII, for restoring and expanding the churches. His counter-reformation sensibility is seen especially in pious digressions. Following a lively description of a storm encountered after passing Cape Finisterre, he retails a series of Latin quotations and concludes: “This small digression I have made to encouradge this poore countrie [Ireland] to devotione and patience, exorting those wch be well enclyned to induere these calamities and myseries (wch lately have hapened) wth patience and wth feare and milde spirites to expect the infallible promises of god, for after the blastering storme of his iustice comethe the sweete calme of his mercye” (p. 215). Given the readability and wide interest of the work, it seems a pity that the text is presented so diplomatically, perhaps over-scru- pulously. Original spelling, word division (“agood”) and punctua- tion are preserved even when misleading or obtrusive. The inser- tion of words and phrases and other scribal minutiae (even, on at least one occasion, repeating the catchword at the beginning of the next page of the manuscript), and the practice of cross-referencing the page numbers of the manuscript rather than the edition, makes this a highly reliable document, but this reader at least would have 266 Book Reviews appreciated a cleaner text with more informative notes, clearly separated from the textual apparatus. Whatever reservations one might have about the editorial policy, however, the introduction is masterly, providing full and useful information about the religious, biographical and social context in Ireland, the relevant history of the English colleges, the provenance of the manuscript, and the sources. The edition will be of lasting usefulness for historians of every shade.

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Victor Houliston

Živilė Nedzinskaitė, Darius Antanavičius, eds, Fontes Collegii Crosensis, qui in Archivo Romano Societatis Iesu asservantur = Kražių kolegijos šaltiniai, saugomi Jėzaus Draugijos Archyve Romoje, tomus/ tomas I, pars/dalis 1: 1608–1700. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2019.LII, 646 pp. ISBN 978-609-425-227-3.

This book is an edition of the seventeenth-century Latin manuscript sources related to the college in Kražiai (Polish: Kroże) from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (hereafter, ARSI). Kražiai is a town in present day Lithuania, which once belonged to the Principality of Samogitia, within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and accordingly part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1569 and 1795. The Jesuit Fathers were invited to Kražiai by the bishop of Samogitia Melchior Giedroyć (Lithuanian: Merkelis Giedraitis) in 1608. The following year they opened a mission, which was soon transformed into a residence and then a college. The Jesuits were active in Kražiai until the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. The Kražiai college played an important role in the cultural life of Samogitia. Christianity had been introduced to this region only in the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth centuries. Pagan practices and beliefs still existed among the rural population when the Jesuits arrived. Moreover, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the spread of the Protestant Reformation had weakened the Catholic Church, depriving it of the nobility’s support. To win the local population back to the Roman Church, the Jesuits developed a broad missionary and educational programme. They taught not only rhetoric, but also philosophy and moral theology; they introduced theatre as a pedagogical tool of religious propaganda, and oversaw the diocesan seminary, thus playing a crucial role in the formation of Book Reviews Book Reviews 267

secular clergy. The relevance of Kražiai in the global history of Post- Tridentine Catholicism fully justifies the publication of this source edition. The Editors are well known Lithuanian scholars. Živilė Nedzinskaitė, a pupil of Professor Eugenija Ulčinaitė, works at the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore (Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, further LLTI). She focuses on the history of Early Modern Neo-Latin literature in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and has conducted intensive research into the poetry of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (Lithuanian Motiejus Kazimieras Sarbievijus) and its European reception.1 Darius Antanavičius, a philologist and historian, works at the Lithuanian Historical Institute (Lietuvos istorijos institutas) and has extensive experience in the edition of prose texts, ranging from the late fourteenth- to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Among his fields of interest are Lithuanian historiography and the history of libraries and book circulation in Lithuania.2 The effort undertaken by these two scholars fits into broader research conducted on the Kražiai college in recent years, which resulted in the publication of fragments of a prose manuscript from 1695,3 an organ tabulature,4 and the library catalogue from 1803.5

1 Živilė Nedzinskaitė, Tepaliks kiekvienas šlovę po savęs... Motiejaus Kazimiero Sarbievijaus poetikos ir poezijos recepcija XVII-XVIII amžiaus LDK jėzuitų edukacijos sistemoje [Let everybody leave glory after himself... The reception of M.K. Sarbiewski’s poetics and poetry in the 17th–18th century Jesuit educational system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania], Vilnius: LLTI 2011.

2 Besides co-editing some of the registers of the Lithuanian Chancellery (Lietuvos metrika) and the city books of Kaunas, Merkinė and Trakai, see: Albertas Vijūkas- Kojalavičius, Lietuvos istorijos įvairenybės [Lithuanian history], dalis 1, sudarė Darius Kuolys; iš lotynų kalbo vertė Darius Antanavičius, Sigitas Narbutas; komentarus parašė Darius Antanavičius, Elmantas Meilus, Vilnius: LLTI, 2003 (Senoji Lietuvos literatūra, kn. 15).

3 Kaip jėzuitai žemaičių mylias trumpino. 1695 m. Kražių rankraščio prozos fragmentai [How the Jesuits shortened Samogitian miles. 1695 Prose fragments of Kražiai manuscript], sudarė ir parengė Živilė Nedzinskaitė, Darius Antanavičius, Vilnius: LLTI, 2014.

4 Liber Organistarum Collegii Crosensis Societatis Jesu, ed. facs. Laima Budzinauskienė, Rasa Murauskaitė, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2017 (Fontes Musicae in Polonia, B II).

5 Elenchus librorum veteris Collegii Crosensis anno 1803 compilatus = Buvusios Kražių kolegijos 1803 metų knygų sąrašas, parengė Darius Antanavičius, 2 vols., Vilnius: LLTI, 2017. 268 Book Reviews

The interest in the history of this college was also reflected by the conference, “Jėzuitų kolegijos ir Lietuvos kultūra: Kražių kolegijai – 400 metų” (Jesuit college and Lithuanian culture: the 400-year anniversary of the Kražiai college), organized by the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore in 2016,6 and recent publications by Polish historians.7 With regard to the historiography on the Society of Jesus, it should be noted that the works mentioned have helped to enlarge the research perspective of Lithuanian scholars, who traditionally focused on the Vilnius Academy.8 The edition also fits into a long scholarly publishing tradition focused on the sources from ARSI. In regard to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this practice dates back to 1940–1941, when the Dutch Jesuit Jean Chretien Joseph Kleijntjens published the documents related to the Jesuit houses in Livonia (present day Latvia).9 The work published by Ž. Nedzinskaitė and D. Antanavičius can be regarded as a model source edition. The introduction, both in Latin and Lithuanian, clearly explains the criteria according to which sources were collected and transcribed. The selected bibliography provides an insight into the historiography related to the Kražiai college. The edition includes different types of archival materials. The first part (pp. 1–17) describes the activity of Jesuit missionaries in Samogitia before 1608 on the basis of the Litterae annuae and Historiae from other colleges (mostly Vilnius and Riga). The second part (pp. 19–32) includes undated Historiae and Informationes from the early seventeenth century. The third part (pp. 33–418) contains the Litterae Annuae, Historiae and catalogues from the Kražiai college in chronological order from 1608 until 1700. The edition is provided

6 The proceedings of this conference have appeared in the issue “Jėzuitiškosios tradicijos paveldas” [The heritage of Jesuit tradition], Senoji Lietuvos Literatūra [Early Lithuanian Literature], 44 (2017).

7 Jan Skłodowski, Zapomniane uczelnie Rzeczypospolitej [Forgotten universities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth], Warszawa: Narodowy Instytut Polskiego Dziedzictwa Kulturowego za Granicą Polonika, 2019, p. 19–128.

8 For a general treatment of Lithuanian historiography on the Society of Jesus, see: Liudas Jovaiša, “Jesuit Historiography in Lithuania since 1990: Proximity and Distance along World Routes”, AHSI, LXXXV (2016), n. 169, p. 221–232.

9 Fontes historiae Latviae Societatis Jesu = Latvijas vēstures avoti jezuītu ordena archīvos, t. 1, ed. Jean Chretien Joseph Kleijntjens, 2 vols., Rigae: Editio Instituti Historiae Latviae, 1940–1941. Book Reviews Book Reviews 269

with an appendix including a list of rectors (pp. 421–22), as well as of the Jesuits who either took their final vows, were dismissed or died in Kražiai (pp. 423–428). There is also a list of all Jesuits active in Kražiai (pp. 429–486), based on the catalogi breves, and a synoptic table of the sources collected in the edition (pp. 487–500). The search for specific information is made possible by an index of names and notable topics. Although the edition is mainly based on the sources from the ARSI, the Editors have made an effort to fill the gaps in the Roman archive.10 In particular, besides Italy, they have utilised the collections of the cultural institutions of three other different countries (Lithuania, Poland and Russia), such as the National Library of Lithuania (Lietuvos nacionalinė Martyno Mažvydo biblioteka), the State Historical Archive of Lithuania (Lietuvos valstybės istorijos archyvas) and the Library of the Vilnius University (Vilniaus universiteto biblioteka), the Library of the Catholic University in Lublin (Biblioteka Uniwersytecka Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego), and the Russian State Archive of Historical Records in Moscow (Rossijskij gosudarstvennyj archiv drevnich aktov). By comparing the sources from ARSI with other documents, the Editors acquired a critical view of the information sent by Jesuits to the General Curia in Rome. This provides an interesting insight into the activity of the Society’s administration as well as the mentalities of Jesuit authors. The Editors have also extensively used published sources and historiography to identify people and places, providing detailed information about them in the footnotes. Compared to the earlier edition of J. Kleijntjens, some choices made by the Editors can be regarded as a notable advancement. For example, the decision to publish all manuscripts from the same year one after another simplifies the use of the source edition. A good solution is also the publication of the names of all Jesuits contained in the Catalogi breves, regardless of them being priests, scholastics or lay brothers. Other choices may be debatable. Necrologies should also have been published, since many of the Jesuits who died in Kražiai spent much of their membership in the Society there. As far as the Catalogi triennales are concerned, the Catalogus primus should have been fully published, instead of being limited to the names and geographical origin of the Jesuits. This would have aided

10 For example, they have used the manuscript 206 from the Library of the Catholic University in Lublin for the catalogi breves missing in ARSI (1667/68, 1668/69, 1669/70, 1670/71, 1671/72, 1673/74, 1677/78). 270 Book Reviews subsequent prosopographical research that undoubtedly will result from this work. In conclusion, the book Fontes Collegii Crosensis, qui in Archivo Romano Societatis Iesu asservantur can be regarded as an important editorial work and hopefully will stimulate similar source editions on other Jesuit colleges within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Once more, the systematic character of the edition should be emphasized: thanks to extensive research, the editors provide possibly the fullest edition of sources related to a specific Jesuit house. Another positive feature of the work is that it is the result of the cooperation between scholars in both the philological and historical fields. Such challenging editorial work should be undertaken only through an interdisciplinary approach. One can only wish that the second volume, including the years 1701–1773, appears in the not-too-distant future.

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań Andrea Mariani

Kilian Stumpf SJ, The Acta Pekinensia or Historical Records of the Maillard de Tournon Legation.Volume II: September 1706 – December 1707, Paul Rule and Claudia von Collani, eds. Leiden - Boston: x, 811 pp. €199.00/$239.00. ISBN: 978-90-04-39631-9.

In April 1705 Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon (1668–1710) arrived in China. He had been sent by pope Clement XI to provide papal oversight over the eastern missions and, in particular, to enforce the decisions taken by the Holy Office against the practice of Chinese rites among Chinese Catholic converts. Appointed as an apostolic legate a latere, he effectively enjoyed the same powers as the pope while in China. From the outset, there were fundamental questions of jurisdiction that Tournon’s legation seemed to override. China had long been regarded as subject to the Portuguese padroado, which meant that even papal representatives needed to be approved by the Portuguese throne. China was also a sovereign state in which the Europeans operated entirely at the grace of the Kangxi Emperor. Yet Tournon demanded unconditional obedience from all missionaries and Christians in China. He even required that all Christians kneel before him when addressing him. This enraged the Kangxi Emperor, who suspected that Tournon was arrogating to himself temporal jurisdiction over Chinese subjects. Book Reviews Book Reviews 271

But most damaging was Tournon’s disastrous dealings with the Kangxi Emperor during his Beijing sojourn. For some unknown reason, Tournon attempted to obfuscate the true purpose of his visit and even refused to show the Kangxi Emperor his credentials. He then made a series of requests that contravened Chinese custom, such as the establishment of a permanent papal embassy in Beijing. Although Tournon was entirely ignorant of the Chinese language, literature and culture, he refused to attenuate his position on the rites, and invited Maigrot to champion his cause before the Kangxi Emperor. But Maigrot performed poorly during his interview with the emperor. He was unable to understand the emperor’s Chinese or respond to the most basic questions about Chinese literature. The emperor dismissed him as effectively illiterate in Chinese. The emperor then hardened his resolve, sending Tournon South and exiling Maigrot. He required all missionaries to apply for a piao (residence permit) and to promise to adhere to the practices of Matteo Ricci. In turn, Tournon issued a decree from Nanjing on 7 February 1707 prohibiting the Chinese rites and the use of Shangdi and Tian for indicating God. Tournon claimed that he made this decision in light of Clement XI’s 1704 decision to similar effect, but he refused to show Clement XI’s decree to the China missionaries. Tournon and the Emperor’s conflicting decrees placed the missionaries in an impossible position. If they were to apply for the piao, they would risk excommunication. If they were to continue residing in China without the piao they would risk exile, imprisonment or even worse punishment. Yet Tournon blamed the Jesuits for the crisis, claiming that the emperor only demanded that the missionaries adhere to the Chinese rites at the Jesuits’ insistence. His breakdown in communications with the emperor was in his view the result of Jesuit meddling and deliberate misinterpretation. Tournon ended his legation imprisoned in Macau, accusing the Jesuits of conspiring against him and even poisoning him. Before his death on 10 June 1710, he was informed that he had been proclaimed cardinal in 1707 by Clement XI as a reward for his actions in China. As apostolic notary, Kilian Stumpf (1655–1720) was commissioned by the Jesuit Superior General to compile a detailed account of Tournon’s activities in Beijing and their aftermath. The result of Stumpf’s labours was an enormous 1,467 folio manuscript which he entitled “Acta Pekinensia”, which literally translates as “What Happened at Beijing”. The transcription and translation of this manuscript has been a monumental task that has occupied the labours of many scholars over decades based in Poland (Monika 272 Book Reviews

Miazek-Mecyznska, Ewa Jarmakowska, and Katarzyna Prychitko), Australia (Joseph Holland, John Wilcken, John Begley and Stan Hogan), and England (Gerard J. Hughes). The final product was edited by Paul Rule and Claudia von Collani. In 2015, the first four hundred pages of this manuscript covering 4 December 1705 to 28 August 1706 were published with a digital transcription and English translation as part of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (MHSI) of the Institutum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Nova Series 9). The narrative of the second volume begins in September 1706, just after Tournon’s departure from Beijing, and finishes in December 1707. Most of the action—such as Tournon and Maigrot’s meetings with the Kangxi Emperor—took place in the first volume. In this first volume, we primarily deal with the tragic aftermath: the dramatic change in the Kangxi Emperor’s attitude towards the missionaries, the letters that Jesuits exchanged defending their actions against Tournon’s accusations of sabotaging his mission and their entreaties to the Kangxi Emperor to forgive the Europeans for their insolence towards the emperor. Unlike the first volume, this volume is published as the inaugural book of the new Brill series, Studies in the History of Christianity in East Asia, edited by Prof. M. Antoni J. Ucerler and Dr Xiaoxin Wu of the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco. Unfortunately, the change of publisher entails a change in price. Whereas the first volume sells for a reasonable €70, this volume costs €199, despite being of roughly the same length as the second volume and including a CD- ROM. Besides translating the next 400 pages of the manuscript, Rule and Collani include a translation of Stumpf’s summary of the events in 1705 and 1706 and provide a short introduction which briefly contextualises the volume. Thus the editors have endeavoured to make this second volume self-contained, though readers are strongly enjoined to refer to the luxurious 170-page introduction of the first volume for a more detailed treatment of the manuscript and its historical context. Stumpf’s punctilious record does not make for easy reading. He laboriously transcribes countless letters that provide exhaustive information about the legation. Many of the letters deal with the same events but are provided simply as corroboration or contrasting views. A continual concern of Stumpf is to point out that the Jesuits were not alone in their defense of the Chinese rites and terms, but were supported by various missionaries from other orders and congregations, such as the Augustinian friar Alvaro de Benavente (1646-1709), who was titular Bishop of Ascalon and vicar apostolic of Jiangxi province. Book Reviews Book Reviews 273

Yet the patient reader will be rewarded with remarkable insights into Qing court life, the complex dealings between the emperor and the missionaries and the emperor’s changing attitudes towards Tournon and other missionaries. Stumpf often even records the Chinese expressions used by the Kangxi Emperor, which are surprisingly colloquial. In this way, the Acta Pekinensia are not only of interest to scholars of the Rites Controversy, but also of Qing China, giving a European account of Qing court life, with tidbits on the customs the missionaries were expected to obey when meeting Qing dynasty officials and the Manchu language used at court. The emperor himself is revealed as a perceptive and forbearing observer of European quarrels, going beyond all Chinese precedent to exend numerous olive branches to the Europeans despite their continual disregard for imperial orders. Most striking is the rather prescient line attributed to the emperor who complained that Claudio Filippo Grimaldi (1639–1712), director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy, had misrepresented Europe to China. The Emperor remarked, “Europeans usually when they intend to speak about the East in fact talk about the West, and when they speak about matters of the West end up speaking about the East.” The Chinese original, which Rule and Collani reconstruct, is even pithier and more evocative: “指東學西，指西學東” (p. 685). The Acta Pekinensia also features interesting digressions on the difficulties of translating Catholic liturgical prayers into Chinese. For instance, the Franciscan friar Basilio da Glemona and the oratorian father Giovanni Donato Mezzafalce proposed replacing the old formula for baptism with some new alternatives because he believed there were grave ambiguities in the meaning of “name” (ming 名) in the Chinese text owing principly to the lack of grammatical number in Chinese and also the lack of a precise Chinese analogue to the Latin preposition in. The conclusion of this digression reveals an interesting problem: in many respects the Latin expression is just as ambiguous as the Chinese translation, but Europeans have been instructed for generations about the correct meaning of the formula, thus eliminating any ambiguity. Hence the removal of the ancient formula would in fact counteract this process of habituation. (p. 623) Stumpf no doubt was hinting to the reader to extrapolate a more general point about the Terms and Rites controversies: Chinese Catholics have been schooled in the correct meaning of the terms and rites for a hundred years, what disruption would a radical change bring now? The translation of this long manuscript is a monument to the rigours of traditional philology. In general, the translators have 274 Book Reviews opted for a slavishly literal translation to the point that they even indicate the precise page breaks of the original manuscript in the translation. Such a translation approach is most useful for scholars who might need to cross-reference with the original text, though unfortunately unlike the first volume the transcription of the original is not published with the translation. However, this literal approach to translation makes the text sometimes very stilted and difficult to understand. The problems are much more acute in the translation of Stumpf’s compendium. On almost every page there are sentences with extremely unnatural word order, unnecessary archaicisms, misplaced or missing commas, inconsistent date formats and syntax errors. Many long periods would be better broken up, such as “They found the Most Illustrious Lord twenty-four leagues from Beijing, ill and outside his boat which was iced up in the river unable to move, and carried him off by the land route to Beijing where on December 4th the Most Illustrious Lord by order of His Majesty was carried to the house of Our Society within the Saffron Wall, which since it was close to the Palace would be more convenient for the frequent benefits to be bestowed on him.” (p. 38) The editors make the decision to render “Canton” as “Guangzhou” when the editors are sure that this ambiguous toponym refers to the city, but this results in a bizarre sentence with both Canton and Guangzhou! (p. 35) The translators are even inconsistent in their rendering of Stumpf’s position, which is sometimes translated as “Apostolic Notary” (110 times) and other times as “Notary Apostolic” (29 times). These two inconsistent titles even find place in the index. Under “Apostolic Notary”the reader is directed to the entry for Kilian Stumpf, whereas “Notary Apostolic” is treated as a separate entry. The editors have done a tremendous service in modernising Stumpf’s romanisation of Chinese words and where possible identifying the corresponding Chinese characters. However, there are many mistakes that should have been corrected during the editorial process: huaiji si should be kuaiji si (p. 38); sometimes characters are not given, for example for the first instance of zhi (p. 51); normally the modern pinyin is given in the main text and Stumpf’s romanisation placed in the footnote, but on p. 234 cha is written as “tche” in the main text; sometimes the customary apostrophes used in pinyin are not given, such as “shang fuan” (p. 366) and “Huaian”, but “Nan’an” is correctly rendered (p. 446). Occasionally modern pinyin and Stumpf’s romanisation have been mixed up in the main text. For instance on p. 516, “women tiexun Book Reviews Book Reviews 275

ji naibude” should be “women de xun ji naibude” (我們的循極耐不 得). The Kangxi emperor’s eldest son is named as “Yinti” and the editors in a note (p. 126, n. 57) explain Stumpf’s transliteration of the name as “yn çi” as a possible reference to the prince’s title as a prince of the Second Rank (zhi 直), but actually the second character of the prince’s name (胤禔) is not transliterated as “ti” but “zhi”, so Stumpf is in fact perfectly correct. There are also wrong characters, such as the final character of Ricci's Chinese name (dou竇) , which is written as 鐸 on page 80. These translation and editing problems should not detract from the excellent scholarship that infuses every page of this fine volume. The next volume of this most important monument to Tournon’s legation is most eagerly awaited.

Sun Yat-Sen University, China Daniel Canaris

Christine W.M. Schunck, Intolerante tolerantie. De geschiedenis van de katholieke missionering op Curaçao (1499–1776). Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers, 2019. 403 pp. € 22.50. ISBN 978-90-5625-504-6.

Little has been written lately on the history of the Catholic Church on Curaçao, in particular regarding the period when the island was governed by the Protestant Dutch Republic (1634–1795) and missioned by those champions of Catholicism, the Jesuits (1705– 1742). One cannot but praise the author—a PhD student in her mid-seventies—for the idea to dedicate her thesis to this topic, an idea even more praiseworthy, considering how many archival sources she had to consult at both sides of the Atlantic. Some were disappointingly small, like the diocesan archives of Curaçao (destroyed by fire in 1969); others were discouragingly large, like the archives of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome or the Spanish colonial archives in Seville; yet others were simply unwelcoming, like the archdiocesan archives in Caracas, with its “rather despotic traits” (p. 22). One would have wished, however, that the author had been better accompanied, both in her research and in the writing and editing of her thesis, all of which remain on a rather low academic level. Also, the Latin transcriptions are far from flawless, and the index of names, with references to chapters instead of pages, is unhelpful, to say the least. If her understanding of the Jesuit ‘way of proceeding’ is anything to go by—often superficial, 276 Book Reviews sometimes erroneous—this thesis ought to be consulted with some caution. The presence of the Society of Jesus in present-day Colombia and surroundings was organised in 1605 in the Vice-Province (in 1611 Province) of the New Kingdom of Granada and Quito (NRQ), with Quito gaining independence in 1696 – the same period in which the first non-Spanish Jesuits arrived, namely seven indipetae of the Bohemian Province, one of whom, Michael Schabel, would work as the first Jesuit on Curaçao. In 1713, Superior General Tamburini entrusted the Curaçao Mission to the Flemish Belgian Province, which reluctantly sent one after the other of its newly ordained men to the island—seven until 1741—most of whom would die there within a few years from illness or exhaustion. So what to think of the author talking about the NRQ Province in the 18th century, as if it had not ceased to exist as such in 1696? Even its split-off, the New Kingdom of Granada Province (NR), never really had much to do with the Curaçao Mission, if not for the erratic Father Schabel. The latter’s ministry on the island, from 1705 to 1713, did not excel in the observance of religious vows, with accusations of espionage, commercial gain, drunkenness, intimate relationships with women, and in general a spirit of independence unbefitting of a professed priest of the Society of Jesus; already in 1702, his superiors had judged his prudence null (p. 92). Nothing could be more obvious than his dismissal from the Order, one would say, but the author dedicates a whole paragraph to the question why Schabel had to leave the Society. “Why does a priest have to be celibate and a Protestant minister not?”, she asks. “Celibacy was difficult on an island where many scantily-clad women walked around. Moreover, there was plenty of alcohol available during his visits to the high society” (p. 109). Her description of Jesuit formation and of what might move a young religious to volunteer for the missions is equally inaccurate and superficial (p. 81–82), leading to loose observations such as that most of the seven Bohemian indipetae wrote their request “around the time of their stay at Telc” (p. 85). Indeed they did, but why? Because, as one can deduct from the tables in the text and in the appendices (II.B.3a), the college of Telč was where they did their tertianship. In other words, they were inspired to greater zeal in this intense, final phase of their religious formation. Others, like Frantisek Wydra (p. 309), applied for the missions in or shortly after the novitiate. More remarkable, on the other hand, is the fact that the seven Flemish Belgian Jesuits were sent to Curaçao alone, without the usual companion; the second man normally arrived a few years Book Reviews Book Reviews 277

later, just in time (or not) to bury his predecessor. The author notes the fact without explaining it, or it must have been for the same reason why the Flemish Belgian Province was so reluctant, too, to aid them financially, namely that it never really had wanted to take over the Curaçao Mission but had been forced by Tamburini to accept it in the aftermath of the Schabel scandal (p. 107–108). Interestingly, three of the seven missionaries made their final vows after having arrived at Curaçao, in the absence of a (major) superior or any other Jesuit – an unusual way of incorporation (p. 110). Given the difficult circumstances in which they had to work, it is not surprising that they were all professed of four vows. Two Bohemian Jesuits who earlier had taken final vows as spiritual coadjutors, Albert von Bukowski zu Hustirzan (not Hustiran) and Elias Sieghardt, were elevated to professed during the voyage to the New Kingdom of Granada or after their arrival, and would even become superior, but their companion Marek Zaurek, praised as “the most enthusiastic and fervent missionary in this region” (p. 310), remained a spiritual coadjutor all his life. From the perspective of Jesuit history, which comprises the one but longest of this thesis’s four chapters (p. 77–127), with another sixty pages of appendices, one must conclude that much remains to be studied regarding the Curaçao Mission, short-lived as it may have been. Despite its shortcomings, which cannot only be imputed to the author, this thesis will prove to be a useful basis for further research and a tribute to the missionaries who founded the Catholic Church on Curaçao. In a climate of ‘tolerant intolerance’ (and not the other way around, as the author has it), where the practice of non- Protestant worship was only allowed under the strictest conditions, there was little or no space for a regular priestly ministry. The sixty Spanish priests who baptized on Curaçao between 1677 and 1707, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a few months (p. 65–70), were missionaries in transit, two thirds of them religious; they may have wanted to stay there, but did not have the chance. Father Schabel did manage to work on the island, for eight years, baptizing slaves, wining and dining with the Catholic notables, and keeping his flock obedient, as the Dutch vice-governor desired (his Nativity scene had black sheep). His seven Dutch and Flemish successors, on the other hand, bore the daily burdens of their ministry without succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. Fr Dominic Dujardin, for example, “crossed the whole island barefooted, because he did not have money for a donkey or for shoes” (p. 119), while Fr John Baptist Cloots, inspired by the same zeal, was the first Jesuit to learn the local 278 Book Reviews language, Papiamento. One of their enemies, a vagrant Augustinian, wrote disdainfully about the handicraft they performed, the wigs and lay attire they wore, the alms they asked for the administration of sacraments and blessings (p. 147), but each sneer was actually a testimony to their poverty and to their selflessness in the service of the equally poor Catholics of Curaçao, most of them mulattos or blacks and often slaves, who suffered doubly—racially and religiously— from the Dutch ‘tolerant intolerance’.

Brussels Marc Lindeijer SJ

Margarida Miranda, Miguel Venegas and the Earliest Jesuit Theater. Choruses for Tragedies in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2019, 240 pp. €106.00/$127.00. ISBN 9789004340428.

Margarida Miranda inizia questa monografia su Miguel Venegas, fondatore del teatro gesuitico portoghese, ricostruendone la vicenda biografica e la personalità. Attingendo a documenti di prima mano, l’autrice rettifica anche alcune inesattezze, primamente quelle relative al cognome e alla data di nascita, fissandoli rispettivamente in Venegas e 29 settembre 1529. Nei primi due capitoli del libro, scopriamo un uomo irrequieto, un gesuita (fu ammesso nel 1554) colto e apprezzato, ma anche ribelle, un umanista e un maestro al quale però, talvolta, l’insegnamento pesava. Passò dalla Penisola Iberica a Roma a Parigi, per tornare, dopo aver lasciato la Compagnia di Gesù, nella terra d’origine; non in Portogallo, dove aveva esordito come drammaturgo, ma nella natia Spagna, docente di retorica (eppure, fu questa la motivazione con la quale volle lasciare l’Ordine: avrebbe voluto essere un predicatore!) presso l’Università di Salamanca. La sua produzione poetica e oratoria è cospicua; quella drammaturgica propriamente detta, alla quale vanno aggiunti dialoghi ed ecloghe, significativa. Essa consta di due tragoediae sacrae (struttura classica, argomento tratto dall’Antico Testamento) composte e rappresentate a Coimbra, rispettivamente nel 1559 e nel 1562, Saul Gelboeus e Achabus (disponibile in edizione moderna), di una tragedia, Juditha, e di un’opera senza titolo delle quali non si hanno i testi, ma si ha notizia, nonché di una Comedia en la fiesta del Santisimo Sacramento (disponibile in edizione moderna), composte e rappresentate a Salamanca. Come d’uso nel teatro gesuitico, Book Reviews Book Reviews 279

specialmente per i testi migliori, le opere di Venegas vennero messe in scena più volte e in paesi diversi; lo conferma l’esistenza, anche fuori dell’Europa, di numerosi manoscritti diSaul e Achabus. Alcuni circolarono anonimi, ma la studiosa ne ha meritatamente accertato la paternità. L’autrice sembra, non a torto, tenere molto alla contestualizzazione e prima di focalizzare il discorso sul drammaturgo, ci offre un panorama dettagliato dell’ambiente nel quale egli si è formato e si muove. Venegas ha una formazione universitaria, porta con sé l’eredità dell’umanesimo cristiano di Alcalá de Henares, dove il bagaglio culturale (grammatica, retorica, opere) delle tre lingue, Latino, Greco, Ebraico e il metodo, impostato sulla correttezza filologica, sono soprattutto un veicolo per la comprensione della Bibbia. Ma la produzione teatrale gesuitica non nasce in un deserto; nel caso del nostro autore, il retroterra è costituito in particolare dal teatro, gesuitico e non, spagnolo. È un retroterra vivace e ricco, nel quale non mancano elementi di novità; nella prima metà del XVI secolo il Vecchio Testamento è la fonte privilegiata, che non viene abbandonata neppure dopo il 1550; parimenti, nonostante l’influenza controriformista e l’apertura all’uso della lingua vernacola, non viene abbandonato quello che abbiamo definito bagaglio culturale. Relativamente alle tragedie di Venegas, nel quadro che Margarida Miranda disegna c’è un elemento da sottolineare: diversamente da ciò che solitamente accade nel teatro gesuitico spagnolo, l’alto registro stilistico dell’opera non passa mai in secondo piano rispetto all’intento morale e catechetico. Una caratteristica che non appartiene però solamente al nostro autore. Come si evince dal sottotitolo del volume, un particolare interesse rivestono i cori. Che le messinscene nei collegi della Compagnia si giovassero della musica, del canto e di movimenti danzanti che talvolta sembrano vere e proprie coreografie è noto, ma qui siamo agl’inizi del teatro dei Gesuiti e dunque vale la pena di spendere qualche parola. Venegas viene da un’università nella quale, diversamente da quanto accade nelle scuole dell’Ordine, si attribuisce grande importanza alla cultura musicale. Quando si tratta dei cori, si parla in particolare di quelli di Achabus, egli non improvvisa, ma si rivolge al musicista Francisco Mouro. Il risultato della collaborazione è una simmetria di musica e parole, dove la prima non è un semplice ornamento, ma, in perfetto accordo con le seconde, ne sostiene l’espressività e il significato. Quando la tragedia venne rappresentata 280 Book Reviews a Roma, presso il Collegio Germanico, dove la sensibilità musicale si manifestava nella pratica della musica vocale e strumentale, il drammaturgo non fu costretto a cercare collaboratori ‘esterni’. I cori rimasero come un vero e proprio modello, ma forse è azzardato affermare, come fa Margarida Miranda, che Miguel Venegas fornì il modello della tragoedia sacra, che, accettato e codificato dal Generale Borja, avrebbe in seguito, dall’edizione del 1586, ispirato la Ratio Studiorum. In sintesi, il volume è ricco e non privo di spunti di discussione. Non gli giova però l’insistenza sulla grandezza, indiscutibile, di Venegas, e, soprattutto, sull’essere stato il fondatore del teatro recitato nei collegi della Compagnia, dal momento che l’autrice arriva a conclusioni a dir poco frettolose. Assodato, e non si può non essere d’accordo, che il teatro gesuitico non fece le prime prove in Italia, come volle una critica ormai datata, bensì in Portogallo, l’autrice scrive che Stefano Tucci (1540-1597) e Bernardino Stefonio (1562-1620) non soltanto non sono i fondatori di quel teatro, ma che, come drammaturghi «may be considered disciples of Venegas» (p. 149). Se non bastasse il fatto che i due appartengono a generazioni diverse, il primo, dopo le tragedie bibliche, scrisse una trilogia cristologica e Stefonio trasse i propri soggetti dal martirologio, Sancta Symphorosa (1591) e dalla storia, Crispus (1597), Flavia (1600)! Riferendosi ancora ai suddetti, l’autrice scrive che, secondo studiosi con i quali, si comprende, non è d’accordo, essi iniziano «a new form of Christian and Jesuit drama» (p. 163). Ella usa indifferente gli aggettivi sacra e cristiana, cosa che non vafatta, quando essi qualificano la tragedia gesuitica. Cristiana si definisce infatti non la tragedia di soggetto biblico, ma la cosiddetta tragedia del martire, iniziata con le tragedie storiche di Stefonio e discussa da Tarquinio Galluzzi in Rinovazione dell’antica tragedia e Difesa del Crispo (1633). Parliamo della cosiddetta riforma stefoniana, della quale hanno scritto studiosi quali Marc Fumaroli e Jean-Marie Valentin. A quest’ultimo si deve inoltre l’aver individuato nelle tragedie cristologiche tucciane il primo passo verso quella riforma. Sull’argomento, come su altri, esiste una bibliografia, anche recente, della quale l’autrice avrebbe dovuto tenere conto.

Roma Mirella Saulini Book Reviews Book Reviews 281

Katalin Czibula [†], Júlia Demeter and Márta Zsuzsanna Pintér, eds, Theory and Practice in 17th–19th Century Theatre. Sources, Influences, Texts in Latin and Vernacular Ways towards Professional Stage. Eger: Lίceum Kladó, 2019. 325 pp. ISBN 978-963-496-129-1.

Il volume, corredato da un’ampia bibliografia, raccoglie le relazioni presentate in occasione del convegno internazionale, dal titolo omonimo, tenutosi a Eger nel settembre 2018. Il convegno che si svolge nella città ungherese ha cadenza triennale – è arrivato all’undicesima edizione – ed affronta, ad altissimo livello, temi attinenti alla storia del teatro. Nel caso, come si evince dal titolo, esso ha preso in esame un tema che, anche per come si presenta e si evolve in un arco di tempo molto ampio, appare complesso. Volendo sintetizzare, possiamo dire che suo presupposto, diversamente sviluppato dai relatori, è l’idea del palcoscenico come metaforico punto d’arrivo e luogo d’incontro di tutto ciò che un testo teatrale porta con sé, dalle fonti cui attinge, alle poetiche che tracciano le linee lungo le quali l’autore si muove. Senza dimenticare quello che il suddetto testo richiede per prendere vita nella messinscena: primamente gli attori, ma anche le scenografie, i costumi, talvolta la musica. Si è parlato anche, inevitabilmente, di quanto ruota attorno ai testi teatrali e alla recita di essi: per esempio la committenza, la quale riguarda il prima e talvolta lega un’opera a un’occasione, oppure la stampa, la quale riguarda il dopo ed è veicolo di trasmissione del testo, nonché testimonianza di esso e della sua fortuna scenica. Pur se il testo teatrale ha una sua specificità, accade che esso sia tratto da un testo letterario o comunque destinato alla lettura; un esempio è il Tobias junior del gesuita Georgius Dingenauer (1571– 1631). Scritto per le nozze della nipote del cardinale Ditrichstein, esso richiede che l’episodio veterotestamentario venga semplificato e, soprattutto, che il motivo del matrimonio diventi centrale (Magdaléna Jacková, Comment dramatiser le récit biblique). Talvolta il testo teatrale non regge bene alla prova del palcoscenico; fu così per Flavia Tragoedia (1600) del gesuita Bernardino Stefonio. La prima di quest’opera, che mette in scena un episodio della storia di Roma, durò dieci ore; di conseguenza, in occasione delle rappresentazioni successive fu necessario eliminare alcune parti, restituite però nella stampa del 1621 (Mirella Saulini, Bernardino Stefonio’s Flavia Tragoedia: Classical Sources. The Staging of a Very Long Tragedy). I drammaturghi attingono a fonti diverse; in tale ottica, essi 282 Book Reviews rendono talvolta protagonisti i grandi dell’antichità. È il caso del filosofo Diogene, di indiscutibile valore emblematico, personaggio, tra l’altro, nell’opera di due autori gesuiti: Comoedia fabulosa: Bacchi schola eversa (1657) di Jakob Masen e Comoedo-tragicum Bacchanal (1664c) di Arnold Engel (Markéta Klosová, How to Get Diogenes on the Stage). Come si può intuire, il teatro recitato nei collegi della Compagnia di Gesù ha trovato spazio in parecchie relazioni; di alcune è stato l’argomento principale; altre lo hanno sfiorato. Sappiamo che la musica fu dall’inizio una componente del suddetto teatro, ma forse Carolus Kolczawa, inserendo una scena metateatrale di musica e danza in Tyrannis triumphans et triumphata, seu Anglia, fa un passo avanti e non aspira tanto ad essere erede della tragedia antica, quanto, anche lasciandosi influenzare dai gusti del pubblico, ad aprire al melodramma (Jean-Frédéric Chevalier, Musique et spectacles de cour dans Anglia de Carolus Kolczawa S.J. (Prague, 1704): peut-on parler de mise en scène?). Kolczawa (1656–1717), autore delle Exercitationes dramaticae, destinate ai docenti futuri drammaturghi, ha esercitato una grande influenza. Da sottolineare come di essa abbiano risentito anche autori come Alois Mickl, il quale, dopo aver studiato presso i Gesuiti ed aver fatto nel loro collegio le sue prime, importantissime prove come autore teatrale, non entrò nell’Ordine (Josef Förster, Sources and Influences of the Dramatic Work of Johann Christian Alois Mickl). Da più d’una relazione è emerso l’interesse che, dalla metà del Seicento, gli autori gesuiti mostrano per la storia contemporanea. Sulla battaglia di Vienna del 1683 fa centro Vienna Austriae defensa e liberata di Gabriel Kapi, pubblicata nel 1686. In metro giambico e senza dimenticare il fine didattico, essa interpreta, anche con immagini di forte valore simbolico, uno scontro sentito come decisivo per la sorte dell’Europa: cristiana o musulmana (Nicol Sipekiová, A Jesuit School Drama about the Battle of Vienna (1683) as an Example of Occasional Literature and Its Function). In Ungheria, dove i collegi gesuitici appaiono molto attivi, e non solo relativamente al teatro, il cosiddetto dramma storico, definito anche da Jacob Masen, riveste particolare importanza: ferme restando alcune caratteristiche, primamente il legame con la didattica, esso non soltanto contribuisce alla formazione dell’identità religiosa, ma riveste un ruolo importante nella formazione di quella nazionale (Márta Zsuzsanna Pintér, Les types du drame historique dans la littérature ancienne hongroise). Book Reviews Book Reviews 283

In tale ottica non poteva sfuggire al ‘protagonismo’ la Stephanskrone, la Corona Regni Ungariae admirabilis (1712). Essa è, al contempo, simbolo della regalità e simbolo identitario, nonché allegoria del potere, della vittoria e della rinascita: Aurea regni Hungariae saecula cum novo Rege renata (1688) (Norbert Medgyesy S., Historische Schauspiele über die Stephanskrone zum Anlass der Königskrönungen (Pressburg, 1688; Tyrnau, 1712)). Ancora una ‘protagonista’ della storia e del teatro dei collegi: l’aquila. Questa ha offerto, tra l’altro, lo spunto per evidenziare la cura che al momento dello spettacolo veniva prestata alla scenografia. I cambiamenti di scena, con le selve che prendono il posto delle solitudini, le aperture con l’apparizione dei Cesari d’Austria, le nubi che lasciano vedere, assisi, i due santi martiri, Stefano e Venceslao, catturano lo spettatore (Kateřina Bobková-Valentová – Martin Bažil, Der Autor als verbogener Regisseur Anweisungen zur Aufführung in der Handschrift von Georgius Auschitzers Spiel Aquila principalium duorum sanctorum… (Schweidnitz, 1703). Al termine di questo pur parziale panorama, va sottolineato, come, tanto dalle relazioni concernenti il teatro dei Gesuiti, quanto dal convegno tutto, sia uscita rafforzata quell’idea della specificità del testo drammatico dalla quale siamo partiti. Esso, proprio in quanto destinato al palcoscenico e dunque inserito in uno specifico contesto, non appartiene alla letteraturatout court, ma alla cosiddetta letteratura teatrale e in tale prospettiva va considerato ed esaminato.

Roma Mirella Saulini

Claudio Ferlan e Marco Plesnicar, eds, Historia Collegii Goritiensis. Gli Annali del collegio dei gesuiti di Gorizia (1615–1772). Trento: FBK Press, 2020. 1132 pp. ISBN 978-88-98989-53-9.

Nata da una collaborazione scientifica tra l’Istituto Storico Italo- Germanico della Fondazione Bruno Kessler e l’Istituto di Storia Sociale e Religiosa di Gorizia, l’edizione dell’Historia Collegii Goritiensis mette a disposizione della ricerca storica un testo molto significativo per molteplici motivi: per la sua estensione cronologica, per la ricchezza delle informazioni fornite, per la possibilità di inserirlo in una rete documentaria. L’Historia Collegii Goritiensis appartiene al genere delle Historiae 284 Book Reviews

Domus della Compagnia di Gesù, la cui stesura era già negli auspici di Polanco per quanto riguardava il periodo della fondazione e fu richiesta a tutte le case durante il generalato di Claudio Acquaviva. Incaricato di stendere una storia della Compagnia, il gesuita Niccolò Orlandini chiese infatti ad Acquaviva che tutti i superiori delle case inviassero una relazione sui loro inizi e tenessero poi annualmente una cronaca annuale. Acquaviva sollecitò più volte i superiori nei vari luoghi della Compagnia a compilare tali resoconti e la VII congregazione generale (1615-1616) ne fece un obbligo. A differenza delle Litterae annuae, che riportavano notizie dell’intera provincia, le Historiae Domus riguardavano gli avvenimenti concernenti la singola casa gesuitica. La produzione e la conservazione di tale documentazione non è stata omogenea e, se per alcune case se ne trova in ARSI una copia, per altre la cronaca è custodita negli archivi locali oppure non se ne rinviene traccia. L’Historia del collegio di Gorizia si salvò dalla dispersione all’atto della soppressione della Compagnia grazie a un ex alunno del collegio, che si preoccupò di salvare la memoria dell’ordine nella sua città di origine, e dopo varie peregrinazioni giunse infine all’Archivio Storico della Provincia d’Italia dei gesuiti, dove ora è conservata. È scritta in latino ed è divisa in due volumi: il primo copre gli anni dal 1615 al 1726 e il secondo dal 1724 al 1772 (la cronaca degli anni 1724-26 è ripetuta all’inizio del secondo volume). Diverse mani si susseguono nella stesura degli annali. Ne sono anche stati ricavati tre manoscritti, due in italiano e uno in latino. L’introduzione di Claudio Ferlan (pp. 11-72) dà conto delle caratteristiche formali dei due volumi e fornisce una lettura dei contenuti dell’Historia. Grazie anche ai suoi studi antecedenti sul collegio goriziano, Ferlan inquadra la cronaca goriziana nel contesto storico più ampio dei domini degli Asburgo d’Austria, della presenza gesuitica nell’Austria interna e della specifica realtà goriziana. La fondazione del collegio goriziano è inserita soprattutto nell’orizzonte del conflitto tra impero e Repubblica di Venezia, che sfociò nella guerra di Gradisca (1615-1617). I gesuiti si stabilirono a Gorizia con un decisivo sostegno imperiale, dunque, e non solo per la volontà di contrastare la presenza luterana nell’Austria interiore, ormai in fase calante. Ai confini del dominio veneto fiorirono velocemente altri collegi della Compagnia anche per attirare sudditi veneti dopo l’espulsione dalla Repubblica in seguito all’interdetto (1606): infatti dopo l’insediamento a Gorizia (1615) e la fondazione del collegio (1618) furono fondati i collegi a Trieste (1620) e Fiume/ Rijeka (1627). Nell’Austria interna erano già stati aperti i collegi di Book Reviews Book Reviews 285

Graz (1572), Lubiana (1596), Klagenfurt (1604) e Leoben (1613). Oltre alle dotazioni del primo decennio, in particolare le unioni al collegio della parrocchia di San Pietro in città e della prepositura di Pisino/Pazin in Istria, con i suoi benefici, e l’acquisizione della commenda di Precenicco e dei beni di Monte Giordano, il collegio di Gorizia si resse su una buona amministrazione e su donazioni e lasciti testamentari di ogni genere, dai fondi immobiliari, ai crediti, al denaro, alle numerose immagini, agli arredi sacri. Non mancarono i conflitti innescati da donazioni talvolta cospicue, puntualmente riportati nell’Historia. L’introduzione si sofferma poi sull’attività scolastica dei gesuiti, la cui presenza fu preziosa anche per l’assenza nel territorio di una precedente offerta formativa strutturata. In deroga alla Ratio studiorum, ma come accadeva anche altrove, il collegio goriziano si fece carico pure dell’insegnamento a livello elementare, propedeutico alle classi di grammatica, umanità e retorica. Agli studi inferiori si aggiunsero insegnamenti superiori, destinati soprattutto agli aspiranti al sacerdozio. L’Historia riporta con soddisfazione la costante crescita degli studenti nel corso del Seicento fino a una cifra di mezzo migliaio e oltre, mantenuta nei primi due decenni del Settecento, dopo i quali iniziò il progressivo calo. Si trattò di una scuola numerosa, alla quale affluirono, come desiderato, anche giovani del dominio veneto. L’Historia permette di cogliere il veloce avvicendamento di maestri e di personale nel collegio gesuitico goriziano, per il quale, tra l’altro, esisteva la questione linguistica, essendo plurilingue la contea di Gorizia e Gradisca: il tedesco era la lingua ufficiale degli Stati provinciali, l’italiano era la lingua notarile, della corrispondenza e dei discorsi, e si parlavano inoltre lo sloveno e il friulano. I gesuiti, impegnati non soltanto nelle scuole, ma anche in altri ministeri quali la predicazione, la confessione e le missioni, dovettero via via curare presenze di soggetti capaci di esprimersi nelle diverse lingue. Per ospitare gli studenti i gesuiti si industriarono al fine di istituire un convitto, che fu aperto grazie alla donazione del barone Giovanni Battista Werdenberg e che per questo ricevette il titolo di seminario werdenbergico. L’atto costitutivo è del 1636 e il seminario funzionò con crescente affluenza fino a giungere alle ottanta presenze nel 1723. Di particolare interesse l’Historia risulta per l’attestazione dell’esercizio del foro civile riguardo agli studenti del collegio, secondo la consuetudine delle università nell’area imperiale, 286 Book Reviews e per la costante registrazione delle rappresentazioni teatrali e dell’assegnazione dei premi. Ricorrente la narrazione di episodi di indisciplina studentesca, anche grave. L’Historia offre poche informazioni sulla costituzione della biblioteca e Claudio Ferlan offre nello studio introduttivo un aggiornamento sui lavori svolti e in corso per identificarne i volumi a partire dai fondi gesuitici della Biblioteca Statale Isontina e della biblioteca del Seminario Teologico Arcivescovile di Gorizia. L’introduzione riserva ampio e articolato spazio ai ministeri svolti dai gesuiti a Gorizia e nel territorio. Ripetutamente attestata fin dai primi anni è la cura spirituale dei soldati, tra i qualisi ottenne anche qualche conversione, e costante fu l’impegno nella predicazione e nell’istruzione catechistica rivolta sia ai bambini sia agli adulti. Ciò richiese, come detto, la presenza di gesuiti che conoscessero le lingue del territorio. Si garantì, ad esempio, l’omelia domenicale in sloveno. Fu favorito il culto dei santi della Compagnia e il ricorso alla loro intercessione, in particolare di san Francesco Saverio, spesso definito come il “nostro taumaturgo”. Dal 1687 san Francesco Saverio fu venerato come patrono della contea, per iniziativa del capitano di Gorizia e dei nobili. La devozione al santo missionario si intensificò durante la peste del 1682-83, quando i gesuiti si prodigarono nell’assistenza materiale e spirituale degli abitanti. Durante l’intera permanenza a Gorizia nel collegio gesuitico vi fu attenzione ai poveri e agli ammalati, resa operativa in diverse forme. Notevole fu il coinvolgimento dei diversi ceti della popolazione attraverso le congregazioni mariane, dedicate agli studenti, ai nobili, ai cittadini, fino all’istituzione nel 1684 pure di una congregazione detta della Buona Morte aperta anche alle donne. Curate anche le processioni organizzate dai gesuiti, che diventavano segno visibile nella città della loro azione pastorale. Lo studio introduttivo si sofferma anche sulle missioni, richiamando l’esistenza di lettereindipetae provenienti da Gorizia o da gesuiti che avevano avuto rapporti con la città. Alcuni partirono per terre lontane, ma le missioni animate dal collegio goriziano furono soprattutto rivolte ad intra, verso le zone rurali friulane ed isontine. Se nell’Historia si accenna già a uscite nei paesi nei dintorni di Gorizia nel 1624, la prima missione formale è segnalata nel 1688. La pratica delle missioni rurali proseguì intensamente nei decenni successivi, raggiungendo anche territori del dominio veneto. Piuttosto tardi i gesuiti goriziani ebbero a disposizione una chiesa adeguata alla loro intensa attività pastorale. Costretti Book Reviews Book Reviews 287

per decenni nella piccola chiesa di San Giovanni Battista loro concessa all’atto dell’insediamento, nel 1654 iniziò la costruzione della chiesa di Sant’Ignazio, che fu però completata dopo molto decenni e consacrata soltanto nel 1764. Nel frattempo Gorizia era diventata sede arcivescovile dal 1751. Dopo un’iniziale questione giurisdizionale i rapporti tra i gesuiti e il primo arcivescovo di Gorizia furono buoni, tanto che quest’ultimo non volle essere lui a comunicare loro la soppressione della Compagnia. Allo studio introduttivo, che offre un’ampia lettura dell’Historia sostenuta da una vasta e puntuale bibliografia, segue l’edizione dei due volumi manoscritti, il primo a cura di Claudio Ferlan, il secondo di Marco Plesnicar. La trascrizione delle oltre quattrocento carte è corredata da note biografiche di tutti i personaggi nominati nella cronaca. Concludono l’opera monumentale l’elenco delle fonti e della bibliografia specifica per interpretare i due volumi manoscritti e due preziosissimi indici dei nomi di persona edi luogo, grazie ai quali si possono fare incontri inaspettati. Opportunamente nel saggio introduttivo Claudio Ferlan si interroga sulla natura della fonte e sull’estensione del suo apporto conoscitivo. Pensata per una circolazione interna a fini identitari, di consolidamento dei legami dentro l’ordine e di edificazione, l’Historia sarebbe portatrice di una “memoria scelta”. La fonte risulterebbe quindi utile, innanzitutto, per studiare l’“identità gesuitica austriaca” e quale sia stato l’apporto della Compagnia alla cultura del luogo nel quale ha operato. Numerose sono le considerazioni che fioriscono nella lettura di una fonte così ricca di informazioni. Riguardo alla fisionomia della Compagnia va sottolineata la possibilità offerta di ricostruire le dinamiche di una comunità: il reclutamento e i suoi problemi (resistenze familiari, selettività nell’accettazione, andamento numerico delle vocazioni nel tempo), la formazione tra le diverse case della provincia (noviziato al Sant’Anna di Vienna, spostamenti degli scolastici), la distinzione in gradi (coadiutore temporale, coadiutore spirituale, professo di tre voti e di quattro voti), la progressività nell’appartenenza (i voti semplici degli scolastici, il più intimo nesso con i tre voti, il quarto voto), la rinnovazione periodica dei voti, la molteplicità dei ministeri, la missione nelle Indie, la grande mobilità, la continua modifica della comunità locale, le dimissioni, addirittura la presenza contemporanea di gesuiti fratelli, non inconsueta nel Seicento. Per questi aspetti la cronaca può essere intrecciata ai dati forniti dai cataloghi annuali e triennali, ma ha la peculiarità di fornire una visione dinamica della 288 Book Reviews comunità in quanto riporta anche i movimenti al proprio interno nel corso dell’anno. Si apprende inoltre che il cambio del personale avveniva di consueto in autunno, prima dell’inizio delle scuole. Ne emerge inoltre la centralità del voto in tutto l’itinerario del gesuita e nella costruzione dell’ordine, snodo cardine tra la coscienza personale e l’istituzione, in totale superamento della critica che nella prima fase del Cinquecento aveva colpito questa pratica caratterizzata da una forte dimensione giuridica e dall’ottica dell’obbligazione, diventata poi la cifra teologico-morale e spirituale della chiesa post-tridentina. La storia della Compagnia dagli ultimi decenni del sec. XVI è anche una lunga storia di voti, da quelli emessi dai giovani aspiranti ai cosiddetti “ultimi voti”. Riguardo al reclutamento, l’Historia fa riflettere sulla capacità attrattiva della comunità gesuitica riguardo ai giovani delle scuole goriziane, che preferiscono spesso entrare in altri ordini religiosi piuttosto che nella Compagnia e non manca nel cronista qualche punta ironica sullo stile di vita altrui (p. 537). L’anno 1706 è eloquente in tal senso: su quattordici studenti che scelsero lo stato di vita religioso soltanto uno entrò nel noviziato della Compagnia e uno all’anno chiese di solito di diventare gesuita nella prima metà del Settecento. Sarebbe interessante studiare in chiave comparativa la questione delle vocazioni alla Compagnia, prospettiva di ricerca ancora non percorsa. La cronaca goriziana permette anche di cogliere il generale crollo delle scelte per la vita religiosa a partire da metà sec. XVIII a favore di un’opzione per lo stato ecclesiastico. Interessante anche notare che nel 1706, dopo aver ottenuto il permesso dei superiori, furono introdotti nel convitto wenderbergico gli esercizi cavallereschi, ad imitazione dei collegi italiani, si scrive negli annali. Evidentemente l’esempio dei seminaria nobilium della penisola aveva esercitato una certa influenza anche in questa terra dell’Austria inferiore. L’introduzione non manca di sottolineare la centralità della confessione nell’azione spirituale dei gesuiti goriziani. E a questo proposito, oltre quanto osservato da Claudio Ferlan, risulta evidente la ricorrenza nell’Historia dei termini legati alla quiete, alla pace e alla tranquillità dell’animo ritrovate attraverso la confessione. Come per l’intensa azione di riconciliazione tra nemici ben ricostruita nello studio introduttivo di Ferlan, l’intento dei gesuiti era di pacificazione, interiore ed esteriore. Si tratta di una fondamentale chiave di lettura dell’autocomprensione del loro operare. A tanto si aggiungeva la richiesta di intercessione ai santi della Compagnia per le guarigioni, perché la consolazione si estendesse anche al fisico. Book Reviews Book Reviews 289

La conversione degli animi appare lo scopo primario di tutta l’azione dei gesuiti goriziani e sotto questo profilo si rivela molto interessante la presenza di una sezione del resoconto annuale dedicata alla “conversatio”, come un ministero specifico accanto ai numerosi altri. La cronaca stessa ne descrive i tratti, caratterizzati dall’affabilità e dalla progressività nella relazione: “Pia conversatio crebro celebres depraedicat conversiones; et quos oratoria pulpita sacraque tribunalia ad cor non reducunt, certa praxi ediscimus religiosae conversationis cordiali alloquio eorum intima saepesaepius penetrari” (p. 530). La cordialità, dunque, fu uno strumento cardine per accedere all’interiorità e innestare processi di cambiamento. Come sottolinea il cronista, ricorrendo a due immagini classiche nella letteratura penitenziale e ascetica, non si fece ricorso solo alla potestà giudiziale del foro spirituale, che comunque è definito foro di clemenza, ma anche alla funzione del medico per la guarigione delle malattie dell’animo (p. 345). La Compagnia scelse la via della persuasione, come molta storiografia sottolinea, e la cronaca goriziana ne è un esempio molto eloquente. Ciò comportava l’uscita dalle chiese e dai pulpiti per entrare nelle strade cittadine e nei luoghi profani e cercare colloqui personali, scrive il cronista nel 1708 (p. 543). Oggetto della “conversatio” furono soprattutto le situazioni conflittuali, sulla cui composizione e sull'attenzione del documento in proposito si sofferma il saggio introduttivo di Ferlan. Anche sulla pratica degli esercizi spirituali gli annali goriziani forniscono indicazioni preziose, soprattutto per la continuità e l’estensione cronologica, e offrono elementi per arricchire la storia della loro diffusione e delle modalità di somministrazione, adattate ai differenti contesti, ancora da scrivere in modo organico. I gesuiti del collegio goriziano, infatti, secondo l’Historia, diedero gli esercizi, talvolta definiti “commentationes”, dapprima saltuariamente a qualche persona, poi in modo sistematico ai propri studenti più grandi, tre o quattro giorni nella Settimana Santa. La pratica degli esercizi si allargò e si intensificò nel Settecento: si sperimentarono gli esercizi di otto o più giorni, ma soprattutto si rispose alla richiesta del patriarca di Aquileia prima e all’arcivescovo di Gorizia poi di dare gli esercizi agli ordinandi, ma anche al clero. Grazie alle numerose e attente descrizioni della cronaca si individuano diverse pratiche di adattamento del testo ignaziano a varie tipologie di persone. Per la rilevanza assunta tra i ministeri dei gesuiti di Gorizia, nella parte settecentesca degli annali viene dedicato un paragrafo a parte agli esercizi, dati in diverse lingue. 290 Book Reviews

I gesuiti goriziani non mancarono di dare gli esercizi alle suore orsoline, il cui insediamento in città nel 1671 fu da loro sostenuto. Si tratta di un altro tassello della storia, ancora in parte da studiare, del rapporto tra le case della Compagnia e le comunità di orsoline, che trova nelle Historiae Domus e nella corrispondenza con il padre generale due fonti privilegiate. Data l’intensa attività di educazione svolta dalle orsoline a Gorizia, sia per le convittrici sia per le esterne, è probabile che i gesuiti ne abbiano favorito la presenza per estendere l’azione formativa a una parte della popolazione femminile della città. Presso le orsoline i gesuiti del collegio goriziano furono nel corso del Settecento, secondo la loro cronaca, confessori, padri spirituali e catechisti. Negli anni Venti del Settecento i gesuiti furono richiesti come direttori spirituali ordinari anche dalle clarisse di Gorizia, alle quali avevano dato gli esercizi. Molto si ricava dagli annali goriziani sul modello di pietà proposto dai gesuiti, ma qui si accenna soltanto al permanere fino ad inizi Settecento del tono ascetico-penitenziale, che trova nella pratica dell’autoflagellazione un’espressione estrema, ma ancora attestata nel terzo decennio del sec. XVIII. Gli ormai numerosi studi sul rapporto tra gesuiti e musica possono trovare nell’Historia goriziana alcune indicazioni, tra le quali la cura per il canto nelle funzioni liturgiche e devozionali, con la presenza di musicisti in alcune occasioni, l’acquisto di un nuovo organo per la chiesa nel 1634 e di un altro nuovo nel 1747, la presenza della musica nelle opere teatrali del collegio. Attenta agli episodi di vita, di cui è intrisa, la cronaca goriziana può essere pure una fonte importante per aprire o arricchire piste di ricerca relative alla cultura materiale di una città di antico regime nell’Austria interna. Numerosi gli spunti, come quando l’Historia cita con ammirazione i fiori fatti a mano dalle orsoline di Gorizia, opere di un raffinato e noto artigianato fonte di reddito per queste donne (p. 579), oppure si sofferma sull’abilità di un gesuita dispensiere che cerchiò di ferro le botti per il vino in tal modo che in seguito non spandevano più nemmeno una goccia, “memorabile opus” (pp. 180-81), o sulla cattura degli scritti delle prediche in italiano da parte dei veneti nell’Adriatico, non disposti a restituirle con grave incomodo per il predicatore, che dovette prepararle nuovamente (p. 110), o sulla costruzione di case in mattoni per i lavoratori di una commenda voluta dal rettore del collegio a sostituzione delle miserrime abitazioni, causa di malattia e di impossibilità al lavoro (p. 145), soltanto per citare alcuni degli Book Reviews Book Reviews 291

innumerevoli esempi possibili. Numerosi poi i riferimenti alle malattie e alle epidemie, come di consueto nelle cronache enei profili agiografici dell’epoca. La cronaca goriziana ha una sua storia interna: il susseguirsi di diversi redattori è rinvenibile nelle differenze stilistiche (e sarebbe interessante studiarne il latino) e nell’organizzazione dei contenuti. In particolare, la cronaca goriziana dopo i primi decenni viene articolata in modo più sistematico e da fine Seicento il resoconto annuale è suddiviso in paragrafi titolati. Da fine secolo XVII vengono aggiunti estesi elogia dei gesuiti, anche se nemmeno prima erano mancati in forma ridotta. La fisionomia degli annali goriziani racconta la storia di un assestamento di una comunità, di un allargamento degli spazi occupati nell’azione pastorale, di un’intensificazione dei rapporti con la città e con le autorità ecclesiastiche. Si tratta della prospettiva dei gesuiti, ma data la loro pervasiva e crescente presenza nella realtà goriziana, non è certo secondario cogliere il loro punto di vista, i loro obiettivi, il loro modo di essere, i loro metodi. La pubblicazione di una fonte come l’Historia Collegii Goritiensis ha una rilevanza notevole sotto il profilo storiografico, sia perché non esistono imprese comparabili, sia per l’estensione cronologica degli annali goriziani. Lo studio del consolidamento e del radicamento della Compagnia nelle realtà locali nel corso del Seicento e del Settecento permette di individuare in che modo si declinò concretamente l’identità gesuitica dopo il primo secolo. A questo fine è prezioso l’esame delle cronache prodotte nelle singole case, oltre che delle storie stese da alcuni gesuiti in gran parte ancora manoscritte (apprezzabile l’edizione dell’Istoria del Collegio di Mantova di Giuseppe Gorzoni curata da Antonella Bilotto, Angelo Piccini e Flavio Rurale). I gesuiti non furono gli unici attori nella chiesa post-tridentina né lo furono a Gorizia, città nella quale operavano, ad esempio, anche i cappuccini. Ma certamente non furono attori secondari. Pregio notevole, e non secondario, dell’edizione dell’Historia Collegii Goritiensis è la sua disponibilità in formato digitale. Lo studio del testo ne trae grande vantaggio e la ricerca trova fruttuosamente nuovi spunti, come quando incontra un termine inconsueto quale “exomologesis” (anche “exhomologesis”, “omologesis”) e mediante le ricorrenze ne individua il senso in quella manifestazione dei peccati, in particolare generale di tutta la vita, che richiedeva la capacità di rileggere la propria esistenza secondo classificazioni da apprendere. 292 Book Reviews

L’edizione dell’Historia Collegii Goritiensis ha una rilevanza che va oltre la ricostruzione delle vicende gesuitiche nell’area goriziana e nell’Austria interiore e può diventare una fonte di riferimento fondamentale per gli studi relativi ai collegi europei della Compagnia di Gesù.

Università di Pavia Miriam Turrini

Jacek Iwaszko, ed, Motecta scripta in Collegio. Braunsbergensis Societatis Jesu (Utl.vok.mus.tr. 394–399). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2018. 160 pp. zł 35,00. ISBN 978-83-65886-48-4

Bogna Bohdanowicz, Tomasz Jeż, eds, Universalia et particularia. Ars et praxis Societatis Jesu in Polonia. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2018. 478 pp. zł 35,00. ISBN 978-83-65886-56-9

The following Short Notice presents two recent publications from the project, The Music Repertoire of the Society of Jesus in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1565–1773).

For nearly five years, an international team of researchers, mainly musicologists, has been carrying out a project entitled The Music Repertoire of the Society of Jesus in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1565–1773), financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The project is led by Tomasz Jeż from the University of Warsaw, a musicologist specializing in the field of early modern music culture in the period of the Protestant and Catholic Reformation (see, for example, his book The Musical Culture of the Jesuits in Silesia and the Kłodzko County (1581–1776), Berlin et al.: Peter Lang, 2019). The results of the research on Polish-Lithuanian Jesuit music culture are being published within the series, Fontes Musicae in Polonia, divided into three sub-series: A – Catalogi, B – Facsimilia et studia, C – Editiones (the first one is co-edited by the author of this short notice). It is fully accessible online at http://fontesmusicae.pl/. The aim of series C of the project—music editions—is to present the repertoire performed in Jesuit churches and schools, and/or written by composers connected to those centres. The scale of local music production—in terms of both composing and performing—was enormous, as we may esteem from the narrative and documentary sources. The music manuscripts and prints are however much less Book Reviews Book Reviews 293

available for us, due to the complicated history of those lands. If the material—intended for practical use and thus exchanged when outdated—survived the stylistic changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up to the suppression of the order, it was often dispersed afterwards. If it survived the nineteenth century as a part of a public or private library, in the twentieth century it was likely to be transferred to another place, or to share the fate of many books burnt or destroyed during warfare. That is why the musicologists’ attempts to reconstruct the Jesuit music culture in early modern Central Europe may seem quite similar to archaeological reconstructions of ancient cities made up from just a few fragments of buildings, or to works on frescoes only part of which is preserved. Moreover, in the case of music sources the corresponding elements can be found quite at a distance one from another, even if originating from the same time and place. Despite these challenges, and through painstaking effort, the overall image of the vivid culture and some of its artefacts— fortunately preserved—can make their path to the wider public. Music pieces written by forgotten composers and not performed for ages may be heard again in concerts and become part of a scholarly re-searchable cultural heritage. Motecta scripta in Collegio Braunsbergensis Societatis Iesu, edited by musicologist and singer Jacek Iwaszko, is the sixth publication within series C, dedicated to editions of music scores. It contains critical editions of nineteen pieces by different composers, copied into one manuscript in the Jesuit collegium in Braunsberg/Braniewo. The collegium itself was the first Jesuit house in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, founded in 1564. This was followed by the foundation of other Jesuit pastoral and educational institutions in the vicinity. At the turn of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the collegium was already a centre of culture, renowned in the region. Its huge library, however, including numerous music prints and manuscripts, was devastated by the Swedish troops in the 1620s, and the collections were transferred to Uppsala—where many of them are preserved up to our times. Iwaszko’s edition of nineteen music pieces is based on the handwritten appendix to a collection of four music prints by Teodoro Riccio bound together (including his masses, Magnificats and motets), held in the Uppsala University Library under the shelfmarks Utl.vok.mus.tr 394–399. The collection includes six partbooks (Discantus, Altus, Tenor, Bassus, Quinta Vox, Sexta Vox). In the appendix—and thus in the edition—one can find sacred vocal pieces set for four to eight voices, with Latin texts, mainly from the Liturgy of the Hours (an invitatorium, a hymn, two 294 Book Reviews responsories, two versicula, five antiphons) as well as Mass settings (two ordinarium cycles, two introits and graduals) and four motets of uncertain liturgical intention. The majority of the compositions remains anonymous. Only two of them are attributed in the manuscript to certain composers, both connected to the Braniewo collegium. Jan Brant (1554–1602), a Polish Jesuit from Poznań, active also in Vilnius, Pułtusk and Rome, attended school in Braniewo and entered the Society’s novitiate there. He was among the first Jesuit composers whose names are known. The edition contains his Christmas invitatory, Christus natus est nobis; it was composed for five vocal parts and instrumental basso seguente (Bassus [pro] Organis), the unique vocal- instrumental composition in the source, however is only partially preserved (Discantus part is missing). The second attributed piece is a gradual Tribulationes cordis mei by the Italian composer, Giovanni Battista Cocciola (fl. 16/17); it was written for five voices and is also incomplete (without Discantus part). At the time of entering this piece to the manuscript (1606, unique date in the handwritten part of the source), Cocciola was active as a musician at the court of Szymon Rudnicki, who was bishop of Warmia and patron of the Braniewo college. Three other pieces, anonymously preserved, have been identified as works by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Haec dies – antiphon ad Resurrectione for 6 voices), Jachet de Mantua (Missa Surge Petre for 6 voices) and Hans Leo Hassler (Verbum caro factum est – Christmas responsory for 6 voices). Even if the two latter are incomplete as well (missing fragments in the Discantus part), they have been reconstructed on the basis of the printed versions; the edition contains the entire material. The incompleteness of six compositions that are transmitted uniquely in this source (four anonymous pieces, together with two abovementioned pieces by Brant and Cocciola) may prompt a discussion on the validity of editing them. If we take into consideration only the performance purpose, the material is certainly not sufficient as it is presented. Compositions with one incomplete or missing part may provide a basis for further ‘reconstruction’, but when the highest voice is missing and, furthermore, when the author is unknown, the ‘reconstructed’ piece may differ quite a lot from the original. Not to mention the extreme case of anonymous Cantemus Domino for six voices, from which only the Sexta Vox is preserved, partially with illegible text not to be found elsewhere. Yet even if the six incomplete pieces cannot be performed as they Book Reviews Book Reviews 295

are transmitted and published in our times, the idea of presenting the whole content of the source seems convincing for various reasons. First, the rest of the compositions—a great majority—is preserved completely or reconstructed after music prints; all of them are ready to be performed. Second, all the music material provided in the edited manuscript, be it completely preserved or not, is a trace of widely understood music culture and may be used for further research. Most of the content of this source is stylistically coherent, being the example of high Renaissance vocal polyphony with broad use of the imitation technique. As Iwaszko points out in the introduction, even if the compositions are quite simple—intended to be performed by pupils of the boarding school in Braniewo—this is not indicative of mediocre artistic qualities. On the other hand, editing only the complete pieces would prevent the possibility of exploring Brant’s and Cocciola’s unique compositions and observing the changes of style visible in the accidentally present Sexta Vox of the latest Cantemus Domino. Last but not least — the blank staves of missing parts in the transcriptions are probably the clearest way to tell the story about losses, explorations and reconstructions in the field of cultural heritage. And the understanding of what is lost—and what is still to be found—from the overall music production and culture of the period also may be regarded as part of being ‘historically informed’, a tendency that fortunately is occurring increasingly frequently among the performers of this kind of repertoire. The online edition of this study, helpfully contains the complete edition, with transcriptions of music, editorial notes, and introduction in both Polish and English. It also contains references to digital versions of the main source and related prints. These features enable wide reception of the material for performance and research purposes. Universalia et particularia. Ars et praxis Societatis Jesu in Polonia is a volume published within the other series of the project (B – Facsimilia et studia), containing fourteen papers presented at the conference held in Warsaw in September 2017, “Universalism and Particularism in Jesuit Artistic Culture: Contexts – Traditions – Sources”. Participants included, not only musicologists, but also researchers from other disciplines within the humanities, such as historians, historians of art, literature and theatre. As the editors of the volume, Bogna Bohdanowicz and Tomasz Jeż, point out in the brief introduction, the main idea was to: “search for the keys to interpret Jesuit music culture as cultivated in the Polish-Lithuanian Book Reviews

Commonwealth”. It set out to collate different fields and branches of cultural studies: “music was one of the many languages of one and the same culture, speaking through many disciplines of art, but serving one overriding goal and bound by the same rhetorical principles”. This volume is an effective illustration of two main keywords, ‘universalism’ and ‘particularism’, which refer to the dynamic and, on occasion, tension between two different approaches present in Jesuit culture: homogenisation (of globally recognizable administration, methods, educational and cultural patterns etc.,) vs. cultural accommodation (with special attention to the local element). Most of the articles include both of these elements, through a specific case study (of a place, source, person etc.) presented with regard to wider geographical or ideological contexts. Alina Nowicka- Jeżowa discusses Piotr Skarga SJ’s critical approach to the ideas of Renaissance humanism, between contradiction and necessary acculturation. Barbara Przybyszewska-Jarmińska shows how the ‘Swedish mission’ of three priest-singers sent from the Collegium Germanicum to the court in Stockholm influenced the cultural patronage of the Polish king Sigismund III Vasa (born and raised in Sweden). Dariusz Galewski observes the cultural patterns—both in architectural forms and their symbolic meaning—in the organ façades of the Jesuit Churches in Silesia. Marcin Szelest analyses the repertoire of the Braunsberg/Oliva organ tablatures, huge repertories of music performed in the Jesuit milieux at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Two articles concern composers: Irina Gerasimova discusses the possible ‘Western’ influences on the music by Nikolay Diletsky, alumnus of the Vilnius Jesuit academy in late seventeenth century, while Maciej Jochymczyk adds some new discoveries to the biography of Jacek (Hyacinthus) Szczurowski SJ, whom he describes as “the best known and most prolific of the Jesuit composers active in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth”. Andrea Mariani introduces the inventories of Jesuit collegia (issued after the suppression of the order) as a source of information concerning music culture. Serhij Sieriakow discusses the historiographical representations of the Jesuit boarding schools in Polish publications from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several articles present a more general perspective of certain issues linked to the overall theme: Lars Berglund focuses on the music culture of Jesuit circles in Rome and its impact on the missionary strategies (especially its reception in the regions north of the Alps); Book Reviews Book Reviews 297

Andrzej Józef Baranowski writes about theatrical elements in the architecture of the Jesuit churches’ interiors, while Jan Okoń, Jurate Trilupaitiene and Jerzy Kochanowicz present different aspects of music, dance and theatre employed for educational purposes in the programmes of Jesuit boarding schools. A reflexion on the Jesuit tendency to combine the global and local perspectives and to look always for what is beyond, is present also in the emblematic illustration on the cover, taken from Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu: an angel with bow and arrow is standing between two hemispheric maps of the globe, with the motto Unus non sufficit orbis.

University of Warsaw Katarzyna Spurgjasz