Book Reviews

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 it could 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 to be 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.

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