Publication Protocol in the Seventeenth ... Century Jesuit Province of Aragon Patricia W. Manning

In 1623, Philip IV of Spain and his favored advisor, Gaspar de Guzman, the Count-Duke of Olivares, informed Muzio Vitelleschi, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, that the Spanish crown planned to found a royal college at the Jesuit Colegio Imperial in Madrid (Elliott, Count 188). This establishment more firmly allied the Jesuits, long the confessors and educators of the Spanish nobility, with the peninsula's rul• ing class. Because of this association with absolutist politics, the Society of Jesus has been considered the strict, conservative vanguard of the Counter-Reformation, part of what Jose Antonio Maravall has labeled a "cultura dirigida (guided culture)" at the service of the absolutist monarch.! Laudatory comments by Jesuits, such as Juan de Mariana's praise for the foundation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition by the Spanish monarchs (Juan de Mariana cited in Elliott, Imperial 218), rein• force the Society's support of the monarchy's control structures. At the same time, the Society of Jesus perpetuated its own norms to regulate the conduct of its members. The governing documents of the Society of Jesus compiled and published in the vast Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu testify to a highly regulated existence governed by the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and as necessary by the Decrees of the General Congregation.2 In addition to these rules, Rivka Feldhay argues that the Ratio studiorum, the plan of studies followed in Jesuit schools, constituted an implicit control mechanism since its division of knowl• edge into rigid categories "could not but shape the minds of students to think in some directions and not in others" (116). In authorizing publi• cations by Jesuits, so detailed were Jesuit censorship procedures that Pedro de Ribadeneira's lives of Generals Lafnez and Borja was delayed because of the exigencies of the Society's reviewers (O'Malley, "Historiography" 7).3 Ribadeneira was not the only Jesuit subjected to such regulation. As Miguel Batllori explains, the Society of Jesus's publication protocol

EIRe 33.1 (Summer 2007): 133-160 134 required that all elements of works written by Jesuits, even dedications, undergo an internal review process prior to their publication (Gracian 92). The text in question would be given to two reviewers; this process could take place either at the provincial level or in Rome (Gracian 92). Regardless of where the initial censorship occurred, the censors' com• ments were sent to the General, who decided whether to grant his approval and allow a book to be printed (Gracian 92). This structure for approving publications and the underlying concern about the manner in which the Order presented itself to the world was no doubt motivated by long-standing suspicions surrounding the reli• gious orthodoxy of the Society of Jesus. During the 1520s, while founder Ignatius of Loyola studied in Spain, he was examined by the Spanish Inquisition on several occasions (O'Malley, First 27-28). Although his opinions were deemed orthodox, this was not the Jesuits' last encounter with the Inquisition. The Spiritual Exercises were scrutinized on several occasions.4 Inquisitorial interest in the Order continued in Rome (O'Malley, First 311). In the mid sixteenth century, Francisco de Borja, a future Jesuit Superior General, was drawn into the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions' prosecution of the Bartolome Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo. Additionally, works attributed to Borja were banned by the Spanish Inquisition's 1559 Index of Prohibited Books (O'Malley, First 317-19). After these early tensions subsided, the Jesuits' theological polemics with other Catholic religious orders (particularly the Dominicans) creat• ed new conflicts. As Virgilio Pinto Crespo signals, the de auxiliis contro• versy (226), a dispute concerning the role of grace, became a divisive issue between the Jesuits and the Dominicans at the close of the six• teenth century. The two Orders also disagreed over confessional practices and the Immaculate Conception. These debates likely led the Society of Jesus to scrutinize works by its members. Since the Spanish Inquisition requested that readers denounce any suspicious material that they found in books to the Inquisition, this practice no doubt also influenced the Jesuits' desire to supervise the printed output of its members. Faced with any control apparatus, whether in the form of the Jesuit hierarchy's ability to enforce regulations or the Spanish monarch's capac• ity to regulate the peninsula's cultural production, the degree to which an individual could negotiate a given stricture and therefore deviate from an authority's goals remains a topic of critical debate.s For example, as George Mariscal argues in the case of seventeenth-century Spanish authors: "subjectivity may be socially constructed, but this is not to say that individuals are incapable of resisting or investing in any given set of