Aside from what these works report explicitly and convey implicitly about the emotional experience of subjects of the suppression-from outrage, melancholy, and despair to nostalgia, pride, and hope-the very fact of their being written in Latin demands to be considered from the perspective of the history of emotions. In addition to letters, diaries, and histories, we find long Latin scientific poems, demonstrating Enlightenment values highly affective devotional pieces mournful elegies satires and nostalgic epics, celebrating a heroic past of missionaries and martyrs. Not only could Latin be the vehicle for articulating sincere and complex emotions, belying the frequent association of “epilinguistic” idioms with cerebrality, impersonality, and stereotypicality, but, I venture, precisely by exploiting the genres and tropes of ancient literature, eighteenth-century Jesuit writers found the tools to express and manage their “modern” emotions with as much authenticity as, and perhaps even more precision and subtlety than, when they wrote in the vernacular. 6 Yet neo-Latin writings are rich sources for historians of emotion, and Jesuit neo-Latin writings for historians of the emotions of the suppression. Scarcely the tip of the mountain of Jesuit Latin writing that survives from this period has been explored, which is perhaps symptomatic of a lingering prejudice against later neo-Latin writing tout court.
#Diego modena love letters series#
5 Via a series of case studies of Jesuit writers anticipating or living through the long era of the suppression, mainly in Italy, but also in Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe, we aim to build up a much more comprehensive picture than hitherto available of their literary works and networks, and of the emotional freight these conveyed in different times and places.
4 In the larger team project of which this paper represents a tentative first step, we hope to consider the twilight of the Old Society of Jesus through a unique and highly revealing prism: that of the Jesuits’ literary production, especially in Latin, over the period leading up to, during, and immediately after the suppression. While there has been an efflorescence of historical studies of the suppression in recent years, especially from national and/or colonial perspectives, 3there has been relatively little work devoted systematically and synoptically to the emotional impact on Jesuits living through these turbulent times, and to how they managed, individually and collectively, their changing religious identities, scholarly careers, and mental health. More sympathetic engravings show groups of humiliated, distraught, sometimes frail and elderly, priests, assembling at ports before embarking for exile. 1 In French pamphlets of the period, Jesuits were portrayed as conspirators and regicides (later, ironically, counter-revolutionaries), profiteering hypocrites, devil-worshippers and corrupters of youth, who get their comeuppance falling off towers, passing through sieves of true piety, and tumbling to hell to be welcomed by demons. Jesuits had been the target of satire and opprobrium from their inception, of course, and not exclusively in Protestant countries, but the avalanche of anti- Jesuitica that gathered momentum over the second half of the eighteenth century was unprecedented. Along with the order, the Latin humanist education that had prevailed in Europe since the Renaissance took a serious body blow in the final decades of the eighteenth century. For the two centuries leading up to the suppression, the Society of Jesus had contributed conspicuously to European science, art, music, literature, and theatre. During waves of expulsion from Portugal, France, Spain, and their overseas territories, from 1759 through to the suppression of the Old Society by Pope Clement xiv in 1773, Jesuits were exposed to intensifying ridicule of their religious positions, their way of proceeding at home and abroad, and even of their enviable educational system.