Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit ScienceAuthor(s): Steven J. HarrisReviewed work(s):Source: Early Science and Medicine, Vol. 1, No. 3, Jesuits and the Knowledge of Nature (Oct.,1996), pp. 287-318Published by: BRILLStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4130251 .Accessed: 30/03/2012 13:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

BRILL is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Early Science and Medicine.

http://www.jstor.org

CONFESSION-BUILDING, LONG-DISTANCE NETWORKS, AND THE ORGANIZATION OFJESUIT SCIENCE

STEVEN J. HARRIS Brandeis University

The Paradox of esuit Science

Jesuit engagement with the recovery, analysis, and dissemination of both received and contemporary learning relating to the expla- nation of natural phenomena, as well as with the description, ex- amination, and manipulation of nature itself-what we might gen- erally, but all too crudely, call "Jesuit science"-has attracted an in-

creasing amount of scholarly attention in recent years. While the work of recovering Jesuit contributions to the fields astronomy,1 optics,2 'physico-mathematics',3 experimental philosophy,4 geogra- phy,5 natural history,6 and neo-Aristotelian scholastic philosophy7

I Edward Grant, "In Defense of the Earth's Centrality and Immobility: Scholas- tic Reaction to Copernicanism in the 17th Century," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 4 (1984): 1-69 and his more-recent Planets, Stars, & Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687 (Cambridge, 1994). See also James Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chi- cago, 1994).

2 See Karl Meyer, Optische Lehre und Forschung im frifhen 17.Jahrhundert, dargestellt vornehmlich an den Arbeiten desJoachimJ ungius (Hamburg, 1974), A.I. Sabra, Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton (Cambridge, 1981), and Catherine Chevalley, "L'op- tique des Jesuites et celle des mrdecins: A propos de deux ouvrages rbcents," Revue d histoire des sciences, 40 (1987), 377-382.

3 See Albert Krayer, Mathematik im Studienplan derJesuiten (Stuttgart, 1991), Ugo Baldini, Legem impone subactis: Studi su filosofia e scienza dei Gesuiti in Italia, 1540- 1632 (Rome, 1992), and Peter Dear, Discipline &Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1995).

4 See John L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study in Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1979).

5 See FranCois de Dainville, S.J., "Enseignement des 'GCographes' et des 'G0o- metres'," in Enseignement et Diffusion des Sciences en France au XVIII Siicle, ed. Rene Taton (Paris, 1964) and Cornelius Wessels, S.J., Early Jesuit Travelers in Central Asia 1603-1721 (The Hague, 1991).

6 For a discussion of Kircher's work in collecting and publishing see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994) and for a general overview of Jesuit natural history see William Ashworth, "Catholicism and Early Modern Science," in God & Nature: His- torical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, eds. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, (Berkeley, 1985), 136-166.

7 See Charles Lohr, S.J., "Jesuit Aristotelianism and Sixteenth-Century Meta- physics," Paradosis 32 (1976), 203-220, William A. Wallace, O.P., Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo's Science (Princeton, 1984), as well as the articles by Hellyer and Leijenhorst.

? E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1996 ESM 1,3

288 STEVEN J. HARRIS

has added considerably to our understanding ofJesuit science, the net effect of these studies has been to highlight a central paradox: why Jesuits? That is, why was it that a religious corporation, con-

sisting largely of university-trained theologians and ordained

priests formally committed to the "care of souls", was able to pro- duce a corpus of some 5,000 published titles touching on virtually every branch of the natural and mathematical sciences and a corps of priest-mathematicians, priest-astronomers, priest-philosophers, and priest-naturalists continuously active for nearly two hundred

years?8 What did science have to do with salvation;9 or with faith, doctrine, prayer, holy offices, the sacraments, or any of the many other spiritual matters with which members of religious orders were traditionally occupied?

The Jesuit authors responsible for the production of the Or- der's scientific corpus were, after all, members not of a scientific

society but a society of clerks regular.1' Ignatius had conceived of his followers as latter-day apostles whose supreme task was to go into the world to work for the salvation of the souls of others and

thereby to spread and strengthen the Catholic faith wherever it was found to be weak, unknown, or under attack. While this apos- tolic, or Ignatian, spirituality carried the early Jesuits into a number of worldly ministries, it is not at all obvious how the good sons of Ignatius could, within a hundred years of his death, emerge as the leading-or among the leading-philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, and naturalists of their day. The

paradox then is why a religious order so often associated with the conservative agenda of the Catholic Counter-Reformation-and

directly implicated in the condemnation of heliocentricism and the recantation of Galileo-could at the same time be so success- ful in nurturing and sustaining a tradition of scientific scholarship within its own ranks.

8 A quantitative analysis of the Jesuit scientific corpus may be found in Steven J. Harris, "Jesuit Ideology and Jesuit Science: Religious Values and Scientific Activ- ity in the Society of Jesus, 1540-1773." Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madi- son, 1988.

9 Rivka Feldhay has examined this question in her article, "Knowledge and Sal- vation in Jesuit Culture," Science in Context 1 (1987), 195-213 and book Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cambridge, 1995).

10 The Society of Jesus was neither monastic, like Benedictines and Carmelites, nor mendicant, like the Dominicans and Franciscans, but part of a group of "re- formed orders of clerks regular" founded in the sixteenth century as part of the Catholic Reformation. The Somascans, Theatines, and Barnabites were, along with the Jesuits, the most important of the reform orders.

JESUIT SCIENCE 289

Confession-building and Learned Ministries

I would like to suggest that this combination of religious activ- ism and scientific activity is not so much a paradox as a puzzle. That is, the juxtaposition of "Jesuit" and "science" is neither inex-

plicable nor self-contradictory; rather, it presents us with the chal-

lenge of trying to discern underlying patterns of coherence in the

hope of finding how the pieces fit together. I believe a coherent

picture does begin to emerge when we place Jesuits' scientific ac- tivities-and especially their work as authors-within the organiza- tional context of the Society's long-distance networks and within the religious context of the Society's program to extend and con- solidate the Catholic confession. As the most effective-or at least the most disproportionately effective-religious order emerging from the Catholic Reformation, the Society pursued a multi-

pronged program of confession-building. Motivated by the same

overarching commitment to spread the "monarchy of the Church" around the globe, the Society also mastered the difficult organiza- tional and administrative tasks required to operate what John Law and Bruno Latour have called long-distance networks. Through a

push-pull process involving the needs and aspirations of both the

Society and society, Ignatius and his advisors made two decisive

moves; one into education (specifically, the education of "externs" who were not members of the Society) and the other into the over- seas missions. Both ministries demanded sophisticated administra- tive apparatus that entailed intelligence gathering, competent ex- ecution of directives, and the recruitment of both human and non-human resources. The combination of overseas experience and direct access to members of the educated elites (i.e., students,

parents, and patrons) presented Jesuits with a number of opportu- nities for novel forms of confession-building, including what may be called "ministries among the learned". I would like to argue that Jesuit long-distance networks provided the infrastructure, and the learned ministries the initial justification for the Society's entry into so many branches of early modern science, an entry marked

by the emergence of specific literary forms, or genres, of scientific

publication. Or to state the matter rather simply, the means of

Jesuit science are to be found in the operation of networks and its

ends in confession-building among the learned. Any thesis that seeks to construe scientific work as an organic ex-

pression of the religious work of clerics is of course very much at

290 STEVEN J. HARRIS

odds with the traditional view, usually referred to as the conflict thesis, which sees a deep and seemingly inevitable antagonism be- tween the ways of science and the ways of religion.11 The fact that a robust scientific tradition emerged from within a Catholic reli- gious order long noted for its counter-reforming zeal may be taken as a partial indication of the inadequacy of this view as a totalizing framework. A more-recent and in many respects more- satisfying historiographic orientation can, however, be found in the work of several continental (mostly German) historians whose work falls broadly under the umbrella label of "confessionalization thesis". The point of departure for most confessional historians is the emphasis, not on the self-evident conflicts between Protestant and Catholic but on the shared strategies and methods the major churches used to accomplish broadly similar goals; namely, "to christianize the masses and spiritualize everyday life."12

The work by Zeeden and his students on the processes of Konfessionsbildung focused initially on the common use of visita- tions in order to maintain confessional unity,13 while more-recent contributions from Schilling and Reinhard have identified a broad range of shared structures and strategies.14 The most important of

" While the polemical tone of the conflict thesis, as originally developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century in John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the War- fare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), has certainly abated, the theme of "inevitable conflict" still informs scholarly interpretation. See, for example, Richard S. Westfall, Essays on the Trial of Galileo (Rome, 1989), 1-57 and Pietro Redondi's Galileo Heretic (Princeton, 1987).

12 The historiography on confessionalization owes its basic orientation to a "hypothesis" proposed some twenty-five years ago by the Catholic historian, Jean Delumeau. After arguing that medieval Europe was Christian in legend only and that the vast majority of people (i.e., the illiterate, rural, and poor) had little under- standing of Christian doctrine and ritual, Delumeau offered the following hypoth- esis as guide to future research, "on the eve of the Reformation, the average West- erner was but superficially christianized. In this context the two Reformations, Luther's and Rome's, were two processes, which apparently completed but in ac- tual fact converged, by which the masses were christianized and religion spiri- tualized." Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter Reformation (London, 1977), 161.

13 Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Enstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung (Munich, 1965), Konfessionsbildung (Stuttgart, 1985), and es- pecially Zeeden and H. Molitor, eds., Die Visitation im Dienst der kirchlichen Reform (Mfinster, 1977).

14 For a fuller treatment of the theoretical framework of the confessionalization thesis, see Wolfgang Reinhard's two articles, "Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Pro- legomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters," Zeitschriftfiir Historische Forschung 10 (1983), 257-77 and "Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the

JESUIT SCIENCE 291

these include the development of a confessional hierarchy who, through a coherent system of doctrines, rituals, and social norms, seek to inculcate confessional values among the masses. Although the configuration of values varied from confession to confession, the methods employed by the major churches were similar and centered on the use of new-or newly deployed-institutions of propaganda (where oral, print, and artistic media were used to en- hance confessional messages in the form of sermons, catechisms, emblematic literature, religious plays, church architecture, etc.); institutions of moral policing (e.g., the organization and supervi- sion of confraternities, the hearing of public and private confes- sions, and church involvement in domestic affairs through mar- riage courts and domestic counseling, etc.); and, most especially, institutions of education (both higher and lower) where the val- ues, ideas, and doctrines of a given confession could be brought into focus with great effect on young minds. The Leitmotif running through the literature on confessionalization is that of social disci- plining; that is, the common concern connecting institutions of propaganda, moral policing, and education was to bring people from every estate into the social grid of well-defined and well-run confessions.

It would not be difficult to place most, if not all of the Society's worldly activity into the framework of Konfessionsbildung. Ignatius had fashioned a religious corporation that from the very outset was outwardly oriented and its chief ministries were intended to be "in the world." 15As itinerant preachers, confessors, theologians,

Early Modem State: A Reassessment," The Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989), 383-404. See also Heinz Schilling, "Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich: Religioser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620," Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988), 1-45.

15 "The end of this Society is to devote itself with God's grace not only to the salvation and perfection of the members' own soul, but also with that same grace to labor strenuously in giving aid toward the salvation and perfection of the souls of their fellowmen." So wrote Ignatius in the "General Examen" of the Society's Insti- tutes. In the "Formula" he elaborated further, "Whoever desires to serve as a sol- dier of God beneath the banner of the cross of our Society ... should ... keep the following in mind. He is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, by means of public preaching, lectures, and any other ministration whatsoever of the word of God, and further by means of the Spiritual Exercises, the education of children and unlettered persons in Christian- ity, and the spiritual consolation of Christ's faithful through hearing confessions and administering the other sacraments." The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. George E. Ganss, S.J (St. Louis, 1970), 77-78 and 66.

292 STEVEN J. HARRIS

educators, and authors of an enormous range of sacred literature, Jesuits engaged in a number of programs, or "ministries," de-

signed to extend and consolidate the Catholic confession. My con- cern here, however, is neither to review the entire gamut of Jesuit confession-building activities nor to trace the parallels between

Jesuits and other Catholic religious orders nor, for that matter, be- tween Catholic and Protestant activist groups.'6 Rather, I wish to

explore in some detail one part of the Jesuit confession-building program; namely, its ministries among the learned.

While the learned ministries were primarily concerned with

right-belief and right-conduct, they also attempted to influence

"right-thinking." The Society's up-scale strategy of proselytization (i.e., ministering to all but targeting elites for conversion and con- firmation) in combination with its decision to pursue an aposto- late in education, gave Jesuits the opportunity to establish them- selves not only as the educators of rising elites but also as Kultur-

triiger among the learned generally. By catering to their needs, atti- tudes, tastes, and intellectual interests, Jesuit scholars could ingra- tiate themselves with the culturally powerful and at the same time

engage in a certain measure of "cognitive disciplining." The most visible residue of this attempt to bring both young and established intellectuals into the conceptual grid of the Catholic world view is to be found in Jesuit publications.

For the sake of convenience, these learned ministries may be

grouped under three heads corresponding roughly to the three main target audiences of Jesuit literary endeavor. These are the studiosi, or the young externs from both lay and clerical estates (as well as Jesuit scholastics) attending the Society's colleges, universi- ties, and seminaries; the virtuosi, the mostly aristocratic connois- seurs and patrons of the arts and sciences who took special delight in collecting and displaying antiquities, natural curiosities, and rarities of all sorts;17 and the cognoscenti, a catch-all term compris- ing the citizenry of the Republic of Letters and especially the skilled readers and technically-competent authors who possessed some form of expertise or specialized knowledge. Despite the im-

16 These issues are touched upon in Steven J. Harris, "Transposing the Merton Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Scientific Tradi- tion," Science in Context 3 (1989), 29-65.

17 Still one of the best introductions to the cult of the virtuoso is Walter E. Houghton's "The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century,"Journalfor the His- tory of Ideas 3 (1942), 51-73; 190-219.

JESUIT SCIENCE 293

precise nature of these labels and the self-evident ways in which these populations overlapped and interpenetrated, they do none- theless help demarcate at least approximately both institutional loci (school, court, and "Republic") and their associated literary genres. For it would seem that most of the Society's scientific pub- lications fall into genres that were developed in the context of one or more of these three ministries. Thus we find Jesuits becoming master-writers in the collegiate genres of textbooks in mathematics and philosophy, commentaries on Aristotle, and ceremonial publi- cations (disputations, dissertations, and theses) in natural philoso- phy; in the gentlemanly genres of illustrated encyclopedias, travel accounts, and reportage of natural curiosities; and in scholarly treatises, in experimental and observational articles in learned

journals, and in technical tables and manuals for the emerging communities of trained specialists. While the collegiate genres were concerned primarily (though not exclusively) with the trans- mission of received, text-based knowledge, several of the genres as- sociated with the virtuosi and cognoscenti functioned as important channels for the dissemination of knowledge of the natural world

gained through the Society's overseas experience.

Law and Latour on Long-Distance Networks

If ministries among the studiosi, virtuosi, and cognoscenti offered

multiple lines of justification for Jesuits' study of nature, then it was the Society's mastery of long-distance networks that provided them with much of the means and mat6riel. While scholars have

long pointed to the Society's talent for organization as the "power and secret" behind its success,18 I believe the model of long-dis- tance networks as developed by John Law and Bruno Latour pro- vides both a more comprehensive and a more concise account of

Jesuit organizational practices. Let me now turn to a pr6cis of their work.

18 The theme of organization was present in the work of Heinrich B6hmer, Die

Jesuiten (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1907), well before Rena Fiillp-Miller's highly influential The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, trans. by F.S. Flint and D.F. Tait (New York, 1930). Max Weber addressed the question of Jesuit organization in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1930), chapter 4. For a

rejoinder to Weber, see Gustav Gundlach, S.J., "Zur Soziologie der katholischen Ideenwelt und desJesuitenordens." Ph.D. diss., Universitait zu Berlin, 1928.

294 STEVEN J. HARRIS

Taking the Portuguese spice trade of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as his exemplar, Law asks, how were the Portuguese able to gain long-distance control over a region previously dominated by resident Muslim traders? "Long-distance control," he argues, "depends upon the creation of a network of passive agents (both human and non-human) which makes it possible for emissaries (also both human and non-human) to circulate from the center to the periphery in a way that maintains their durability, forcefulness, and fidelity."19 In order for the Portuguese to gain long-range con- trol of the trade routes to the East Indies, they had to master three types of "emissaries": what Law calls "devices, drilled people, and documents." Devices are the technological aides required to de- velop and sustain repeated cycles of long-distance navigation and would embrace everything from sextants to lateen-rigged carracks and large-bore cannon. The list of drilled people would include everyone employed as trained and disciplined agents of the crown-from advisers to the king, financiers, astronomers, instru- ment- and chart-makers to captains, crews, shipwrights, and mer- chants-who willingly submit to a central authority and who be- lieve that their individual interests are best served by helping to achieve corporate ends; i.e., profitable trade runs to and from the Spice Islands.

By documents Law means all the work-on-paper that serves to record, direct, and coordinate activities demanded by those trade runs. Law uses two groups of documents (among the many re- quired) to illustrate his point, the regimento (or pilot's book) and rutter (or portolano). The former is a distillation of astronomical theory translated into a series of recipes or procedures whereby a captain with moderate training-and with regimento and sextant in hand-could solve the practical problems of open-sea navigation (e.g., measuring the elevation of the pole star or sun, setting a course along a rhumb line, estimating distances traveled, reckon- ing of time, etc.). The latter gives additional navigational informa- tion in graphical form and at the same time provides (like the cap- tain's log-book) a surface for the recording of new details of shoals, shorelines, soundings, winds, and currents. As individual documents, each regimento or rutter taken on board and consulted by a captain is essentially a portable compendium of practical

19 John Law, "On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India," Sociological Review Monographs 32 (1986), 234-63.

JESUIT SCIENCE 295

knowledge of immediate relevance to the navigational tasks at hand. Yet as part of stable genres, the usefulness of each class of documents grows with every cycle of voyages since manual-writers and cartographers back in Lisbon would routinely incorporate newly-received information from in-coming logbooks and sea- charts into revised versions of the out-going regimento and rutter. This reciprocating relationship between documents and trade runs meant that just as reliable genres helped make voyages more successful, successful voyages helped make the genres more reli- able. And it is precisely this functional role in the operation of a long-distance network that calls forth and stabilizes various catego- ries of documents.

Finally, Law emphasizes that in order for devices, drilled people, and documents to come together and enable a long-distance net- work to run its cycles, they must also possess "forcefulness, fidelity, and durability". Thus, in regard to devices, the forcefulness of carracks and cannon is preserved only if each remains in one piece during use. Equally necessary is the fidelity of human subjects to the Portuguese crown; that is, the conscientious execution of the duties required of them and the subordination of personal gain to corporate goals. And third, the durability of newly-acquired infor- mation is greatly enhanced if it is somehow written down on paper (e.g., in log-books, sea-charts, or in printed pilot's manuals) rather than committed only to memory.

The central question for Latour is essentially the same as for Law, namely "how to act at a distance on unfamiliar events, places, and people?" and his answer owes much to Law's work.20 Latour recasts Law's notions of the durability of devices and documents in terms of "immutable and combinable mobiles." Such mobiles con- sist chiefly of "inscriptions"-the reports, charts, and logs where reliable information about remote events, places, and people is re- corded-which are brought back to a center where they are "cu- mulated, aggregated, or shuffled like a pack of cards."21 Thus, as in Law's model, centralized administrations can strengthen their

position vis-4-vis remote peoples and events if they obtain regular

20 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 223. Latour's model of long-distance networks follows from his extended discussion of "short networks". Whether Latour's notion of short networks could also be applied to parts of the Society or to individual members, though promising, will not be addressed in this article.

21 Ibid., 223.

296 STEVEN J. HARRIS

and reliable intelligence from the field. Latour, however, empha- sizes more so than Law the iterative nature of this process and

gives it a name, "cycles of accumulation." With each cycle useful in- formation about the distant world is brought back to an adminis- trative center (what Latour calls a "center of calculation") where information from the periphery is gathered together, collated, dis-

tilled, reduced, and made available for the next round of emissar- ies. While this is all very much as in Law's model, Latour manages to sharpen the image by insisting that the knowledge cannot be re- duced solely to the stable inscriptions, the "immutable and com- binable mobiles," gathered at the center. Rather, knowledge is in-

separable from the means by which it is acquired.22

The Society of esus as a Long-Distance Corporation

If Law tends to emphasize the structural elements, and Latour the processes of long-distance networks, there are still many shared features of their models that find immediate resonance in the operation of the Society ofJesus. A centralized administration, the training and deployment of reliable agents acting under in-

struction, the cycles of administrative correspondence bearing di- rectives from Rome and intelligence from the Society's missionary fields all worked together to help the Jesuit leadership engage in "action at a distance." Especially in the early work of the Society's itinerant preachers venturing into Calvinist territory in southern France,23 its visitors seeking to re-invigorate missionaries in In-

dia,24 its confessors to Catholic princes in Germany and Austria,25 or its educators teaching the sons of nobles in Italy,26 we see Jesuit

22 Tbid., 219-222. Thus knowledge and power (as expressed in the operation of the network) are linked neither solely by a one-way flow of the former to the centers of power, nor by the latter dictating the contents of the former. Rather, knowledge-and-power reside in the network as embedded processes marked by re- peating cycles of cumulation and calculation.

23 A. Lynn Martin, TheJesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France (Ithaca, New York, 1988).

24 Josef Franz Schiitte, S.J., Valignano 's Mission Principles for Japan: Volume 1. From His Appointment as Visitor until His First Departure for Japan (1573-1582), trans. John J. Coyne, S.J. (St. Louis, 1980).

25 Robert Bireley, S.J. Religion and Politics in the Age of the Counterreformation: Emperor Ferdinand II, William Lamormaini,

S.J., and the Formation of Imperial Policy

(Chapel Hill, NC, 1981). 26 G.P. Brizzi, La formazione della classe dirigente nel Sei-Settecento: I seminaria nobi-

lium nell 7talia centro-settentrionale (Bologna, 1976).

JESUIT SCIENCE 297

generals and their assistants in Rome gradually learning how to

process information from Jesuits in the field and use it effectively to direct their further movements. Certainly by the end of the third quarter of the sixteenth century the elements necessary for the maintenance of long-distance networks had become perma- nent features of the Society's administrative apparatus.27

Before examining the details of the Jesuit long-distance net- works-and especially the Society's use of "documents and drilled

people"-I would like to suggest a few modifications to the model to bring it in line with the empirical evidence of the Society's ac- tual practices.28 First, Latour's notion of "centers of calculation," with its emphasis on numbers and measurements,29 seems more

appropriate for a twentieth-century census bureau or actuarial firm than for a religious order. Calculation of the sort Latour dis- cusses simply were not a prominent part of what the Society did. What the Jesuit administration in Rome did do remarkably well

(given the constraints on travel and communication in the age of

sail) was to gather and concentrate information obtained from its domestic and overseas stations. The more appropriate label would therefore seem to be "centers of concentration" rather than of cal- culation.

By the same token, Latour's cycles of accumulation might, in the context of the Society, be better thought of as "cycles of recruit- ment."30 What is crucial to the operation of a long-distance net- work is not the mere accumulation of knowledge (the center of a network is, after all, much more than a repository for data) but its

27 This schematic representation of the Society is of course meant to highlight those features which seem to match the central elements of long-distance networks. What it does not convey, however, are the difficulties, inefficiencies, and outright failures of the Jesuit system in practice. As the detailed studies cited in the previous few footnotes demonstrate, the struggles to establish the order and efficiency for which the old Society is famous were great. While the gap between actual practice and the schematic model presented here is large, the purpose is to bring into relief key organizational elements without denying the complexity of operations on the ground.

28 These modifications in turn suggest the need for a typology of long-distance networks with perhaps two major classifications, the "charismatic network" orches- trated by the forceful individual-e.g., of the sort Latour assigns to Louis Pasteur in his The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA, 1988)-and the "corporate net- work" developed here. Such a division need not preclude the possibility that the latter, under appropriate circumstances, could evolve from the former.

29 Latour, Science in Action, 232-56. 30 "Recruitment" is understood here to be the functional equivalent of Latour's

notion of "enrollment".

298 STEVEN J. HARRIS

incorporation into network processes. Moreover, the Society's most important resources, its young novices, were in fact recruits who, after being "tested in experience," were brought directly into the body of the Society. But, as in Latour's usage, these cycles can refer equally well to the recruitment of non-human-i.e., natural and technological-allies. And, to broaden the notion of recruit- ment somewhat further, recruits (both human and non-human) may be either "internal" and directly subject to the Society's proce- dures and control, or "external" and bound only loosely and infor-

mally to the Society. Thus successful novices and effective medi- cines like cinchona (once known as "Jesuit's bark") may both be considered internal recruits since the Society could largely control their performance and therefore count on them as reliable agents,31 while aristocratic patrons and Spanish galleons were weakly-controlled, external recruits whose reliability was always more a matter of "translation of interests" than of direct control. 32 Whether external or internal, human or non-human, the crucial point is that the effectiveness and growth in projective power of the Society depended fundamentally on the recruitment of re- sources, the deployment of reliable agents in designated fields of activity, and their on-going control by a central administrative au- thority.

With these modifications in place, we can now think in terms of the Society's chief center of concentration in Rome (with ancillary centers in Coimbra, Seville, and the provincial capitals), its cycles of recruitment involving both the incorporation of novices and natural objects, and its translation of patrons' interests all being subsumed under the broad goals of confession-building. The question remains, however, regarding the precise linkages among the general workings of the Jesuit long-distance network, the learned ministries, and the Society's engagement in the study of nature. The easiest way of seeing these interconnections is through Law's notion of functionally-embedded documents, for it was from the Society's internal administrative documents that the nature- bearing genres ofJesuit publications first arose.

31 Both the human and herbal recruits had explicit duties in the Society and were subject to strict regulation. Regarding the schedula Romana to which the latter was subjected, see Saul Jarcho, Quinine's Predecessor: Francesco Torti and the Early His- tory of Cinchona (Baltimore, 1993), 17-18.

32 On the notion of "translation", see Latour, Science in Action, 108-21.

JESUIT SCIENCE 299

A Taxonomy of esuit Administrative Documents

While historians have long recognized the importance of Jesuit correspondence, most of their attention has focused on the con- tent of those letters rather than on their generic classification and functional significance.33 Yet the few works that have addressed these problems give evidence of a surprisingly systematic-and symmetric-structure governing the Society's administrative docu- ments.34 In the terse prescriptive statements found in the Constitu- tions and other normative documents,35 in Ignatius's own letter-

writing habits,36 in the offices established to assist the general in the governance of the Society, and in its actual organizational practices, what we find is a near-perfect symmetry in two parallel administrative apparatus. One was intended to facilitate the good governance of the Society and the other to build and maintain the morale of its members. Each was supported by a specified set of administrative offices and each charged with handling specific cat-

egories of administrative correspondence. The most obvious aid to good governance (though by no means

the easiest to achieve) concerned the knowledge the governing have of the governed. To this ends the Constitutions enjoined the

Jesuit general to keep "himself frequently informed by the

provincials of what is occurring in all the provinces and by writing to the provincials."37 Well before the Constitutions were approved,

33 As B6hmer noted at the beginning of this century, "Already in the time of St. Ignatius communications by letter in the Order had an importance as in no State of contemporary Europe." Die Jesuiten, 43. It was from this enormous body of corre- spondence that the hundred or so published volumes of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu have been drawn.

34 The following description of Jesuit administrative correspondence is taken from John Correia-Afonso, S.J., Jesuit Letters and Indian History (Bombay, 1955), 1-44 and Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 6 vols. (Chicago, 1965), 1:314-331.

35 Ganss, Constitutions, 292-93, 324-25, 327. 36 It is perhaps worth noting that, although Ignatius had traveled extensively as

a soldier, student, and pilgrim, he never left Rome after becoming general of the Society. Yet it was during these later years that he wrote the vast majority of his ad- ministrative letters, which constitute the largest surviving correspondence from the sixteenth century.

37 Ibid., 324 & 326. The regular exchange of administrative correspondence was to extend up and down the ranks of the Society, for the Constitutions also required that "local superiors or rectors ought to write their provincial superior every week [and] the provincial should likewise write to the general every week if he is near. The general too will see to it that a letter is written to them ordinarily once a

300 STEVEN J. HARRIS

reports from the field took form as a stable genre of administrative

correspondence called hijuela. These in-coming reports, written

primarily by provincials, covered matters of personnel,38 the state of the province or house, and local events and developments of relevance to the Society; and they were to be sent to Rome at regu- lar intervals, factual in content, succinct in expression, sufficiently detailed to give the general and his advisers a picture of the situa- tion in question, and (most importantly) confidential.39 To assist the general in the review of in-coming hijuela the office of secre-

tary to the general was created, and the secretary's chief duties were to read through all the hijuela, digest and prioritize their con- tents, and summarize key points for the benefit of the general and his advisors.40 The secretary also helped the general with the com-

position of responses, which often took the form of the instructio, or instructions and directives. These out-going instructions carried the core administrative decisions of the Jesuit leadership and, like the hijuela, they were confidential, detailed, and iterative.41

The other major division of Jesuit correspondence had as its task the "union of hearts" through the systematic circulation of

"edifying reports." In addition to the self-evident need for regular- ized communication of administrative matters, Ignatius recog- nized from early on the importance of establishing procedures for

month, at least to the provincials; and the provincials in turn will take care that a letter is sent to the local superiors [and] rectors once a month." Ibid., 292.

38 In addition to regular reports of events in the field, each provincial was also to send to Rome every four months updated lists of personnel working under his direction, along with confidential "accounts of the qualities of these persons for in this way it will be possible to have better information about the persons and to gov- ern the whole body of the Society better, for the glory of God our Lord." Ibid., 293.

39 Correia-Afonso, Jesuit Letters, 5-7. So important were the hijuela that both Ignatius and his secretary Juan Polanco, produced long instructions-amounting almost to a manual for the writing of the Society's internal correspondence. Here Polanco clarified what sort of information each class of correspondence should contain, the style in which each should be written, and how information should be arranged. Ibid., 15-16.

` Ganss, Constitutions, 327.

41 For an example of this iterative process, see Schfitte, Valignano s Mission Prin-

ciples, 48-53. Before his departure to India as the new-appointed visitor of the So- ciety's Indian province, Valignano took with him copies of instructio generalis (gen- eral instructions regarding the overall scope and goals of the given project.), in- structio particularis (detailed instructions on particular matters), andfacultia (lists of articles specifying special powers and duties of the relevant offices)--all of which were modified through repeated exchanges of correspondence both before and af- ter his departure.

JESUIT SCIENCE 301

the regular composition, editing, and circulation of newsletters

"through which each region can learn from the others whatever

promote mutual consolation and edification in our Lord."42 Every four months provincials were to gather from the colleges, mission- stations, and houses under his charge correspondence containing "only edifying reports."43 After making any emendations he

thought appropriate, the provincial had multiple copies of the

quadramestral reports made (in both the vernacular and Latin), oversaw their circulation within his province, and sent copies to Rome. The in-coming quadrimestral reports were the special re-

sponsibility of the office of the hebdomadarius.44 Like the secretary to the general, the hebdomadarius was to gather, collate, and review all in-coming reports, make judgments about what was the most

important news or the most edifying stories, and then pass the re-

sulting distillation on to the general for his approval. The out-go- ing correspondence took the form of newsletters and Annuae Litterae, which circulated among all of the Society's far-flung mem- bers. As reservoirs of edifying stories and de facto chronicles of the

Society's activities for that year, the Annual Letters played an im-

portant role in bolstering Jesuit morale and building a sense of

corporate identity and purpose. And despite the administrative burden they imposed, the edifying newsletters were much-loved by Jesuits and became a permanent feature of the internal corre-

spondence of the Society. The distinct functions, but similar modes of organization of the

offices of secretary and hebdomadarius suggest a simple of way of ar-

ranging the Society's internal correspondence.45 These two offices

42 Ganss, Constitutions, 292. 43 Because of the administrative burden this four-month cycle imposed on pro-

vincials, the quadrimestral reports were made annual in 1565.

44 From the Latin hebdomas, meaning "seventh day", since it was Ignatius's origi- nal intention to have such edifying letters written and circulated (at least locally) once a week. The Constitutions required that the office be given to a "father of tal- ent and prudence" and, like the office of the secretary to the general, it existed from the Society's earliest days. The Society's first hebdomadarius was in fact Francis Xavier. Correia-Afonso,Jesuit Letters, 2.

45 Correia-Afonso offers the following five-part classification of Jesuit adminis- trative documents: those meant for 1) the superiors of the Order, 2) the members of the Society in general, 3) the public at large, 4) personal friends within or with- out the Society, and 5) "allied documents" consisting of "studies or reports on par- ticular topics, such as the life and customs of a particular tribe", etc. Ibid., 8-9. Al-

though the scheme I suggest covers only the first two or three categories, it has the

advantage of emphasizing specific administrative functions within the Society. And while personal correspondence, both among Jesuits as well as between Jesuits and

302 STEVEN J. HARRIS

give us the two major divisions of "administrative" and "edifying" correspondence; the former confidential, private, and written as an aid to governance and the latter familiar, pubic, and written to

help maintain the Society's esprit de corps. Each body of correspond- ence may in turn be subdivided into two categories, depending on whether the correspondence is "in-coming" (i.e., directed toward an administrative center) or "out-going" (directed outward to

Jesuits working in the apostolic fields). Administrative genres may thus be arranged in a two-by-two grid with the two administrative cells occupied by private, in-coming hijuela and the private, out-go- ing instructions and directives. Similarly, the public, in-coming quadrimestral letters and the public, out-going Annual Letters make up the cells of edifying correspondence. This arrangement not only highlights the symmetry of the cycles of in-coming and out-going correspondence but also the symmetry between the pri- vate/administrative and the public/edifying cycles. More impor- tantly, this scheme also suggests how the Society could successfully move from genres designed solely for employment internal to the

Society to genres intended for use among externs.46 Of the four internal administrative genres we have touched

upon, it was the Annual Letters that held the greatest potential as a medium for an external reading public. If the Society's members were hungry for news from their far-flung confreres and if they found reports of their deeds and accomplishments uplifting, then

externs, surely carried a great deal of scientific information (the published corre- spondence of virtually every major scientific figure of the period, from Tycho and Kepler to Leibniz and Lalande, contain numerous letters from Jesuits), unpub- lished literary commerce lies beyond the scope of this paper.

46 It is worth noting in passing that while Law acknowledges the importance of the "fidelity of drilled people" and Latour elaborates upon the ways in which the translation of interests can lead actors to become enrolled in someone else's net- work, neither provides a mechanism for how group identity and loyalty might be maintained. What the empirical evidence from the Society of Jesus suggests, how- ever, is that the "union of hearts" among members and their "mutual consolation and edification" were valued as highly as administrative intelligence and control. What is more, the organizational machinery to accomplish the task of edification was strikingly parallel in structure to that employed in the making and communi- cating of administrative decisions. While there were other elements necessary for the task of boosting morale (e.g., well-articulated "Rules of Deportment," the early inculcation of ideals, and the Jesuit habit of assigning members to small "primary groups"), it would seem that the sociological mechanisms of loyalty, whatever they might be, deserve a more prominent place in the received model than they thus far have. Clearly these mechanisms would have a greater role to play in longer "corpo- rate" than in shorter "charismatic" networks.

JESUIT SCIENCE 303

perhaps similar benefits could be expected from the circulation of such news and reports among non-members. In fact, a key ele- ment in the legitimization of the Society's move from an internal,

"public" genre to external, published genres intended for a learned and lay readership was the prospect of edifying (and per- haps recruiting) externs. The move from internal to external and from manuscript to print was therefore also largely a move from vocatus to ministerium; that is, while the primary function of edify- ing reports within the Society was to help confirm Jesuits in their

calling through a heightened sense of fraternal solidarity and cor-

porate identity, the published versions of those reports were meant to confirm members of the learned elite in their commit- ment to the Catholic confession and in their patronage of the So-

ciety's educational and missionary apostolates. The crucial point here is that the published "genres of edification" were also the ear- liest vehicles for the dissemination of Jesuit reports of nature and

therefore, I would argue, the common ancestors of several line-

ages of publications that figure prominently in the Society's scien- tific corpus. In a word, the legitimization of published letterbooks for the learned elites opened the door for other forms of "pro- fane" publications, including scientific genres tailored to the tastes of the virtuosi and eventually the cognoscenti.

The Phylogeny of Scientific Genres

Ignatius himself had recognized the broader "public relations" value of the edifying correspondence he helped create, and he ex-

plicitly stated that the circulation of judiciously-edited news from the missions among friends of the Society was "a means to secure their interest and goodwill."47 Juan Polanco, secretary to Ignatius, appended to his manual on the writing of administrative letters a list of reasons why correspondence was important to the Society: in addition to edification and good governance, reports could adver- tise the good works and name of the Society, attract readers to the

Jesuit vocation, and inspire friends of the Society to continue or in- crease their support of its missions.48 Such insights were quickly put into practice; in the 1540s Ignatius arranged to have extracts

47 Correia-Afonso,Jesuit Letters, 33. 48 Ibid., 33-34.

304 STEVEN J. HARRIS

from Jesuit letters transcribed for the personal collection of Marcello Cardinal Cervini (later Pope Marcellus II), and already by 1545 we find that letters written the previous year by Francis Xavier in Cochin had been translated into French and published to great acclaim. This was one of the earliest publications from the

Society and the first letter from the East ever to be published in

Europe.49 So great was European curiosity for "news from over- seas"-and so well-positioned was the Society to exploit that curi-

osity-that the Jesuit leadership took the remarkable step of sys- tematically printing portions of its internal correspondence and

distributing those collections through secular booksellers.50 By 1573-less than thirty years after the first published letter from Francis Xavier and just ten years after the final session of the Council of Trent-the Society had published more than fifty edi- tions of letterbooks from the Indian mission alone.

The thirst of the learned for all thing foreign extended of course to the natural world of foreign places. Ignatius understood

early on that assuaging this curiosity, while perhaps not the royal road to salvation, was nonetheless a road to royalty (or at least to those members of the aristocracy taken by the cult of virtuosity) and therefore to friendships of great potential value to the Society. In his instructions to the Jesuit superior in Goa, Ignatius remarked that he had "taken the pulse of persons of great quality and intelli-

gence" and found that they desired not only more information from the Indian missions but also information of a sort different from what had been found in previous reports. Ignatius therefore

suggested the following shifts in focus and emphasis in order to better accommodate the appetites of his patients.

Some leading figures who in this city [Rome] read with much edification for themselves the letters from India, are wont to desire, and they request me repeatedly, that something should be written regarding the cosmography of those regions where ours [i.e., members of the Society of Jesus] live. They

49 Lach, Asia, 315-16. 50 The Introduction to Copia de algumas cartas (Lisbon, 1562), edited by the

Jesuit fathers of Coimbra, provides the following justification for the Society move to print. "Since from this Province of Portugal have to be sent to all the colleges and houses of the Society the letters which each year are written to us from India, Japan, and China, and other eastern regions by our Fathers and Brothers who are there engaged in the conversion of the gentiles, and it is not possible to satisfy the desires of all if they were to be copied by hand and by other ordinary processes, it seemed convenient in the Lord to print some of the many that have arrived." Correia-Afonso,Jesuit Letters, 34. See also Lach, Asia, 317-20.

JESUIT SCIENCE 305

want to know, for instance, how long are the days of summer and of winter; when summer begins; whether the shadows move towards the left or towards the right. Finally, if there are things that may seem extraordinary, let them be noted, for instance, details about animals and plants that are either not known at all, or not of such a size, etc. And this news-sauce for the taste of a certain curiosity that is not evil and is wont to be found among men-may come in the same letters or in other letters separately.51

It bears repeating that, despite the mild tone in which they were

conveyed, these "suggestions" were in fact part of an instructio and therefore binding, that Ignatius was in fact the general of the Soci-

ety, and that he was explicitly altering the instructions for the let-

ter-writing duties ofJesuit missionaries in order to please "persons of great quality and intelligence." What we have here then is com-

pelling evidence that before the end of the Society's second dec- ade-and coincident with its move into the publication of genres of edification-the content of the Society's internal edifying re-

ports was deliberately broadened to include information of par- ticular interest to the virtuosi scattered among Europe's well-edu- cated. By catering to the tastes and interests of the virtuosi, Ignatius opened a space within the Society's growing corpus of external

publications for reports from nature. Thus the presence of such

reports in the Society's early publications was neither an unin- tended consequence of Jesuit missionary travel nor purely a mat- ter of individual Jesuit initiative, but a matter of policy set by the

Society's founder and leader. And when we recall that these re-

ports appeared in genres that proved to be among the early Soci-

ety's most successful publishing ventures, then we can begin to see the extent to which the study of nature was itself becoming "natu- ralized" within the Society and confessionalized within the So-

ciety's strategies of recruitment. Once the move to print had been taken and as long as the cycles

of administrative correspondence from the Society's ever-expand- ing network of overseas missionaries continued to turn, the Society was able to sustain not just occasional letterbooks but a number of different published genres based on its quadrimestral and annual

reports. Beginning in 1583 and continuing for more than thirty

51 Ignatius to Gaspar Berze (also Barzaeus), dated February 24, 1554. Correia- Afonso, Jesuit Letters, 14 (citing Monumenta Ignatiana. Espistolae et Instructiones, V, 329-30). Already as early as 1547 we find Ignatius urging missionaries in India to send information about "such things as the climate, diet, customs and character of the natives and of the peoples of India." Ibid., 13 (citing Monumenta Ignatiana. Espistolae et Instructiones, I, 648-50.

306 STEVEN J. HARRIS

years, the leadership in Rome oversaw the publication of the Annuae Litterae Societatis Jesu (or Annual Letters), which were sys- tematic compilations based on the in-coming reports from all Jesuit provinces.52 The consolidation of editorial control in Rome not only solved many of the problems that had plagued earlier letterbooks (e.g., unauthorized editions, irregular censorship of sensitive material, embarrassing factual inaccuracies or contradic- tions, poor translations, inconsistencies in content, style, and em- phasis, etc.), it also served to standardize the genre, sanction the content, and legitimate the publication of works that could be clas- sified as neither explicitly theological, liturgical, catechistical, nor spiritual. In a word, through a series of decisions to tolerate, en- courage, and then control the printing of works deemed useful in the edification of externs, the Jesuit leadership effectively legiti- mated a new category of publications neither strictly sacred nor strictly profane but nonetheless instrumental in the recruitment of friends and patrons.

There is yet another important consequence of this move into the publishing arena. The centralized editorial control of corre- spondence from afar intended for continuous publication in a se- ries of indefinite duration gave the Annuae Litterae many of the characteristics of a genre usually associated with the late seven- teenth century, the learned journal. And indeed, by the beginning of the eighteenth century there appeared in Paris under the editorship of French Jesuits two serial publications, the Lettres

Edifiantes et Curieuses53 and the periodical (properly so-called) enti-

52 The first series, initially entitled Annuae Litterae SocietatisJesu annii MDLXXXI ad Patres et Fratres eiusdem Societatis (Rome, 1583), covered the years 1581-1614 in thirty volumes. After a long hiatus, the second series (published in the 1650s) cov- ered the years 1650-1654. Ibid., 38.

53 The first of thirty-four volumes of the Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, ec'ites des Missions Etrangekres par quelque Missionaires de la Compaignie de Jisus appeared in 1702, the last in 1776, with several re-editions thereafter. Ibid., 39. It is important to note here that in the years between the publication of the last volume of the Annuae Litterae and the first volume of the Lettres Edifiantes French Jesuits also brought out annual volumes of the Jesuit Relations, which consisted almost entirely of missionary correspondence from New France. See R.G. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations (Cleveland, 1896) and J.C. McCoy, Jesuit Relations of Canada (New York, 1937). From 1726 to 1758 Josef St6cklein edited the series Neue Weltbott (Augsburg and Vienna), which contained translations into German of many letters from the Lettres Edifiantes as well as a large number of previously-unpublished correspondence from German- speaking missionaries in India, China, South and Central America and the Philip- pines. See Anton Huonder, "P. Joseph St6ckleins 'Neuer Welt-Bott', ein Vorldtufer der Katholischen Missionen im 18. Jahrhundert," Die Katholischen Missionen 33 (1904- 1905), 1-4, 30-33, 80-83, 103-107.

JESUIT SCIENCE 307

tled,Journal de Trevoux.54 Although smaller in format and in scope and focusing primarily on French overseas missions, the Lettres

Edifiantes was like the Annuae Litterae in that it drew its substance from Society's edifying reports, catered to the tastes and interests of the learned, and was enormously successful as a publishing ven- ture. The Trevoux was created to compete with the Journal des Scavans and sought to address a broad range of cultural topics of current interest to citizens of the Republic of Letters. About half of the journal's articles were in the natural and mathematical sci- ences and a great many of those (especially in astronomy, natural

history, geography, anthropology, and medicine) depended di-

rectly on reports and observations from the overseas missions. The fact that the Trevoux was one of the most successful learned jour- nals of the eighteenth century suggests that, like the Annuae Lit- terae and Lettres Edifiantes, it was at least partially successful in ac-

complishing its implicit task of winning or retaining the cultural al-

legiance of the learned. While each member of this family of genres, from letterbooks to

learned journals, was a form of published correspondence gath- ered and edited under the auspices of the Society and distributed

among the educated elites with the implicit goals of edification, patronage, and recruitment in mind, none (with the partial excep- tion of the Trevoux) could be considered a scientific genre prop- erly so-called. However successful these genres of edification may have been in their primary tasks, none was dedicated to the de-

scription, study, or manipulation of natural objects or phenom- ena. Given that the tastes of the target audiences, this should not be too surprising. What one finds in these genres are works with

varying amounts of space (depending on time and place-less in the early letterbooks and a great deal in the Lettres Edifiantes) given over to largely anecdotal but reliable descriptions of exotic flora, fauna, landscapes, rivers, mountains, and peoples with occasional runs of systematic measurements and observations (primarily in

54 The full title was Journal de Trevoux Mimoires pour servir i 1 histoire des sciences et des arts. Its name was taken from the small town of Tr&voux near Lyons where it was published from 1701 until 1731, when it was moved to Paris and continued under the name Mimoires de Trevoux until the dissolution of the order in France in 1762. See Jean Erhard and Jacques Roger, "Deux Periodiques FranCais du 18e siecle, Le 'Journal des Savants' et des 'Memoires de Trevoux': Essai d'un Etude Quantita- tive," in Livre et Societe dans France du XVIIe Siecle, ed. G. Bolleme et al. (Paris, 1965), 33-59.

308 STEVEN J. HARRIS

the fields of astronomy and positional geography and mostly in the

eighteenth century). One might object with justification that occasional reports of the

"remote and heterogeneous" productions of nature with little at- tention to sustained programs of observation, measurement, or collection scarcely constitute a scientific tradition. If the matter ended with the genres of edification, the point would be well taken. My claim, however, is that once this literary pathway to the curious had been opened and once genres intermediate between the sacred and profane became acceptable vehicles for Jesuit au-

thors, a veritable commerce in natural knowledge arose between

Jesuits and segments of the learned laity. Other genres would, however, be needed if the trade in natural knowledge were to be

expanded. The gifts of exchange upon which this commerce was based in fact soon over-topped the bits of "cosmographical" infor- mation Ignatius suggested and gave way to long missives giving de- tailed reports in response to specific requests on this or that natu- ral phenomenon; to natural objects themselves (e.g., plant and animal specimens, herbal medicines, exotic stones, gems, and min-

erals); and to published treatises on the natural history, geogra- phy, and anthropology. As the body of natural knowledge used and controlled by the Society grew, enterprising Jesuit authors found new genres-or old genres new to the Society-through which to court patrons and benefactors.

The Ontogeny of a Scientific Treatise

The expanding role of natural knowledge in the operations of the Society as well as the move from anecdotes and curiosity re-

ports to full treatises in natural history is nicely illustrated in the work of Jose de Acosta. Born in Medina del Campo the same year the Society of Jesus was founded, Acosta joined the order when

only thirteen years old. By age sixteen Acosta had written three

plays (which count as among the earliest recorded in the Society) and by age thirty-two he had set sail with several fellow-Jesuit for Peru. There he joined the entourage of the Viceroy of Peru, Fran- cisco de Toledo, and accompanied him on his extensive travels

through the region. In addition to the considerable experience he

gained during his travels (he crossed and re-crossed the Andes on several occasions, traversed jungles and valleys, and even witnessed

JESUIT SCIENCE 309

the famous comet of 1577 at the Jesuit enclave of Juli near the shore of Lake Titicaca), Acosta also availed himself of the reports of his fellow-Jesuits some of whom had traveled as far as the Ama-

zon, others had already lived for years among indigenous peoples, and still others had mastered several of the indigenous languages. During his travels as missionary and itinerant preacher, he re- corded his observations on mountains, rivers, peoples, plants, and animals he had seen and summarized his conversations with ship's captains and soldiers.55 And during his more sedentary duties as

professor of theology at the recently-founded College of St. Martin in Lima and provincial of the Peruvian province, Acosta began re-

working his notes into the first two chapters of what would become his celebrated treatise, Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias.

His literary intentions notwithstanding, Acosta's knowledge of

peoples and places stood him in good stead during the Provincial Council of 1582-83 in Lima, where he helped prepare highly de- tailed instructions for missionary priests and catechisms for the In- dians. A solid grasp of the geography of a region as well as a minute understanding of local beliefs and customs was of critical

importance to the success of the Society's proselytizing efforts. Af- ter the close of the Council, Acosta departed for Mexico, again re-

cording his observations of both the natural and human worlds. Recalled to Spain by Philip II and to Rome by Claudio Aquaviva, the Jesuit general (both of whom desired to have personal reports from him regarding the state of Peruvian Viceroyalty and Pro-

vince), Acosta left Mexico in 1587. Once he was back in Madrid, Acosta quickly brought to press several manuscripts in theology, one on the conversion of Indians, and another on the natural his-

tory of Peru and Mexico.56

55 Acosta informs us in his "Advertisement to the Reader" of his Historia Natural that in regard to what he has written concerning the Indians of the New World, "I have beene carefull to learne from men of greatest experience and best seene in these matters, and to gather from their discourses and relations what I have

thought fit to give knowledge of the deedes and custome of these people. And for that which concernes the nature of those Countries and their properties, I have learned it by the experience of many friends, and by my diligence to search, dis-

cover, and conferre with men of judgement and knowledge." Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans. Edward Grimston (1604; reprint, with Introduc- tion by Clements R. Markham, New York, 1912), xxiv.

56 His important publications in theology were De Christo revelato (Rome, 1588) and De temporibus novissimis (Rome, 1588). The works on the conversion of Indians De promulgatione Evangelii apud barbaros and natural history De natura novi orbis were

published in Salamanca in 1588-89. The latter work Acosta soon translated into

310 STEVEN J. HARRIS

This last work contained a wealth of observations-as well as some rather astute speculations-regarding both the general problems of geography (e.g., the distribution of land masses and oceans, the formation of mountains, the cause of winds and tides, the phenomena of earthquakes and volcanoes) as well as the par- ticular problems of New World natural history. Here Acosta specu- lates about the historical relationship between inhabitants of the New World and the Old (and surmises that a land-bridge must have once connected the two regions), and reports in consider- able details on the customs, beliefs, and practices of New World

peoples and on the natural plant, animal, and mineral produc- tions of Peru and Mexico. Acosta's descriptions are generally quite accurate with little tendency toward exaggeration or invention; he is critical of received opinion and balanced in his assessment of ex-

planations; and his breadth of information is astounding. These

qualities, along with the sheer novelty of his material, helped make the work enormously successful.57

After his initial meetings with Philip II-and after receiving the

king's leave to do so-Acosta dedicated his Historia Natural to the Infanta Dofia Ysabela Clara, the daughter of Philip and Elizabeth of Valois. In that dedication we find an echo both of Ignatius' im-

plicit praise of "a certain curiosity that is not evil" and of his ex-

plicit concern to strengthen the bonds of friendship between "per- sons of great quality" and the Society.

[Als knowledge of, and speculations concerning the works of nature, espe- cially if they are remarkable and rare, causes a feeling of pleasure and de- light in refined understandings, and as an acquaintance with strange cus- toms and deeds also pleases from its novelty, I hold that this work may serve as an honest and useful entertainment to your Highness. It may be that, as in other things so in this, your Highness showing a liking for it, this little work may be favored so that the King our Lord may choose to pass a short time in the consideration of affairs and of people so nearly touching his royal crown. I dedicated another book to his Majesty, which I composed in Latin, touching the preaching of the evangel to those Indians. I desire that all I have written may serve, so that the relation of what God, our Lord, de- posited of his treasure in those kingdoms, may cause the people of them to receive more aid and favor from those to whose charge His high and divine providence has entrusted them.58

Spanish, appended several chapters, and published anew under the title Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590).

57 The Historia Natural went through a total of four editions in Spanish, two in Dutch, two in French, three in Latin, two in German, and one in English-almost all appearing before 1610. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, xii-xiv

58 Acosta, Natural and Moral History, xix-xx.

JESUIT SCIENCE 311

While the dedication may have been a gracious and discreet

plea for continued patronage from the crown, the book itself, though perhaps an "honest and useful entertainment", was none- theless a deeply erudite work displaying both Acosta's humanist

learning and his critical reflection on his observations of the Peru- vian and Mexican territories. It was, in other words, a scholarly treatise worthy of the attention of the best naturalists of the day.

As important as Acosta's Historia Natural was to contemporaries' understanding of the New World, we ought not loose sight of its

significance as a Jesuit publication. This work ranks not only as one of the most important treatises of the period on the natural

history of the New World, it is also one of the first book-length treatises by a Jesuit author dedicated solely to natural history. Moreover, Acosta had gathered his observations while serving in various offices of the Society; he compiled, distilled, and organized his notes while serving as professor and provincial in Lima; his in- formants were very often members of his Order (whose experi- ences among the Indians far exceeded his own); and his work on natural history was but one treatise in a veritable explosion of pub- lications in theology and missiology released immediately follow-

ing his return to Spain. And while Acosta was clearly an intelligent observer and deeply curious about the natural world, much of the information he gathered was crucial to the operation of the Soci-

ety. And just as clearly, Acosta massive work was not called forth by casual requests from friends of the Society back in Europe. Rather, it was a product of Acosta's own initiative, his critical reading of re- ceived texts, and the opportunity of extensive travel afforded him

by his vocation as a Jesuit and assignment to an overseas mission. And finally, just as in the case of letterbooks, the treatise in natural

history could now be construed as a pious double-entendre; on the one hand it was a thing in itself, pursued for its own sake and a contribution to the scientific discourse of the day. On the other, it was a means to an apostolic end, an instrument used in the recruit- ment of patrons, and a way of advertising the talent and accom-

plishments of Jesuits to a powerful reading audience consisting certainly still of the ever-curious virtuoso but now also of the in- formed scholar, the cognoscento.

The Historia Natural was Acosta's only published work in natural

history and his only contribution to the natural sciences generally; all his many other publications were in theology and missiology.59

59 After the publication of the Historia Natural, he was named visitor of the Soci- ety's Spanish provinces of Andalusia and Aragon and eventually became embroiled

312 STEVEN J. HARRIS

It would not, of course, be the Society's only contribution to the natural sciences. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies Jesuit authors produced a steadily increasing number of works in natural history resulting in a collective literary output of

nearly one thousand published treatises, textbooks, journal arti- cles, reference works, and compendia on topics ranging from de-

scriptive and mathematical geography, hydrography, mineralogy and meteorology to botany, zoology, and what we would now call cultural anthropology. Until about the middle of the eighteenth century (when local and regional natural histories entered the

Jesuit corpus), the vast majority of Jesuit publications in natural

history came from authors who either themselves had served in the overseas missions or who were in contact with those who had. And in a great many cases, the works arose directly from mission-

ary work. Two examples will have to suffice to illustrate the char- acter of the Jesuit tradition in natural history, the obscure work of Manuel Tristao and the well-known activities of Athanasius Kircher.

At about the time of Acosta's death, a Jesuit lay brother and "in- firmarian" (a nurse and perhaps also an apothecary) by the name of Manuel Tristao was nearing the completion of a manuscript on the natural and moral history of Brazil (based on his thirty years of

experience among the indigenous peoples) when an English raid-

ing party headed by Frances Cooke took it from him. The manu-

script was eventual sold to Samuel Purchas who included it in his well-known Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrims. Tristao's

only compensation for his literary labors (virtually nothing is known about him otherwise) is Purchas's praise of the work as "the exactest Treatise of Brasil which I have seene written by any man, especially in the Historie of the multiplied and diversified Nations and customs of men; as also in the naturall Historie of Beasts, Serpents, Fowles, Fishes, Trees, Plants, with divers other remarkeable [sic] rarities of those Regions."60 While in this highly

in an "unedifying" theological and administrative disputes with the Jesuit General Claudio Aquaviva and in the Society's Fifth General Congregation (1593). His last years he served as rector of the Jesuit college at Salamanca where he died in 1600. See William V. Bangert, S.J. A History of the Society ofJesus (St. Louis, 1972), 98-102.

6 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1624; reprint, Glasgow, 1906), p. 417. Appended to Tristdo's "Treatise of Brazil" (pp. 418-503) is his (or what is presumed to be his) "Articles for Brasil" (pp. 503-517), in which the author makes a number of recommendations regarding improvements in the gov- ernance of the Brazilian territory.

JESUIT SCIENCE 313

unusual case the path to publication lay far beyond the control of the Society, the content of the work suggests its original purpose. The treatise is mostly devoted to the geography of the region (es- pecially to the location of rivers, impenetrable jungles or swamps, and hospitable openings); the identity and character of the many tribes of the region (i.e., which ones were of a mild disposition, which ones hostile, and how to identify each tribe by its character- istic style of haircut); the symptoms and cures of diseases (many of which seemed indigenous and unlike those in Europe, and had cures based on local materia medica), and the careful descriptions of edible and on-edible plants, poisonous serpents, and dangerous beasts. Such choices of topic and emphasis mark the work as a handbook (or rather a survival manual) for pioneer-missionaries. This would seem to be exactly the sort of book that a missionary might wish to pore over during the voyage to Brazil and have in hand as he sets off to find his assigned mission-station. Had

Tristaio's treatise not been abducted as one of Purchas's unwilling pilgrims but instead seen print as a mission manual, Jesuit mission- aries bound for Brazil would, in Latour's words, "be familiar with

things, people and events, which are distant" and therefore would be that much stronger as they entered into their trials of strength against an otherwise unknown human and non-human environ- ment.61 Whatever the intended purpose of Tristao's manuscript may have been within the Society, clearly it suited Purchas's pur- pose in reaching an audience of well-educated, well-born, and

well-placed friends (and potential patrons) of English long-dis- tance voyaging. Presumably it could have been as useful a literary emissary for Jesuit interests had its publication remained under the authority of the Society.

One could scarcely imagine a greater contrast than the one be- tween Tristao, the poor and obscure lay-brother missionizing at the margins of the Society who was wrongfully deprived of what was very likely his only literary production, and Athanasius Kircher, the learned priest, theologian, and mathematician who became

perhaps the most famous Jesuit of the seventeenth century and one of the Society's most prolific authors while working in Rome, the very heart of the Catholic imperium. The distance separating Trist~io and Kircher is, however, only the distance between periph- ery and center within a single organizational network. Rome of

61 Latour, Science in Action, 219-220.

314 STEVEN J. HARRIS

course had always been the administrative nerve-center of the Soci- ety, and Kircher's years there coincided with what most historians consider the golden era not only of the Society but also of the counter-reforming Church.62 And it would seem that Kircher's work in the Society-his disparate roles as author and editor of a startlingly wide-ranging opus, as an intelligencer who amassed one of the largest bodies of correspondence of the seventeenth cen- tury, as a collector and exhibitor of rarities of unimaginable vari- ety, and as an impresario evangelizing through the emblematica of nature and wonder-making "devices"-takes on a good deal of co- herence when viewed in context of a center of concentration.63

Kircher sat at the center of a network largely coincident with the Society's administrative network but one that had as its object in- telligence reports not about the human world but about the natu- ral. As Findlen demonstrates, the fraternal bond among Jesuits made it easy for Kircher to trust his confreres located in the over- seas missions to provide him with reliable reports on nature, to carry out his instructions regarding observations, to send of speci- mens for display in his museum or as gifts to selected friends of the Society. As missionaries were recalled to Rome for debriefing with the Jesuit general, Kircher was quick to avail himself of the opportunity and converse at length with them, as he did for exam- ple with Michael de Boym after his return from China in 1664.64 And it was Kircher (along with his students and assistants) who col-

62 Paula Findlen, "Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum," Roma Moderna e Contemporanea 3 (1995), 625-65. Findlen provides extensive detail on Kircher's activities in Rome and embeds it in the rich cultural connotations of the time.

63 Ibid., 628. Insofar as the institutional support for Kircher's activities is con- cerned, her discussion of Kircher's contacts with Jesuit missionaries, exchange of correspondence, and his requests of specific information or objects seems largely consistent with the notion of center of concentration developed here. As Findlen her writes, "It is hardly surprising that a religious order which produced the proto- type of the professional traveler, the missionary, should have facilitated the work of one of Europe's greatest collectors who used the information accumulated by his fellow Jesuits to create a new encyclopedia of knowledge. ... Training collectors of scientific data, corresponding with Europe's leading scholars and cultivating pa- trons wherever he went, Kircher was uniquely situated to receive the riches that in- creased travel and exploration had uncovered." Ibid., 630-31.

64 Findlen, Possessing Nature, 165. Kircher relied heavily not only upon Boym's spoken word about the wonders of China but also upon his written and published word. He cited both Boym's correspondence and his Flora sinensis (Vienna, 1656) in his own China ilustrata (Rome, 1667), as well as the Novus atlas Sinensis (Vienna & Amsterdam, 1655) of Boym's fellow-missionary Martin Martini.

JESUIT SCIENCE 315

lated the information and objects sent from afar, classified it, and

arranged it in both the published encyclopedias for which he was so well-known and in the innumerable displays and exhibits found in his Wunderkammer and museum for the edification and enter- tainment of the wealthiest and most powerful patrons in western Christendom-Protestant as well as Catholic. Thus Kircher, oper- ating from the very center of the most important center of concen- tration in the Society, could amass a greater quantity of natural

knowledge and a greater number of natural objects than any Jesuit before (or after) him. Even more importantly, he could put both

knowledge and objects to work in securing the intellectual alle-

giance and material support of patrons by deciphering for them the great emblem of nature, the meaning of which bespoke of

god's omnipotence, wisdom, and care as well as of man's moral and spiritual responsibilities to the deity.65

If there is irony in Kircher's repeated requests-and repeated denials-for permission to travel to China as a missionary, there is also a deep logic. Those on the periphery and those at center were bound together not only by iterated cycles of correspondence, they were also bound by codes of trust and a common identity based on their shared formation as Jesuits and their commitments to the ideals of the Society. While Kircher may have longed for the overseas adventures of an itinerant missionary, he surely must have also realized that he never could have gained as much knowledge of the periphery from the periphery as from the center. And he must have also realized that however much he might have envied his fellow-Jesuits "laboring in the vineyards of Christ," he too was

laboring in the vineyards-though perhaps the vintage he sought was more in the way of confirmation of the faithful (and powerful) than conversion of those with little or misplaced faith.66 Indeed, in Kircher's correspondence, publications, and collections we see

perhaps the clearest example of the uses of the Jesuit long-dis- tance network in the recruitment of nature for the purposes of

confession-building.

65 Ibid., 379. 66 Findlen, "Kircher and the Roman College Museum," 653.

316 STEVEN J. HARRIS

Conclusion

Within a hundred years of its foundation the Society had suc-

cessfully established an extensive network of overseas missions and the largest unified system of higher education ever known in Eu-

rope. At the same time the administrative apparatus required to

operate both apostolates had matured and stabilized; appropriate offices had been created, duties defined, procedures codified, cat-

egories of administrative documents standardized, and the train-

ing and oversight of personnel routinized. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Society's involvement in the learned min- istries (primarily among the studiosi but, as we have seen, also

among the virtuosi and cognoscenti) had produced a number of

well-respected scholars publishing in well-marked genres within the mathematical and natural sciences as well as in natural philoso- phy.67 Young Jesuits entering at this time with an inclination to- ward the study of nature not only found themselves in a religious order that tolerated and even encouraged their interests through a curriculum that included mixed mathematics and emphasized natural philosophy,68 they also found themselves in an interna- tional corporation capable of providing them with informational and organizational resources not generally available in the era be- fore the foundation of large, state-supported scientific academies. Thus, while originally intended to serve the administrative needs of an apostolic religious order dedicated to the extension and con- solidation of the Catholic confession, by the seventeenth century the organizational elements of the Society's long-distance net- works also served to facilitate and coordinate collaborative efforts between Jesuit professors in the Society's colleges and universities and Jesuit missionaries scattered throughout its overseas stations.

67 The publications of Christoph Clavius in mathematics, the Coimbra com- mentaries on Aristotelian natural philosophy, and as we have seen above, Acosta's treatise on natural history may be taken as generally representative of the stable genres of the Jesuit scientific corpus ca. 1600.

6 While the scope of this article precludes an examination of the forces acting in the legitimization of collegiate genres in the early Society, the accompanying ar- ticles by Leijenhorst and Hellyer make clear both the centrality and pervasiveness of academic publications. From the enormously influential Coimbra commentaries printed at the turn of the century to the ubiquitous textbooks and Cursus in natural philosophy and mathematics, collegiate publications remained the single largest family of genres in the Society's scientific corpus throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accounting for well over half of the entire scientific corpus.

JESUIT SCIENCE 317

The resonance between a network capable of the in-gathering of natural knowledge from the remote parts of the world and multi-

ple university-based centers for the concentration and dissemina- tion of that knowledge can scarcely be over-emphasized. While nei- ther component was unique to the Society, no other long-distance corporation of the early modern period succeeded in operating both a long-distance network of the sort described here and a sys- tem of higher education. While the other large Catholic religious orders involved in the overseas missions faced similar problems of

long-distance control, not even the Franciscans and Dominicans

(both mendicant orders with a strong tradition in education) were able to develop and expand their studia generalia in such a way so as to take advantage of the natural knowledge now available

through their respective long-distance networks. And if the largest and most successful overseas trading companies (like the Portu-

guese in the sixteenth century, the Dutch in the seventeenth, and

English in the eighteenth) were wealthier and more efficient in matters regarding the durability of "devices" (i.e., ships and can-

non) and in the control of travel than the Society, none was in the business of educating the sons of nobles and ambitious burghers. Although merchant ships provided the means of travel for a large number of naturalists and their cargo of natural specimens in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries, the na- ture of the mercantile enterprise itself did not generally encour-

age the open communication of knowledge lest that knowledge strengthen rival companies. Most crucially, no other long-distance corporation seems to have possessed the organizational means or incentive to transpose administrative correspondence into publish- ed genres useful in the advancement of corporate programs. While other religious orders and a few trading companies tried their hand at letterbooks of one form or another, none was as sys- tematic in their redaction, as sophisticated in their "marketing", or as successful in their sustained exploitation as the Society of Je- sus.69 Only with the arrival of large, state-supported scientific aca- demics toward the end of the seventeenth century do we begin to find the sort of organizational structures necessary to run long-dis- tance networks capable of both gathering and dissemination natu- ral knowledge from remote regions.

In sum, the movement of the Society's authors into genres bear-

69 Correia-Afonso,Jesuit Letters, 34.

318 STEVEN J. HARRIS

ing natural knowledge from afar depended upon a unique combi- nation of factors at play in the origin and development of the Soci-

ety: the mastery of long-distance networks, an apostolate in educa- tion, and the expansion of its confession-building program to in- clude ministries among the learned elites. The Society's sustained "scientific interests" were in part a reflection of the fact that a cer- tain amount of natural knowledge was required in order to run that network (geography, surveying, practical natural history, prac- tical anthropology, medicine, and pharmacy) and in part a reflec- tion of the learned interests of its target clientele. By construing their knowledge of the natural world as a means of securing ac- cess, friendship, and patronage among cultural elites, Jesuits as

priests and theologians could justify their engagement with math- ematics, natural history, natural and experimental philosophy. Thus we may see the entry of the Society into so many branches of

early modern science neither as an aberration of the religious vo- cation nor as an abandonment of the cleric's primary duty to god and church, but as the attempt to recruit nature as an ally in the central task of confession-building.

ABSTRACT

The ability of the Society ofJesus to engage in a broad and enduring tradition of scientific activity is here addressed in terms of its programmatic commitment to the consolidation and extension of the Catholic confession (i.e., to a multi- pronged program of confession-building) and its mastery of the administrative apparatus necessary to operate long-distance networks. The Society's early move into two major apostolates, one in education and the other in the overseas mis- sions, broughtJesuits into regular contact with the educated elites of Europe and at the same time placed the Society's missionaries in remote parts of the natural world. The modes of organization of travel and communication required by the Society's long-distance networks (i.e., the training and deployment of reliable agents willing to work under direction in remote locations and capable of provid- ing trustworthy reports and observations to their superiors through regular ex- change of correspondence) not only facilitated scientific communication and col- laboration within the order, it also provided Jesuits with the resources they needed to engage successfully in 'ministries among the learned'. Evidence of a sustained attempt by Jesuit authors to assume the role of Kulturtrfger is found in the several genres of scientific publications that dominate the Society's scientific corpus. Thus the Society's early recognition of the "apostolic value" of scientific publications in recruiting friends and allies among Europe's intellectual elites, I argue, allowed a robust interest in natural knowledge to emerge as a legitimate part of the Jesuit vocation.