Recent decades have shown the general public what librarians and historians of the book and of material culture have long known: collections of texts, whether by institutions, organizations, or individuals, are not static things. The development, for example, of Little Free Libraries around the world, and the replacement of many college and university libraries with Learning Commons, demonstrate that libraries are living entities, both responding to and creating trends, and adapting to significant challenges on multiple physical, economic, intellectual, and existential fronts.1 They have historically been centres of controversies regarding censorship, gatekeepers of specialized knowledge, hosts for cultural events, havens for those seeking a quiet spot, and so much more. As such, libraries are among the most versatile institutions in society. Yet few patrons pause to ask why specific books were chosen or rejected, or why certain texts have survived but others have not. This study addresses questions related to these collection and maintenance issues, by examining survivals of physical volumes with Jesuit library provenance, along with available pre-modern inventories from those institutions run by Jesuits. Studying these issues can provide insights into the intellectual life of the period stretching from the Reformations to the Enlightenment, including educational trends and priorities, as well as institutional constraints related to location and financing. My focus here is northern, central, and eastern Europe, with the hope of expanding comparative and contextual knowledge by including several areas not well represented in Anglophone studies of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.2
This study relies on data collected for my ongoing public and digital history initiative, the European Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project (EJLPP), formally launched in 2018 at www.jesuit-libraries.com. The EJLPP is a census of books known to have been in the possession of a European Jesuit college, professed house, probationary house, or museum prior to the papal suppression of the Society (which began in 1759 and was completed in 1773, excluding areas of Russia). At this writing, it consists of information about authors, printers, book titles, and institutions associated with over 5,300 titles, available in a downloadable spreadsheet. The data can provide support and context to scholars of multiple disciplines, and allow for broader comparative studies than have generally been undertaken with respect to the study of Jesuit teaching, collecting, and book production and consumption. Thanks to the generous support of Georgia Southern University, a total of eleven undergraduate and graduate students and three Digital Commons specialists have assisted in various ways, including cataloguing photographs and creating data visualizations. In addition, the EJLPP includes contributions by individual researchers, and is partnered with the University of Uppsala Libraries and the CRAI Biblioteca. They have changed their name to CRAI Biblioteca de Fons Antic of the University of Barcelona.3 We are currently working on agreements with other institutions and scholars. These enable us to expand the size and reach of the project, and to engage researchers working on similar undertakings in other parts of the world so that we can best achieve our shared goals of better understanding the Republic of Letters. In this article, I use data analysis to investigate aspects of Jesuit book collection and suggest some tentative conclusions about the intellectual history of the Society of Jesus based on the subjects, languages, and authors of those books and the locations where they were held.
1 Jesuit Libraries: A Brief Introduction
Libraries were one of multiple supports for the main institutional goals of the Society of Jesus: evangelization and education. The practice of Jesuit librarianship dates back to the foundation of the Society, beginning with passing references to acceptable texts for teaching and reading in the Constitutions, and continuing with local recommendations and regulations.4 The latter included the 1551 Rule of the Roman College, which stipulated that the institution keep ‘sufficient’ books for the subjects taught there, and Jerome Nadal’s (1507–80) 1566 Instructions Presented to the Provincial of the Rhine which required that ‘general books in each one of the faculties necessary for our student brothers are to be … put in some place common to all’ whereas ‘the others,’ presumably including those suspected of heretical content, would instead be housed in a locked room, for which the librarian would hold the key.5 The 1567 Regulae communes for the Society were the first to include ‘Rules for the Prefect of the Library,’ requiring that he keep a copy of the Index, organize the books by subject and author, keep records of circulation, restrict use to those given permission by the Superior, and maintain the neatness of the space and the books.6 In 1580, an update to this section empowered the librarian to request that his superior purchase ‘necessary … or … very useful’ books or dispose of the ‘useless ones’ in exchange ‘for other better ones’.7 Later Regulae of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contained ‘Rules for the Novice Master,’ to which were appended a list of roughly thirty titles, largely theological in subject, and vague suggestions for others to be considered (e.g., ‘Thomas de Kempis, De Imitatione Christi, et alia eius Opuscula’ [Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, and others of his works]).8
The foundation of the Congregation of the Index in 1571 marked a shift in both librarianship and publishing. It institutionalized the practice of censorship, long a concern for the Catholic Church, and gave it permanent bureaucratic support. On the one hand, the Index of Prohibited Books, and a body with regular meetings revising that list, meant strong, formal restrictions, inhibiting intellectual inquiry. On the other, it meant convenience: this was a frequently updated catalogue of books which were never to be purchased or read at the Jesuit colleges, neatly organized into a document which must be displayed for all to see. Abiding by it relieved librarians and prefects of certain difficult decisions. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Antonio Possevino, S.J. (1533–59) issued the two-volume Bibliotheca selecta (editions in 1593, 1603, and 1607). Possevino catalogued and occasionally discussed the contents of the books he considered necessary for a Catholic education, essentially outlining an ideal library.9 This was not intended as a set of instructions, but instead served as a kind of ‘library triumphant’ or ‘index of recommended books’. Such flexibility was important; one could never guarantee the availability of acceptable books, and to require a specific list would make at least the non-European missions nearly impossible. Essentially opposite sides of the same coin, the Index and the Bibliotheca selecta were fundamental to the development of Jesuit librarianship. Possevino’s work can therefore provide modern scholars of Jesuit libraries with a set of guidelines which, when applied to inventories from individual pre-suppression libraries, can be used to determine whether or not Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used identifiable collection practices, and whether, either by accident or design, the different college and residence libraries held books on similar subjects, collected texts in specific languages, favoured particular authors, et cetera.10 Scholars who have attempted to recreate the libraries of institutions from the old Society have used both such inventories and surviving volumes for information. Examples include the very thorough work of historian Klára Jakó, who in a 1991 article attempted a reconstruction of the pre-1604 library in the Jesuit College in Cluj, and historian Andrea Mariani, whose more recent work focuses on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.11
Jesuit library beginnings were, therefore, not particularly proscriptive or prescriptive in the sixteenth century, but as librarianship developed, the collections began to fall into identifiable configurations. Among the reasons for this is the 1599 version of the Ratio studiorum, which made explicit provision for funding the library (which ‘may under no circumstances be diverted to other uses’) and directed the librarian to preserve the literary output of members of the Society and to follow the ‘directions of the prefect of studies in regard to the circulation of books,’ statements which indicate that the Society hesitated to impose narrow instructions.12 The institutionalization of censorship within the Catholic Church, along with the development of a number of library treatises, including works by the Jesuit Jean Garnier (1612–81) and the Jesuit-educated humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), introduced some more standardization.13 Nevertheless, the book collections associated with the pre-suppression Society’s colleges, houses, and offices show vast differences in the representation of authors, languages, and subjects. As a whole, European Jesuit libraries, from what we can discern in the twenty-first century, largely followed the topic patterns that can be identified in Possevino, as listed in the tables which follow, but with significant variations in emphasis according to place and time. This article explores some of those variations, focusing on the distinctions between collections in different geographical regions. Changes over time are more difficult to document, because librarians either did not take or did not preserve inventories on many occasions; however, I am including here some discussions on the developments in librarianship.14
2 The EJLPP: Methodology and Overview
It is ironic to note that one of the best ways to study the libraries of the early Society of Jesus is to access the records of its dissolution. As governments across Europe and their global empires expelled Jesuits and outlawed the order, they saw to the recording of inventories of the Society’s possessions. While these vary in detail, the documents created between 1759 and 1773 have provided a kind of library catalogue for many of the institutions which were shut down. Some institutions preserved earlier inventories, and as a result, researchers may discuss changes in holdings and collection patterns over time. What follows focuses on the records from the Professed House at Antwerp (inventory from 1660) and the colleges of Leuven (1635), Antwerp (1613), and Delft (1614), along with the Irish College at Rome (c.1630 and 1671), and the English College at Liège/Saint Omer (early seventeenth century) for a total of 1,246 titles.15
In addition to manuscript inventories, the EJLPP contains records for thousands of extant Jesuit-owned books. As of this writing, the vast majority of the titles (nearly 3,400) in the section of the EJLPP dedicated to surviving print copies come from Google Books, and another 281 from the Internet Archive, Hathitrust, and the Bavarian State Library combined. Approximately 23% of the entries were harvested from online library catalogues in the US, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, without access to scans of the texts. I have proceeded with an eye to finding specific titles rather than by attempting to represent authors fully or to gather all the information from a given library catalogue. When I find reference in an article to a title which I think would be at home in a Jesuit institution in an article, and when I find a physical book with Jesuit provenance, I search for copies in libraries and in digital repositories.16 Using extant copies of texts along with manuscript inventories can provide information on books which may have been lost over the centuries. This in turn gives the modern observer a better understanding of institutional priorities, because it does not depend on preservation of a specific text (or its provenance; during the suppression, some provenance marks were blotted out or excised). Please note that the quantitative and qualitative statements which follow should be understood as provisional. The EJLPP is a work in progress. Certain geographical areas of Europe are represented disproportionately. The new partnerships referenced above will be instrumental in balancing the scope, as we continue to integrate the data they make available to us.
Approximately 39% of the titles (2,093 entries) in the complete database of extant books with Jesuit provenance were held by 162 Jesuit institutions in regions which at the time were known as Bohemia, the Kingdom of Croatia, the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Low Countries, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, heavily favouring Central Europe, and this article focuses on these establishments (see Figures 6.1a–b). The dominant institutions are the colleges in Munich (accounting for nearly 36% of the 2,093 titles), Prague (just over 18%), and Augsburg (slightly below 8%). No other single institution represents more than 2% of the total.17 The books themselves were printed in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Latin, heavily favouring Latin, and were written by authors from all over Europe, dating from ancient Greece and Rome to contemporary scholars, and include a single author from Peru: the Jesuit Diego Ruiz de Montoya (1562–1632). Authorship is dominated by the Italian peninsula, from which 32% of the total known writers hailed. The next largest geographical groupings are the Low Countries (12%), the Holy Roman Empire (14%), and Spain (15%). Only 2% of the authors in the Northern/Central/Eastern European subset were from Eastern Europe, the largest concentration of those from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also representing Bohemia, the Kingdom of Croatia, the Kingdom of Hungary, and the Principality of Moldavia. The inventories from the Low Countries include books in Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, again heavily favouring Latin, with about 17% of the authors hailing from the Low Countries, 8% from England, Scotland, and Ireland combined, 7% from the Holy Roman Empire, and 7% from the Italian peninsula.
Geographical distribution of the Jesuit Libraries in the EJLPP and the identified subset. a) Distribution of Colleges/Houses in the EJLPP. b) Distribution of Colleges/Houses in the North, Central, and Eastern European Subset of the EJLPP
Although the official instructions on book collection for the Society were vague, the purposes of the Jesuit college and mission libraries were clear: the transmission and preservation of knowledge in subjects determined by the Society from its beginnings to be worthy of studies. The books which Jesuits kept generally reflect the advice in the Constitutions regarding the subjects which should be taught in the colleges: ‘humane letters of different languages, logic, natural and moral philosophy, metaphysics, scholastic and positive theology, and Sacred Scripture’.18 A more comprehensive listing of categories is the following, based in part on definitions devised by Joseph S. Freedman and Jill Kraye, in part on the categories identified in the Bibliotheca selecta, and in part on experience with multiple inventories. I have attempted to maintain some consistency in categorization of theological disciplines across the centuries, and at the same time have endeavoured not to adhere too strictly to a system of organization, as some works could clearly be used for multiple purposes.19 These labels are thus artificially applied, as many premodern library inventories were not arranged according to subject, and those that were organized that way both reflect varied definitions of the categories and show that the priority was listing books, not categorizing them. In several cases, for example, the first books inventoried were assigned to categories, but as the inventory progressed, adherence to these categories waned.20
This chart allows for a comparison of inventories of colleges in the seventeenth century with a list constructed from surviving texts. Among the most obvious inferences one can draw from it relate to the disparities of representation. Those topics which were represented in large numbers in actual inventories (apologetics/controversies/heresy, humanities, and scripture and commentary account for more than 10% each) are consistent with the mission of the Jesuits, and for the most part were preserved in large numbers up to the present. A comparison with the EJLPP, however, shows that books on these subjects must have had a fairly low rate of survival. In the inventories from the Irish College at Rome, the English College of Liège/St. Omer, the colleges at Delft and Leuven, and the college and professed house at Antwerp, those subjects accounted for approximately 16% of the total collection; among those books still available in 2021, less than 7% were on those subjects. In the inventories, the humanities account for more than 22% of the books, while scriptures and commentaries represent over 10% of the titles; in each case, that is in the neighbourhood of twice the size of the percentage associated with the complete EJLPP. On the other hand, subdisciplines of theology which would be practical for priests (sacramental, pastoral, and liturgical theology as well as devotional texts) account for a total of about 12.5%, a full 50% lower than the EJLPP.
General subjects found in prescriptive materials and in Jesuit libraries in selected colleges in Europe prior to the suppression
Looking closer, we can see that subjects associated with foreign missionary activity were fairly poorly represented in the collections of European libraries. Titles related to the history, travel, language, and missions of Africa, the Americas, and Asia together account for less than 2% of those mentioned in inventories from the Low Countries, Holy Roman Empire, British and Irish mission colleges, and Eastern Europe combined. In the EJLPP subset, those associated with the same regions total about 7%, as do those from the whole, suggesting that this kind of book had a high rate of survival. In some categories, the representation ratios are far closer: the highlighted lines in the chart show the subjects in which each category is within one-half of one percent of all the others. That is a limited group, represented by ascetical theology, bibliographies/dictionaries/encyclopaedias, empiricism/scepticism/epistemology, history/travel/missions (Africa), and non-Christian religions and philosophy. These total only about 2.6% overall. From the other direction, the large discrepancies between holdings in history/travel/languages/missions (Asia), patristics, prayer/devotion, practical and pastoral theology, and scripture and commentary, in which one grouping has significantly more or less than the other two, shows that focusing on surviving texts does not produce faithful reconstructions of suppressed libraries. While the subjects in each category are similar, the reconstructed collections do not very closely resemble the inventories.
3 Collection Patterns and Comparisons
Thus, although there was no standardized, comprehensive list of what titles or subject a Jesuit library ought to hold, and attempting to analyse developing librarianship from surviving texts is fraught with pitfalls, the library inventories and extant books do reveal certain collection patterns, either by design or by accident. To explore this issue deeper, and tease out more design and less accident, we turn to subjects in more detail, followed by language and then authorship.
The Society’s emphasis on global evangelization, and the large numbers of Jesuits from all over Europe who served as missionaries, first raises the question of what those missionaries might have known about the territories that they evangelized. The Ratio studiorum required no training in the culture, history, or languages of Africa, the Americas, or Asia, or in similar subjects for European mission territory. Young men from colleges in Europe were sent to faraway places with little to no knowledge of those places, except the fantastic and heroic tales related in the annual letters describing triumphant conversions or terrifying battles for survival. Most of the libraries which appear in the EJLPP had large collections of texts focused on preaching or otherwise spreading the message of Christianity (i.e., both secular and sacred rhetoric, bibles or parts thereof, catechisms, and sacramental theology), to train students how to serve as priests. Foreign missionary activity, however, required a significant set of other skills, on subjects not well represented. Both the inventories and the surviving texts indicate that the students would have been woefully underprepared to confront the physical realities of travel and the demands of communication and survival outside Europe.21 In the subset of available books in the EJLPP from North, Central and Eastern European institutions, slightly over 7% of texts are dedicated to the geography, history, and language of non-European territories, and just under 4% for European mission territories, percentages closely matched by the full database. The only non-European language in the subset was Chinese, vs. Arabic, Chinese, Guaraní, and Japanese in the complete group. On paper, the Society supported learning native languages. Letters from the 1580s and 1590s referred both to attempts to learn (for example) American tongues and to the need for stronger support from the leadership to do so. However, language acquisition remained a serious problem up to the suppression of the Society.22
In addition, while the average mission-bound Jesuit would have had access to many reports from the missions, including spectacular tales of martyrdom, heroic stories of successful conversions, and testimonies to the zeal of newly baptised Christians, he would have learned little practical information about the history, customs, geography, economy, or language of the region. Reports from the missions are decidedly general and formulaic, emphasizing the same points regardless of whether they describe Brazil or Japan. The dearth of books which could have trained missionaries better for their overseas work cannot be explained easily. The inventories of Antwerp, Delft, Leuven, Liège/Saint Omer, and the Irish College in Rome contain no mention of books on the subjects of the culture, geography, or history of European mission territories, and less than 2% of the total relates to all the non-European missions together. This is significantly smaller than the total in the full EJLPP and North/Central/Eastern European subset, which suggests that the survival of texts in these subjects is disproportionate to the interest institutions showed in collecting them.
The same geographical subset of the EJLPP shows other similarities with the subjects of the complete database. In the full set as well as in the section under consideration here, texts in what might be called ‘reference’ subjects (bibliography, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and librarianship) account for about 1.4% of the total subjects; European history not related to missions (ancient history, art history, biography, chronology, and church history) for about 5.6%, and items specifically related to the work of the Jesuits (administrative issues, including Rules and mission letters) for about 3.5%. There are also some striking differences. The North/Central/Eastern group of libraries had considerably smaller collections of texts on medicine, health, pharmacy, natural history, natural philosophy, astronomy, church law, and cosmology than the full set. On the other hand, they had a significantly larger percentage of books focused on moral theology, pastoral theology, prayer and devotion, and systematic theology. The reasons for these discrepancies are unclear; we have no evidence, for example, that colleges or houses in Poland-Lithuania were less interested in European history than those in Portugal, or that colleges in Spain were less concerned with moral theology than those in the Low Countries. Some volumes, in particular those related to devotion and martyrdom (including texts related to the missions, like the circular letters) were certainly studied in detail and by many people; they were meant to be read aloud to students at meals, and they were also read enthusiastically by those who wished to engage in the missions. As a result, such topics probably had a lower survival rate.
In earlier investigations, I remarked on a correlation of sorts which emerged from exploring the sixteenth-century inventories of the colleges in Florence and Siena, contextualized with brief remarks on the English mission college of Liège, which transferred to Saint Omer. There appeared to be a relative favouring of issues concerning the region in which the college was found: local authors, vernacular texts, and regional subjects for those vernacular tests.23 Choosing nearby authors certainly made sense in terms of availability (both of books and authors) and cost of books (particularly in printing centres). In addition, the desire on the part of the Society to disperse its members (to send those who joined to regions in Europe remote from their families), suggests the necessity of providing the colleges with texts which would help foreigners understand their new locations.24 Texts concerned with local issues and written in the local vernaculars could have been used to teach the members of the Society about the place where they were working. However, the vernacular texts in the Jesuit libraries I have studied rarely favoured local subjects, or community authors, with an important exception. The colleges which served missions, including the Irish College in Rome and the English college at Liège/Saint Omer, did favour books with regional connections, especially those printed locally. Trading large numbers of books from areas where Catholicism was inconsistently legal in early modern Europe could be dangerous, and as a result, the mission colleges relied on their own presses for their vernacular texts (and for many in Latin as well). This demonstrates that geography was important, but so, in a certain sense, was regional identity: for example, the libraries of the English colleges in the Low Countries had no books in Dutch and only eight in French, but seventy-four in English (out of a total of 124 titles).25
This should not be overemphasized. In the North/East/Central Europe subset of the EJLPP, with the exception of colleges serving hostile territory, the correlation between location and subject is very weak. One can find histories of Europe, but they are largely written in Latin; among the handful of texts on the subject in the vernacular languages of Europe are Italian-language histories of Italy, in Ingolstadt and Munich; several French-language histories of France, in Brussels, Mindeheim, Munich, Passau, Prague, and Tournai; German-language histories of the Holy Roman Empire, in Augsburg; and of Spain, in Italian, in Munich. A fair number of histories of the Low Countries can be found in colleges in that region, but those are in Latin. The colleges in Prague and Munich had comparatively significant collections of texts on European history: studies of Denmark, France, Lithuania, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Empire, and Poland. In total, these represent less than 4% of the books identified in this subgroup of the EJLPP. Furthermore, only five books out of 2,093 consider the life and martyrdom of Stanisław Kostka, S.J. (1550–1568), the only Eastern European saint represented in the collection; eighteen more relate the tales of others martyred in the global missions, but these favour the English missions. The books related to the missions in the Holy Roman Empire and South-eastern Europe are concerned with combatting other religious traditions which could be found there (Protestantism and Islam), not with violence and sacrifice.
Colleges might have saved time and money by using not just local authors, but local Jesuits. Books about Jesuit martyrs, and those printed in the mission colleges, were more often than not written by members of the Society of Jesus. Did Jesuit librarianship develop to favour Jesuit authors in other subjects? Approximately 57% (3,006) of the titles in my complete database were written by members of religious orders; by comparison, about 65% of the titles in the North/Central/European subset were, and a considerably smaller number, just over 30%, can be found in the inventories. The remainder of the authors included ancient, medieval, and early modern writers associated with a variety of religious and secular professions. A total of 50 different religious orders, the majority of which were Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans of some kind, Benedictines of some kind, and Augustinians of some kind, are represented (see Figure 6.2). In both the full EJLPP and the North/Central/Eastern European subset, Jesuits dominated, more in the North/Central/Eastern colleges (over 82%) than in the whole, including Southern Europe (about 77%) and in the written inventories (nearly 67%). However, there is little apparent connection between the place of birth of the Jesuit author and the location of the library holding that author’s books.
The complete EJLPP does demonstrate a marked increase in Jesuit authors in the college and residence libraries throughout the period between the foundation and the suppression. Joseph De Guibert observed that even a quarter century after Ignatius’ death, the early lists of reading material for the colleges made little reference to the growing corpus of Jesuit-authored books.26 That would change after the next quarter century. Approximately 20% of the titles overall have provenance markings which include dates. Most of those are from institutions in Lyon (17%), Munich (36%), and Prague (8%), and they show a fifteen-fold increase between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the number of texts authored by Jesuits, vs. a threefold increase for both Franciscans and Dominicans (which are the second- and third-largest represented religious orders). The practice of collecting new books written by members of religious orders declined in the eighteenth century, but Jesuits still dominated, and declined by less than other orders: they saw a 44% increase, vs. only a 14% increase among Dominican authors and a 25% increase among Franciscans. In other words, as Jesuit librarianship developed, a bias toward collecting Jesuit authors was clearly a part of it.27 For the subset of books associated with institutions in North, Central, and Eastern Europe, of all the books authored by members of religious orders (65% of the titles), Jesuits accounted for over 88%, versus 3.8% for Dominicans and 2.6% for Franciscans.
The language issue, while related to the subject issue, is more complex. The sample college inventories, serving a population which spoke English, Dutch, French, and Italian, held a significant number of texts in those languages, accounting for close to 14% of the total books. Questions about the language of instruction in European institutions loom generally large in discussions of early Jesuit teaching. Allan Farrell noted that in the 1599 or final version of the Ratio, ‘the amount of vernacular usage allowed both teacher and pupil was very considerable,’ referencing several of the Rules for teachers of grammar, including a directive to have students translate dictation in other tongues to Latin, and permission to use the students’ native languages in written composition.28 Although the ‘Common Rules for the Teachers of the Lower Classes’ states that ‘pupils should never be permitted to use their mother tongue in anything connected with class. … Hence also the teacher must always speak Latin,’ it also permitted the teacher to interpret reading in vernacular languages, provided that he ‘keep to the Latin word order as much as he can. In this way the ears of his pupils become accustomed to the Latin rhythm’.29 The books which were to be read at table were also in Latin.
Representation of selected religious orders among authors in the inventories and the EJLPP
Seventy-two percent of the titles in the six inventories discussed here were in Latin, with another combined 6% in Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew. The remaining 22% were in Dutch, English, French, Italian, and Spanish, with more than 6% in English, nearly 6% in French, less than 2% each in Dutch and in Italian, and less than 1% in Spanish. The distribution of these languages is not particularly surprising: all of the books in Dutch and 98% of those in French are from libraries from the Low Countries, and 100% of those written in English were held in colleges serving the English or Irish missions. A total of about 13% of the titles are in the everyday languages of the people in the region housing the colleges or professed house (or, in the case of English, the language of the region to which the students were destined to serve).
With respect to the EJLPP, the most common language for the texts was Latin, accounting for over 79% of the North/Central/Eastern European group and 72% of the whole. The other texts were largely in European languages, heavily favouring Western European tongues.30 In the North/Central/Eastern European libraries, I have found only two books printed in Eastern European languages, both in Polish. In the complete data set, a total of four books were in the Eastern European languages: one each in Albanian and Croatian, and the other two in Polish. The Albanian-language text was held by the Professed House of Rome, and the one in Croatian belonged to a college in Paris. The inventories under consideration had no titles in Eastern European languages, and a tiny percentage, less than 0.25%, in German. Even noting that the vast majority of texts in these institutions were in Latin, this is a striking finding, at odds with southwestern European foundations. In particular, the dearth of texts in the languages spoken in Bohemia, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Croatia, et cetera, among surviving volumes is noteworthy. Five hundred thirty-nine books in my data set were held by institutions in Bohemia, the vast majority of those by the college in Prague. Not one of them is in a Slavic language, and only eight of them were authored by someone from Bohemia. Indeed, only 5% of the texts in the North/Central/Eastern Europe grouping were written by authors of the same nationality as the institution, and the vast majority of those are from the Holy Roman Empire. As for books in non-European languages, I have found one each in Persian and Japanese, two each in Arabic and Chinese, and twenty-four in Hebrew. Among these, the one Chinese-language book, and ten of the Hebrew books, were kept in Northern, Central, or Eastern European libraries.
Geography is important to the language issue in other ways as well. The presence of many authors who would have called themselves ‘Romans’ in the classical period muddies identification of place within the Italian peninsula as a whole, but also throughout the Europe and the non-European Mediterranean. In states like the Low Countries and Spain, multiple languages were spoken. Many small, independent states of the Italian peninsula shared a common vernacular; in the viceroyalties of Naples and Sicily, Spanish as well as the local dialects of Italian were spoken. These facts considerably complicate the task of determining whether or not local collection preferences can be discerned. Over 13% of the texts in the full database were written by authors of the same nationality as the institution, with a significant bias toward far western and southern Europe. Approximately 18% of the books associated with French libraries were in the French language, and approximately 32% of those from Spanish libraries were in Spanish. By contrast, about 9.6% of the books in libraries in the Holy Roman Empire were in German. In the inventories, nearly 63% of the books in the English and Irish missions were written in English, as compared to less than 2% of the books in Dutch-speaking Low Countries institutions which were in Dutch. In the available inventories from the Low Countries and the English and Irish mission colleges, more than 16% of the titles were certainly written by authors from those regions; the vast majority of those (over 96%, accounting for almost 15.9% of the whole) were from the Low Countries. That relationship between author and place is expressed more weakly in the surviving books in the EJLPP: 13% of the texts were written by authors from the same geographical area as the institution, with Spain accounting for more than 30% of those, followed by France (24%), the Holy Roman Empire (20%), the Low Countries (nearly 5%), and Bohemia (less than 2%). In the North/Central/Eastern Europe subset, 11% of the texts were written by authors from the regions where the colleges were housed. Most of those (79%) were in the Holy Roman Empire, with the Low Countries trailing considerably (16%).
4 Conclusions
This examination of the rich heritage of Jesuit librarianship uses two complimentary approaches: identification of titles from manuscript or published inventories, and seeking out physical or electronic copies of actual texts with verifiable Jesuit provenance. I have attempted to understand libraries in the colleges in North, Central, and Eastern Europe by investigating the appearance of given subjects, the presence of members of religious orders among the authors of texts, and the use of vernacular languages. As I continue to add to the database, I expect to see my observations shift and become more nuanced, but several tentative conclusions are suggested by the data. First, vernacular texts were widely available in Jesuit college and residence libraries. While Latin dominated, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Jesuits and their students had access to books in most of the European languages, but southern and western European languages were far easier to find, even in Eastern Europe. Second, the availability of texts in the English language, and focused on English martyrdom, at the continental Irish and English colleges shows a strong commitment to those missions which is not mirrored by texts focusing on the missions in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Among the many issues related to this point, only vanishingly small percentages of books were available in languages from outside Europe. Third, while we associate Jesuit education with good training in the humanities, logic, preaching, and missionary activities, based on the advice in the Constitutions regarding the subjects which should be taught in the colleges, texts on these subjects were far eclipsed in their libraries by scholastic theology, moral theology, and scripture commentary. Fourth, some of our assumptions are quite close to the mark: Jesuit institutions favoured Jesuit-authored texts, and they collected large numbers of books related to casuistry and controversial theology. Further exploration of the vast intellectual and material heritage of the Society of Jesus, in particular with reference to the European missions and Eastern Europe, will surely lead scholars onto firmer ground in understanding the importance of early modern information management.
Little Free Library (LFL), which calls itself ‘the world’s largest book-sharing movement,’ is a US-based nonprofit serving more than ninety countries around the world, www.littlefree library.org/ (last accessed 17 March 2022). Each community, business, or individual which hosts a LFL provides a box, shelf, or basket for books, so that members of that community may borrow, lend, or donate books. That means that the collections are eclectic, but the LFL has designed programs to promote access to neighbourhoods which are underserved by traditional library systems and to support the reading and distribution of books which amplify diverse topics and authors. Detractors have argued that it can harm public library systems, disproportionately serves higher-income areas, and serves as a dumping ground for unwanted and out of date books (cf. Kriston Capps, ‘Against Little Free Libraries,’ Bloomberg CityLab, 3 May 2017, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-03/down-with-little-free-library-book-exchanges [last accessed 17 March 2022]). Nevertheless, LFL has garnered multiple awards, including a 2013 Innovations in Reading Prize from the (US) National Book Foundation – www.nationalbook.org/programs/the-innovations-in-reading-prize-archive/ (last accessed, 20 March 2022) – and the Library of Congress’s Best Practices Award of 2015 for Creating a Community of Literacy – www.loc.gov/item/prn-15-210/library-of-congress-literacy-awards-publishes-2015-best-practices/2015-12-01/ (last accessed 20 March 2022). ‘Learning Commons,’ first embraced by academic libraries, is a term adopted by an increasing number of school and public libraries, to emphasize that they not only provide books and spaces to read them, but also furnish access to digital media, equipment for creating content, areas for remote and face to face education, and places to hold meetings, study groups, or other collaborative efforts. Cf. Steven Overly, ‘The Download: Digital Commons, the Library of the Future?’, The Washington Post, 21 July 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-download-digital-commons-the-library-of-the-future/2013/07/19/e62bfde0-effe-11e2-a1f9-ea873b7e0424_story.html (last accessed 17 March 2022); Marlene Asselin and Ray Doiron (eds.), Linking Literacy and Libraries in Global Communities (London: Routledge, 2016); and Dan Kennedy, ‘In Session: York High School Abandons Traditional Library with Renovated “Learning Commons,”’ 13newsnow.com, 20 January 2020, www.13newsnow.com/article/news/education/york-high-school-learning-commons-library/291-cf3fb020-e28a -4e50-9148-bc8a119fd25f (last accessed 17 April 2022).
Recent publications in the Open Access resource Jesuit Historiography Online www.dx.doi.org/10.1163/2468-7723-jho-all (last accessed 17 March 2022), help introduce Anglophone readers to the history of Jesuits in Bohemia, Croatia, Hungary, and Poland-Lithuania. These include Krzysztof Fordoński and Piotr Urbański, ‘Jesuit Culture in Poland and Lithuania, 1564–1773’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 5:3 (2018), pp. 341–351; Andrea Mariani, ‘The Contribution of the Society of Jesus to the Political Culture of Lithuanian Elites’, Open Political Science, 2 (2019), pp. 153–173, here p. 154. Mariani’s observations on the importance of Justus Lipsius, the myth of Venice, and contemporary Polish authors on the subject of politics in the Jesuit libraries of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, provide much food for thought and have aided my efforts to expand the Eastern European representation in the EJLPP. In addition, Paul Shore’s ‘Fragmentum Annuarium Collegii Societatis Iesu Claudiopolitani: The Account of a Jesuit Mission in Transylvania, 1659–1662’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 8:1 (2006), pp. 83–106, seeks to address the unfortunately minor presence of Hungarian historiography in the Anglophone scholarly community focusing on the Society of Jesus prior to the opening up of Eastern Europe in 1989.
For further information, including photographs and biographies of the contributors, see www.jesuit-libraries.com/about-us (last accessed, 17 March 2022).
The Constitutions frequently mention books, and the virtues and dangers associated with reading. Part IV, Chapter 14, ‘The Books to be Lectured on’, has the most specific statements on books, but only identifies a handful of texts by name: the Old and New Testaments, the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1096–1160), and the works of Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and Aristotle (384–22 BCE) are required, whereas Terence (c.195/85–c.159 BCE) is cautioned against. George E. Ganss, et al. (transl. and ed.), The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and Their Complementary Norms: A Complete English Translation of the Official Latin Texts (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), paragraphs 464–470, pp. 184–185.
The Rule for the Roman College, in Monumenta Ignatiana series tertia, Constitutiones et Regulae Societatis Iesu, Regulae Societatis Iesu (1540–1556) (Rome: Monumenta historica Societatis Iesu, 1948), IV, Mon. 63, ‘Regulae Collegii Romani (1550)’, paragraph 11, pp. 270–71. Jerome Nadal, Epistolae P. Hieronymi Nadal Societatis Jesu ab anno 1546 ad 1577 (Madrid: Lopez de Horno, 1905), 4, Monumenta Provincia Rhenanae, 54, pp. 330–331. Translation by Brendan Connolly, ‘The Roots of Jesuit Librarianship: 1540–1599’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1955), p. 91. See also Brendan Connolly, ‘Jesuit Library Beginnings’, The Library Quarterly, 30:4 (1960), pp. 243–252.
Regulae communes (Rome: Collegio Societatis Iesu, 1567): ‘Regulae Praefecti Bibliothecae’. USTC 832410. The book is not paginated.
Connolly, ‘Roots of Jesuit Librarianship’, p. 74; his translation of the ‘Regulae Praefecti Bibliothecae’.
Cf. Institutum Societatis Iesu. Regulae, Ratio Studiorum, Ordinationes, Instructiones, Industriae, Exercitia, Directorium (3 vols., Florence: Typographia SS. Conceptione, 1893), 3, pp. 120–131, here pp. 121–122; Regula Societatis Iesu (Tarragona: Philip Mey, 1583), pp. 140–180, book list on pp. 143–145; Regula Societatis Iesu (Rome: Collegium Societatis Iesu, 1590), USTC 832498, pp. 97–117, book list on p. 99.
See Luigi Balsamo, Antonio Possevino S.I. bibliografo della Controriforma e diffusione della sua opera in area anglicana (Florence: Olschki, 2006); Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer, ‘Antonio Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta: Knowledge as a Weapon’, in Manfred Hinz et al. (eds.), I gesuiti e la Ratio studiorum (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004), pp. 315–155; Alberto Biondo, ‘La Bibliotheca selecta di Antonio Possevino: Un progetto di egemonia culturale’, in Gian Paolo Brizzi (ed.), La ‘Ratio studiorum’: Modelli culturali e pratiche educative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento, (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1981), pp. 43–75; Grant Boswell, ‘Letter Writing among the Jesuits: Antonio Possevino’s Advice in the Bibliotheca Selecta (1593)’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 66 (2003), pp. 247–262; and Dirk Werle, Copia librorum. Problemgeschichte imaginierter Bibliotheken 1580–1630 (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2007).
See Kathleen M. Comerford, ‘Jesuit Tuscan Libraries of the 1560s and 1570s: Bibliotheca not-yet Selecta’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 81, 162 (2013), pp. 515–531.
Klára Jakó, ‘Az elsö kolozvári egyetemi konyvtar törtenete és állományák rekonstruckcioja 1579–1604’ (Reconstruction of the History and Collection of the First University Library of Kolozsvár [Cluj], 1579–1604), in Erdélyi Könyvesházak I, Adattár XVI–XVII. századi szellemi mozgalmaink történetéhez (Szeged: Scriptum, 1991). I am grateful to Éva Szeli of Arizona State University for her help in translating this title. Another example is Pierre Guérin, Les Jésuites du Collège Wallon de Liège durant l’ancien régime (Liège: Société des bibliophiles liégeois, 1999), 1, an attempt to reconstruct the library of the Walloon Jesuit College in Liège, based on book lists from 1678, the mid-eighteenth century, and 1773, with a nineteenth-century catalogue of manuscripts, and a receipt for books (containing only the ‘noms des acheteurs, les prix payés pour les different lots, mais non pas les titres de ces libres’ [‘names of the buyers, the prices paid for the different lots, but not the titles of the books’]) sold in late February, 1779. See also Andrea Mariani, ‘L’insegnamento delle scienze nelle scuole dei Gesuiti polacchi. Fra popolarizzazione e applicazione pratiche (1740–1773)’, History of Education & Children’s Literature, 7:1 (2012), pp. 319–339.
The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599, transl. Allan P. Farrell (Washington, DC: Conference of Major Superiors of Jesuits, 1970), ‘Rules of the Provincial’, paragraph 33, p. 11; ‘Rules of the Rector’, paragraphs 16–17, p. 17.
Jean Garnier, Systema bibliothecae Collegii Parisiensis Societatis Jesu (Paris: Sebastianus Mabre-Carmoisy, 1678); Justus Lipsius, De bibliothecis syntagma (Antwerp: Jan Moretus, 1602), USTC 1003389, see Thomas Hendrickson, Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism: The De bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
For a deeper exploration of Jesuit librarianship as it developed over the centuries, see my Jesuit Libraries (Leiden: Brill, 2023), doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004517370 (last accessed 18 April 2023).
Archive sources: Rijksarchief Antwerpen, Archief Nederduitse Jezuïetenprovincie (Flandro Belgica) [hereafter RAANJ(FB)] 3278: Bibliotheekcatalogus [Library catalogue] (s.d.); RAANJ(FB) 2045, Stukken betreffende een proces voor de Geheime Raad tussen Joachim Trognesius, boekdrukker in Antwerpen, aanlegger, en de provincie, verweerder, over het drukken van boeken voor de Sociëteit (1613) [Documents concerning a trial before the Secret Council between Joachim Trognesius, book printer in Antwerp, petitioner, and the province, defendant, about the printing of books for the Society (1613)]; RAANJ(FB) 2046: Catalogus van de boeken over architectuur, achtergelaten door P. Gulielmus Cornelii, overleden te Leuven in 1660 [Catalogue of the books on architecture left by P. Willem Cornelius, d. Leuven 1660], which contains books on many non-architectural subjects; and Rikjsarchief Leuven, Jezuïeten College Leuven, 20. Catalogus van de schenkingen aan de bibliotheek, 1635 (Catalogue of donations to the library). Print sources: Delft Catalogue of 1614 (RAANJ[FB] 3002, fols. 2v–4v), transcribed by Paul Begheyn in ‘The Oldest Jesuit Library Catalogue in the Dutch Republic: The Book Collection at Delft (1614)’, in Pedro F. Campa and Peter M. Daly (eds.), Emblematic Images and Religious Texts: Studies in Honor of G. Richard Dimmler, S.J. (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2010), pp. 71–88; Saint Omer catalogue, printed by Willem (Wim) Schrickx, in ‘An Early Seventeenth Century Catalogue of Books from the English Jesuit Mission in Saint-Omer’, Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique/Archief-en bibliotheekwezen in België, 46 (1975), pp. 592–618; Irish College in Rome inventory, in Hugh Fenning, ‘Some Irish Donors of Books to the Irish College in Rome, 1611–1678’, in Dáire Keough and Albert McDonnell (eds.), The Irish College, Rome, and Its World (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), pp. 45–63. I have transcribed all of these and made them available at www.jesuit-libraries.com/the-database (last accessed, 17 March 2022).
I have seen physical copies of 258 books (from Emory, Princeton, and Yale Universities, and the Folger Shakespeare Library), and have consulted photographs of title pages of another 107 at the CRAI Biblioteca de Fons Antic, University of Barcelona. Michael Davies-Powell of the University of Kent and the Middling Culture Project contributed six titles from the British Library. I began the EJLPP by identifying other surviving copies of the Yale and Princeton books, and continue this practice whenever I find a book with Jesuit provenance; I have since progressed to seeking out extant copies of books identified in the manuscript inventories. Since then, I have mined printed articles and books for authors and titles. As an example, I have used Mariani’s ‘Contribution of the Society of Jesus to the Political Culture of Lithuanian Elites’; cf. p. 159, nn. 45, 52, 53, 54, and 56. I have also come across several titles in bookseller and auction catalogues, but stopped searching those fairly early on, because of the likelihood that I would be unable to return to the source to find any further information I might want. I have retained those in the database; they account for less than 2.5% of the total.
I have been unable to identify with certainty the institutions for fifty-eight of the books, accounting for less than 3% of the total.
Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, Part IV, Chapter 5, paragraph 351, p. 188.
Cf. Joseph S. Freedman, ‘Classifications of Philosophy, the Sciences, and the Arts in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe’, The Modern Schoolman, 72 (1994), pp. 37–65, here 40–43, 47, and 49, explaining the differing understandings of philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including consideration of the placement of ethics, family life, religious life, history, grammar, lexicography, and oratory; and Jill Kraye, ‘Conceptions of Moral Philosophy’, in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.), Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (2 vols., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2, pp. 1279–1316, here 1281, 1298. I have attempted to be as broad as possible in my definitions, because (for example) theological and philosophical disciplines changed across the centuries, and because some works could clearly be used for multiple purposes. See also Comerford, ‘Jesuit Tuscan Libraries of the 1560s and 1570s’.
For example, the exhaustive Books in Cambridge Inventories demonstrates that some private bookowners separated ‘humanities’ into different subjects (most often poetry and history), whereas others did not, and that both ‘philosophy’ and ‘theology’ were inclusive categories, which bookowning individuals did not divide into rational, theoretical, speculative, ascetical, or other subcategories. E.S. Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods. The Inventories (2 vols., London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1.
On this, see Kathleen M. Comerford, ‘Did the Jesuits Introduce “Global Studies”?’ in David Whitford and Amy Leonard (eds.), Embodiment, Identity, and Gender in the Early Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 197–209.
Cf. Andes Prieto, Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011), pp. 109–10; Micah True, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), pp. 58–60, 63; Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Harvard University Press, 2007), passim; Takao Abé, The Jesuit Mission to New France: A New Interpretation in the Light of the Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2011), passim; and Qiong Zhang, Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 299.
I made references to this correlation in several conference papers in 2014 (including at a conference celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the now-defunct Heythrop College of the University of London, which traced its ancestry to Liège/Saint Omer) and 2015, and at greater length in Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532–1621 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 197–207.
On the dispersion of Jesuits, see Gian Paolo Brizzi, ‘Educare il Principe, formare le élites: i gesuiti e Ranuccio I Farnese’, in Gian Paolo Brizzi et al. (eds.), Università, Principe, Gesuiti: La politica farnesiana dell’istruzione a Parma e Piacenza (1545–1622) (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), pp. 133–211, here 157–168; Nigel Griffin, ‘“Virtue versus Letters”: The Society of Jesus 1550–1580 and the Export of an Idea’, in European University Institute Working Paper, 95 (Fiesole: EUI, 1984), pp. 22–26; A. Lynn Martin, ‘Jesuits and Their Families: The Experience in Sixteenth Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 13 (1982), pp. 3–24, here 5–6, and Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, pp. 183–188.
Maximilian von Habsburg has observed that ‘the Jesuits became specialists in “cultural translation”, forming a vital part of their conversion strategy’, using the English mission as an example. Of the ‘devotional works targeting English markets’, 50% were written in Spanish, Italian, French and Latin; the remainder were in English. Maximilian von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi, 1425–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 182.
Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, transl. William J. Young (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1994), p. 217: in the 1581 list ‘no spiritual writings published by Jesuits appear, except for the letters from the missions and the life of Ignatius’.
This is clearly reflected in the pre-suppression libraries, yet Congregation 21 (1829), Decree 26 (17 and 18 in the manuscript version) hints at trouble: ‘present circumstances do not so much require that Ours should be encouraged to write as that the compulsion which some experience to write and to publish their works should be reined in and held in check’, John W. Padberg et al. (eds.), For Matters of Greater Moment: The First Thirty Jesuit General Congregations. A Brief History and a Translation of the Decrees (St. Louis, Mo: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1994), p. 443. A reference to Congregation 11 (1651), Decree 18 (32 in the manuscript version), follows, reminding members of the ‘severe and definite penalties’ for publishing without permission, including ‘privation of office, loss of active and passive voice, disqualifications from any honors and prelacies within the Society, even corporal punishment – all these to be decreed in proportion to the gravity of the transgression, as judged by the Superior’, For Matters of Greater Moment, p. 325.
Allan Farrell, The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education: Development and Scope of the Ratio Studiorum (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1938), p. 349.
E.g., Rule 30, Farrell, Jesuit Ratio studiorum, pp. 64 and 67.
In order of representation, these were Italian, French, German, Spanish, English, and Dutch. Rarely, one can find texts in Asian, African, or American languages; on this, see Comerford, ‘Did the Jesuits Introduce “Global Studies”?’