Introduction

The definitive history of the Society of Jesus in German-speaking lands was written by Bernhard Duhr, S.J., (1852–1930). His magisterial work Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge, published between 1907 and 1928, remains the first point of reference for topics related to German Jesuits through the eighteenth century. In terms of scope and detail, the study is remarkable. The work spans four volumes—two of which are divided into two hefty parts—and fills over four thousand pages. With systematic organization, it moves methodically by century (sixteenth century, first half of the seventeenth century, second half of the seventeenth century, eighteenth century) examining in turn the Jesuits in Germany and Austria both geographically (divided by provinces) and by their ministries. No one has tried to reduplicate the product that Duhr dedicated decades to creating.¹ Although Duhr himself has received comparatively little historiographical or bibliographical attention, Duhr’s work continues to be cited widely today.² Duhr, though, has by no means offered the last word on the history of pre-suppression German Jesuits.

In this essay, I emphasize the importance of two eras of scholarship that remain vitally essential to the research of the present-day. The first is the era of scholarship from the late nineteenth century and first few decades of the twentieth century which was in the midst of its vibrancy roughly one hundred years ago. Duhr’s work is characteristic of the achievements of this era when scholarship, especially in the German language, pioneered the type of detailed archival investigation that remains a defining feature of the historical profession. Studies from these decades created multi-volume compilations of primary sources together in one place for the first time and created historical narratives based on modern methods of archival research and a methodology that prized the ideal of objectivity. The projects from this era marked the beginning of a new stage in studies on the Jesuits in German lands prior to the 1773 suppression of the order. Since the first decades of the twentieth century, new studies have drawn from shared access to records that were not widely available before this era. Although they do not comprise a first generation of scholarship on the Jesuits, those monumental works from this era around the turn of the twentieth century constitute a foundational era in Jesuit scholarship. Modern academic study of the Jesuits which has proliferated throughout the last century has been built on the base of this era.³

The second era that I will emphasize in the historiography of pre-suppression German Jesuits emerged about three decades ago.⁴ A number of factors combined at this time to give scholarship on early modern and Enlightenment-era Jesuits the essential features that remain today. At the risk of oversimplification, one could say that about thirty years ago the history of the Jesuits became interesting to more people than it had been before. One of the most significant shifts in Jesuit studies was the expansion of scholars writing about Jesuits to include those besides Jesuits themselves. Whereas mostly Jesuits wrote the history of Jesuits before the mid-twentieth century, the current era of Jesuit historiography includes robust contributions from scholars outside the Society. The broadening of contributors to the historiography of the Jesuits coincides with a broadening of questions posed to the historical records left by the Jesuits. Scholars now study the Jesuits for reasons besides the older motivations of an interest in one’s own institution or the history of ecclesiastical organizations more broadly.

The so-called “cultural turn” in the historical profession as a whole since the 1980s, especially in North America, corresponds with the emergence of new research interests and questions that eschew institutional histories and top-down approaches.⁵ Common features of historical scholarship since the cultural turn—an abundance of microhistories, discipline-specific methodologies, skepticism towards metanarratives, unease about claims to objectivity—have fragmented the scholarship about pre-suppression German Jesuits. New scholars from outside the order as well as leading Jesuit historians have recently lent new perspectives to topics previously in the domain of church history. No longer an autonomous and unified subject of study in itself, the Society of Jesus in German lands has become an access point for countless places throughout the early modern world. The records created and preserved by German Jesuits from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries offer one-of-a-kind perspectives on a host of subjects that scholars are seeking to uncover, including popular religious practice and beliefs, education, the arts, gender roles, activities of women, intercultural contact, globalization, and many more.

A close examination of the field of scholarship on German Jesuits before 1773 reveals two key features of the field. On the one hand, there is a unifying influence caused by the long tradition of scholarship specifically about—and often produced by—Jesuits, including many of the standard works from roughly a century ago that remain the foundation of modern scholarship. On the other hand, there exists a fracturing influence stemming from a recent proliferation of methodological approaches to Jesuit records. This new diversity reflects the broadening of academic disciplines in which early modern Jesuits have become relevant. Despite seemingly pushing the field separate directions, however, these two features are actually best understood as overlapping with each other. A contemporary study utilizing German Jesuit history to engage the most current research debates in a given field still makes use of the accrued scholarship on Jesuits from generations past. In this way, the scholarship of the past, including its focus on the very real religious characteristics of the pre-suppression German Jesuits, becomes relevant to new historical inquiries inspired by developments within various academic fields in the past few decades. The work of Louis Châtellier offers but one prominent example of how the history of Jesuit ministries has been employed as part of the story of a societal development bigger than the history of the Jesuits themselves.⁶ The following essay overviews the plurality of ways in which, during the past thirty years, the history of the Society in German lands has become a part of other disparate histories.

The structure of the essay reflects the diverse nature of the body of literature on pre-suppression Jesuits in German-speaking lands and is thus divided thematically.⁷ Like much else about German Jesuits before the suppression, archival sources are also highly decentralized.⁸ The well-known Jesuit archival collections in Rome and even German archives of the various Jesuit provinces in German-speaking lands often do not hold a comprehensive collection of archival materials for the subjects discussed below. While it would be impossible to list all the archives and other institutions that house records of the Jesuits in Germany, in the text and footnotes below I attempt to guide the reader to relevant primary sources. The ever-growing amount of primary-source material from early modern German-speaking lands available online may someday create a single digital location for accessing German Jesuit sources, but for the time being these records remain scattered.⁹

The Early German Jesuits and the Development of the Order in German Lands

Jesuits arrived in German lands almost simultaneously with the founding of the Society of Jesus by Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556) in 1540. The first to arrive were Pierre Favre (1506–46), Nicolás Bobadilla (1511–90), and Claude Le Jay (c.1504–52).¹⁰ All three of these men were among the nine companions of Ignatius who assembled in Paris between 1528 and 1536.¹¹ Within early communities of Jesuits that these men established in Germany, Peter Canisius (1521–97) is the single figure who has had the most substantial historical legacy.¹² Canisius was born the son of a wealthy burgomaster in Nijmegen in the Netherlands in 1521, in the archdiocese of Cologne.¹³ He studied at the University of Cologne, earning a bachelor degree and licentiate of liberal arts there. He made his first contact with the Jesuits in Cologne, and in 1543 he visited Pierre Favre in Mainz. On May 8 of that year, his twenty-second birthday, he joined the Society of Jesus in Mainz.¹⁴ Over the next fifty-four years until his death in 1597, Canisius engaged in a host of activities throughout many cities and played a major role in establishing Jesuit institutions in the Rhineland, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, and Switzerland. In his first two decades in the Society of Jesus, Canisius worked in Cologne (1543), Ingolstadt (1549), Vienna (1552), Prague (1555), Worms (1557), Straubing (1558), Augsburg (1559), and Innsbruck (1563).¹⁵ He was also the first head of the Upper German province from 1556 to 1569.

Memorialized as the second apostle to Germany by those who celebrate his efforts to re-Catholicize regions drifting to the Protestant Reformation, Canisius was beatified in 1864 and canonized in 1925. Both dates correspond to important stages in the historiography of Canisius.¹⁶ In 1865, the Jesuit Florian Rieß (1823–82) wrote a biography of Canisius to commemorate his beatification.¹⁷ His canonization sparked a flood of literature after 1925 including the standard biography of Canisius written by James Brodrick, S.J., (1891–1972) and published in 1935.¹⁸ In terms of total publications about individual people from 1900 to 1980, Canisius was the most written about German Jesuit, ahead of Karl Rahner, S.J., (1904–84), and the fifth most written about person of all Jesuits.¹⁹ Scholarship about Canisius throughout the twentieth century has highlighted his multiple endeavors and accomplishments, often with an emphasis on his role as a leading figure in the re-Catholicization of much of the Holy Roman Empire and his pioneering work in establishing a foothold for the Jesuits to build from in German lands. These themes have continued to inspire scholarship about Canisius in the last few decades.²⁰ The scholarship on Canisius exemplifies the continued attention placed on the spiritual and pastoral ministries of Jesuits in recent histories. As the work of Hilmar M. Pabel shows, even the polemical aspects of Canisius’s ministry are still emphasized in the most recent scholarship.²¹ The significance of this investigation is no longer to champion the cause of Canisius, but rather to understand the religious world, in which he lived.

The foundation for the secondary scholarship on Canisius in the past century or so is the monumental work of Otto Braunsberger, S.J. (1850–1926). Braunsberger spent roughly four decades compiling and editing Canisius’s writings and correspondences, ultimately producing the eight-volume Beati Petri Canisii Societatis Iesu epistulae et acta, which was printed between 1896 and 1923.²² Published over the same decades as Duhr’s history of the Jesuits in German-speaking lands, Braunsberger’s work similarly remains the most comprehensive work on its given subject. His final product consists of approximately eight thousand pages with over 2,400 letters and over 1,600 other documents.²³ Braunsberger also published four other works on Canisius in his lifetime. His extensive archival work included personal trips and collaborations via correspondence that involved gathering sources from three hundred different libraries and archives.²⁴ Although carried out in a scope rarely attempted in later decades, Braunsberger’s work—like others produced in German scholarship during these same years—utilized the methodologies of archival research that largely remain standard in the historical profession. The number of archives that Braunsberger and his collaborators consulted also underscores the fractured nature of records about the early Jesuits in German lands. Since Braunsberger, others have carried on the work of publishing Canisius’s writings. Friedrich Streicher, S.J. (1881–1965) published critical editions of Canisius’s catechism and meditations from the 1930s to the 1960s.²⁵ Most recently, Paul Begheyn, S.J., has continued the task of publishing Canisius’s writings.²⁶

Canisius and the other early Jesuits in German-speaking lands established colleges in cities that would become centers of their activities over the next centuries. Of particular significance are the colleges founded in Cologne (1544), Vienna (1552), and Ingolstadt (1556). In the sixteenth century, these cities were vital to the first Jesuit provinces in German-speaking lands: the Upper and Lower German provinces founded in 1556. In the 1560s, the Rhine province emerged from the Lower German province and an Austrian province had split from the Upper German province.²⁷ In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit provinces further expanded by dividing the Rhine province in 1626 into the Lower Rhine province²⁸ and the Upper Rhine province centered in Mainz. In the early 1620s, the Austrian province was divided into the Austrian province and the Bohemian province centered in Prague.²⁹ The devastation of wars in these regions starting with the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648 reduced the number of Jesuits in these areas in the second half of the seventeenth century.³⁰ In the eighteenth century, however, the Jesuits added the Silesian province including the cities of Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland) and Braunsberg (today Braniewo, Poland).³¹ A short-lived Bavarian province was founded from the Upper German province just a few years before the suppression of 1773. The Jesuits also carried out missions to northern regions of German lands, and expanded the Austrian province to the borders of Habsburg lands in the east.³² From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, therefore, the Jesuits spread to and resided in an eclectic mix of cities in regions comprising the generically designated “German lands.” Unique local contexts and influences shaped the experiences of “German Jesuits.”

Controversies

Controversy plagued early modern German Jesuits and has continued to be a theme in accounts and scholarship about the order in Germany ever since. German lands were fraught with religious struggles between Protestants and those loyal to the Roman church. Confessional polemics and Jesuit efforts on behalf of the Counter-Reformation framed representations of the Jesuits from both sides of the conflict. The Jesuits in Germany actively participated in and contributed to the polemical struggles of the day through in-person ministries as well as through printed records that remain to this day.³³ Characteristics of the Jesuit order, such as its institutional structure and relationship to papal authority, were scrutinized and vilified. Besides its ecclesiastical features, the Jesuits’ connections to temporal powers were viewed with suspicion by contemporaries and continue to generate discussion among scholars. The image of the Society of Jesus as a controversial organization was codified by the global suppression of the order in 1773. That event, while in itself immensely controversial, has ever since framed the memory of the pre-suppression order.

Controversies about the Jesuits in Germany may be longstanding, but they are in no way static. Treatments of individual points of controversy have been subject to historiographical trends. The Jesuits played an active and varied role in combating Protestantism throughout the German lands. How this effort is framed establishes the parameters for how the Jesuits’ activities can be understood. On the one hand, Jesuit efforts at promoting the Roman Catholic Church against Protestant forms of Christianity have been seen as a missionary effort akin to that of overseas missions.³⁴ The notion of converting Protestants was taken seriously by Jesuits who even restricted the access of German Jesuit missionaries outside of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to focus on evangelization at home.³⁵ On the other hand, Jesuits have been depicted as those who suppressed the spreading of the true Gospel, believed to be contained in the teachings of Luther and subsequent Protestants.³⁶ In this light, the Jesuits have been cast as militant and a type of mercenary force for the papacy.³⁷ As scholarship on the Jesuits has become less polemical in the past few decades, newer studies have attempted to bypass the gridlock that these two oppositional starting points imposed. In these studies, the Jesuits in German-speaking lands become part of a more diverse and complex early modern Catholicism.³⁸

This shift happened not only because of the broadening of scholars interested in Jesuit history to include those not primarily focused on religion, but also because of developments within the field of religious history. The wide adoption of the confessionalization thesis in the 1980s, largely developed in the work of Ernst Walter Zeeden, Wolfgang Reinhard, and Heinz Schilling, moved scholarship beyond framing Catholicism and Protestantism as two opposites.³⁹ The idea of seeing Catholicism and its Protestant counterparts as different “confessions” on a parallel historical trajectory has made a huge impact on the field in the past three decades.⁴⁰ The title of John W. O’Malley’s 2013 collection of essays, Saints or Devils Incarnate?, reflects the framework that dominated scholarship on Jesuits from the sixteenth century through most of the twentieth century. The confessionalization thesis, at least in part, created an escape from having to choose whether the Jesuits were completely good or completely evil. More than just a moral verdict was at stake for historical interpretation. In the tradition of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) and Max Weber (1864–1920), along with being evil the Catholic side was medieval and anti-modern, again the complete opposite of how Protestants were portrayed. Such a framework precluded recognition of the intellectual and social contributions that Jesuits made to European society at the dawn of the modern age.⁴¹ Marc R. Forster has moved this scholarly conversation even further. With attention to early modern German Catholicism at the popular level, he has nuanced the narrative of a top-down implementation of confessionalization. His studies show a more dynamic interplay between the church reform promoted by Jesuits and medieval Catholicism in the early modern era.⁴²

Certain ideas that people held regarding the Jesuits gave life to the accusations that they were malicious. One of these was that the Jesuits exerted influence over political decisions. Jesuits did have connections to powerful political figures in the polities where they had bases throughout the Holy Roman Empire. During the Thirty Years’ War critics were very wary of Jesuit relationships with Wittelsbach Duke Maximilian of Bavaria (r.1598–1651) and Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand who governed Inner Austria from Graz from 1595 to 1619 and became Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (r.1619–37).⁴³ The idea that Jesuits were in some fashion pulling the strings behind major political operations was not unique to German lands, but drew from a conception of a centralized enterprise manipulating the whole world from Rome. This idea has been convincingly challenged in recent studies that have highlighted the complexities of Jesuit political thought in this era and the plurality of views and political policies within the order. While often maligned, the Jesuits actually made key contributions to early modern political thought that was widely adopted if unacknowledged.⁴⁴ The possibility for this scenario existed in part because contrary to popular slander, the Society of Jesus was not a “monolithic organization” uniformly pursuing a grand plan for European or global politics.⁴⁵ Moreover, a conspiratorial emphasis on Jesuits and tyrannicide or a view of them as solely advocating papal authority above temporal governments overlooks the actual roles Jesuits played in early modern German politics. Jesuits in various courts throughout German lands had local concerns and spiritual aims.

The global suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV is the controversial event that had the most outstanding impact on the Jesuits. Recent studies have grappled with the question of why the suppression occurred.⁴⁶ Simple explanations have become unconvincing as scholars engage the complex confluence of global politics that factored in the suppression. Jesuit missionaries had been removed from the Portuguese Empire in 1759, France in 1764, and the Spanish Empire in 1767 with suspicions about the political intentions of Jesuits being a factor. Because the overseas empires did not include German polities, German Jesuits do not always receive a great deal of mention in discussion of the global suppression. Many German Jesuits were directly affected by these developments, however, because the German provinces supplied a high percentage of the Jesuit missionaries in the eighteenth century who were removed from their overseas mission fields.⁴⁷ Of course, German Jesuits at home in Europe also experienced the heightened tensions faced by the order in local contexts as well.⁴⁸ The plight of German Jesuits in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century leading up to the suppression is also a complex story that continues to intrigue researchers.⁴⁹

One of the most fascinating pieces of this puzzle is the figure of Maria Theresa of Austria (1717–80).⁵⁰ A strong ally of the Jesuits, Maria Theresa eventually ceased her support of the order, removing one of the last obstacles before the 1773 global suppression.⁵¹ Recent scholarship has shown that the Jesuits’ loss of political backing in Austria, as elsewhere, belies a simple explanation and involved ambivalent attitudes towards the Jesuits. Derek Beales has extensively studied the Holy Roman Empire and Austrian monarchy, with special attention to Maria Theresa’s son, coregent, and heir Joseph II (1741–90).⁵² Beales shows that Joseph II was no enemy of the Jesuits and that in the eighteenth century Jesuits remained part of a Catholic effort that inspired reforms in the Church.⁵³ The Society of Jesus was a creative force in society and not merely an obstacle to change and reform.

One final controversial subject that is not usually mentioned by scholars in the same context as the other, more notorious, debates treated thus far is Jesuit involvement in witch trials. The European persecution of witches was particularly acute in German lands and especially Catholic regions. Bernhard Duhr addressed the legacy of Jesuit participation in these persecutions at four separate points in his history of the Jesuits in Germany, recording that Jesuits both favored and opposed the existing forms of violence against accused witches.⁵⁴ Duhr’s approach of acknowledging Jesuit support for witch trials but also reflecting upon those Jesuits who criticized them has continued to the present day. Especially in German scholarship, Friedrich Spee, S.J. (1591–1635), one of the first Europeans to develop systematic critiques of the use of torture in witch trials with his Cautio criminalis, is the subject of great attention.⁵⁵ A number of publications about Spee in German emerged around 1985, the 350th anniversary of his death.⁵⁶ Since 1994, the Spee-Jahrbuch has been published—bi-annually since 2009—with a mixture of scholarly articles and reports aimed at a general readership. The scholarly and popular interest in Spee in German literature has not been matched in any large measure in English scholarship.⁵⁷ Even the topic of witch trials, therefore, fits a larger trend in the recent scholarship of disinterest in making moral judgements about the Jesuits in favor of exploring their setting and the complexities of their times.

Education and Learning

German Jesuits had a profound impact on education in Europe during the late Renaissance and Enlightenment. They shaped the institutions of learning in German lands and made vital contributions to the academic disciplines of mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy that set the course for progress in the so-called Scientific Revolution.⁵⁸ As this history is acknowledged, a substantial portion of literature about Jesuits in German lands is focused on themes related to proto-scientific or scientific developments. Long excluded from a Burckhardtian narrative of European progress, Jesuit thinkers are now increasingly recognized as important actors in many of the multiple processes that increased knowledge of the world. This shift has coincided with historiographical trends in the field of history of science.⁵⁹ As in many other fields that have moved away from all-encompassing, often teleological meta-narratives to explain changes in the past, “the days of the large scale historical account of the Scientific Revolution seem to be almost gone.”⁶⁰ Rather than the history of science, scholars have begun to acknowledge a plurality of sciences in Europe before 1800.⁶¹ The Jesuits had several points of connection to these sciences.

Jesuit schools, colleges, and universities in German lands formed the foundation for the great influence the Jesuits had on European education from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.⁶² The Jesuits rapidly founded colleges and gained important positions in existing universities from their first decades in German lands.⁶³ In the early seventeenth century, the Jesuits had ten colleges in the Lower Rhine province, twelve colleges or academies in the Upper Rhine province, twenty colleges in the Upper German province and twenty-three colleges in the Austrian province.⁶⁴ These academic institutions connected the Jesuits to all levels of society in their various communities. Records from the Jesuit school at Munich reveal that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over eighty percent of the school’s students came from non-noble or civic office holding families.⁶⁵ As the case of the University of Ingolstadt shows, however, Jesuits also utilized connections to elites in local cities to bolster their own presence in academic institutions.⁶⁶ The institutional records of Jesuit schools, colleges, universities, therefore, are a wealth of information about local early modern towns and cities, and they have been mined accordingly.⁶⁷

One of the brightest stars to emerge from the German Jesuit education system in the seventeenth century was the polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80).⁶⁸ Kircher was born in Geisa near Fulda, attended the Jesuit school in Fulda, and studied in Paderborn, Cologne, and Koblenz before eventually relocating to Rome for the rest of his career.⁶⁹ The abundance of scholarly attention paid to Kircher in the last two decades, a reversal from earlier inattention, is representative of the way the Jesuits have been newly recognized for their contributions to science.⁷⁰ Kircher’s wide range of studies included many pursuits that did not fit neatly in a teleological narrative of steady progress towards modern science. Recent scholarship in the history of science has challenged such positivist narratives and has given attention to subjects such as early modern alchemy which has previously been seen as pseudo-science. Similarly, the new scholarship on Kircher recognizes his work as an important part of the intellectual world which produced long celebrated advances and not just a historical dead end.

German Jesuits’ roles in institutions of higher learning gave them influence on important developments within academic fields. Older narratives often depicted Jesuits, and Catholics as a whole, as traditional and retrospective during the advances of the Scientific Revolution.⁷¹ Many studies have recently shown that Jesuits were actually very active participants in the shifts that enabled new paradigms for understanding the natural world.⁷² This awareness includes a more nuanced understanding of the relationship of Jesuit thought to Aristotelian frameworks that were gradually overturned in the late Renaissance. German Jesuits made key contributions to transformations within the field of natural philosophy, specifically the acceptance of a mathematical basis for explaining nature, that was a central factor in the landmark shift that eventually overthrew two thousand years of accepted knowledge about the world based on Aristotle. The Jesuits actively helped shape the course of this shift in academic disciplines and not just by resisting change.⁷³ The Jesuit universities in German lands became European centers for advances in mathematics.⁷⁴ Students and scholars from these locations made leading discoveries in various fields.⁷⁵ At the dawn of the Enlightenment, German Jesuits continued to remain engaged with the leading thinkers in Europe as is shown by the correspondences between Barthélémy de Bosses (1663–1738) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).⁷⁶

In the decades before the suppression of the order in 1773 at the height of the Enlightenment, the Jesuits in Germany came under siege intellectually from many different directions; even during these years, however, the Jesuits were hardly on the sidelines as the world passed them by.⁷⁷ Voltaire’s unflattering depiction of a Jesuit in Candide exemplifies a certain dichotomy between Enlightenment secularists and scorned Catholics.⁷⁸ In German lands, the actual situation was far more complex.⁷⁹ Even as they lost the stronghold they established in earlier centuries at educational institutions throughout Catholic German lands, the Jesuits remained an influential force in the age of Enlightenment. As a whole, scholarly recognition of Jesuit contributions to science—with central figures and institutions in German lands—has been a key theme in the major shifts within the field of the history of science. In the field of Jesuit studies, it has brought a burst of new energy and perspectives to topics that had been viewed more parochially in the past.

The Arts

The task of concisely summarizing the German Jesuits’ contributions to the arts is uniquely challenging given the varied media the Jesuits employed and the rich scholarly treatment of their contributions. Although the artistic endeavors of the Jesuits in German lands largely defy generalization, Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s 2002 work, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany, offers a good introduction to the range of Jesuit art, including architecture, and some key themes in recent analysis of it.⁸⁰ Chipps Smith draws attention to the connections between German Jesuit art and the Jesuits’ missionary objectives in German lands. Art, therefore, is yet another example of how the pastoral aims of Jesuits guided their activities in Germany. Chipps Smith’s work on Jesuit art dovetails nicely with a more general historiographical trend in North American scholarship focusing on how experiences with art were shared from different perspectives.⁸¹ Ignatian spirituality lends itself very well to this interest because of its focus on sensual experience.⁸² Furthermore, the Jesuits intentional aim of provoking a response from audiences through their art also fits harmoniously with current scholarly interest in better understanding the interplay between artists, art, and audiences.

It did not take the scholarly trends of just the past decades, however, to spark research on the art of German Jesuits. Already in the era of monumental works on Jesuit history in the early twentieth century, scholars had taken up the topic of German Jesuit art. In 1908, Joseph Braun, S.J. (1857–1947) published a volume on the church architecture of the Jesuits in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁸³ In 1923, Willi Flemming (1888–1980) published his work Geschichte des Jesuitentheaters in den Landen deutscher Zunge and in 1930 Johannes Müller, S.J., published the similarly entitled Das Jesuitendrama in den Ländern deutscher Zunge: Vom Anfang (1555) bis zum Hochbarock (1665), both evoking their contemporary Bernhard Duhr with their titles.⁸⁴ German Jesuit theater, music, poetry, and literature have especially garnered the attention of scholars.

Jesuit theater was an expansive enterprise with rich details that have been analyzed in depth by scholars.⁸⁵ Fidel Rädle has recently published one overview of Jesuit theater in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.⁸⁶ Rädle traces historic predecessors and origins of Jesuit theater, the ancient sources that inspired the text of the plays, their numerous genres, political employments of the plays, as well as geographic networks of Jesuits behind the plays. He also explains that the plays had several functions but were most of all intended to “lead both to the reinforcement and psychological comfort of all individuals and to a solidarity of Catholic feeling in the community.”⁸⁷ The conscious awareness of these communal aims make the plays a valuable source for investigating Jesuit goals and techniques as well as how Jesuits interacted with all levels of society in their localities. The most famous individual figure in Jesuit theater is playwright Jacob Bidermann (1578–1649).⁸⁸ His first play, Cenodoxus, was performed in the early seventeenth century and was published in 1666.⁸⁹ Recent analysis of it has examined how the various elements of the text, production of the play, and experience of the audience combined to foster an experience of Ignatian spirituality.⁹⁰ Following an increased interest in global connections and the formation of ideas about distant global regions, scholars have recently looked at German theater for its representations of other parts of the world.⁹¹

German Jesuits’ contributions to the fields of music, poetry, and literature have also received extensive treatment in older and new studies. Alexander J. Fisher has recently published an extensive work on Jesuit music in Bavaria that even puts music in the context of a rich theoretical analysis of the various sounds that comprised the “soundscapes” of the region.⁹² Fisher’s work is part of a burgeoning field of scholarship on music related to the work of the Society of Jesus in German lands and the Jesuits globally.⁹³ Poetry and other literature from the Jesuits in German lands has similarly been examined by scholars as a source for understanding Jesuit thought and strategies for interacting with others.⁹⁴ Use of “emblems” is one feature of Jesuit literature in particular that has attracted the continued attention of scholars interested in how Jesuits incorporated diverse influences into their writings for often pluralistic communities.⁹⁵ Altogether, the arts remain one of the most vibrant topics of study about Jesuits in German lands.

Missions and Global Networks

An interest in understanding globalization has given rise to attention to the new connections that were forged throughout the world following extended contact between people from the eastern and western hemispheres after 1492. This interest is a component of the influential historiographical development in scholarship over the past twenty years sometimes called the global turn.⁹⁶ It is not a coincidence that the Jesuit order with its extensive records and global reach from the mid-sixteenth century captured the attention of scholars who investigate early modern global connections. This attention has reshaped perspectives on the unity and characteristics of the global Roman Catholic Church in the early modern era, especially in regards to the position of the Jesuits with Rome.⁹⁷ A recognition that empires—Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English—were not the only entities through which to frame a perspective of overseas contact in the early modern world opens up the possibility for looking to other sources such as the Jesuits. The perspective of missionaries has added new textures to our understanding of global interactions in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Narratives of imperial history have also been altered. One instance of this shift that is slowly unfolding is the inclusion of Germans as part of the history of global exploration and expansion by Europeans. Recent scholarly attention to German Jesuit missionaries overseas, then, sits at the intersection of several new trends in global histories.

There are early studies that chronicle German Jesuit involvement in overseas missions, but they did not become part of the main narratives of imperialism.⁹⁸ Today, the activities of German Jesuits are seen in a more comprehensive light. In 2014, Ronnie Po-chia Hsia noted that the eighteenth century was “the era of the German missionary.”⁹⁹ One reason for this was that already by the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries German Jesuits made up over one-third of all Jesuits and therefore had the resources in terms of people to send missionaries abroad.¹⁰⁰ It has only been in the 1990s and 2000s, however, that historians have painstakingly compiled records of which German Jesuits served as overseas missionaries and chronicled their biographies including as many details as possible about where they lived in German lands and abroad.¹⁰¹ This extensive knowledge of German involvement in overseas missions has begun to result in more precise historical accounts of non-European spaces, such as Bernd Hausberger’s history that highlights that role of German Jesuits on the colonial frontiers of Spanish Mexico in the eighteenth century.¹⁰²

Another important result of this scholarship on German Jesuit connections overseas is what it has revealed about religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices of Jesuits in Germany.¹⁰³ German Jesuits at home and the families of Jesuits corresponded with their colleagues, sons, and brothers who were overseas.¹⁰⁴ Jesuit missionary Franz Inama (1719–82) once shared a recipe from colonial Mexico for making tortillas with his sister, a Carmelite in Cologne.¹⁰⁵ The possibility of Carmelite nuns enjoying tortillas in a Cologne convent is an example of one small, but tangible way in which Jesuit missionaries influenced their homelands from abroad.  Religious piety among German Jesuits was deeply shaped by information from around the world, as Ulrike Strasser has recently detailed in her study on the influence of the images of missionaries such as Francis Xavier on German Jesuits’ own self-fashioning.¹⁰⁶

On a broader level, Jesuits contributed to and sometimes fell victim to the position of German lands as a center of printing in Europe. Many global information networks passed through German lands.¹⁰⁷ On the one hand, accounts from Jesuits about distant lands were popular reading for Germans who were interested in hearing about new peoples and places. On the other hand, critical and sometimes fantastical accounts of Jesuit activities abroad also swirled in print at levels that the Jesuits themselves could not keep pace.¹⁰⁸ These records provide information to today’s scholars for assessing the merits of Jesuit missionary activities—a controversial issue that still generates interest and debate.¹⁰⁹ One of the most remarkable German publications comprising information from Jesuits around the world was Jesuit Joseph Stöcklein’s (1676–1733) Neue Welt-Bott (New World messenger) which was printed from 1726 to 1761 and consisted of 812 texts in forty parts and five volumes.¹¹⁰ Not only was this publication read widely by German Catholics and Protestants alike, it was also the product of local and long-distance German networks with connections to the cities of Graz and Augsburg, the German publishing giant Veith, and, of course, the German Jesuits’ own global network of correspondences. It is one prominent example of the German printed records by and about Jesuits that bear witness to the active role that Jesuits played in the formation of European ideas about the world and the information networks which shaped them.

Conclusion

Studies of Jesuits in German-speaking lands are varied and cover a range of topics. This reflects the reality of the Jesuits’ multifarious activities in this region of Europe. They touched many aspects of society including politics, religion, and art and made records of nearly all their actions. The fractured state of scholarship about German Jesuits today is also a result of very well developed individual scholarly fields of research. Many specialized and detailed areas of study are illuminated by attention to Jesuit sources. This necessitates that proper analysis of the Jesuit source or historical figure in question satisfactorily address an existing body of specialized secondary literature. This takes expertise and space, in the form of pages, in a work. This fracturing has also been intensified in the past few decades by the expansion of topics seen as legitimate subjects for historical inquiry and new topics of interest such as globalization, print culture, and information networks. In these areas, the Jesuits have correctly been identified as being well-suited for study. Finally, this all becomes possible also as a result of the shift away from studies that were mostly by or against Jesuits. There is now a broader range of questions posed to the historical records left by the Jesuits. With such a fractured body of literature, is it even possible to speak of a single field of scholarship about pre-suppression German Jesuits today?

Certainly, it is. The unity of scholarship on German Jesuit history is being preserved by projects such as Jesuit Historiography Online and the bibliographical projects mentioned above which employ great energy to systematize the proliferation of studies that examine Jesuits. These projects are not merely manipulations from outside—an effort to domesticate unruly terrain or to mold a formless mass into something recognizable. They are a continuation of institutional record keeping and self-reporting that has been a central feature of the Society of Jesus for centuries. Even though interests in Jesuit history have diversified, the new studies that result from those interests are accumulated into a uniquely well-established web of information about the Society of Jesus as an institution. Without being rigid or limiting, well-developed structures are in place, which make it possible to connect new scholarship, as vast as it is, to existing narratives about and knowledge of Jesuit history.

At an even more fundamental level, the new scholarship on sixteenth- to eighteenth-century German Jesuits binds itself together as it is produced. Here again I call attention to the overlapping relationship between the studies and narratives produced around a century ago and the scholarship of the past few decades. Although the nationalism and religious dogmatism that often colored past scholarship has been eschewed in recent years, new research still references the data and narratives of earlier generations of scholars. The early modern Jesuits, as described by their Jesuit descendants in the early twentieth century, were spiritual men with spiritual concerns. Clossey has written of the risk of those early modern Jesuits losing their Christianity at the hands of modern scholars and becoming merely anthropologists.¹¹¹ One could replace “anthropologist” with any number of roles the Jesuits played—such as artist or natural philosopher—that attract the attention of scholars today. To lose sight of the Jesuits as priests, pastors, confessors, and missionaries would be a loss, but as Clossey’s own work excellently models, it has also been largely avoided. The scholarship of the past few decades has not ignored the existing body work on Jesuits, which emphasized spiritual aims. The reason for this is not simply that it is good practice for scholars to be well-versed in old historiography. The work from a century ago still remains relevant. The religious and institutional features of the German Jesuits—minutely detailed in those older works—have only become more important as the Jesuits are recognized as key actors in the early modern world.

The burgeoning awareness of the German Jesuits’ significance in the early modern world has triggered a sequence of compounding interest for Jesuit studies. The German Jesuits have long been recognized as important for understanding church history and the history of Catholicism. Now, they are becoming recognized as important for understanding the history of science, the history of globalization, and other important processes that developed in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The interest is compounding because rather than diminishing the importance of the Jesuits’ spiritual motivations and ecclesiastical structures, those topics now become relevant for understanding how and why the Jesuits influenced societies in the ways that they did. With thoughtful attention, nearly any feature of the early modern German Jesuits can now be linked to the important roles they played in shaping the modern world. Given the wealth of primary sources left by the order in German-speaking lands, the basis is firmly set for continued growth in the field of scholarship on pre-suppression German Jesuits.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Robert A. Maryks for attentive and generous work in his role as editor of this project. Ulrike Strasser at the University of California, San Diego kindly read a draft of this essay and offered her expert opinion. The anonymous reviewer exhibited a detailed knowledge of this field in providing very helpful editorial suggestions and useful references. I offer my appreciation to both of them, as well as to Virginia Johnston for closely reading a later draft of the essay.