The Reformation Era · 1540-1650 · Rome, then the world
The Society of Jesus
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About This Movement
Ignatius of Loyola was a Basque soldier whose leg was shattered by a cannonball in 1521. During a long convalescence he read the lives of the saints, and the notes he made about his own inner experience became the Spiritual Exercises, a structured month of prayer that afterwards shaped everyone the order trained. The Society of Jesus was approved by Rome in 1540 and grew astonishingly fast. Not as a monastic order in a cloister but as a mobile body of preachers, confessors, schoolmasters and missionaries, running dozens of colleges across Europe within a generation, and some two hundred and fifty by 1600, and sending men to India, Japan, China, Brazil and Canada. By 1650 its members were at once the Catholic Church's most effective teachers and its most controversial operators, admired and resented in roughly equal measure.
Sources
- Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings (trans. Munitiz & Endean, Penguin, 1996/2004 - Reminiscences, Spiritual Diary, select letters), with the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions (primary) — The founder's own voice, and the Society's own self-design.
- The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier (trans. Costelloe, Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992) (primary) — The mission's outward reach, in its first protagonist's own letters — though reporting home to superiors carries its own genre pressures.
- The Jesuit Relations (Thwaites 73 vols; Greer's selection, Bedford, 2000) and the litterae annuae system (primary) — The Society's serialized self-reporting, written for an edifying purpose and shaped by its intended audience.
- The non-founder texture: Ratio Studiorum (1599, Eng. trans.), college records, Nadal's exhortations, Marian congregation/sodality registers (primary) — Shows the Society's ordinary, everyday footprint through schooling and lay religious associations.
- John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Harvard, 1993) (secondary) — The standard scholarly account, written to counter mythologized readings of the order's founding.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 10 'New religious orders' (Donnelly), with ch. 9 (Bireley) (reference)