Journal of Jesuit Studies 

About: Journal of Jesuit Studies is an academic journal published by Brill. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Church history & World history. It has an ISSN identifier of 2214-1324. It is also open access. Over the lifetime, 271 publications have been published receiving 403 citations.

Conflicting Visions of the Jesuit Missions to the Ottoman Empire, 1609–1628

Abstract: Beginning in 1609, as a result of the Capitulations concluded between France and the Ottoman Empire, the French Jesuits launched their missionary work in Istanbul. Protected by the French ambassador, the French Jesuits defined themselves as both French subjects and Catholic missionaries, thus experiencing in a new and complicated geopolitical context the tensions that were at the core of their order’s identity in France, as elsewhere in Europe. The intricate story of the French Jesuit mission to the Ottoman Empire is here considered through two snapshots. One focuses on the foundational period of the mission in Istanbul, roughly from 1609 to 1615. A second one deals with the temporary suspension of the Jesuits’ mission in Istanbul in 1628. These two episodes illustrate multilayered and lasting tensions between the French and the Venetians, between the hierarchy of the Greek Orthodox Church and Western missionaries, and between missionaries belonging to different Catholic orders, between the Roman church’s centralism and state-funded religious initiatives. Based on missionary and diplomatic correspondence, the article is an attempt to reconstitute the way in which multiple allegiances provided expedient tools for individual Jesuit missionaries to navigate conflicts and to assert their own understanding of their missionary vocation.

The Dispersion of Jesuit Books Printed in Japan: Trends in Bibliographical Research and in Intellectual History

Abstract: This article introduces the recent bibliographical research on Kirishitan-ban , a series of books published by the Jesuit mission press in Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Afterwards, the books were dispersed through political turmoil; some are still to be found scattered across the world. In addition, the study presents a textual comparison of some Kirishitan-ban with their European originals, in order to examine the compilation and translation policies of the Jesuits in Japan. Authors or editors sometimes manipulated or revised important sections, for instance omitting a statement on predestination or adding a discourse on the immortality of the soul, illustrating the Jesuits’ strategy of balancing the Japanese and the European-Catholic intellectual climates of their time. Analyzing both the books and their contents will contribute to the study of the globalization of Jesuit intellectual history and library research.

Early Modern Jesuit Arts and Jesuit Visual Culture: A View from the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: This stock-taking of research on the arts and visual culture of the Society of Jesus since the turn of the twenty-first century entails an assessment of the status of the big questions about the existence, nature, and purposes of the Jesuit use of things visual. It is a propitious moment to reflect on whether there have been gains for the definition of our subject from the visual turn in the humanities. Rather than surveying a wide and diffuse field of publications published in a rather short span of time, here a handful of issues are isolated that have attracted particular intensity of research or that pose significant questions for the future. These issues include much continuing research into the central regulation of and the architectural dialogue between the worldwide foundations of the Society, the widespread adoption of the Spiritual Exercises as an explanans for Jesuit pictorial cycles, and related issues around meditational images. A clear articulation is called for of the extent to which Jesuit “images” were embedded in discourses around art, or not, and the varied classes of images (propaganda, scientific, etc.) outside of the discourse of art so that we might arrive at a definition of a Jesuit visual culture.