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THE JESUITS AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY

IN EARLY MODERN POLAND AND EAST–CENTRAL EUROPE

“Jesuits were involved to a greater or lesser degree in almost every facet of early modern culture, both in Europe and abroad, and they left behind an extensive paper trail in print and manuscript, much of it unexamined. They were playwrights, astronomers and mathematicians, architects and painters, emblematists, creators of a world-wide network of “secondary” schools and universities, confessors to kings and spiritual directors to devout lay folk, lexicographers, designers of fortifications, polemicists, casuists (in the technical sense), pharmacists, urban planners, inspiration for women’s congregations, and experimenters in cultural adaptation, among many other enterprises. Jesuits were also the objects of scorn and hatred as virulent among Catholics as Protestants” (John W. O’Malley).

Indeed, in the regional context of early modern Polish and East-Central European politics, culture, and sciences, the contributions of the Jesuits, such as Józef Baka, Bohuslav Balbín, Franciszek Bohomolec, Andreas Jaszlinszky, Georg Joseph Kamel, Felix Kadlinský, Grzegorz Knapski, Adam František Kollár, Adam Naruszewicz, Grzegorz Piramowicz, Marcin Poczobut, Peter Pázmány, Maciej Sarbiewski, Piotr Skarga (after whom this project is named), Jan Tesánek, Stanislaw Warszewicki, Jan Pawel Woronicz, and Jakub Wujek, to name a few, testify to the multi-faceted impact the Jesuits had in the region since mid-sixteenth century, when they began founding a web of colleges of liberal arts. Many of them became leading universities and centers of international learning and scholarship.

In the past decades, scholarship on the Society of Jesus before its suppression in 1773 (just after the first partition of Poland) has exploded, inaugurating a global trend that is now being described as “the new historiography” on the Jesuits. The purpose of the Skarga Project is to re-examine Jesuit projects in early modern Poland and, more broadly, in East-Central Europe both in the traditional scholarly context that sees them as agents of the Counter Reformation as well as in newer approaches that see them as agents of modernity in a variety of enterprises. It does so from an interdisciplinary perspective, gathering international scholars of different backgrounds, who engage in offering courses, organizing colloquies and conferences, publishing, and advising students and scholars interested in this field.

Here are samples of areas of scholarly investigation and/or reinterpretation that the project aims to develop.