Spring 2012 (English)

Did the Jesuits ruin Poland?

THE JESUITS AND THE MAKING OF MODERNITY

IN POLAND AND EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE, 1540-1773

Fall 2011

Hybrid Online Course

The Jesuits were involved in virtually every facet of early modern culture almost around the globe, and they left behind an extensive paper trail, much of it relatively unexamined. In the past fifteen years scholarship on them before their suppression in 1773 (just after the first partition of Poland) has exploded, inaugurating a trend described as “the new historiography.” In that historiography the Jesuits have been freed from the old stereotypes of agents of the Counter Reformation and agents of Catholic Reform and moved into more expansive categories. The seminar will situate Jesuits in the traditional mode as agents of the Counter Reformation, of course, but more so in the new approaches that see them as cultural agents of modernity on a massive scale in a variety of fascinating enterprises. The Jesuits were, for instance, theologians, polemicists, political theorists, astronomers, dramatists, botanists, architects, royal court preachers, journalists, cartographers, musicians, and, above all, missionaries and schoolmasters. They are thus an ideal subject for a college course because participants have a wide range of areas of interests to choose from.

The sessions of the seminar, both face-to-face and online will be devoted for the most part to discussion of primary and secondary texts (in English and Polish). Instruction language: Polish.[1]

[1] This syllabus has borrowed some ideas from the syllabus of the history course on the Jesuit enterprises that Professor John W. O’Malley delivered at Georgetown University in 2010. Many thanks to Professor O’Malley for allowing to use his material.