Chapter FiFty-eight

the passion(s) oF Jesuit Latin

yasmin haskell

rejected’.2 But it is in the third volume of the Encyclopédie, under the rubric, ‘Collège’, that the sometime translator of tacitus reveals the true extent of his animus against the Latin cul-ture of the society of Jesus. D’alembert writes scathingly of the back-to-front education of the ( Jesuit) college system, bemoaning the fact that young boys were compelled to devote the best years of their lives to the mastery of Latin verse and rhetorical composition.3 they wasted their time on frivolous and pedantic tragedies and comedies, in effect learning how to talk about nothing (language) before acquir-ing, almost as an afterthought, a mere smatter-ing of something (science).4 the Jesuits’ Latin

2 Aves Frisicae (rotterdam, 1787), pp. 296-297, n. 44. heerkens is criticising the Latin of French zoologist, Mar-thurin Jacques Brisson. For further discussion of heerkens’ critique of d’alembert, with whom he had several personal encounters, see my Prescribing Ovid. The Latin Works and Networks of the Enlightened Doctor Heerkens (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), especially pp. 85-89, 148-149, 195.

3 the Jesuits quickly realised that d’alembert had his sights set on them in this article. Cf. r. grimsley, Jean d’Alembert, 1717-83 (oxford: Clarendon press, 1963), chap. 2, pp. 34ff. Cf. Luciana alocco Bianco, ‘Latin et langues vivantes dans l’Encyclopédie’, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, 20 (1996), 141-147.

4 Cf. d’alembert’s comments on renaissance and later Latinity in the ‘preliminary Discourse’: ‘Furthermore, they did not see that if there were great beauties of style in the ancients that are lost to us, for the same reason there must also be many defects in them which escape our notice and which we run the risk of copying, mistaking them for beauties. and lastly, they did not realize that the best for which one could hope from the slavish use of ancient languages would be a weirdly diverse style conglomerated from an infinite number of different ones. this compos-ite style would be correct and even admirable in the view of our moderns, but Cicero or Virgil would have found it ridiculous. in the same way we would laugh at a work in our language in which the author had collected together

Was there ever such a thing as Jesuit Latin, and if so, how and why did it die? By the mid-eighteenth century, philosophes such as Jean le rond d’alembert seem to have associated belle-tristic Latin primarily with the society of Jesus, and with a perniciously reactionary world view. Knowledge of Latin was necessary for reading the works of horace or tacitus, the port royal alumnus conceded, but original literary com-position in Latin was absurd. in the preface to the Encyclopédie, d’alembert endorsed Latin’s continued use as an international language of science and philosophy, of erudition—to which he was not in principle opposed1—, but his (disingenuous?) resignation to the fact that the old language was, for all that, on its way out, no doubt hastened its march to an early French grave. Jesuit-educated Dutch physician, gerard nicolaas heerkens (1726-1801), in his youth an acolyte of Voltaire and a frequenter of the philosophes, would scoff in the footnotes to an ornithological work: ‘that d’alembert, a man of such great judgment, licensed only the expli-cators of scientific matters to write in Latin [sc. in the preface to the Encyclopédie], but to write it in any old way—lest, that is, anyone who was going to write plainly should waste their time. But that writer will waste his time who is scarcely understood, and who is under-stood with such difficulty that he is therefore

1 see Dan edelstein, ‘humanism, l’esprit philoso-phique, and the encyclopédie’, Republics of Letters. A Jour-nal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2009) (http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/27).

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was by implication a Latin designed to control and distract, puerile and decadent.

of course, the Jesuits of the eighteenth cen-tury (and of the seventeenth, for that matter) were no scientific slouches.5 When he was on vacation from his professorial duties in logic and mathematics at the roman College, orazio Borgondio (1675-1741) composed arcadian Latin poems on mechanical motion, and claimed that, from his earliest years, mathematics, not frivo-lous pagan myth, had been his Castalian spring. Borgondio’s student and successor, roger Bos-covich (1711-1787), distinguished himself on an international stage in natural philosophy and, if not to the same degree, in Latin scientific verse, as composer of a poem on eclipses in five books (De solis et lunae defectibus, London, 1760).6 Boscovich, moreover, supplied exhaus-tive scientific annotations to the meteorologi-cal poems of another Jesuit professor of natural philosophy, Carlo noceti (1694-1741), De iride et aurora boreali carmina (rome, 1747), and to the veritably Lucretian Leviathan on newtonian physics by his compatriot, Benedict stay (1714-1801), Philosophiae recentioris libri x (rome, 1755, 1760, 1795). stay, who had begun to imper-

sentences from Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyère, and racine, quite correctly persuaded that, taken individually, each of these writers is an excellent model. such prejudice on the part of the first scholars produced in the sixteenth century a multitude of Latin poets, orators, and historians whose works, we must confess, too often draw their prin-cipal merit from a Latinity which we can hardly evaluate. some of these works can be compared to the harangues of most of our rhetoricians—they are empty, resembling bodies without substance. one would need only to put them into French, and no one would read them’ (‘prelimi-nary Discourse’, The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, transl. by richard n. schwab and Walter e. rex (ann arbor: Mpublishing, university of Michigan Library, 2009). Web. 25 March 2012. <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.083>. trans. of ‘Discourse préliminaire’, Encyclopédie ou Dic-tionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1. paris, 1751).

5 Mordechai Feingold (ed.), The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives (Dordrecht: Klu-wer academic publishers, 2003), and id. (ed.), Jesuit Sci-ence and the Republic of Letters (Mit: 2002).

6 see now Luca guzzardi’s introduction to the six-book paris edition (1779), with translation by augustin Barruel, for the edizione nazionale: http://www.edizione nazionaleboscovich.it/index.php/biblioteca-digitale/viewdownload/3-opere-a-stampa/10-volume-132.html.

sonate Lucretius already as a Jesuit high-school graduate from ragusa, in a poem on the physics of Descartes (Philosophiae versibus traditae libri vi, Venice 1747; rome, 1748), was much imitated by the Latin scientific poets of the Collegio romano. Jesuit literary historian, Juan andrés, paid him the dubious compliment of having ‘subjected poetry to all the exactness and pre-cision of mathematical demonstrations’.7 But the mathematician, d’alembert, regarded such feats of difficulté vaincue as misplaced, if not pathological.8 stay himself described a sort of inertia of the mind corresponding to the inertia of bodies, which compelled him to keep writing verses, and rendered his literary labours almost perversely pleasurable: ‘hence we do not enjoy leisure so much when devoid of activity, and respite from our labours is not always sweet; but [it is sweet] to conserve our present state, and only to do that very thing which we are doing, and to cling to the well-known, and to engage in those activities and pursuits which detain us, rather than those which, in other cir-cumstances, we would approve’ (Philosophiae recentioris vol. 1, 1755, pp. 103-104).9 this charm-ing confession of a compulsive versifier contains a wink, of course, at Lucretius’ famous late-night poetic labours (perferre laborem suadet

7 ‘gode del singolarissimo vanto d’avere assoggettata la poesia a tutta l’esatezza e precisione delle matemat-iche dimostrazioni’ (Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura, parma, 1785-1822, pp. 198f.).

8 Cf. his sarcastic comment in a letter to paolo Frisi, of Boscovich’s ‘mania’ for talking about himself, his ‘sup-posed discoveries and beautiful Latin verses’ (‘. . . la fureur qu’il a de parler sans cesse de lui, de ses prétendues découvertes, et de ses beaux vers latins, qui ne sont pour-tant, ce me semble, ni les unes ni les autres, propres à faire tomber à la renverse d’admiration’ (L. pepe, ‘Boscovich and the Mathematical historiography of his time: an unpublished Letter by d’alembert’, in R. J. Boscovich: vita e attività scientifica. His Life and Scientific Work, ed. by p. Bursill-hall (rome, 1993), 491-509, at p. 508).

9 Hinc nos ipsa juvant non tantum expertia motus / Otia, non requies semper jucunda laborum est; / At servare statum, quo tum sumus, illud & ipsum, / Quod facimus, tan-tum facere, assuetisque teneri, / Et quibus in rebus, studi-isque moramur, obire / Plus eadem, quam quae diversa in sorte probantur. For discussion of stay’s poem in its con-temporary context, see yasmin annabel haskell, Loyola’s Bees. Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (oxford: oxford university press, 2003), ch. 4, pp. 178-244 (pp. 218-219 for a translation of the longer passage from which the present one is excerpted).

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777 chapter 58 the passion(s) of jesuit latin

et inducit noctes vigilare serenas, 1.140-2), but it also reveals a psychological truth of more gen-eral application, one that goes to the heart of the Latin culture of the early modern society of Jesus, if not to the formation of an early modern Jesuit ‘mind’.

in speaking, cautiously, of a Jesuit ‘mind’, i do not wish to raise the spectre of the regicidal, Machiavellian Jesuit of the Encyclopédie,10 nor to imply that the society’s official mind was always perfectly aligned with those of its mem-bers, nor that a Jesuit mind was defined by a prescriptive table of contents, and still less that it could never be changed. But we might justifiably wonder, with d’alembert, how a lit-erary education as structured and intensive as that provided in Jesuit schools could not have produced long-term effects on adult minds and culture. For a representative sample of those minds and that culture we may turn to the pro-ceedings of the 1996 Boston conference, ‘Jesu-its: Cultures, sciences, and arts’, from which a consensus appears to have emerged that the pre-suppression Jesuits evinced an approach to contemporary european society, science, and culture, and to other cultures, that was, on the whole, creative, flexible, and dialogic.11 to my knowledge, a connection between these

10 see the caricature of the paradoxical Jesuit in the article by Jaucourt and Diderot (authorship ascribed by Jacques proust): ‘no doubt you have stopped at this point to ask how this society is sustained, despite all it has done for its own ruin; famous, despite all it has done to obliterate itself; how it has obtained the confidence of sovereigns while assassinating them, the protection of the clergy while degrading them, such great authority in the Church while filling it with troubles and perverting its morals and dogmas. the answer is that we have seen, at the same time and in the same body, reason sitting beside fanaticism, virtue beside vice, religion beside impiety, rig-orism beside laxity, science beside ignorance, the spirit of withdrawal beside the spirit of cabal and intrigue—all the contrasts reunited. only humility has ever failed to find refuge among these men’ (The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, transl. by Jason t. Kuznicki (ann arbor: Mpublishing, university of Michigan Library, 2003); http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo .did2222.0000.033 (accessed 26 March 2012). originally published as ‘Jésuite’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire rai-sonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 8:512-16 (paris, 1765)).

11 Cf. g. g. thompson, review of J. W. o’Malley a.o., The Jesuits. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, in Canadian Journal of History, 37 (2003), 412-414.

qualities and tendencies and the society’s Latin humanist education has never been proposed, but it is a hypothesis worth entertaining, i sug-gest, especially in the light of the so-called ‘cog-nitive turn’ in literary and cultural studies.12

this premium placed on creative expression in the language of a radically foreign culture was not just central to the development and expression of the early modern Jesuit ‘mind’ in literature and the arts, i suspect, but also in moral and political philosophy and the scienc-es.13 thus the character, diversity, and wide intellectual horizons of early modern Jesuit culture might be put in the context of mount-ing modern evidence of the benefits of early foreign language acquisition for attention and memory, for building metalinguistic compre-hension (the capacity to reflect on language rules, a precondition of literacy), cross-cultural competency,14 creativity, and the capacity for scientific innovation.15 the poeto-rhetorical

12 Cf. the activities of the Balzan project, ‘thinking with Literature’, led by terence Cave, at st John’s College, university of oxford: http://www.s.J.c.ox.ac.uk/3122/the-Balzan-project.html.

13 the galileo affair has undoubtedly cast a long shadow, but Jesuit science was by no means monolithic, nor typically ‘reactionary’. e.g. steven J. harris, ‘trans-posing the Merton thesis. apostolic spirituality and the establishment of the Jesuit scientific tradition’, Science in Context, 3 (1989), 29-65; Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Ma: the Mit press, 2002); id., The New Science and Jesuit Science. Seventeenth-Century Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer academic publishers, 2003), especially Feingold’s chap-ter, ‘Jesuit savants’, pp. 1-46; J. W. o’Malley, s.J., a.o. (eds.), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (toronto: toronto university press, 1999 and 2006).

14 there is no space here to discuss the distinguished achievements of Jesuit missionaries as linguists, transla-tors, and sometimes even as creative writers in the lan-guages of africa, india, the americas, and east asia. as for the influence of Latin paradigms on Jesuit visions of non-europeans, see, at least for north america: John a. gallucci, ‘Latin terms and periphrases for native ameri-cans in the Jesuit relations’, in yasmin haskell and Juanita Feros ruys (eds.), Latinity and Alterity in the Early Mod-ern Period (tempe, aZ: arizona Center for Medieval and renaissance studies; turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 259-272; and haijo Westra, ‘Les premiers déscriptions du Can-ada par le jésuite pierre Biard. Du témoignage oculaire à sa réécriture’, in ‘nova gallia: recherches sur les écrits latins de nouvelle-France’, special issue ed. by Jean-François Cottier of Tangence, 99 (2012): 9-17.

15 Kenji hakuta and ellen Bialystok, In Other Words. The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition

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Latin education of the Jesuits was designed to equip students with the tools for Catholic elo-quence, to be sure, but it also equipped them, by default, with tools for thought—for ‘inven-tion’ in all senses of the word.

of course if Jesuit Latinity had a head, it also had a heart, one that was strong enough to sus-tain, for over two centuries, a vigorous corpus of longer and shorter poems, ingenious emblems, dialogues, plays, and orations. the vastness and yet integrity of this literary organism was felt in all its parts, and triumphantly proclaimed, for example, in the preface to the Parnassus Soci-etatis Iesu (Frankfurt, 1654):

Just one Society of Jesus has substituted . . . many poets for any one that learned antiquity revered and believed divine. one Society has given to the world so many ovids, horaces, senecas, and Martials, that it would be dif-ficult to choose one from among so many to wear the crown, since all deserve it—when it was once very easy to award first place in their genre to one Virgil or Flaccus, who had no runner-up . . . i, one person, wanted to ful-fil the wishes of many; and to offer here, for sampling by individuals, whatever was sought after by many throughout the vast regions of the globe. there will be some—for i doubt there will be no-one—who will find something suspicious here: namely that in one soCiety such an abundance of that science [of poetry] may be found which was once rare throughout the entire world, and was therefore considered worthy of honour by so many Maecenases. . . .16

it is notable, moreover, that not only did this ‘one society’ of Jesus conspicuously distinguish itself for services to early modern Christian

(new york: Basic Books, 1994); penelope W. armstong and Jeny D. rogers, ‘Basic skills revisited. the effects of Foreign Language instruction on reading, Math and Language arts’, Learning Languages, (spring 1997), 20-31; Franco Fabbro, Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism. An Intro-duction (east sussex: psychology press, 1999); ellen Bia-lystok, ‘Cognitive Complexity and attentional Control in the Bilingual Mind’, Child Development. 70 (1999), 636-644; a. Mechelli a.o., ‘neurolinguistics. structural plasticity in the Bilingual Brain’, Nature, 43 (2004), 757; i. Kovelman a.o., ‘Bilingual and Monolingual Brains Compared: a Functional Magnetic resonance imaging investigation of syntactic processing and a possible “neural signature” of Bilingualism’, J Cog Neurosci, 20 (2008), 153-169.

16 My translation from p. ii of unnumbered preface (emphasis original).

Latin poetry, but that several of its most cel-ebrated writers, especially in the seventeenth century, were active across so many fields of verse and literary prose. Virgil cleaved to the hexameter, but one of his Jesuit emulators, Lau-rent Lebrun, was happy to append an Ovidius Christianus to his Virgilius Christianus (aug-mented edition, paris, 1661).17 and the alsatian horace, Jacob Balde, s.J., arguably had more in common with ovid, the restless experimenter, turning out lyric, but also satirical, elegiac, and dramatic verse. Jesuits were invariably adapt-able and prolific practitioners of the literary skills drilled into them in the classroom, not least because they, in turn, were obliged to drill these very skills into others, via the ‘labour of the schools’. all Jesuit poetry is ultimately ‘ludic’ in the twin Latin senses of ‘playful’ and ‘scholastic’.

excitingly, much of the Latin literary his-tory of the society of Jesus has yet to be writ-ten, and i cannot pretend even to adumbrate it here.18 a handful of historical Belgian, german,

17 on Lebrun’s letters from exile in the persona of nova gallia, see peter o’Brien, ‘La Franciade de Le Brun. poétique ovidienne de l’exil en nouvelle-France’, in ‘nova gallia: recherches sur les écrits latins de nouvelle-France’, special issue ed. by Jean-François Cottier, Tangence, 99 (2012), 35-60. Lebrun’s Ovidius Christianus is not to be con-fused with the Ovidius Christianus: sive B. Thomae a Kem-pis, De imitat. Christi libri 4, versu, quantum licuit, Ovidiano redditi by Johann Baptist Bebber (1734).

18 For the Jesuit rhetorical tradition in France and ger-many: Marc Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et ‘res literaria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (geneva: Droz, 1980); Barbara Bauer, Jesuitische ‘ars rhe-torica’ im Zeitalter der Glaubenskampfe (Frankfurt a. M.: peter Lang, 1986). emblem books enshrine much impor-tant Jesuit Latin poetry, e.g. herman hugo’s Pia desideria (see gabriele Dorothea rödter, “Via piae animae”, Grund-lagenuntersuchung zur emblematischen Verknüpfung von Bild und Wort in den “Pia Desideria” (1624) der Hermann Hugo S.J. (1588-1629) (Frankfurt a.M. – new york: peter Lang, 1992)) and sidron de hossche’s contributions to the Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu. on the latter, see Marc Fumaroli, ‘Baroque et classicisme. L’Imago primi saeculi Societatis Jesu et ses adversaires’, in Questionnement du baroque, ed. by a. Vermeylen ((Louvain-la-neuve – Brussels: Collège erasme, 1986), pp. 75-111. More generally on Jesuit emblematics: John Manning and Marc van Vaeck (eds.), The Jesuits and the Emblem Tradition (turnhout: Brepols, 1999); peter Maurice Daly and richard g. Dimler, The Jesuit Series (Mcgill-Queen’s press, 1997-); g. richard Dimler, Studies in the Jesuit Emblem (new york: aMs press, 2007); and id., The Jesuit Emblem: Bibliography of Second-ary Literature with Select Commentary and Descriptions

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French, and italian anthologies of Jesuit neo-Latin poetry are known to specialists,19 and some of the more distinguished talents such as Jacobus pontanus (spanmüller),20 Maciej Kazi mierz sarbiewski,21 Jacob Balde,22 Jacob

(new york: aMs press, 2005). the german-speaking lands have been the best served by scholarship on the drama, e.g. Jean-Marie Valentin, Le théâtre des Jésuites dans les pays de langue allemande, 2 vols. (stuttgart: hiersemann, 1983-1984), elida Maria szarota, Das Jesuitendrama im deutschen Sprachgebiet, 3 vols. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1979-1983). see also below, n. #.

19 e.g. of tragedy, Selectae Patrum Soc. Jesu tragoediae (2 vols.; antwerp, 1634); of epic, Parnassus Societatis Iesu (Frankfurt, 1654); of emblems (accompanied by original verse), Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis Jesu (antwerp, 1640); of speeches and poetry in various genres, J. B. Lertius (ed.), Selecta patrum Soc. Jesu orationes (genoa, 1747) and Selecta patrum Soc. Jesu carmina (genoa, 1747; 1754); of didactic poetry, pierre-Josephe thouiller d’olivet/ Fran-çois oudin, s.J. (ed.), Poemata didascalica (1749; 1813). it was a theatine, giampietro Bergantini, who planned a series of translations of Latin didactic poems by Jesuit fathers of which his edition of Francesco savastano’s Botanicorum libri iv (first published naples, 1712) was the flagship (Venice, 1749).

20 Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer, ‘Jacob pontanus s.J., ein oberdeutscher Lipsius. ein augsburger schulmann zwischen italienischer renaissancegelehrsamkeit und jesuitischer Dichtungstradition’, Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte, 47 (1984), 77-120; ead., ‘Jacob ponta-nus in augsburg. seine schülergespräche, seine poetik und sein Drama ‘opferung isaaks’’, in Jakob Bidermann und sein ‘Cenodoxus’. Der bedeutendste Dramatiker aus dem Jesuitenorden und sein erfolgreichstes Stück, ed. by helmut gier (regensburg: schnell und steiner, 2005), pp. 15-60; ead., ‘abraham, der leitende Vater. nachwirkun-gen gregors von nyssa in exegese und Dramatik (im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert)’, in Isaaks Opferung (Gen. 22) in den Kon-fessionen und Medien der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Johann anselm steiger and ulrich heinen (Berlin—new york: De gruyter, 2006), pp. 309-397; stefan tilg, ‘Der Ludus de ins-tauratione studiorum von Jakob pontanus—eine edition’, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, 8 (2006), 267-292.

21 see Casimir Britannicus. English Translations, Para-phrases, and Emulations of the Poetry of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, ed. by Krzysztof Fordoński and piotr urbán-ski. revised and expanded edition (London: the Modern humanities research association, 2010).

22 Opera poetica omnia. Neudruck der Ausgabe München 1729, 8 vols., ed. and intr. by Wilhelm Kühlmann and hermann Wiegand (Frankfurt: Keip, 1990); Claren Lutz, Wilhelm Kühlmann, Wolfgang schibel, robert seidel, and hermann Wiegand (eds.), Urania victrix. Liber I-II—Die Siegreiche Urania. Erstes und zweites Buch (Ber-lin, 2003); eckart Lefèvre (ed.), Balde und Horaz (tübingen: niemeyer, 2002) Frühe neuzeit, 85; heidrun Führer, Stu-dien zu Jacob Baldes Jephtias. Ein jesuitisches Meditation-sdrama aus der Zeit der Gegenreformation (Lund, 2003); thorsten Burkard, günter hess, Wilhelm Kühlmann and Julius oswald s.J. (eds.), Jacob Balde im kulturellen Kon-text seiner Epoche. Zur 400. Wiederkehr seines Geburt-

Bidermann,23 Jeremias Drexel,24 stefano tucci,25 niccolò giannettasio,26 and tommaso Ceva,27

stages (regensburg: schnell und steiner, 2006); and most recently, günter hess, Veronika Lukas, Wilfried stroh, and Claudia Wiener (eds.), Christus und Cupido. Embleme aus Jacob Baldes Poetenklasse von 1628 (regensburg: schnell und steiner, 2012) Jesuitica, 18. Cf. the older bib-liography on Balde in andrée thill, La lyre jésuite. Antho-logie de poèmes latins (1620-1730) (geneva: Droz, 1997), pp. 103-105, including a collection of studies by andrée thill herself: Jacob Balde. Dix ans de recherche (paris: hon-oré Champion, 1991).

23 gier (ed.), Jakob Bidermann und sein ‘Cenodoxus’.24 see most recently nicholas J. Crowe, Jeremias

Drexel’s‘Christian Zodiac’. Seventeenth-Century Publish-ing Sensation. A Critical Edition, Translated and with an Introduction & Notes (Farnham, uK and Burlington, usa: ashgate, 2013).

25 Mirella saulini, Il teatro di un gesuita siciliano. Ste-fano Tuccio S.J. (rome: Bulzoni, 2002); ead. (ed.), Padre Stefano Tuccio S.I. Un gesuita tra la Sicilia e Roma nell’epoca della controriforma; atti del Convegno di Studi, Monforte San Giorgio, 24-25 agosto 2006 (pellegrino – Monforte san giorgio: associazione Culturale noialtri, 2008); ead. (ed.), Stefano Tucci, S.J., Christus nascens; Christus patiens; Christus iudex: tragoediae (rome: institutum historicum Socie,tatis iesu, 2011).

26 Claudia schindler, ‘nicolò partenio giannettasios Nauticorum libri Viii. ein neulateinisches Lehrgedicht des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, 3 (2001), 145-176; ‘L’invenzione della realtà. alcuni brani biografici e storici nei poemi didascalici di nicolò partenio gian-nettasio (1648-1715)’, Studi umanistici piceni, 22 (2002), 245-260; ‘Vitreas Crateris ad undas. Le egloghe piscatorie di nicolò partenio giannettasio (1648-1715)’, Studi uman-istici piceni 23 (2003), 293-304; elisabeth Klecker, ‘“Liebe verleiht Flügel”. ein neulateinisches epos über die Mis-sionsreisen des heiligen Franz Xaver’, in Franz Xaver—Patron der Missionen. Festschrift zum 450. Todestag, ed. by rita haub and Julius oswald s.J. (regensburg: schnell und steiner, 2002), pp. 151-181; haskell, Loyola’s Bees, ch. 2, pp. 70-82; ead., ‘poetry or pathology? Jesuit hypochondria in early Modern naples’, Early Science and Medicine, 12 (2007), 187-213; ead., ‘Let the Mountain (Vesuvius) Come to Mahomet. the healing powers of travel, Conversa-tion, and neapolitan Simpatia in niccolo giannettasio’s Herculanean Spring (1704)’, in Neapolitan Affairs. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies, ed. by siegfried Zielinski and eckhart Furlus (Cologne: Walther König, 2011), pp. 273-290.

27 see Marco Leone, ‘Milano chiama napoli: tommaso Ceva, nicola giannettasio e il latino gesuitico tra sei e set-tecento’, in Geminae voces. Poesie in latino tra Barocco e Arcadia, ed. by Leone Marco (Lecce: Congedo, 2007), pp. 71-94; giovanna Zanlonghi, Teatri di Formazione. Actio, parola e immagine nella scena gesuitica de Sei-Settecento a Milano (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2002) La Città e lo spet-tacolo, 13, pp. 235-60; yasmin haskell, ‘sleeping with the enemy. tommaso Ceva’s use and abuse of Lucretius in the Philosophia novo-antiqua (Milan, 1704)’, in What Nature Does Not Teach. Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. by Juanita Feros ruys (turn-hout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 497-520.

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have attracted or are beginning to attract more concerted scholarly attention.28 there is a critical dearth of bilingual editions and com-mentaries of many ‘classic’ Jesuit authors that would provide a firmer basis for synoptic stud-ies of Jesuit intertextuality and style, especially across regional boundaries.29 the massive Par-nassus Societatis Jesu is a useful starting point for the exploration of Jesuit heroic verse—only the first volume was printed, and runs to 1415 tightly-printed pages in double columns30—but, outside of hungary, how many have ever perused the Analecta epica of Carolus Klein?31 even in italy, traditional disciplinary boundar-ies, if not a lingering streak of anti-clericalism, have prevented that country’s rich post-renais-sance Jesuit Latin literature from being ade-quately explored.32

it is to be hoped, moreover, that internation-ally co-ordinated efforts will be brought to bear on the fundamental question of implementa-tion and variation of the society’s humanist curriculum across different periods and prov-

28 see andrée thill (ed.), La Lyre jésuite. Anthologie de poèmes latins (1620-1730) (geneva: Droz, 1999). James J. Mertz, s.J. and John p. Murphy, s.J., with Jozef iJsewijn, Jesuit Latin Poets of the 17th and 18th Centuries: An Anthol-ogy of Neo-Latin Poets (illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci publishers, 1989) is a wider-ranging but less scholarly collection, which is aimed at the high-school student or general reader.

29 For a review of recent scholarship, see my ‘in the Vineyard of Verse: the state of scholarship on Latin poetry of the old society of Jesus’, forthcoming in Journal of Jesuit Studies, 1 (2014).

30 the remaining six volumes were scheduled to con-tain: Elegias; Lyrica. Epigrammata; Comica et Tragica; Symbolica; Sylvas, seu Miscellanea.

31 Cf. László szörényi, ‘De carminibus heroicis ovid-ium Vergiliumque imitantibus a patribus s.J. provinciae austriacae saeculis XVii-XViii scriptis’, in Acta Conventus Neolatini Amstelodamensis, ed. by pierre tuynman, ger-dien C. Kuiper and eckhard Kessler (Munich: Fink, 1979), pp. 964-75. at the time of writing the Analecta epica (1755) was not yet available online, but Klein’s two-part anthol-ogy of epigrammatic poetry from the austrian province (Vienna, prague, and targovist, 1757) may be downloaded from google books.

32 the infra-peninsular animus against ‘Jesuit’ style in sei/settecento italy and its perseveration into the twen-tieth century is tracked in Marco Leone’s Geminae Voces (n. 27).

inces.33 Maurizio Campanelli has explored the rich (and happily, published) record of the lit-erary and pedagogical activities of eighteenth- century Jesuit military historian and political theorist, guido Ferrari, whose pure Caesarean style was admired as far afield as nijmegen.34 an older collection of essays by François de Dainville, s.J., assembled by Marie-Madeleine Compère as L’Education des jésuites (xvi-xviiie siècles) (paris, 1978), is, in spite of its uni-versal title, almost exclusively concerned with French authors and institutions. given the range of aids to composition available to or produced by Jesuit educators in europe alone, from the manual of emanuel alvares through the many incarnations of the Gradus ad Par-nassum, from the school dialogues of ponta-nus, the school editions of classical authors by Joseph Jouvancy, the manuscript school plays, poetic exercises, and affixiones of so many Jesuit professors of rhetoric,35 through to the

33 For example, might there be extant, in the german-speaking lands, hungary, portugal, spain, and their former colonies, and elsewhere, unexplored manuscript materi-als to match the exercise books of parisian Jesuit school-boys studied by Marie-Madeleine Compère and Dolorès pralon-Julia (eds.), Performances scolaires de collégiens sous l’Ancien Régime. Étude de six séries d’exercises latins rédigés au college Louis-le-Grand vers 1720 (paris: publica-tions de la sorbonne, 1992)?

34 ‘settecento Latino ii’, L’Ellisse. Studi storici di let-teratura italiana, 3 (2008), 85-110. Ferrari was professor of rhetoric at the Jesuit college of Brera in Milan from 1747; as Campanelli notes, the fifth volume of his published Opera ‘contiene i testi direttamente collegati all’attività didattica, la cui lettura restituisce un quadro vivace dell’insegnamento a Brera alla vigilia della soppressione dei gesuiti e delle riforme che portarono sulla cattedra di eloquenza il parini’ (p. #). For Ferrari’s fame beyond Jesuit college walls cf. haskell, Prescribing Ovid, esp. pp. 115-16. Dutch philologist Cornelius Walraven Vonck published an edition of Ferrari’s De rebus gestis Eugenii principis a Sabaudia in bello Pannonico (‘on prince eugene of savoy’s deeds in the pannonian War’, the hague, 1749) and of his De politica arte oratio (‘oration on the political art’, nijmegen, 1750).

35 For example, the four volumes of manuscript Com-positiones rhetoricae by Jesuit dramatic theorist and play-wright, Franz Lang in the Bayerische staatsbibliothek, Clm 9242-45), contain, inter alia, his smaller school plays and exercise poems (Declamationes oratoriae, Exercita-tiones scholasticae and Carmina affixa) from the years 1678 to 1694 (Clm 9242 und 9243). a bio- and bibliographi-cal introduction is provided by thomas erlach in the ‘Bay-erisches Musiker Lexicon online’ (http://www.bmlo.lmu.

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published ‘model’ Virgilian and ovidian poems of a Jacob Masen or Laurent Lebrun, and the supplementary materials promiscuously con-sulted by zealous students,36 a more granular picture of the means by which Jesuit Latinity was acquired in diverse local contexts remains a primary scholarly desideratum.37 For Jesuit Latinity was not always and everywhere the same. internal debates flared over individual models and styles (e.g. senecan, or ‘argutial’, versus orthodox Ciceronianism38). national or local loyalties sometimes conflicted with Jesuit

de/l0001/). Cf. the author’s revised doctoral dissertation: Unterhaltung und Belehrung im Jesuitentheater um 1700: Untersuchungen zu Musik, Text und Kontext ausgewählter Stücke (essen: Verlag Die blaue eule, 2006).

36 Dainville has given an account of the private librar-ies of toulouse scholastics, registered on their entry into society, in ‘‘Librairies d’écoliers toulousains à la fin du seizième siècle’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et de Renais-sance, 9 (1947), 129-140, at pp. 132-133; reprinted in id., L’Education des jésuites (xvie-xviiie siècles, ed. by Marie-Madeleine Compère (paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1978), pp. 267-278, at pp. 271-272.

37 Jozef Kordoš brings to my attention a fascinating Vita poetica per omnes aetatum gradus deducta sive Poësis tota vitalis, docens, canens & ludens. Imbuta piis, morali-bus, historicis, poëticis & curiosis eruditionibus (‘the poetic Life, or, the Whole of Living poetry, teaching, singing, and acting. Filled with pious, Moral, historical, poetic, and Curious teachings’, tyrnau, 1693), by Jesuit-schooled pia-rist, Lucas a s. edmundo [= Mősch Lukács]. this work was published by the Jesuit university of tyrnau, but whether for use by their students and teachers, or by the piarists (who were concerned with reform of the lower and inter-mediate levels of education), is unclear. nevertheless, Kordoš relates Lukács’ work to the short historical epic, Tyrnavia nascens (tyrnau, 1706), composed for recitation at the solemn graduation of the bachelors by Jesuit pro-fessor, stephanus Csiba. see Kordoš, ‘Vita poetica. theory of Creative Writing and its practical use in Baroque neo-Latin poetry’, in Pietas non sola Romana. Studia memoriae Stephani Borzsák dedicata, ed. by a. Czeglédy a.o. (Buda-pest, 2010), pp. 570-579; cf. id. (ed.), Štefan Čiba: Zrod Trnavy/stephanus Csiba: Tyrnavia nascens (tyrnau: Filo-zofická fakulta trnavskej univerzity, 2011) (in Latin and slovenian).

38 see e.g. Manfred hinz, ‘agudeza e progymnasmata’, in I Gesuiti e la Ratio Studiorum, ed. by Manfred hinz, roberto righi, and Danilo Zardin (rome: Bulzoni, 2004), pp. 293-314. on the stylus concisus in Jesuit emblems, see ‘richard Dimler, ‘imitatio, inventio and Jesuit emblem theory’, European Iconography East and West. Selected Papers of the Szeged International ConferenceJune 9-12, 1993, ed. by geörgy e. szóny (Leiden: Brill, 1996) symbola et emblemata, 7, pp. 209-222. the stakes were high when it came to the defence of Cicero. see ch. 3 of robert alek-sander Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits. The Influence of the Liberal Arts on the Adoption of Moral Probabilism

ones, as when italian and Latin poet, giambat-tista roberti, s.J., sneered at the ‘inferior’ Latin-ity of the american brethren who fetched up in italy after the suppression of the society in spanish america in 1767.39

hearts on Fire: the engine of ‘aemulatio’

Wanting to be better, best—it all started at school.40 Jesuit Latin humanist education flour-ished from the middle of the sixteenth century until the suppression of the order in 1773 (and to some extent thereafter, where Jesuits con-tinued to teach and publish).41 While a cen-tral educational policy based on the modus parisiensis was laid down for all in the Ratio stu-diorum of 1599,42 prescribing the order of stud-

(aldershot: ashgate; rome: institutum historicum soci-etatis iesu, 2008), pp. 83-105.

39 on this affair, see most recently andrew Laird, ‘patri-otism and the rise of Latin in eighteenth-Century new spain. Disputes of the new World and the Jesuit construc-tion of a Mexican legacy’, in Renaessance Forum, 8 (2012), 231-261. giants of Mexican Jesuit Latinity rafael Landívar, Francisco Xavier alegre, and Diego José abad merit more space than can be devoted to them in this chapter. see Laird in this volume, and his The Epic of America. An Intro-duction to Rafael Landivar and the Rusticatio Mexicana (London: Duckworth, 2006).

40 an excellent account of the growth of the schools, which were almost an afterthought in ignatius’s original conception of the society but destined to be its crowning glory (over 800 institutions worldwide by the time of the suppression), is given in John W. o’Malley, s.J., The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Ma – London: harvard university press, 1993), ch. 6, pp. 200-242.

41 three years after the suppression, a collection of ele-gies by raymond Cunich, giuseppe Maria Mazzolari, and Bernard Zamagna were published in innsbruck by Karl Michaeler.

42 allan p. Farrell, s.J., The Jesuit Code of Liberal Edu-cation. Development and Scope of the Ratio Studiorum (Milwaukee: Bruce publishing Company, 1938); gabriel Codina Mir, s.J., Aux sources de la pédagogie des jésuites. Le ‘modus parisiensis’ (rome: institutum historicum societatis iesu, 1968); id., ‘the Modus parisiensis’, in The Jesuit Ratio studiorum. 400th Anniversary Perspectives, ed. by Vincent J. Duminuco, s.J. (new york: Fordham uni-versity press, 2000), pp. 28-49; gian paolo Brizzi (ed.), La ratio studiorum. Modelli culturali e pratiche educative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (rome: Bulzoni, 1981). the Latin text of the Ratio is available on-line, with the english translation of Farrell, at http://www.bc.edu/sites/libraries/ratio/ratiohome.html (accessed 5 april 2012).

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ies and (Latin and greek) authors to be studied in the ‘lower’, that is, literature, classes, we must imagine that there was always some flexibility and regional variety on the ground. Virgil43 and Cicero44 were the twin peaks of poetry and prose to which, theoretically, all Jesuit Latinists should aspire; one suspects, though, that ovid may have ruled in the colleges.45 in any case, mature Jesuit writers are to be found imitat-ing, in whole or part, not just Cicero and Virgil, but horace,46 ovid, Livy, and sallust, but also

43 see my ‘practicing what they preach. Vergil and the Jesuits’, in A Companion to Vergil’s aeneid and its Tradition, ed. by Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. putnam (hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 203-16, with further bibliography.

44 see Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits; id., “Le cicéronianisme jésuite: un pont entre l’est et l’ouest,” in De l’Orient à la Huronie. Du récit de pèlerinage au texte missionnaire, ed. by guy poirier a.o. (Les presses de l’université Laval: Québec, 2011), pp. 61-74.

45 in a verse letter dated 25 august 1760, g. n. heerkens wrote to ignatius Weitenauer, professor of rhetoric at the Jesuit college in innsbruck: ‘your school introduces ovid before the others, and well teaches epic, born before the elegy, after it’ (Vestra schola ante alios Nasonem osten-dit, eposque / Ante elegos natum, post bene, credo, docet; Italicorum libri iii (groningen, 1793), p. 234). ovid was a useful model for juvenile jeux d’esprits, especially meta-morphoses, but he was also impersonated in earnest by mature Jesuit poets in so many Christian Heroides, elegies of spiritual love (notably the Lacrymi S. Petri of sidron de hossche and the Pia desideria of hermann hugo), and even in didactic poetry. For the ovidian ‘art of ’ poems on life at court, in the city, and of the householder, by the eighteenth-century roman Jesuit, Francesco grimaldi, see my Loyola’s Bees, ch. 5, pp. 268-290. grimaldi’s Oviditas is acknowledged by another professor at the roman col-lege, girolamo Lagormarsini, in a note to the catalogue of outstanding Jesuit men of letters that concludes giuseppe Maria Mazzolari’s didactic poem on electricity (Electrico-rum libri vi, rome, 1767, p. 227). in the preceding footnote, Lagomarsini relates of the Florentine Jesuit poet, Carlo roti, that ‘no sooner were [his] poems published than there were those who did not fail to put about that they were written in an ovidian style—as if, indeed, no-one could follow the ovidian plan [ratio] and imitate him cor-rectly and in a praiseworthy manner’ (ibid.). in any case, Lagomarsini points out, roti is no poeta Ovidianus, but has more of tibullus, propertius, and even Catullus about him (cf. his Carmina et Orationes, padua, 1741).

46 sarbiewski and Balde vie for the laurels of the Jesuit horace, but playwright Bernardino stefonio, for example, imitated horace’s Carmen saeculare in the chorus of his play, Flavia, set in Domitian’s rome. see salvador Barera, ‘horace’s Carmen saeculare. a Case of reception among the Jesuits’, Paideia, 66 (2011), 299-320.

Lucretius,47 Juvenal,48 Martial, seneca, Lucan, and Claudian.49 the ‘Code of studies’ stipu-lated that post-classical and Christian Latin authors were not to be taught in the classes of upper grammar, humanities and rhetoric.50 they are nevertheless recommended reading in antonio possevino’s Bibliotheca Selecta.51

47 possevino’s appraisal of Lucretius in the Biblioth-eca selecta is surprisingly positive, on both aesthetic and philosophical grounds. Certain passages, of course, must be avoided, but others, including those treating the con-tempt for death, control of the passions, the tranquillity of the soul, and the causes of diseases, were recommended. see most recently Mariantonietta paladini, Lucrezio e l’epicureismo tra Riforma e Controriforma (naples: Liguori, 2011), ch. 6, ‘La censura e i gesuiti’, pp. 176-190 (reprinted from Vichiana, 4th ser., 8. 2 (2006): 179-191).

48 For example giulio Cesare Cordara (1705-1785), writing under the pseudonymn, ‘L. sectani, Q. filius’.

49 i thank neven Jovanović for bringing to my atten-tion to the chequered spiritual and literary career of Jesuit-trained and sometime Jesuit, ignatius georgius/ ignjat Đurđević / ignazio georgi (1675-1737), whose Poetici lusus varii are available online via the ‘Croatiae auctores Latinae’ project (http://www.ffzg.unizg.hr/klafil/croala/). see e.g. XXXVii, ‘epinicium in the style of Claudian’: http://www.ffzg.unizg.hr/klafil/croala/cgi-bin/getobject .pl?c.70:37.croala.140794 (accessed 30 March 2012). Cf. Veljko gortan’s edition of the Poetici lusus varii (Zagreb: Jugoslovenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, 1956). according to Kordoš, stephanus Csiba (see above, n. #) borrows from as far afield as the Panegyricus Messallae in his Tyrnavia nascens.

50 ‘in the prelections, only the ancient classics, never the modern writers, are to be explained.’ (Ratio studiorum, ‘Common rules for the teachers of the Lower Classes’, §27, trans. Farrell). But see Brian Dunkle, s.J., ‘Classics, patristics, and the Development of the Ratio Studiorum’, in Jesuit Education and the Classics, ed. by edmund p. Cueva, shannon n. Byrne and Frederick Benda, s.J. (newcastle upon tyne: Cambridge scholars, 2009), pp. 41-54, for the latitude given to the teaching of greek patristic writers by authors of the Ratio (though greek had a distinctly subor-dinate role in the curriculum).

51 see Ch. 29 of Book 17 (‘on pagan, human, and Fabu-lous poetry and painting, united with that which is true, Decent, and sacred’): ‘List of poets who have written something either about sacred things or at least not about obscene things, or who have made the right use of poetry’ (Venice, [1593] 1603), vol. 2, pp. 520-8). For the context of possevino’s Library see albano Biondi, ‘La Bibliotheca selecta di antonio possevino. un progetto di egemonia culturale’, in La Ratio Studiorum. Modelli culturali e prat-iche educative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento, ed. by gian paolo Brizzi (rome, 1981), pp. 43-75; Luigi Bal-samo, ‘how to Doctor a Bibliography. antonio possevino’s practice’, in Church, Censorship and State in Early Modern Italy, ed. by gigliola Fragnito (Cambridge: Cambridge uni-versity press, 2001), pp. 50-78; Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer, ‘antonio possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta. Knowledge as a Weapon’, in I Gesuiti e la Ratio Studiorum, ed. by Manfred

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By the same token, possevino has reservations about adolescents reading even the sixth book of the Aeneid, although that was not officially proscribed by the Ratio studiorum (as was the fourth).52 the astonishingly voracious read-ing habits of Jesuit scholastics in toulouse, extending even to some works of erasmus (of whom ignatius was famously suspicious), have been documented by François de Dainville.53 More recently, Dirk sacré has identified post- classical writers such as Boethius from the recherché metres employed by budding poets at the Brussels college.54

Many of the literary productions of the Jesuit masters were tailor-made for consultation by aspiring student writers: rainier Carsughi’s Ars bene scribendi is an horatian/ Vidan poem expressly designed for his rhetoric students at the roman College at the turn of the eighteenth century.55 Jacob Masen’s (1606-1681) Sarcotis, an epic on the expulsion of adam and eve56 from paradise, became something of a cause celèbre in eighteenth-century england when William Lauder claimed Milton had plagiarised it in Paradise Lost. it is debatable, however, whether the poem was ever intended for wider worldly consumption. it was first printed in the second volume of Masen’s poetic textbook, Palaestra eloquentiae ligatae (Cologne, 1654-1683). the poet asks the benevolent reader to excuse in this work his liberal descriptions of the vices,

hinz, roberto righi, and Danilo Zardin (rome: Bulzoni, 2004), pp. 315-355.

52 and yet both teachers and boys will have been very familiar with the story of Dido, given frequent references to it in Jesuit poems and plays (e.g. Johan Baptist adolph’s ‘pietas in peregrinos’ (1704), in which a co-operative Dido lets aeneas go with a good grace!). it is not, moreover, expurgated in Jesuit Charles de la rue’s edition of the Aeneid for the Dauphin.

53 ‘Librairies d’écoliers toulousains . . .’ (1947/ 1978), at pp. 133-134/271-272.

54 Karel porteman (ed.), Emblematic Exhibitions of the Brussels Jesuit College (1630-1685) (turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 47-53.

55 the renaissance bishop and poet, Marco girolamo Vida (1485?-1566), who wrote didactic poems on chess and silkworms, as well as a verse De arte poetica, was a favou-rite of the Jesuits. For Carsughi’s poem, see: http://www .uni-mannheim.de/mateo/desbillons/rainer.html.

56 they are fused in the character of ‘sarcotheus’, or ‘human nature’, because, according to Masen, the epic requires a single hero.

‘so that it may better serve as a sort of garden of the many images common to poetry, that those who are still beginners in this discipline may reap pleasure and profit’ (ut plerarumque imaginum magis in Poësi communium quidam quasi hortus esset, unde rudior etiamnum aetas ad hanc disciplinam erudienda delectationem usumque caperet). it was never his aim to cre-ate the ‘perfect form of an epic poem’ (absolu-tum heroici carminis corpus). and we must not blame him for the frequency and amplification of descriptions, since he has set out ‘to make a sort of dense forest of them, but just in one work, so that they might stand out the more’ (ut congestam aliquam illarum silvam, uno tamen in opere, quo eminerent illustrius).57 Masen’s poem thus does double duty as a school of the passions and of poetry.

original Latin orations and poems by Jesuit professors were recited at the beginning of the academic year, read aloud in the refectory, and circulated among colleagues and presumably among their abler students. niccolò giannet-tasio (1648-1715), professor of mathematics at the neapolitan great College and a prolific Latin poet, presents in his ‘academic year’ (Annus eruditus, naples, 1696-1704) an idyllic vision of his down-time literary mentoring of talented tyros. in these delightful dialogues, ‘parthenius’, his friends, and students, relax in the Campanian countryside with cups of hot chocolate and dinners cooked by their Jesuit host, and discuss hot topics from vulcanology through to anthropology, zoology, and medi-cine. their conversations are interspersed with recitations from giannettasio’s latest poetic compositions, at the prompting of his affec-tionate interlocutors.58 But no doubt the most exciting, and literally spectacular, forum for

57 Cf. the publication of poetic precepts together with original poetry in e.g. Jacobus pontanus (1542-1626) in his Poeticarum institutionum libri tres. Tyrocinium poeticum (ingolstadt, 1594), and Laurent Lebrun, Eloquentia poetica sive praecepta poetica exemplis poëticis illustrata (paris, 1605).

58 see, e.g., my ‘Let the Mountain (Vesuvius) Come to Mahomet: the healing powers of travel, Conversa-tion, and neapolitan Simpatia in niccolo giannettasio’s Herculanean Spring (1704)’, in Neapolitan Affairs. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies, ed. by

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Jesuit Latinity was the school drama, written or adapted by in-house playwrights (the pro-fessor of the ‘rhetoric’ class), and performed by students in elaborate productions designed to thrill and edify actors and audience alike.59 some plays took classical and historical,60 oth-ers biblical or hagiographical,61 missionary,62 and even pedagogical,63 themes. they were often accompanied by music and sometimes dance.64 Jesuit plays were attended in droves

siegfried Zielinski and eckhart Furlus ( Cologne: Walther König, 2011), pp. 273-90.

59 For a short introduction in english, see William McCabe, An Introduction to the Jesuit Theater: A Posthu-mous Work (rome: institute of Jesuit sources, 1983). the bibliography on Jesuit drama is vast and ever-growing. see nigel griffin’s Jesuit School Drama (London: university of exeter press, 1976); Jesuit School Drama: A Checklist of Critical Literature. Supplement no. 1 (Woodbridge, suffolk: grant and Cutler, 1986); and ‘Jesuit Drama. a guide to the Literature’, in I Gesuiti e i primordi del teatro barocco in Europa, ed. Federic Doglio & Maria Chiabò (rome: Cen-tro studi sul teatro Medioevale e rinascimentale, 1995), pp. 465-496. griffin plans to make his up-dated bibliog-raphy available online, since it now runs to thousands of entries. Cf. my ‘Vineyard of Verse’, for discussion of a handful of reocent monographs and collections.

60 see, e.g., nigel griffin, ‘Plautus castigatus. the soci-ety of Jesus and classical drama’, in Doglio and Chiabò (eds.), I Gesuiti e i primordi del teatro barocco in Europa, pp. 257-286.

61 e.g. stefan tilg (ed.), Die Hl. Katharina von Alexan-dria auf der Bühne des Jesuitentheaters: Drei Innsbrucker Dramen aus den Jahren 1576, 1577 und 1606 (tübingen: Max niemeyer Verlag, 2005) Frühe neuzeit, 101.

62 see ruprecht Wimmer and adrian hsia (eds.), Mission und Theater. China und Japan auf den deutschen Bühnen der Gesellschaft Jesu (regensburg: schnell und steiner, 2005).

63 see stefan tilg, ‘Der Ludus de instauratione studio-rum von Jakob pontanus—eine edition’, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, 8 (2006), 267-292; alison saunders, ‘ “Make the pupils Do it themselves”. emblems, plays and public per-formances in French Jesuit Colleges in the seventeenth Century’, in The Jesuits and the Emblem Tradition, ed. by John Manning and Marc van Vaeck (turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 187-206. as the title of the last article shows, Jesu-its celebrated their education system in diverse genres, too, from the emblematic (e.g. unattributed poems by sidron de hossche and Jacques van de Walle in the Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu, antwerp, 1640) through to the epic. For an interesting instance of the latter, see elisabeth Klecker, ‘ “imperium Minervae”. Jesuitische Bildungspro-paganda in der Ignatias des antónio Figueira Durão’, in Imperium Minervae. Studien zur brasilianischen, iberische und mosambikanischen Literatur ed. by Dietrich Briese-meister and axel schönberger (Frankfurt: Domus editoria europaea, 2003), pp. 181-209.

64 see t. Frank Kennedy, s.J., “Jesuit opera in seventeenth-Century Vienna. patientis Christi memoria

by proud parents and citizens well into the eighteenth century.65

and of course Jesuit students, too, incessantly composed, both in class and in the extracurricu-lar literary academies.66 the Ratio even allowed for the occasional composition, by students, of a dramatic piece (an eclogue, dialogue, or play), for performance in the classroom. in this case, no costumes or sets were permitted (Ratio stu-diorum, ‘rules of the teacher of rhetoric’, §19, trans. Farrell).67 the best student composi-tions were posted on the walls of the classroom, sometimes accompanied by painted emblems,68 read out in the auditorium, or even in Church.69 the winners of the annual prize competitions for prose and verse were decided on the basis of a one-off examination; contestants could

by Johann Bernhard staudt (1654-1712)” and “appendix: patientis Christi memoria,” in o’Malley a.o. (eds.), The Jesuits II, pp. 787-801. the Latin text is by the Viennese Jesuit, Johan Baptist adolph (1657-1708). another musi-cal play by staudt-adolph, ‘Mulier Fortis’, is published in the series ‘Denkmäler der tonkunst in Österreich’ (graz: artaria and Company, 2000), vol. 152. its subject is the martyrdom of a Japanese Christian lady.

65 stefan tilg argues convincingly against a falling-off in interest in the eighteenth century, at least in the context of the innsbruck college. see ‘Die entwicklung des Jesuit-endramas vom 16. Bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. eine Fallstudie am Beispiel innsbruck’, in (eds.), Das lateinische Drama der Frühen Neuzeit. Exemplarische Einsichten in Praxis und Theorie, ed. by reinhold F. glei und robert seidel (tübingen: Max niemeyer Verlag, 2008), pp. 183-199.

66 ‘in order to give greater prominence to literary exercises, he should with the rector’s assent organize academies both in the classes of rhetoric and humanities and in the grammar classes. in these academies, in accord with the rules laid down at the end of this book, the stu-dents should meet together on stated days and take turns in giving prelections and in conducting other exercises appropriate to able students’ (Ratio studiorum, ‘rules of the prefect of Lower studies’, §34, trans. Farrell).

67 the Jesuit scholastics, as opposed to the extern stu-dents, seem to have been given further opportunities for public display

68 see Karel porteman, Dirk sacré, Marcus de schep-per, Emblematic Exhibitions (affixiones) at the Brussels Jesuit College (1630-1685). A Study of the Commemorative Manuscripts (Brussels: royal Library, 1996).

69 ‘he should also see to it that besides the pub-lic prizes other small tokens or symbols of victory (which the rector will provide) are awarded by the instructors in their own classes to spur on their pupils when they seem to merit distinction by besting a rival in competition or interpreting an entire book of an author or reciting it from memory or some similar note-worthy performance’ (Ratio studiorum, § 36).

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take their time, however, provided they did not continue composing beyond sunset! the Ratio allowed for interim, in-classroom rewards for academic achievement, but did not require that ‘all must have prizes’. the highest acco-lades will have been garnered by a very few.70 nevertheless, the Jesuit fathers seem to have understood early and well—from Quintilian, of course, but also through their personal class-room experience—the motivational power of aemulatio in boys’ learning. they divided their students into teams of ten (decuriae), ranked according to performance, and further into class camps, with monthly contests for promo-tion and demotion of ‘dictators’, ‘praetors’, and ‘tribunes’; students were assigned a personal rival whose mistakes they were encouraged to point out.71 rainier Carsughi even encour-aged his young rhetoricians to compete with their ‘masters’, where the masters in question are, ambiguously, living teachers and/ or the ancient writers: ‘it is proper to do this. one must dare! the noble passion will carry the imitator beyond the ancients: and perhaps he will defeat the masters who thinks he can defeat them! (Sic decet: audendum est: imitantem nobilis ardor /

70 this is clear from Marie-Madeleine Compère and Dolorès pralon-Julia (eds), Performances scolaires de col-légiens sous l’Ancien Régime. Étude de six séries d’exercices latins rédigés au collège Louis-le-Grand vers 1720 (paris: institut national de recherche pédagogique, 1992). some-times even the naturally gifted were resistant to the Latin yoke. such was the case of Jacques Vanière, destined to become one of the French society’s most accomplished Virgilian poets. the Ratio’s ‘rules of the prefect of Lower studies’ prescribed: ‘only for a serious reason should he exempt anyone, especially for a long time, from writing verse or learning greek’ (§31, trans. Farrell).

71 the Ratio studiorum prescribed for the teacher of humanities: ‘Class contests are to be highly valued and are to be held whenever time permits, so that honor-able rivalry which is a powerful incentive to studies may be fostered. it is customary in these contests to have the teacher ask the questions and the rivals correct the errors or to have the rivals question one another. individuals or groups from opposite camps, particularly from among the officers, may be pitted against each other, or one pupil may engage several opponents. as a rule a private should seek out a private, an officer seek out an officer. some-times, however, a private may match his skill with an offi-cer, and if he comes off the victor, he should be given the rank of the defeated officer or be awarded another prize or symbol of victory as the dignity of the class and local circumstances dictate’ (§31, trans. Farrell).

Deferat antiquos ultra: vicisse Magistros / Forsi-tan & poterit, qui vincere posse putabit; Ars bene scribendi, p. 44). While such a system might strike us today as unconstructively agonistic and élitist, it was perhaps no more so than one that mandates universal participation in school sporting teams, factions, and competitions. indeed, a spirit of sportsmanship and teamwork is evident in the collaborative volumes the boys sometimes produced (usually with substantial input from their teachers).72

the accent in Jesuit humanist education was on creative composition, not erudition or alter-tumswissenschaft or discovering an ancient author’s ‘true’ voice or meaning.73 thus Car-sughi urges his students not merely to read, but to put pen to paper: ‘What does it avail one to have enriched the mind, unless you pour forth the wealth locked in your secret breast? thus the rich miser starves and is a squalid pauper in the midst of his gold’ (Quid mentem ditasse juvat, nisi pectore clausas / Arcano defundis opes? sic dives avarus / Esurit, & misero pauper sordescit in auro; Ars bene scribendi (rome, 1709), p. 23). not a moment was to be wasted in

72 see the poems of the ‘Muses of the rhetoric [Class]’ edited by gilles-anne-Xavier de La sante, s.J. (Musae rhetorices . . ., paris 1782), including a series on children’s games, originally published as ‘on the origin of children’s games . . .’ (De origine ludorum juvenilium, argumenta poetica a P. Aegid.-An. Xaverio de la Sante, Rhetorices pro-fessore proposita, a selectis rhetoribus scripta, et ab iisdem recitata . . ., Caen, 1719). Cf. my Loyola’s Bees, appendix 2, ‘poetic sports at Louis-le-grand’, pp. 321-327.

73 thus, ‘[e]rudition should be introduced here and there as a means of stimulating intellectual interest and relaxing the mind. it should not be allowed to distract attention from concentrated study of the language’; ‘the prelection should be supplemented here and there with some points of general erudition to the extent that the passage calls for it. the teacher should concentrate all his effort on the idioms of Latin itself, the precise mean-ings of words and their origins (in which he should rely on recognized authorities, chiefly on the ancients). he should explain the value of special phrases, of variety of expression, and should encourage careful imitation of the style of the author whose work is being read . . .’ (Ratio studiorum 1599, ‘rules of the teacher of humani-ties’, §§ 1 & 5, trans. Farrell). But see andrew Laird on the extraordinary Vergilian commentary of Cerda: ‘Juan Luis De La Cerda and the predicament of Commentary’, in The Classical Commentary. Histories, Practices, Theory, ed. by Christina shuttleworth Kraus and roy K. gibson (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: Brill, 2002), pp. 171-203.

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idle reflection. While the teacher of the ‘rheto-ric’ class was correcting their written work:

the tasks of the pupils will be, for example, to imitate some passage of a poet or orator, to write a description, say, of a garden, a church, a storm, to change an expression about in vari-ous ways, to turn a greek speech into Latin or a Latin speech into greek, to turn Latin or greek verse into prose, to change one kind of poem into another, to compose epigrams, inscrip-tions, epitaphs, to cull phrases from good ora-tors or poets, both Latin and greek, to apply figures of rhetoric to some subject or other, to draw arguments for any subject from the com-monplaces of rhetoric, and other exercises of a similar nature. (Ratio studiorum, ‘rules of the teacher of rhetoric’, §5, trans. Farrell)

other Minds, other hearts

of all the metaphors (re)produced by ancient and renaissance writers to describe the varieties of literary imitation and their purpose—from the gathering of pollen by bees, filial similitude, overtaking in a race, to unreflective aping74—none, it seems to me, adequately captures the restlessness, resourcefulness, and frankly, recy-cling, typical of Jesuit imitation of the Latin clas-sics. arguably not even the Jesuits’ own poetic treatises are wholly satisfying in this respect.75 But other metaphors, more or less explicit in individual literary works, may be illuminating of their practice at a meta-poetic level: trans-vestitism, for example. it is well known that Jesuits were expert role-players, a skill they honed on the boards of their school theatre, where young boys stepped out as ancient gen-erals or as biblical heroines and anti-heroines.76

74 g. W. pigman iii, ‘Versions of imitation in the renais-sance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 1-32, remains a useful survey. pigman divides the analogies, images and metaphors . . . into three general classes, which i shall call transformative, dissimulative, and eristic’ (p. 3).

75 so while Carsughi in the passage quoted above uses the familiar ‘eristic’ metaphor of vanquishing the ancients, he does not tell us exactly how this vanquishing is to be accomplished or what it is in aid of.

76 elida M. szarota has noted that the stage directions of eighteenth-century austrian playwright, Jacob adolph, reveal a preference for casting very young actors in heroic roles, e.g. hannibal to be played by a nine-year-old (‘Der

they also learned to impersonate women from ovid. the Heroides authorized much Jesuit ele-giac poetry in the voice of complaining, yearn-ing, or consoling souls and saints, both female and male.77 in one of his Sacrarum heroidum epistolae (‘Letters of sacred heroines’, tournai, 1640),78 Jean Vincart of the gallo-Belgian prov-ince celebrated the chaste love of early Chris-tian maid, theodora, for young roman soldier, Didymus (he rescues her from the brothel to which she has been condemned for refusing marriage).79 the letter is written in the voice of theodora, who reflects on the terrors of her escape, weighed down by Didymus’s hel-met, her anxious backward glances, her joyful achievement of safety and imagined allegorical triumph over unchastity, only to learn, too late, that her gallant rescuer has been killed. Vincart alludes explicitly to Lot’s wife fleeing gomor-rha, but there are shades of Virgil’s orpheus and eurydice, if not peter’s quo vadis encounter with Christ on the road from rome. at any rate, theodora now resolves to die herself, remem-bering her emblematic dream of the previous night: a pair of swans, one of which passes safely through the reeds while its mate finds itself trapped and menaced by a cruel soldier. there is no escaping the fact that theodora’s letter rather uneasily inhabits the borders of

einfluss der Frühaufklärung auf das Jesuitendrama’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 30 (1981), 197-213, at p. 212).

77 on the genre of the heroic epistle in its Jesuit heyday see now Jost eickmeyer, Der jesuitische Heroidenbrief. Zur Christianisierung und Kontextualisierung einer antiken Gattung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Walter de gruyter, 2012). unfortunately i had not yet received a copy of this book when completing the present chapter.

78 not all Vincart’s fictional correspondents are female. his collection includes letters from Christian martyresses, to and from Jesuit saints, and from the personified society of Jesus to her sons. (the phenomenon of pious Heroides predates the foundation of the society of Jesus.)

79 pp. 89-93. perhaps it is too much of a stretch to hear an echo of the ‘lesbian’ love story of iphis and ianthe in ovid’s Metamorphoses (iphis is dressed and raised as a boy from birth; she is promised in marriage by her father to the maid, ianthe; iphis is transformed into a man at the eleventh hour). nevertheless, Vincart’s sentimental tale of symmetrical love between two young people does follow a pattern observable, e.g., in the mythological epyllia that grace several didactic poems by French Jesuits; there the (chaste) love is invariably between two males, brothers or close friends. see Loyola’s Bees, pp. 66, 135, 308.

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an ancient erotic paradigm, but the Jesuit (boy/ teenaged) reader is intended to reflect primar-ily on Christ’s death for us, and the love that he should be prepared to repay with his own martyrdom.

this almost comical episode of doubled cross-dressing, in which the poet (/reader) imagines himself alternately as timid virgin decked out in heavy armour, and as manly sol-dier paradoxically feminized, has a resonance in Jesuit poetry beyond the elegy. it parallels a subversively anti-heroic ethos that has been remarked more than once in Jesuit epic.80 in his ‘dissertation on the epic poem’, a protreptic to his own Ignatiad, Laurent Lebrun contrasted the morally imperfect aeneas with the truly ‘pious’ Loyola (who was, for that matter, also more martially accomplished than his ancient counterpart), and required of an epic hero that he be ‘endowed with admirable virtue, so that he may be set forth not just as a model of politi-cal virtue through illustrious deeds, but also inspires other mortals to emulation’ (‘Disser-tatio de epico carmine’ in Virgilius Christianus (paris, 1661), p. 173). But in order to capture an audience not just of everyman but of everyboy, and to fix its heart on deeds of spiritual hero-ism, the society’s Latin poets were not afraid to cast women as men, men as women, classical heroes as villains, and even babies as heroes.

german Jesuit playwright, Jacob Bidermann, composed in his youth a pacy and powerful epic on herod’s massacre of the innocents: Herodiados libri iii (Dillingen, 1622). there is no space here to explore the subtle interplay of dramatic and epic poetry in this work.81

80 see e.g. elisabeth Klecker, ‘ein Missionar in Japan auf den spuren des aeneas. Die Paciecis des Bartholo-maeus pereira s.J. (Coimbra, 1640)’, De litteris Neolatinis in America Meridionali, Portugallia, Hispania, Italia cul-tis, ed. by Dietrich Briesemeister and axel schönberger (Frankfurt: Valentia, 2002), pp. 99-112.

81 see günther hess, ‘Der Mord auff dem papier oder: herodes in augsburg. Über Jakob Bidermanns vergess-enes epos herodias (1601/02)’, in gier (ed.), Jakob Bider-mann und sein ‘Cenodoxus’, pp. 169-189. the following paragraph reprises material explored in greater detail in my ‘Child Murder and Child’s play. the emotions of Children in Jakob Bidermann’s epic on the Massacre of the innocents (Herodiados libri iii, 1622)’, International Journal

the proem orients us to Virgil, but it is hardly Virgil as we know him: ‘unspeakable troops, shameful wars of profane rage, illegal army destroying the sons of palestine: and cradles running with milky blood, the two years at the mother’s breast filled with howling, the Muse orders me to set forth in song’ (Infandas acies, iraeque pudenda profanae / Bella, palaestinos vetito populata nepotes / Agmine: Et undantes lactenti sanguine Cunas, / Maternique sinus ululata Biennia, cantu / Promere Musa iubet). these opening verses, with their sensational imagery and word-play (infandas is no doubt a pun on infantes), already reveal something of Bidermann’s senecan striving after maximum affective impact. But they are also telling of his baroque orientation to the ‘master’, Virgil, who is deconstructed and reconstructed almost beyond recognition. in the second book, for example, the regal cloak of herod’s infant son, ‘polites’, and his toy sceptres, seem to recall Dido’s gifts to aeneas’s son, iulus; but when herod catches sight of them, and it flashes through his paranoid mind that his own child may be the king prophesied to overthrow him, he is overcome by a rage which seems to recall aeneas’s when he catches sight of pallas’s belt on turnus. Bidermann’s relation to his liter-ary model is paralleled, if not metapoetically figured, in the insistent and brutal imagery of dissection and disaggregation of infant body parts, and of pious re-collection of those parts for burial by the boys’ grieving mothers and sib-lings. as readers, we are called to join this work of ‘recollection’ ourselves, to remember the pagan, but also to discover here a truer, epic, one that transcends the pornographic cata-logue of senseless slaughter. ultimately, the helpless innocents and their frantic, defenceless mothers are celebrated by Bidermann as more heroic than the male warriors of Virgil’s Aeneid; the ‘passion’ (in both senses of the word) of the mothers is inspired by a pure and selfless love, a piety that the reader is implicitly invited to emulate. at the same time, Bidermann’s poem

of the Classical Tradition (2013): http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12138-013-0323-x#page-1.

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exemplifies the textual violence to which Jesuit Latin poets were often prepared to subject their much-loved classical authors. this, too, was a passion of sorts, and the road to a literary resur-rection ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Further reading

Davidson, peter, and ann sweeney (eds.), The Collected Poems of S. Robert Southwell (Manchester: Carcenet press, 2007).

Klecker, elisabeth, and eva taranová, ‘Vergilrezeption als ausdruck jesuitischen gottvertrauens. Michael Denis,

extinctae societati meae’, in Aurora Musas nutrit. Die Jesuiten und die Kultur Mitteleuropas im 16.-18. Jahrhun-dert. Acta conventus Bratislavae, 25.-29. September 2007, ed. by Ladislav Kačic and svorad Zavarský (Bratislava: slavistický ústav Jána stanislava saV—teologická fakulta trnavskej univerzity, 2008), pp. 113-124.

Korenjak, Martin, Florian schaffenrath, Lav subaric, and Karlheiz töchterle (eds.), Tyrolis Latina: Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur in Tirol (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2012).

Laird, andrew, ‘enlightenment, atomism and the sub-lime. the Jesuit Latinists in Clavigero’s Circle’, in Lucre-tius in the European Enlightenment, ed. by thomas ahnert, hannah Dawson and Michael Lurie (oxford: oxford university press, forthcoming).

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