The Jesuit In The Family

In The Jesuit Mind, A. Lynn Martin delves into the mental worlds of the Jesuits involved in the Society of Jesus's French mission during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Drawing upon the extensive correspondence between Jesuits in France and the Society's generals in Rome, Martin seeks to determine what was distinctive about the Jesuit mentality in early modem France. The first part of the book focuses on these Jesuits as a value-forming elite. In it Martin covers such topics as their strategy for the salvation and perfection of souls in France, their difficulties in dealing with the ideals established by Ignatius Loyola, their educational program, their hostility toward Protestants, and their reaction to the increasingly centralized Jesuit bureaucracy. The author then goes on in the book's second part to look at the Jesuits as members of French society. Here we see these men coping with the perennial problems of shelter, death, and disease, and intimately involved with their own families amid the dangers of plague, famine, and religious war.

In "The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews" the author explains how Christians with Jewish family backgrounds went within less than forty years from having a leading role in the foundation of the Society of Jesus to being prohibited from membership in it. The author works at the intersection to two important historical topics, each of which attracts considerable scholarly attention but that have never received sustained and careful attention together, namely, the early modern histories of the Jesuit order and of Iberian purity of blood concerns. An analysis of the pro- and anti-converso texts in this book (both in terms of what they are claiming and what their limits are) advance our understanding of early modern, institutional Catholicism at the intersection of early modern religious reform and the new racism developing in Spain and spreading outwards.