In this volume the author completes his study of the period of the Counter-Reformation between the years 1537- 1622. On the basis of the original documents he reveals the underground work of the agents of the Counter-Reformation in their attempt to entice eligible students from the far North to study at Jesuit colleges in Dorpat, Vilna, Braunsberg, Prague, Graz, and Rome at the expense of the Holy See with a view to infiltrating them into the body politic of the Scandinavian kingdoms at all levels of society, viz. church, school, state bureaucracy. In his analysis the author attempts to identify the students involved and trace their degree of success.
Because of the overarching shadow of ‘the state’ in all things diplomatic, traditional diplomatic history has neglected the study of any actors in foreign relations other than state diplomats, such as ambassadors. This volume focuses on the question of how and why consuls, missionaries, and spies not formally tied to the state or a prince could play a role in premodern diplomatic relations. It highlights their multiple loyalties, their volatility, and the porous boundaries of diplomatic activity. Historical research on non-state actors – in the context of the so-called new diplomatic history – is all the more urgent as it demonstrates their undeniably significant contributions to the formation of Europe’s international relations. Contributors are: Maurits Ebben, Dante Fedele, Alan Marshall, Jacques Paviot, Felicia Roșu, Jean-Baptiste Santamaria, Louis Sicking, and John Watkins.
This book repositions early modern Catholic abroad colleges in their interconnected regional, national and transnational contexts. From the sixteenth century, Irish, English and Scots Catholics founded more than fifty colleges in France, Flanders, Spain, Portugal, the Papal States and the Habsburg Empire. At the same time, Catholics in the Dutch Republic, the Scandinavian states and the Ottoman Empire faced comparable challenges and created similar institutions. Until their decline in the late-eighteenth century, tens of thousands of students passed through the colleges. Traditionally, these institutions were treated within limiting denominational and national contexts. This collection, at once building on and transcending inherited historiographies, explores the colleges' institutional interconnectivity and their interlocking roles as instruments of regional communities, dynastic interests and international Catholicism.
This volume deals with the strategies of the Counter-Reformation in the far North during the Thirty Years' War, and untangles the policies and motives that led to the conversion of Queen Christina of Sweden to Roman Catholicism in 1965.
English Catholic voices, once disregarded as merely confessional, are now acknowledged to provide important perspectives on Elizabethan society. Based on extensive archival research, this book builds on previous studies for the first thorough investigation of the Jesuit mission to England during a critical period between the unsuccessful armadas of 1588 and 1597, a period during which the mission was threatened as much by internal Catholic conflict as it was by the crown. To address properly events in England, the study fully engages with the situation in Ireland, Scotland and the continent so as to contextualize the ambitions, methods and effects of the Jesuit mission. For England felt threatened not only by the military might of Spain but also by any assistance King Philip II might provide to Catholics earls and a vindictive James VI in Scotland, powerful nobles in Ireland, and English Catholics at home and abroad. However, it is the particular role of the Jesuits that occupies central place in the narrative, highlighting the way in which the Society of Jesus typified all that Elizabethan England feared about the Church of Rome. Through an exhaustive study of the many facets of the Jesuit mission to England between 1589 and 1597, this book provides a fascinating insight not only into Catholic efforts to bring England back into the Roman Church, but also the simmering tensions, and disagreements on how this should be achieved, as well as debates concerning the very nature and structure of English Catholicism. A second volume, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598-1606 will continue the story through to the early years of James VI & I's reign.
Based on extensive archival research, this book builds on previous studies for the first thorough investigation of the Jesuit mission to England during a critical period between the unsuccessful armadas of 1588 and 1597, a period during which the mission was threatened as much by Catholic and Jesuit opponents as it was by the crown.
This volume is the first comprehensive study of the work of the Society of Jesus in the British Isles during the sixteenth century. Beginning with an account of brief papal missions to Ireland (1541) and Scotland (1562), it goes on to cover the foundation of a permanent mission to England (1580) and the frustration of Catholic hopes with the failure of the Spanish Armada (1588). Throughout the book, the activities of the Jesuits - preaching, propaganda, prayer and politics - are set within a wider European context, and within the framework of the Society's Constitutions. In particular, the sections on religious life and involvement in diplomacy show how flexibly the Jesuits adapted their "way of proceeding" to the religious and political circumstances of the British Isles, and to the demands of the Counter-Reformation.
This volume chronicles Jesuit efforts to engage with Muslim populations in Christian Europe, such as the Moriscos, as well as the work of Jesuit missionaries in Muslim territory, such as Constantinople. It provides insights into the activities of the Society of Jesus along the eastern frontier of the Ottoman Empire, and tracks the careers of individual Jesuits such as Tomás de León and Antonio Possevino. These influential Jesuits devoted much of their lives to addressing the claims of Islam and the pressures applied on Christian Europe by Muslim polities. Some lesser-known Jesuits, such as the translator Ignazio Lomellini, are also profiled.
