Notes
Linda A. Newson
The Jesuits had a profound effect on cultural and intellectual life in Latin America. In 2017 the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, held an international conference to mark the 250-year anniversary of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish territories in 1767. At that time they were administering over 250,000 Indians in over two hundred missions. However, Jesuit activities went far beyond the conversion of native peoples to Christianity. The Jesuits pioneered interest in indigenous languages and cultures, compiling dictionaries and writing some of the earliest ethnographies of the region. They also explored the region’s natural history and made significant contributions to the development of science and medicine. On their estates and in their missions the Jesuits introduced new plants, livestock and agricultural techniques, while they left a lasting legacy on the region’s architecture, art and music.
It was the desire of the conference to capture the diversity of Jesuit contributions to Latin American culture. This volume of 12 essays includes papers from scholars of history, linguistics, religion, art, architecture, music, medicine and science. No volume could cover all the fields in which the Jesuits had an influence, but following the conference two scholars were invited to contribute papers on the role of the Jesuits in medicine and music. The essays presented in this volume are not overviews of Jesuit contributions to particular fields, each of which could be a book on its own, but are either studies based on original unpublished research which are representative of new scholarship in these domains or are reviews of research on specific topics which have not been examined previously. Scholarly books on the culture of the Jesuits often focus on one theme or region and approach it from a particular disciplinary standpoint. An exception is the monumental two-volume work The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto, 1999 and 2006), edited by John O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven Harris and Frank Kennedy, which is both multidisciplinary and global in scope. This edited book shares the aim of this work in considering the wide range of fields in which the Jesuits were active, but has a narrower geographical focus on Latin America. The contributors to this volume include a range of scholars, from well-established authors to those just embarking on their academic careers; they are from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, the USA and the UK. The book consists of four main sections, though there is considerable overlap between them and several essays could be placed under other section headings.
Art, architecture and material culture
The first section of the book focuses on different aspects of the art, architecture and material culture of the Jesuits in Latin America. While in most cases the Jesuits themselves were not involved in material production, they did exert an influence on the styles and images which were used, a practice which reflected their belief in the importance of the visual arts to evangelisation. Yet from the beginning of the 20th century, some scholars began to argue that there was no uniform ‘Jesuit style’.1 What the Jesuits had was a common approach or strategy – a noster modus procedendi [our way of proceeding] – which favoured the adaptation of art styles to local circumstance. Thus, the styles took account of indigenous cultures and landscapes, while reflecting the experience of individual Jesuits and the practical issues they faced. Their approach was what Gauvin Bailey has summarised as ‘accommodating and assimilating’.2 All three chapters in this section exemplify this understanding.
First, new scholarship on Jesuit art sees it as developing in a global context, while at the same time recognising the role which individual knowledge and experience might play in promoting a distinct style in particular places. In his richly illustrated contribution, Gauvin Bailey shows how Jesuit global connections were manifest in the introduction to Brazil of an ecclesiastical Chinese style from Beijing by the French Jesuit brother sculptor Charles de Belleville around 1707. He notes that this Chinese style differed from that in Spanish America, where Asian artwork was associated with secular objects, which were introduced by traders rather than missionaries. He argues that this style depicted Jesuit missionary victory in Asia with the aim of inspiring missionary work in the Americas.
Another focus of recent scholarship on Jesuit artistic production is the way it was influenced by the encounter with indigenous cultures. This is most evident in Kate Ford’s chapter on the Jesuit mission to the province of Chiquitos in the eastern lowlands of present-day Bolivia. Ford shows how the decoration on Chiquito churches echo local indigenous practices of body-painting and incorporate motifs made on rock and clay vessels which had traditionally been used to protect them from harm. She also shows how, at the same time, the Jesuits, wishing to conform to European standards of construction in a region which lacked stone and marble, improvised by ordering the painting of decorative and architectural features common in baroque stone-built churches onto the adobe they were forced to use in their construction. Hence, her chapter concludes that the painted churches of the mission to the Chiquitos reflect both Jesuit attempts to disguise the churches’ perceived deficiencies and indigenous attempts to protect them from supernatural harm.
Another strand of recent research on Jesuit art in Latin America concerns the physical production of art objects in workshops, especially those in the missions. In her study of the 30 Guaraní missions in the Jesuit province of Paraguay, Clarissa Rahmeier examines the different methods employed in pottery-making by the Guaraní and the Jesuits. Through examining the materiality of pottery and pottery-making, she shows how it reflected a degree of assimilation, exchange, accommodation and the persistence of traces of both cultures; and that the cultural encounter can therefore be better described as transculturation.
Jesuit mission life
As research on colonial Latin America in general has moved away from institutional history towards understanding the social, cultural and political lives of the popular classes, so also has research on the social life of the missions adopted a more critical approach. The early historiography often romanticised life in the missions, portraying native people as innocent children and passive recipients of European culture.3 In reality, the process was more complex, as native peoples resisted, adapted to and accommodated Spanish mission life. Barbara Ganson, well-known for her book The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (2003), follows this argument here in her study of gender relations. Using new sources, including a Guaraní text, she analyses the cases of the punishment of two women involved in adultery in the former Jesuit mission of Jesús de Tavarangue in 1782. She shows how the patriarchal society the Jesuits had established in the missions continued in one town under the post-expulsion Franciscan administration.4 However, she also argues that women did not always accept their subordinate position, but resisted in different ways, although often at considerable personal cost.
One of the romantic images of life in the Jesuit missions derives from their musical performances. The practice of music was promoted by the Jesuits, since it was seen as integral to the process of Christian conversion and worship. In his overview of studies of musical practice in colonial Spanish America, Leonardo Waisman shows how research on Jesuit music has centred on the Jesuit provinces of Paraguay (including Chiquitos) and Moxos, where archival sources in the form of musical scores are most abundant. He then aims to fill a gap in the literature by studying musical practices in the province of Mainas in the Upper Amazon. Using missionary accounts, particularly those by German Jesuits who laboured in the region in the 18th century, Waisman shows how knowledge of musical practices can be gleaned from other sources. He concludes that despite several attempts by the Jesuits to introduce more advanced musical instruments and polyphony to the province of Mainas, musical practice there did not reach the sophistication of that in the province of Paraguay.
Stationed in the missions, many Jesuits learned native languages in order to facilitate evangelisation, often compiling dictionaries, grammars, catechisms and confessionals. This proved more difficult in areas where there was no written language and the oral language had to be structured and systematised before it could be included in dictionaries and grammars. Capucine Boidin exemplifies this process of ‘translation’ from an oral to written language in her analysis of an extensive corpus of Tupi-Guaraní documents written between 1628 and 1832, showing how the ‘translation’ might lead to the transformation of the language itself.5 She demonstrates how the Jesuits, confronted by a multiplicity of languages on the coast of Brazil and in Paraguay, developed different linguas francas to aid evangelisation and create literate native elites that are still used today. The process of creating a Brazilian lingua franca is also examined by Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Caroline Egan in a later chapter.
Jesuit evangelisation
Jesuit methods of evangelisation differed widely, not least because of the different cultural and political contexts in which priests worked. The significance of local circumstances is evident in Oriol Ambrogio’s comparative study of the perceptions and acceptance of baptism by native societies on the colonial fringes of Spanish America, in north-west Mexico, southern Chile and the Chaco. He argues that native people were often fearful of missionaries as powerful curanderos-hechiceros capable of healing the sick but also of causing death. However, in other cases they might see the acceptance of Christianity and baptism as providing an opportunity for socio-political advancement. This divergence in the approach to the adoption of Christianity is attributed by him to differing economic, social and political conditions. He argues that economic stability and regular food supplies in north-west Mexico and among the non-sedentary Guaycuruas encouraged them to perceive the missions as a means of promoting their material interests, whereas the lack of a sustained Jesuit presence and the piecemeal acceptance of baptism among the Mapuche in Chile served to perpetuate intertribal conflict.
How indigenous people should be brought to the Catholic faith was a persistent topic of debate among the Jesuits. Exemplifying how views on the process of evangelisation might diverge, Virginia Ghelarducci explores the writings of a Jesuit missionary, Giovanni Anello Oliva, who worked in colonial Peru and Bolivia in the early 17th century. At that time, frustration with the slow progress of the Christianisation of Andean peoples led to official campaigns to eradicate idolatrous practices. However, Anello Oliva, with a deep knowledge of Andean culture, argues that true conversion could only be achieved by having a well-organised education system based on a combination of quality teaching, persuasive argumentation and knowledge of indigenous cultures and language.
The importance of indigenous language in evangelisation is the focus of a study by Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Caroline Egan. They examine a document written by a Jesuit in 16th-century Brazil, entitled ‘Doutrina Christã na Linguoa Brasilica’, which is currently housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The authors show how the Jesuits, in seeking to find terms which were understandable to potential converts, used Tupi words for doctrinally significant concepts, such as ‘God’ or ‘father’, but rendered others in Portuguese or in a combination of both. They argue that the Jesuits were concerned with imposing a stable, permanent alphabetic framework on the Tupi language and believed that through enunciating the words the native Tupi would ultimately be converted to Christianity, an approach they characterise as ‘proleptic’.
Jesuit agriculture, medicine and science
Jesuit scientific activities in Latin America were more intimately linked to their missionary goal than they were in Europe.6 The Jesuits’ spiritual quest to reveal the magnificence of God’s work in nature was combined with the search for knowledge about places, peoples and plants. This knowledge was not only essential for their work in unfamiliar natural and cultural environments, but, through the commercialisation of certain activities, could generate a revenue which could further their missionary enterprise. This last theme is taken up in the essays on Jesuit involvement in mule breeding and the medicine trade.
Much has been written about the biological consequences of European arrival in the Americas in 1492 and some attention paid to the role of the Jesuits in the process. A particular focus has been on the agricultural estates they established, but also on the introduction of new foods, agricultural equipment and techniques more broadly.7 Despite the fact that mules were essential to the transport system, as well as vital in agriculture and mining, they have not been subject to scholarly study for Latin America as a whole. Approaching the question from the perspective of debates over how innovative and profitable Jesuit agricultural enterprises were, William Clarence-Smith provides a comprehensive overview of mule breeding on Jesuit estates in Latin America which fills this obvious gap. Samir Boumediene also considers the commercial activities of the Jesuits in the context of their large-scale trade in new medicines to urban centres in Europe. He shows how this trade was facilitated by their network of colleges, convents and missions which enabled books, texts, people, drugs and curiosities to circulate. He exemplifies this process by focussing on the commodification of drugs and using the example of cinchona, which came to be known as Jesuit’s bark.
The importance of the Jesuits’ global network of missions and colleges in enabling scientific developments is also evident in Eduardo Ortiz’s account of the development of the physical sciences. While some attention has been paid to the contribution of the Jesuits to knowledge of the natural world, much less has been written about their role in this field. Eduardo Ortiz shows that even though scientific developments sometimes conflicted with religious beliefs, the Jesuits made internationally recognised advances, especially in mathematics and astronomy, even constructing their own instruments. At the same time, the global reach of the Jesuit order and its colleges, combined with their rigorous training and an emphasis on accuracy, meant they formed the basis of an international network of observatories, which enabled significant progress in cosmic physics in the 20th century.
There are many areas, thematic and geographical, which it has not been possible to cover in this volume. However, it demonstrates that Jesuit activities continue to attract scholarly interest and generate exciting new research which is representative of the best scholarship currently being conducted on colonial Latin America.
Bailey, G.A. (1999) ‘Le style jesuite n’existe pas: Jesuit corporate culture and the visual arts’, in J.W. O’Malley, G.A. Bailey, S.J. Harris and T.F. Kennedy (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 38–89.
Caraman, P. (1975) The Lost Paradise: The Jesuit Republic in South America (New York: Seabury).
Cunninghame Graham, R.B. (1901) A Vanished Arcadia; Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607 to 1767 (London: Heinemann).
Cushner, N. (1980) Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru (Albany, NY: SUNY Press).
— (1982) Farm and Factory: The Jesuits and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Colonial Quito, 1600–1767 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press).
— (1983) Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial Argentina 1650–1767 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press).
Durstan, A. (2007) Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
Ganson, B. (2003) The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
MacCormack, S. (2006) ‘Grammar and virtue: the formulation of a cultural and missionary program by the Jesuits in early colonial Peru’, in J.W. O’Malley, G.A. Bailey, S.J. Harris and T.F. Kennedy (eds.), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 576–601.
Millones Figueroa, L. and D. Ledezma (eds.) (2005) El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert).
O’Malley, J.W, G.A. Bailey, S.J. Harris and T.F. Kennedy (eds.) (1999 and 2006) The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
Prieto, A.I. (2011) Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press).
Rafael, V.L. (1988) Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
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1 For a bibliographical summary of the subject and new approaches to scholarship see: G.A. Bailey, ‘Le style jesuite n’existe pas: Jesuit corporate culture and the visual arts’, in J.W. O’Malley et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 38–89.
2 Bailey, ‘Le style jesuite n’existe pas’, p. 73.
3 E.g., R.B. Cunninghame Graham, A Vanished Arcadia; Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607 to 1767 (London: Heinemann, 1901); and P. Caraman, The Lost Paradise: The Jesuit Republic in South America (New York: Seabury, 1975).
4 Following the expulsion, secular administrators and Franciscan, Mercedarian and Dominican missionaries took over the administration of the Paraguayan missions (B. Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 118.
5 For a classic study of the issue of translation and evangelisation see V.L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). For a study of the Jesuits’ approach to systematising Quechua see: S. MacCormack, ‘Grammar and virtue: the formulation of a cultural and missionary program by the Jesuits in Early Colonial Peru’, in J.W. O’Malley et al. (eds.), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 576–601; and A. Durstan, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
6 For an overview of Jesuit scientific activities in Spanish America see A.I. Prieto, Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011); and L. Millones Figueroa and D. Ledezma (eds.), El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2005).
7 See N. Cushner’s trilogy: Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1980); Farm and Factory: The Jesuits and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Colonial Quito, 1600–1767 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982); and Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial Argentina 1650–1767 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1983).