Mapping Jesuit Science

9 / Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge

STEVEN J. HARRIS

Introduction: The Geography of Knowledge

Ever since the work of Cornelius Wessels, Herbert Bolton, and especially François de Dainville, we have known a great deal about Jesuit contributions to geography and natural history.1 As great travellers and field observers as well as authors and educators, Jesuits of the Old Society hold a special place in the history of the exploration and description of non-European lands and peoples. We need only recall that Francis Xavier's Letter from India, first published in 1545, was not only among the earliest publications of the Society but also the first letter from the East ever to be printed in Europe.2 While only briefly touching on matters that might be considered geographical, it was nonetheless the beginning of Jesuit- mediated, literary descriptions of what Francis Bacon some seventy years later would call 'the remote and heterogeneous instances of nature.' What is more, this pre-Baconian Baconianism was sanctioned by Ignatius himself, though for rea- sons only partially motivated by the desire for the advancement of learning. As early as 1547 we find Ignatius urging missionaries in India to send information about 'such things as the climate, diet, customs and character of the natives and of the peoples of India.'3 Some years later, again in directives sent to India, Ignatius made clear the rationale behind his request:

Some leading figures who in this city [Rome] read with much edification for themselves the letters from India, are wont to desire, and they request me repeatedly, that something should be written regarding the cosmography of those regions where ours [i.e., Jesuits] live. They want to know, for instance, how long are the days of summer and of winter; when summer begins; whether the shadows move towards the left or towards the right. Finally, if there are things that may seem extraordinary, let them be noted, for instance, details about animals and plants that are either not known at all, or not of such a size, etc.

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And this news - sauce for the taste of a certain curiosity that is not evil and is wont to be found among men - may come in the same letters or in other letters separately.4

In 1782, almost ten years after the Society's general suppression and almost 230 years after Ignatius's instruction, Joâo de Loureiro returned to Lisbon after forty years as a Jesuit missionary in Cochinchina (Vietnam). De Loureiro had served the king of Vietnam as both court mathematician and physician, and his search for indigenous herbal remedies led him to gather more than a thousand local plant specimens for his garden and herbarium. He added another three hundred on his return journey, which took him to China, the Malabar Coast, and Mozambique, making him one of the most important - if most neglected - botanical collectors of the eighteenth century.5 Between the first voyage of Francis Xavier and the last of de Loureiro, the Society produced a good deal more 'sauce' for those stay-at-homes back in Europe insatiably curious about the remote regions of the world. There were, to name but a few of the best-known representatives of this tradition, José de Acosta's firsthand description of the lands and peoples of Peru and Mexico, 6 Antonio de Andrade and Bento de Goes's accounts of their treks across the Himalayas,7 Pedro Paez's travels to Ethiopia and the Upper Nile,8 Samuel Fritz's journey down the Amazon River,9

Jacques Marquette's partial exploration of the Mississippi,10 Martino Martini's report of his travels in China,11 Ippolito Desideri's sojourn in Tibet,12 Eusebio Kino's exploration of northwest New Spain,13 and Joseph Tieffenthaller's extensive geographical observations in India.14 Less exotic, though no less relevant to the geographical sciences, was the work of Jesuit mathematicians who in the mid-eighteenth century were commissioned by secular and ecclesiastical rulers to conduct painstaking cartographic and meridian surveys of the Palatinate, Austria, Hungary, Silesia, China, and the Papal States.15 Before de Loureiro, dozens of other botanizing Jesuits had gathered and described plant specimens from as far away as China, the Philippines, and Ceylon in the east and from Paraguay, Peru, Mexico, and Canada in the west.16 Finally, Jesuit professors had, from the mid-seventeenth century onward, assembled cabinets, botanical gardens, and multivolume compendiums on natural history and taught geography in their classrooms all across Catholic Europe.

The written works of these men are representative of the nearly eight hundred titles in geography and natural history published by Jesuits of the Old Society, a figure which accounts for about one-seventh of the entire Jesuit scientific corpus. The sheer number and variety of works in these fields compels us to ask the obvious: Why would a religious order of clerks regular invest so much of its collective energy in the profane (and non-mathematical) sciences? To say that they were acting at the direct command of Ignatius is of course to answer

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inadequately; like so much else in the Society, the intellectual ramification of the Society cannot always be so easily reduced to, or explained by, an Ignatian seed. Rather, the development of a robust tradition in the natural sciences took place in the daily and local contexts in which Jesuits found themselves. In this respect, we need to remind ourselves of three basic facts: none of our Jesuit explorers and authors were naturalists or geographers by training or profession, none travelled or worked as naturalists or geographers per se, and even in the eighteenth century none travelled at the behest of any of the major scientific academies.17 With few exceptions, they worked as missionaries and/or served, in one capacity or another, as educators - though not necessarily as professors - within the Society. The knowledge of the natural world they produced was knowledge that arose in the course of their work, their 'profession,' as Jesuits. Thus neither their practice of, nor their contributions to, nor their publications in geography and natural history can be separated from their travels as agents of the Society.18 In other words, the question, Why did an order of priests and theologians produce so many works in the natural sciences? is, in my view, only a corollary of the more basic question, Why (and how) did Jesuits travel?

Thus, while there is still much for us to learn from the travel reports and published treatises of these and other Jesuit naturalists and geographers, the question I wish to explore here is not primarily about Jesuit knowledge of geography, but about the geography of Jesuit knowledge. These are by no means unrelated questions, and there is more at stake here than simple word-play. What I mean by 'geography of knowledge' is simply a systematic account of the spatial distribution and motion of the people, texts, and objects required by Jesuits in their production of knowledge, specifically knowledge of the natural world. By casting the problem of knowledge production in terms of geography, I am really asking a question about the role of travel in the making of scientific knowledge.19

The Society, after all, was a disciplined corporation whose members were far- flung, well travelled, and well informed. We might therefore expect to find that knowledge production depended not only upon the specific conditions of a given local context (say, the intellectual and political tensions attending mathematical and experimental knowledge-claims of Jesuits working in the Collegio Romano in the decades after the trial of Galileo)20 but also upon the material and informational resources made available to local actors by virtue of a spatially distributed network of trusted confrères.

At least in the case of the Society of Jesus (and I suspect in a number of other well-defined and well-run corporations of the early modern period),21 there is great advantage in thinking of scientific knowledge as simultaneously - and reciprocally - local (i.e., 'embedded' or 'situated') and distributed. While I shall focus largely on the distributed character of Jesuit natural knowledge and specifi-

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cally on the role of travel and the movement of texts and objects constitutive of such knowledge, I would suggest that the strength, longevity, and flexibility of the Jesuit scientific tradition owes much to an organizational structure that effectively combined spatially distributed networks (the Society's overseas missions) with multiple nodal points or nexuses (Jesuit colleges and universities) which served as the locally conditioned centres for the gathering, collation, distillation, and dissemination of much of Jesuit science. No other early modern corporation (either religious or secular) engaged in overseas activities had as part of its corporate mandate such an extensive program of higher education. The circulation of people, texts, and objects between European administrative and intellectual centres and the peripheries of Jesuit overseas missions gave the Society what was in essence a unique institutional geography, and its production of natural knowledge arose within and simultaneously helped sustain that institutional configuration.

Before questions regarding the interface - if that is the right metaphor - between global networks and local sites can be addressed, however, we must first establish with some precision the macroscopic geography of place, or rather the geography of spaces controlled by the Society.22 The basic framework is of course given by the geographical locations of those Jesuits who made observations and published their accounts of the natural world. For Jesuits engaged in such work, we need to ask, on the one hand, where they were when they made their field observations, gathered their plant and animal specimens, or recorded their measurements, and, on the other, where they were when they worked over their notes, wrote up their manuscripts, and published their writings. Be- yond merely plotting the location of Jesuit mathematicians, philosophers, and naturalists in geographical space, there is also the matter of their location in the social spaces defined by the Society's corporate structures. Where within the Society's 'organizational chart' were they located? Of what grade were they, and which offices did they hold? And where did they reside in relation to the order's central administrative authorities, both in Rome and in provincial capitals?

However, if our analysis of Jesuit travel is to be genuinely informative, then it must also include, in addition to a static geography of place, a kinematic and even dynamic mapping of movement among places. We must not forget that despite the high levels of mobility that characterized the order from its foundation to its suppression, travel (like most things in the Society) was much regulated. Their seemingly ceaseless peregrinations notwithstanding, Jesuits were neither knights- errant nor roving pilgrims. Jesuits almost always travelled under the authority of one or more superiors (or were passed from one provincial superior to another) and often 'under instruction,' that is, they carried with them explicit written directives broadly directing their movements in conformity with the Society's

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ministries. Indeed, the rules governing modes of travel generally as well as the specific directives outlining the movements and goals of individual Jesuit emissaries were part of the Society's elaborate mechanism for the administration of travel.23 In this sense then, Jesuit travel was what we might call corporate or organized travel. In the trope repeatedly used by Ignatius himself, the Society is likened to a body in which the 'head' guides and directs the movement of its 'members' in the manner best suited to accomplishing the ends for which the body was created.24 We ought therefore to think of characteristic patterns of travel in terms of the channelling of movement in fulfilment of - or at least broadly consistent with - the Society's internal governance and external ministries.

Travel, in other words, was an integral part of the Society's ongoing life as a religious corporation. To extend Ignatius's trope, the health and vigour of the body depended fundamentally on the well-regulated circulation of three vital elements - wel1-trained and reliable members, informative and timely correspondence, and matériel appropriate for the task at hand. Conversely, the cessa- tion or even the disorderly flow of any one of these elements would render the corporation ineffectual in accomplishing its ends. As this somewhat anachronis- tic metaphor suggests, when we think of travel within the Society we should think not only of the circulation of individual Jesuits acting under the authority of the Society's leadership but also and equally of the circulation of information, texts, and objects. Reports from the field, instructions, 'edifying news,' and correspondence of all kinds as well as natural and artificial objects were, each in their own fashion, made to serve as agents of the Society and to help in the achievement of its goals.

In sum, the map of Jesuit science I wish to sketch is of movements as well as of locations, and it pertains as much to non-human as to human travellers. And while that map is in the first instance a map in the literal sense, since it depends upon the fixed reference points of a geography of place, it is also a map in the figurative sense, since the task here is also to capture activities not easily reducible to graphic form. Finally, I am interested in mapping not so much the activities of any single scientific discipline like astronomy, botany, or even geography per se, as the pattern of movements and practices characteristic of Jesuit natural science generally. For my central claim is that the long-distance network that enabled the Society to serve as a conduit for exotic knowledge and objects was itself in part sustained by the knowledge thus gained.

Jesuit Travel and Corporate Geography

The incentive for Jesuits to travel - first and foremost as missionaries to remote and heathen lands - came of course from Ignatius himself. He had conceived of

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his order neither as monastic, and thus safely sequestered from the corruption of the outside world, nor as diocesan, and thus legally bound to bishop and parish. Rather, his order was to be itinerant, and its members not merely obedient but reliable. He had insisted from the outset that those who accepted the Jesuit vocation should be prepared at a moment's notice to go wherever they might better serve God, and readiness to travel at the behest of either pope or superior general was made explicit in the Fourth Vow of the fully professed.25 While the Fourth Vow has often been viewed as an extension of the traditional vow of obedience, which it surely was, it was essentially a commitment to an obedience bound to mobility and therefore often an obedience without direct supervision. That is, the professed was not only trusted, he was trusted to travel beyond the secured spaces of the Society and to use his own best judgment in achieving its ends. Obedience at a distance, if we may call it that, was really more a matter of trust and reliability, since spatial separation often meant long postal cycles and hence infrequent instructions, leaving the Jesuit missionary to his own wits and initiative in fulfilling what he - with training and testing behind him -judged to be the best tactics for accomplishing corporate goals. We see this obligation to react constructively to local contingencies especially clearly in the careers of Alessandro Valignano in India and Japan and Matteo Ricci in China.26

The extent to which the circulation of people and information was woven into the very fabric of the Society is nowhere more clearly evident than in the list of offices created and in the flow of administrative and 'edifying' correspondence. The offices and duties requiring regular travel included not only those of the itinerant preacher, the missionary, the procurator, and the visitor, but also those of the 'diplomats' sent to European courts27 and the emissaries sent to distant regions, for example to the courts of the Mughals in India, of the king of Ethiopia, of the Chinese emperor, and of the king of Siam. Collectively, in the decades after the establishment of most of the major overseas missionary fields (i.e., after c. 1640), the Society at any given time had between 8 per cent and 12 per cent of its members stationed in the overseas missions.28 In order to keep some measure of administrative control among so many members so widely dispersed and to maintain their morale, the Society operated an elaborate correspondence network. The Constitutions enjoined the Jesuit general to keep himself 'frequently informed by the provincials of what is occurring in all the provinces and by writing to the provincials.'29 The gathering and redaction of hijuela, the regular incoming reports written primarily by provincials and covering matters of personnel, the state of the province or house, and local events, were among the chief duties of the secretary to the general. In addition to the self-evident need for regularized communication of administrative matters, Ignatius recognized from early on the importance of establishing procedures for the regular composition,

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editing, and circulation of newsletters 'through which each region can learn from the others whatever promotes mutual consolation and edification in our Lord.'30

Like the secretary to the general, the hebdomadarius was to gather, collate, and review these edifying reports and pass the resulting distillation on to the general for his approval before circulating them to the provinces in the form of newsletters and (eventually) the more formal and externally directed Litterae annuae.31

The Society ran on this double cycle of correspondence, and so it should not be surprising that the largest surviving personal correspondence from the Renais- sance is from Ignatius, that 150 or so published volumes of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu consist largely of administrative correspondence, and that the best-known Jesuit periodicals of the eighteenth century (Lettres édifiantes, Journal de Trévoux, and Neue Weltbott) all depended directly upon the Society's repeating cycle of 'edifying reports' for their content.32

If the offices and genres of correspondence give an indication of the importance of travel within the Jesuit corporate network, we still need to ask where that network went. That is, what was the spatial ordering of the Society's administration, and what was its geographical reach? At the largest scale, Jesuit geography consisted of administrative territories called 'assistancies' (because each fell under the administrative purview of one of the Jesuit general's 'assist- ants'), and these corresponded approximately to the major nations or linguis- tic divisions of Europe: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and 'German.'33

Within each assistancy were a half-dozen or so provinces,34 each of which was nominally an extended territorial division but was made up in practice of a pointillist collection of colleges, seminaries, churches, residences, and professed houses located almost exclusively in the province's larger towns and cities. While Jesuits in both the European and the transoceanic provinces ventured into hinterlands in the name of Volksmissionen or to establish remote mission sta- tions, the base of operations was almost invariably located in regional urban centres and not in isolated rural enclaves.35 In other words, our emerging Jesuit map shows a strongly hierarchical organization of assistancy, province, and town centrally governed from Rome yet spatially distributed across Catholic Europe and throughout the trading and colonial territories of France (eastern Canada and old Siam), Portugal (Brazil, the west coast of India, China, and Japan), and Spain (Central and South America and the Philippines). By about the middle of the seventeenth century, one could have said without exaggeration that the sun never set upon the Jesuit empire - or, as the non-heliocentric authors of the Imago primi saeculi would have it, 'None can hide from its [i.e., the Society's] glow.'36

The assistancy-province organizations proved to be a remarkably stable ad-

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ministrative structure while at the same time allowing for an almost organic growth as the Society extended its geographical reach. Indeed, during the golden age of Jesuit expansion and beyond, the more artistically minded of the Society's members seized upon the motif of a tree to capture the rootedness of the order in Rome and its ongoing ramification into new territories. The most elaborate - though neither the first nor the last - example of the 'Ignatian Tree' is from Athanasius Kircher's treatise on light (fig. 91).37 While in its general conception the Ignatian Tree borrows directly from the arboreal depictions of Old Testament genealogies stemming from Noah or Jesse, here the issue is not human progeny but the assistancies and provinces of the order. Ignatius himself is seen kneeling at the base of the tree holding in his hands what is presumably the Jesuit Constitutions, with the background opening onto a seascape bestrewn with sailing vessels taking the sons of Ignatius to the farthest regions of the globe. The trunk and major branches of the tree correspond to the assistancies (the lower part of the trunk represents the Italian assistancy, and the upper part the German assistancy), and the spatial sequence of the branching reflects more or less accurately the chronological order of the establishment of assistancies and provinces. Smaller branches terminate in leaves bearing the names of towns in which Jesuit colleges were located. At the fork of most branches is placed the face of a sundial oriented to show local time in relation to 'Roman mean time.'38

As a device proposed for the edification of the Society's members, the Ignatian Tree nicely captured multiple themes of unity so crucial for the governance of a geographically dispersed religious corporation. The trunk of the tree symbolized the diachronic link between the living Society and its roots in the person of Ignatius. The regular disposition of its branches, all belonging to and indeed constituting the same tree, spoke of the spatial unity of the order. And the synchronized horological decorations suggested temporal unity of action among its geographically scattered twigs and leaves.

This same motif, when executed with greater attention to functional represen- tation (if with less artistry), can be used to exhibit two other facets of the Society's organizational unity. First, if we prune away the leaves and twigs representing the colleges and seminaries run by the Jesuits, alter the geometry of the branches somewhat, and treat the time of foundation as a third coordinate, then we obtain a schematized tree - or rather a sprawling and spindly bush - that more accurately reflects the actual administrative and territorial growth of the Society (fig. 9.2).39 Here the five major assistancies radiate from Rome in their approximate geographical relationships to one another, with the dates of their establishment given in parentheses. While provinces are clustered along the appropriate assistancy branch as in Kircher's rendition, here the formation of

9.1. The Ignatian Tree as represented in Horoscopium catholicum, an engraving in

Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Rome, 1646), p. 553. Photo courtesy of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

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9.2. Province tree: the corporate geography of the Society. The assistancy names are in boldface type, with their dates of foundation in parentheses (note that the Polish

assistancy, upper right, was formed from the Slavic provinces only in 1755). Province names are underlined, with their dates of foundation placed near the points of

bifurcation. The names of vice-provinces (e.g., Novi Regni Granatensis, a region roughly equivalent to modern-day Colombia) are not underlined, and the date in

parentheses indicates when the vice-province became a full province. Diagram by Kristen Hiestand after J.B. Goetstouwers, Synopsis historiae Societatis Jesu (Louvain,

1950), plate 4.1, 'Natales provinciatum Antiquae Societatis,' pp. 706-7.

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new provinces is accurately represented as a bifurcation process in which the parent province retained the older name and the geographically distinct daughter province acquired a new name.40 By plotting the dates of province formation against an imaginary time axis rising at a right angle from the plane of the page, we can imagine something like the overall growth-pattern or habit of the order. What is striking about the Society's organizational growth is the rapidity with which it achieved geographical coverage and administrative stability. Moving out along the assistancy branches we see that the first, second, and (in most cases) third nodes of province formation occurred prior to 1600, and that almost all subsequent divisions occurred before 1640.41 The Jesuit bush, in other words, spread to about two-thirds of its maximum geographical size within the first sixty years (and to about 90 per cent within the first century) and then maintained a stable configuration of provincial branches for the next 170 years.42

A second schematic rendering of the Ignatian Tree, one that focuses on the twigs at the extremities rather than on the supporting branches below, allows us to integrate the geographical and institutional spaces of the order by locating the Society's offices in their physical settings. As noted above, the office of assistant to the general carried with it responsibility for the daily administration of the several culturally related provinces. The office of the provincial, in turn, carried responsibility for the operations of a given province. Within a province there were at any one time seminaries, colleges, residences, professed houses, and usually a novitiate or two, each headed by the appropriate superiors such as rector, ministers of the community (responsible for the day-to-day 'temporali- ties' of local operations), master of novices, and so on. This hierarchical administrative structure may be represented schematically in a final 'twig and twiglet' ramification of the Jesuit bush (fig. 9.3). Through most of its history the German assistancy, to take but one example, consisted of nine provinces. One of those provinces, Upper Germany (roughly equivalent to modern-day Bavaria), con- tained several towns in which were located various of the Society's 'compounds,' or Jesuit establishments that performed various pastoral, pedagogical, and spiritual tasks at the local level.43 Within a given compound, which could be anything from a single modest building (say, a house for the fully professed) to a sprawling architectural complex consisting of a dozen or more buildings, there were a number of offices necessary for the operation of the compound.

Mapping Jesuit Science: The Kinematics of Practice

If this assistancy-to-province and compound-to-offices breakdown were to be articulated along the entire width and breadth of the Society's corporate periph-

ery - its institutional interface with the world - we would have the first component of our wished-for map. That is to say, if we were to follow temporally the growth of assistancies and provinces, locate spatially all Jesuit compounds scattered throughout the world, and track longitudinally the careers of all members of the Old Society as they moved through the offices associated with these compounds, then we would begin to have a map showing us the institutional geography of the order. While such an exhaustive geography is well beyond the scope of this paper, this imagined map provides a useful background against which to plot the activities of the Jesuit 'naturalists' and 'geographers' upon whom I wish to focus. Fortunately, although the Jesuits who in one way or another contributed to the natural sciences were many in number and widely scattered in space and time, the sites for the production of natural knowledge seemed to enjoy a threefold concentration. First, with regard to physical location,

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most activities relating to the collection, collation, writing, and publication of natural knowledge were confined to about three dozen or so principal compounds, namely, the largest Jesuit universities and colleges in the provincial capitals of the Italian, French, and German assistancies. Second, the redaction of the vast majority of the eight hundred or so published titles in the natural sciences occurred in connection with just a handful of key offices, chiefly those associated with teaching in Jesuit colleges but also the 'health care' offices of apothecary, surgeon, and infirmarian. And third, nearly all Jesuit authors were members of the highest rank of the Society at the time of publication, that is, they were fully formed priests professed of the Fourth Vow.

From around the mid-seventeenth century until the beginning of the national expulsions in the 1750s and 1760s, there were some 800 towns around the world in which the Society had established a compound of one form or another. About 650 of these were Jesuit 'college towns' - towns and cities in which Jesuit colleges (really the equivalent of modern preparatory schools or gymnasia), universities, and seminaries were located - and about 250 of these towns were sites for the printing of Jesuit titles in the natural sciences.44 Yet the distribution was far from even. If we take just those towns that had Jesuit universities (or Jesuit colleges that became universities some time before the general suppression), we find that these 35 or so locations account for more than two-thirds of the entire Jesuit scientific corpus.45 Put another way, about 70 per cent of the Society's scientific knowledge production - as represented in publications - was concentrated in only about 5 per cent of its sites of knowledge dissemination.46 It is also worth noting in this connection that these same university towns were the location of most of the Society's chairs of mathematics, natural history and physical cabinets, astronomical observatories, and libraries. Broadly speaking, we may thus refer to them generically as centres for the concentration of scientific knowledge.

The problem of determining the key offices of knowledge production is of course made more than a little difficult by the Society's custom of rotating members through a variety of different offices over the course of their careers. While one may point to broad operational divisions between 'administrators' and 'educators' or between 'sedentary' and 'itinerant' offices, these turn out not to be terribly robust categories since assignments frequently took Jesuits back and forth across these boundaries.47 The Society did, however, tend to fill positions in cycles of a minimum of three years (though even here there are many exceptions), so we can determine where authors were and what they were doing in the few years immediately prior to the date of publication of a given work. While a longer treatise may well have taken more than three years to write and have been

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written over several disparate offices, the strategy of identifying the most recent office at least allows us to correlate likely place of redaction with office held. The well-defined offices of the Society number about two dozen: they included the more or less sedentary duties of Father General, assistant, secretary, and hebdomadarius in Rome and the manifestly itinerant offices of visitor and procurator, which required a certain amount of shuttling to and fro between Rome and the provinces. In the provinces themselves there were the itinerant offices associated with Volksmissionen either in towns or in rural areas (preacher, confessor, minister, catechist, etc.), and the many seemingly settled but often peripatetic jobs pertaining to the spiritual guidance of elites (e.g., court confessor, chaplain, and tutor) as well as of Jesuits themselves (superior of a professed house, instructor of the tertianship, master of novices, spiritual director, and seminary instructor). The offices necessary for intellectual training in the Soci- ety's colleges and universities included those of rector, professor, regent, scriptor, and librarian, and those necessary for the general maintenance of the college compound ranged from amanuensis and apothecary to cook, carpenter, infirmarian (i.e., nurse assigned to the infirmary), surgeon, and gardener - positions almost invariably filled by temporal coadjutors (i.e., the lay brothers rather than the ordained Fathers of the order). Of these many offices, the ones mostly likely to be held on the eve of publication were the collegiate positions of professor, scriptor, and rector and the comparatively infrequent but strategically important positions of court tutor, court mathematician, and 'mandarin,' all of which depended directly on aristocratic and royal patronage.48 With regard to institutional location, these half-dozen or so offices correlate with about 60 per cent of the publications in the natural sciences. While this pattern of office-holding can hardly come as a surprise since these were, after all, the most bookish offices of the Society's most bookish ministry, it is important to anchor the sites of knowledge production in the Society's corporate spaces.

As a corollary to this last observation, it is also important to note that the vast majority of Jesuit scientific publications - perhaps up to 95 per cent of them - were written by priests, about 90 per cent of whom were professed of the Fourth Vow at the time of publication. Of the remaining 5 per cent of publications, most were written by temporal coadjutors serving as apothecaries (many of whom were located in the Spanish and Portuguese overseas provinces) or by spiritual coadjutors, and very few indeed by Jesuits still in training (i.e., novices, scholas- tics, or those in their tertianship).49

What these global - and rather anonymous - statistics indicate is a marked concentration of scientific knowledge production in the Society's most highly trained and trusted members (the professed) holding key academic positions in

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the largest and most prestigious Jesuit universities in Catholic Europe, especially those located in the major urban centres of central and northern Italy, central and southern France, and the western and southern provinces of the German assistancy. This geographical and corporate concentration of sites of final production contrasts with the global range of administration and movement outlined previously. If we are to complete even an outline of the map of Jesuit science alluded to above, then we must somehow link these well-defined centres of concentration with the worldwide distribution of Jesuits along the branches and twigs of the Ignatian bush. Here, however, the arboreal image can be temporarily set aside in favour of the more appropriate metaphor of the network. That is, these three dozen or so centres of concentration can be thought of as nodes embedded in the Society's long-distance network, with the exchange of personnel, texts, and natural objects necessary for the production of natural knowledge viewed as a sort of circulation between local sites and distributed practices.

While an exact and exhaustive mapping of this circulation is not feasible either in principle (too much of the requisite information regarding place of origin and pathway taken has been lost) or in practice (the systematic recovery of the 'travel information' that has survived would be a daunting task), I believe we can obtain at least a general outline of such a map through the following exercise. Just as Ignatius asked those making the Spiritual Exercises to imagine all the peoples of the globe, their many languages and various customs,50 so too must we imagine the comings and goings of Jesuit travellers as they moved among the peoples who lived along the Malabar Coast or in southern China, in the Philippines or the Rio de la Plata region of South America, up and down the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, or along the coast of Maine and westward on the shores of the Great Lakes. More closely related to the task at hand, we must imagine the movements of the many Jesuit explorers who mapped the lands and riverine routes, often for the first time, from India to China, or from Egypt to Ethiopia, from Quito to the Atlantic via the Amazon, or from Lake Michigan down the Mississippi River almost to the Gulf of Mexico. Now imagine having attached long pieces of thread to the soutanes of our peripatetic Jesuits. We then ask what paths these threads traced through space as each Jesuit travelled from place to place in execution of his duties in the Society.

Since we are interested in the movement of information and objects as well as of people, we need to attach threads to the many textual descriptions, observational reports, maps, and recorded measurements needed for the construction, say, of José de Acosta's natural history of Peru and Mexico,51 or of Ignace Gaston Pardies's star-chart of the Southern Hemisphere,52 or of Joseph François Lafitau's comprehensive comparative study of ancient and contemporary pagan peoples.53

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We would need additional thread to trace the paths of the innumerable natural objects that travelled under the authority of the Society and aided its pedagogical and pastoral ministries. Whence came the plant, animal, and mineral specimens presented to the Society's great patrons as tokens of appreciation and affection or as the tangible 'sauce' to whet their appetites for the overseas missions? Whence came the hundreds of objects in Athanasius Kircher's museum of natural curiosities assembled from the 1630s to the 1650s?54 And whence came - and whither went - the many vials of powders, simples, and herbals prepared by Pietro Paolo Puccerini, Kircher's contemporary and the chief apothecary in the Society's main pharmacy in Rome?55 How in general did the exotic 'productions of nature' like bezoar and snakestone, ambergris, guaiacum, kosso, and cinchona find their way to the shelves of Jesuit pharmacies in Rome, Bologna, Bordeaux, Ingolstadt, and Prague? What trajectories were followed by the natural curiosities found in Ferdinand Orban's collection assembled at the end of the seventeenth century, by the mineral specimens in cabinets at the University of Coimbra in the mid- eighteenth century, or by the exotic plants in the botanical garden in Munich that Franz von Schrank designed for the Bavarian prince?56 Having attached our threads to these texts and specimens, we ask as before what paths these threads traced through space as each object moved from its place of origin in the natural world to its artificial resting-place within the human world. Put simply, how was this piece of nature brought into the Jesuit order - and into the Jesuit order of things?

For work in mathematical geography, astronomy, and meteorology, we would need additional thread to trace the paths taken by the Jesuits' scientific instru- ments, both the many paths that led to their manufacture and their movements as travelling-companions to the missionaries. And then there are the movements of the published texts and treatises that our imaginary Jesuits consulted as they sought to bring coherence to their travels and observations. And finally, every so often one of our well-travelled Jesuits - but not only the well travelled, think of Kircher comfortably ensconced in Rome - might attempt to weave together the observational, natural, instrumental, and textual threads feeding into his own local world in order to produce a new statement about the shape, structure, and operation of the natural world. Not only would such a manuscript have thousands of kilometres of thread trailing behind it, it would itself now begin its own multilineal tracing through space as its many published copies travelled from printer to publisher, from publisher to book fair, from book fair to bookseller, and from bookseller to reader and student.

Surely the actual mapping of provenance for all the constituents of a scientific text would be an exceedingly tedious task. As an exercise in imagination, however, such 'thread maps' alert us to the importance of travel in the geography

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of knowledge, for they help make visible the role of travel in various scientific practices. What is more, the thread maps associated with the several descriptive, collecting, and measuring projects just alluded to make evident the different patterns of travel that underlie various forms of scientific practice. That is, we can easily imagine that our thread maps would take on different shapes depend- ing on the type of project in question. Even without doing the actual mapping, we can readily imagine that Kircher's museum, for example, resided at the centre of an enormous spider's web the strands of which radiated quite literally to every continent on which Jesuit missionaries could be found. On the other hand, the thread map for Kino's explorations of the Baja Peninsula would produce a comparatively small but dense criss-cross pattern. The threads marking the regular shipments of cinchona - that miraculous antifebrile drug once called 'Jesuit's bark' - from Quito to the Jesuit pharmacy in Rome would fall into long, well-defined channels, while those tracing the eclipse observations of Jesuit astronomers in Beijing, Goa, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Lyon, Heidelberg, Tyrnau, Milan, Vilnius, and Vienna would resemble a delicate though extensive filigree with multiple nodes of exchange. In each case the pattern of traces would represent a record of movement coincident with scientific practice and anteced- ent to the making of a scientific text, collection, or object. What is more, when we recall the relatively small number of centres of concentration that produced such a disproportionate share of Jesuit publications and collections in the natural sciences, we should not be surprised to find that most of our thread maps have nodes anchored to these same sites.

The Society as a Long-Distance Corporation: The Dynamics of Practice

In the foregoing I have tried to sketch, however roughly, a map of Jesuit scientific practices by identifying critical sites of knowledge production against the grid of the Society's administrative organization. I have also tried to indicate characteristic patterns of movement along the Society's extensive corporate network for various types of scientific activity. However important it is to establish a static geography of place (i.e., the Jesuit bush) and a kinematic geography of travel (i.e., the unfolding trajectories implicit in thread maps), we still do not have a dynamic geography of practice. That is, there is still the question of the 'causes behind the motions of things' : Why did Jesuits travel as they did? What forces, either institutional or personal, caused their movements and the movements of the material objects constitutive of scientific knowledge? As one may readily surmise, these questions will lead us back to the notion of corporate or organized travel briefly touched upon above and to the related problem of the obedience versus reliability of Jesuits who were trusted to travel. The movement of Jesuits

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and, more generally, the circulation necessary for the making of scientific knowledge took place within the context of what I have elsewhere called a long- distance corporation.57 Not only did the organizational practices required in the operation of a long-distance corporation, which the Society had mastered with consummate skill, facilitate the gathering, transportation, and concentration of information of relevance to the natural sciences, but the knowledge thus obtained from the natural world could be used in various ways to facilitate the ongoing operation of that network. And, I would argue, this positive feedback loop between long-distance network and local knowledge production is what accounts for the Society's remarkable record of achievement in the natural sciences.

In the light of the Society's regulations governing the travel of its members, it is clear that the traces upon our hypothetical thread maps do not run willy-nilly across the surface of the globe. They neither unrolled themselves of their own volition nor maintained themselves in the absence of human travel. Indeed, our threads have no existence apart from the shuttling to and fro of Jesuits going about the Society's business. All those threads, in other words, are simply spatial records of the Society's internal circulations as its members pursued the many and scattered activities of its various ministries. In fact, their chief advantage is that they make manifest the Society's ability to organize travel in a particular way. While scholars have long pointed to the Society's talent for organization as the 'power and secret' behind its success in executing its religious programs,58I would suggest that we gain a clearer understanding of 'the secret of Jesuit organization' if we think in terms of the models of long-distance networks that sociologists like John Law and Bruno Latour have developed over the last several years.59 Much of the Society's administrative apparatus can, I believe, be readily understood as a historical instance - with modification - of Law's and Latour's model of long-distance networks.

What are the key elements in this model? With some change in nomenclature and adjustments in the light of the actual administrative practices that Jesuits employed, these may be grouped under the following heads. In order for a central administrative authority 'to act at a distance on unfamiliar events, places, and people,' it must have at its disposal reliable agents, whose competence and commitment to the corporate agenda (i.e., their willingness to see personal gain in the accomplishment of corporate goals) renders them capable of working under instruction in remote locations.60 Corporate leadership, however, can engage in effective 'action at a distance' only if its agents send regular, trustwor- thy reports to centres of concentration, where reports from various quarters can be gathered, sorted, and reduced to administrative memoranda. Usable digests of reports of remote events and circumstances in turn enable leaders to make better- informed decisions in their outgoing directives. The repeated exchanges of

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reports from the field and directives from headquarters - as well as the shuttle of personnel between centre and periphery - have as their common purpose the projection of corporate power and the expansion of its sphere of control and influence through cycles of recruitment of human and naturai resources. Finally, among the 'literary emissaries' we find, in addition to the manuscript administrative genres (reports and directives), printed genres intended to circulate externally among potential recruits, patrons, or protectors.

In the long process of spiritual and intellectual formation demanded of its members, the Society had an unusually rigorous way of inculcating corporate values and solidifying group identity. What was being tested and selected for prior to full acceptance within the order, I would argue, was not so much obedience - the immediate execution of explicit orders - but reliability, which ultimately rested upon the willingness of the Jesuit-in-training to make the Society's ideals and goals his own and to work towards their realization through a combination of corporate obedience and personal initiative. This long proba- tion, during which the Jesuit-in-training was 'tested in experience,' was the means by which the Society's superiors could ascertain the depth of his assimila- tion and certify his trustworthiness, dependability, and sense of responsibility towards the Society. Immersion in Ignatian codes of conduct and belief gave Jesuits a shared frame of reference against which they would measure both the world around them and their own responses to it. While 'cadaver-like obedience' may have had its place in the initial formation of novices, I believe the ultimate goal was to foster in Jesuits - at least in the fully professed - an abiding commitment to the Jesuit 'way of proceeding, ' and to have that 'way' articulated through initiative and personal judgment guided - but not dictated - by instructions and directives from superiors. In so far as one can identify a single linchpin in the machinery of the Society (though one should never lose sight of the necessary interrelationship of parts), I believe it is the high index of reliability of its agents. And in so far as the Society possessed distinctiveness and coherence in its corporate culture, I believe it arose through a continuous process of 'enact- ment' in which Jesuits configured their world as they moved through it in accordance with that shared frame of reference.61 What distinguished the Society from other organizations of the day and gave it a distinctive cultural style was this method or ratio for instilling reliability. For this is what made Jesuits - individually and collectively - agents upon whom the leadership could depend not only for the execution of explicit instructions but also and more significantly for the projection of the 'Jesuit way of proceeding' into new cultural domains like the natural sciences, which otherwise seem about as far removed from the proper duties of a religious as one can imagine.

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Yet when we think of the 'greater good' that was achieved by Ricci's mathematical and technological publications in Beijing, by Kircher's scientific show- manship as collector of the rare and curious or as a virtuoso responsible for 'scientific spectacles' designed to impress visiting nobility,62 by the herbal remedies concocted by Jesuit apothecaries like Sigismund Aperger in Paraguay or Johann Steinhöfer in Mexico,63 or by the usefulness of de Acosta's treatise on the natural and moral history of Peru and Mexico in securing royal patronage for Jesuit missions in those regions,64 then we can begin to see the value of Jesuit reliability not only for the good of the Society but also for the good of the sciences the Society needed in pursuit of that greater good. Just as Jesuit superiors in Rome were inclined to trust administrative intelligence from members who by virtue of their remote locations could not be queried face to face but only through cycles of correspondence, so too was Kircher (also in Rome and therefore at the hub of the Jesuit communications network) inclined to trust in the reports from his remote confrères regarding eclipse observations from Beijing, snakestone from Goa, cinchona from Quito, or the direction of ocean currents recorded on the high seas. Trust and reliability, in other words, were no less important in the communication of scientific information than in the communication of administrative intelligence. And as Steven Shapin has convincingly argued, trust and moral order - whether in society or in science - go hand in hand.65

Upon this bedrock of trust and reliability both Jesuit superiors and Jesuit professors could build a network of reliable agents who were willing to carry out written instructions and, just as important, report on the outcome of those instructions after execution. From the earliest days of the Society - and indeed from the hand of Ignatius himself - there had been instructions, amounting almost to a manual, for the writing of letters. Juan Alfonso de Polanco, secretary to Ignatius and later generals, expanded upon these instructions and clarified what sort of information each class of administrative correspondence should contain, the style in which each should be written, how information should be arranged, and so on.66 Although not always carried out as per instructions, this sort of attention to informative yet concise intelligence was generally a hallmark of Jesuit reportage. If powers of observation, judgment, clarity of expression, and diligence in composing and sending off in a timely fashion administrative correspondence were crucial for superiors in Rome, who depended upon these letters as their eyes and ears in remote regions, they were no less crucial for Jesuit astronomers, naturalists, and geographers, who also relied upon them as their remote eyes and ears. In other words, it was not only the quantity and frequency of epistolary exchange that facilitated the gathering of scientific intelligence

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from afar, but also the quality of observation and the dependability of remote agents in executing requests for measurements, descriptions, or the sending of natural objects.

We have already seen how scientifically edifying 'reports from nature' flowed along the Society's administrative pathways and accompanied the stream of morally edifying reports subjected to redaction and public dissemination in the form of the Lettres édifiantes, the Journal de Trévoux, and the many 'Annual Letters,' 'Jesuit Relations,' and 'Letter Books' that appeared under Jesuit impri- matur. But of course these large-scale, ongoing, in-house editorial projects all ultimately depended upon correspondence; and indeed we may usefully think of the Society as a republic of letters within the Republic of Letters. For not only were the members of the Society themselves brought closer together - as Ignatius correctly foresaw - through the frequent exchange of letters, many Jesuits were also brought into closer contact with the intellectual and cultural currents of their day through their correspondence with the lay citizenry of the Republic of Letters. At least within the history of science, Jesuit letters can be found in the correspondence of every major figure, from Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century to Kepler, Galileo, Mersenne, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz in the seventeenth and Euler, Lalande, several of the Jussieus and Cassini, and at least two of the Bernoulli (Daniel and Johann II) in the eighteenth.

Yet it was not simply the circulation of Jesuit letters in the Republic of Letters that distinguishes the Society. For Jesuit correspondence was not so much a matter of private, informal exchange as it was part of a method of systematic information-gathering, collation, editing, and targeting for publication. The internal correspondence of the Society saw the light of day only after it had passed through editorial filters. In fact, the redaction of most of the collected or serial publications of Jesuit correspondence took place in one of the three dozen major centres mentioned above. In other words, the main sites for the redaction and dissemination of Jesuit public correspondence were also the centres of scientific publication and education. And so what we have is evidence, especially by the eighteenth century, of a strong correlation between the 'physical plant' of scientific activity (i.e., Jesuit universities, chairs of mathematics, astronomical observatories, natural history and physical cabinets, botanical gardens, and major libraries) on the one hand, and scientific publication (textbooks, treatises, collected correspondence, journals, etc.) on the other. In this sense, then, we can speak of these locations on the Jesuit organizational bush as having been simultaneously centres of concentration and centres of dissemination, and thus as the critical nodes where the in-flow of texts and natural objects from the Society's extensive network was translated into an out-flow of (filtered) knowledge in the form of lectures, displays and demonstrations, and publications in the natural

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sciences. While we may rightly think of each of these centres as uniquely embedded in local culture - the history of Jesuit science in Vienna is indeed quite different from that in Paris or Rome - it is also true that these 'local knowledges' were bound up with and dependent upon practices that were spatially distributed across large segments of the Jesuit web.

What I have tried to argue is that Jesuit natural knowledge emerged organi- cally, as it were, from the organizational dynamics required in the Society's operation of a long-distance network. These elements of organization were of course initially and primarily developed to serve the Society's administrative needs, and they eventually enabled the Society to extend its controlled spaces to a geographical network that virtually encircled the world. My point, however, is that these organizational elements also greatly facilitated the gathering and communication of scientific information within the Society. At the level of social cohesion, the shared identity, values, and goals of Jesuit corporate culture fostered high levels of intra-ordinal trust (Jesuits more readily trusted other Jesuits than non-Jesuits) and thus made comparatively easy the sharing of information, cooperation in the execution of requests, and collaboration on large projects. More critically, not only did Jesuits gain their knowledge of the natural world (here I am speaking primarily of the transoceanic world) while travelling in the service of their order, but the knowledge thus gained in turn facilitated their travelling by enabling the Society to operate with increased effectiveness in remote corners of the world, either by understanding something about local climate, customs, and natural productions or by retailing this information to curious patrons back in Europe and winning their financial support. Because of its early entry into a ministry in higher education, the Society possessed what was virtually a unique corporate structure - an overseas network of missionaries directly coupled with a network of intellectual centres. While neither component was unique to the Society, no other long-distance corporation of the early modern period succeeded in combining a long-distance network of the sort described here with a system of higher education.67 If we return to the first question posed above - Why would the Society invest so much of its energy in the natural sciences? - at least part of the answer has to do with Ignatius's desire to create a company of itinerant apostles, ready at a moment's notice to travel wherever they may be sent. For travel in the making of Jesuit science was part of the travel required in the making of the Society itself.

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THE JESUITS

Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540-1773

Edited by

John W. O'Malley, S J. Gauvin Alexander Bailey

Steven J. Harris

T. Frank Kennedy, S.J.

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1999 Toronto Buffalo London

Printed in Canada

Reprinted 2000

ISBN 0-8020-4287-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

The Jesuits : cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540-1773

Papers from International conference titled: The Jesuits ; Culture, Learning, and the Arts, 1540-1773, held late May 1997 at Boston College.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4287-2

1. Jesuits - History - 16th century - Congresses. 2. Jesuits - History - 17th century - Congresses. 3. Jesuits - History - 18th century - Congresses.

4. Christianity and culture - History - 16th century - Congresses. 5. Christianity and culture - History - 17th century - Congresses. 6. Christianity and culture - History - 18th century - Congresses.

I. O'Malley, John W.

BX3706.2.J47 1999 271'.53 C99-930022-9

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry

Development Program (BPIDP).

BX 3706.2 .J464 1999

The Jesuits

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Mapping Jesuit Science