South Atlantic Modern Language Association

The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System by Aldo ScaglioneReview by: H. Franklin BrooksSouth Atlantic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (May, 1988), pp. 148-150Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199926 .

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148 Book Reviews

tional or uncritical audience.

Gary Neal Underwood, University of Texas at Austin

1I The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System. By Aldo Scaglione. Amster- dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1986. 248 pp.

Stereotypical Jesuits are all too familiar. Today's historian must deal with centuries of favorable and unfavorable bias, expressed sometimes by very distinguished writers indeed. Pascal stigmatized the Jesuits' theological complacency, reckless innovation, and indulgent toleration of crimes among the ruling classes. Voltaire satirized their colonies in South America and their unholy wars there. Ever since the Goncourts' Madame Gervaisais, the Jesuit style in art and architecture has stood for Baroque excess, illusionism, and a troubling confusion of sensuality and mysticism. James Clavell's recent Shogun labels the sixteenth-cen- tury missions in Japan as outposts of western imperialism. But still today, the Company of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier stands as well for missionaries, martyrs, and saints as Roland Joffe's film, The Mission, set in the Brazilian jungle of the 1750s, showed in 1986. Moreover, the Company remains synonymous with schools, for from the beginning, educational programs were their principal weapon in service to their faith. Consequently, most major cities in the world still boast of a "Jesuit High," a "College des Jesuites," or the equivalent, either as a living institution or as a historic monument.

True to its origins, Jesuit education is also controversial. Tradi- tionally its critics have denounced its scholasticism and its focus on rote learning. The present study seeks to show, however, that the Jesuit endeavor was in fact a distinguished success in promoting the hu- manism that it had inherited from the Italian Renaissance. The study considers the nature of humanist education, the varieties of schools that developed in northern and southern Europe before the Reforma- tion, and models of Reformation and Counter-Reform pedagogy, both lay and ecclesiastical. To support its conclusions, it surveys the Jesuits' cultivation of Latin and Greek, the rehabilitation of classical literature in a Christian context, and the primacy of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) among the liberal arts. It also attempts a synthesis of scholarship of the past thirty years on many aspects of Jesuit controversy, a period that has seen not only the energetic publication of original Jesuit documents, but also the examination of historical issues in an atmosphere largely free from anticlericalism. Marc Fumaroli's

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South Atlantic Review 149

ground-breaking studies of the debt of seventeenth-century French eloquence to Jesuit models are used extensively.

Traditional hostility against Jesuits was rooted in their fight with established local schools for status, funds, and students. In modern times the Jesuits might be considered a multinational corporation or a race of entrepeneurs. They claimed to represent a new age in educa- tion, inspired by Counter-Reform ideals, and promoted their claims and their Papal patronage shamelessly. Their problems came precisely from the fact that they had no national base. They could enter a country only at the sufferance of the sovereign state, monarchy, or republic, whose welcome blew hot or cold as relations with the Papacy fluctuated. Once admitted, the Company had to compete with local schools. Sixteenth-century education, for instance, was the concern of bishops, ancient religious orders, and of parliaments and municipali- ties. The latter's public funds supported lay schools; in return they expected the teaching of appropriate conservative civic virtues. The Jesuits aroused hostility wherever they went with their army of teachers recruited from countless nations, their loyalty to the Pope alone, and their open-door policy for rich and poor students of promise. This study surveys a polyglot documentation of awesome proportions in an effort to make sense of this troubled record. Surprisingly, the Jesuit ex- perience appears here as almost entirely European. No attention is given to colleges in other parts of the world except to note that in Goa a student could read Virgil, Sallust, and Cicero in 1552 and Ovid's Tristia in 1556 (70), and it disregards the Company's remarkable scholarship in biblical and exotic languages. In this light, the book's illustrations - unexplained in the text - of a Jesuit College in Salvador (Bahia), Brazil, seem irrelevant.

Rarely in this study does one sense the excitement that the Jesuits felt about their mission and that they communicated to their students and to their local patrons, upon whose generosity they depended almost exclusively. Although Jesuit theology is not the issue here, some ex- planation of casuistic discussions of regicide would have helped explain local reactions. Likewise, in the context of the trivium, one is surprised to see no analysis of the Jesuit promotion of the theater in its curricu- lum, and of the discipline of memory, which Jonathan Spence has illustrated so vividly in his life of Matteo Ricci. As for quadrivium, one would not know from this text that Christopher Clavius, who published an influential reworking and analysis of Euclid's Elements of Geomety in Latin in 1574, demanded that his students in Rome study astronomy as well as physics in conjunction with mathematics. This study only mentions in passing that Louis XIV founded a number of the twenty-

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150 Book Reviews

six chairs of mathematics in Jesuit colleges as "royal chairs of mathe- matics and hydrography for the navy" (they were still in existence in 1762) and that of the 130 astronomical observatories in Europe in 1773, 30 belonged to the Company. Supposedly these facts are not relevant to the book's conclusions because only a fraction of students enrolled in those courses. But Jesuit schools promoted themselves as centers of learning as well as teaching institutions, just as American universities do, and surely Renaissance humanism influenced goals in the former area no less than in the latter.

However admirable this study's aim at synthesis is, it fails in the actual presentation of its evidence. The editors probably deserve the blame, not the author. The text refers to the same man as "the Spaniard Juan de Marianna" and to "Giovanni Marianna" (97). It refers to the same work as Philostratus's Tableaux, Philostrati's Eikones, and Philostra- tus's Eikones, but never as "Philostratos'" (121-23). "The German Chris- tophorus Clavius" (88) also appears as "Christoforo Clavio" (82). The same information about secular colleges in French provincial towns appears twice, and in the same terms (19-20, 57). Finally, the editors should have recommended the use of extensive footnotes in a text so heavily dependent on documents.

There is a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, but the latter does not include the author's earlier study referred to in the text. There is no index.

H. Franklin Brooks, Vanderbilt University

E Turne. Tragidie. Edition critique avec introduction et notes. By Jean Pr6vost. Edited by Francoise Kantor. Poitiers: M6moires de la Soci6t6 des antiquaries de l'ouest, 1985. 168 pp. 120 FE

E Kantor has provided a meticulously prepared edition of a play that apparently had not been republished since its original appearance in 1614. The text is clearly and attractively presented, with a profusion of notes dealing largely with Pr6vost's language and the literary, historical, and mythological references in the text and to some extent with the play's prosody. The presentation suffers from mediocre reproductions of woodcuts from the Folger Collection, apparently so reduced that de- tails are muddied; but other, smaller, reproductions are clear and useful.

The edition is a version of Kantor's 1975 dissertation, and shows no evidence of updating (the most recent references are to four works published in 1972). The bibliography contains the familiar war horses

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