Narratives of Adversity
Jesuits on the Eastern Peripheries of the Habsburg Realms (1640–1773)

Paul Shore, Brandon University, Canada

Addresses the experience of Jesuit missionaries, teachers and writers along the peripheries of the Habsburg lands, which stretched to Moldavia, Ukraine, Serbia and Wallachia, and which were continually torn with ethnic tensions. The time scale of the study is from the “high tide” of the Society (often labeled “the first multinational corporation”) in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, until its suppression in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV. The book examines several of the communities situated along the periphery and the records that they left behind about their interactions with the local populations. It constructs a vivid picture of Jesuit life on the frontier that is built up in mosaic fashion and livened by compelling anecdotes. The Jesuits of Royal Hungary exercised a baroque expression modeled after the larger western cities of the Habsburg lands, which was a fragile splendor in part defined by the need to defend Catholicism from the hostility of Orthodox, Lutherans,
Calvinists, and others.

Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction: A Fragile Splendor; Prelude; I Narratives of Adversity; II Peripheries; III “In Campos”; IV Campaign in Prešov; V Sex and Demons; VI Detrimenta, Damna; VII Theatre and Suffering; VIII Jesuits in Banská Bystrica, Kláštor pod Znievom, Sárospatak, and Levoča; IX In Pursuit of History; X An Unredeemed Loss: The Jesuit Mission in Belgrade; XI Trnava; XII Conclusion; Bibliography; Index; Registry of geographical names

“There is no comparable work in any language on this subject. The book is wide-ranging, covers a large chronological and geographic space, is informed by careful study of a variety of different manuscript and archival sources, and built on complete familiarity with the secondary literature, in many languages. The author is an acknowledged international authority on the Jesuits in Central and Eastern Europe. There are no competing books.“
Martyn Rady, Professor of Central European History, University College London

2012
394 pages
978-615-5053-47-4 cloth $60.00 / €55.00 / £50.00