Published in 2014 by the University of
Toronto Press as part of the UCLA Clark
Library publication series, Jesuit Accounts
of the Colonial Americas offers a look at the
rich experience of the Jesuits in France and
Spain’s American colonies. Co-edited by
Clorinda Donato together with Marc-André
Bernier and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Jesuit
Accounts offers the first comprehensive
examination of Jesuit writing and the role it
played in solidifying images of the
Americas. The collection also provides a reexamination of the work of the Jesuits in
relation to Enlightenment ideals and the
modern social sciences and humanities.
“The writings about the New World from the
time of the Jesuit missions has not been
studied that much,” said Donato, a member
of the university since 1989. “The Jesuit
order was founded by Ignatius Loyola in
1534, shortly before the time of the Counter
Reformation when the Catholic Church initiated a period of inward renewal and
outward evangelization in response to the Protestant Reformation. One of their
mandates was to go abroad to bring the word of Catholicism far and wide.” Over
the ensuing centuries, they established missions throughout Asia, Canada and
Latin America and wrote prolifically about the languages and cultures they
experienced in histories, chronicles, relaciones, relations and récits, collectively
constituting the Jesuit Accounts discussed in this volume. The images of the
New World they produced are probed here as a function of Jesuit training and
the various impulses of official mission, personal mission, national agenda and
gender, as well as the evolving reception of the history, geography and customs
of the cultures being described; more importantly, the ways in which different
generations and groups have accepted or rejected those images over time have
also been evaluated. This work plumbs a field of inquiry that has long received
backburner status in Iberoamerican studies in Europe, Latin America, Canada
and the United States alike: pre- and post-expulsion Jesuit accounts of the New
World and their role as an important medium of intercultural transfers between
the New World and the Old. “The expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America
constitutes another misunderstood chapter in history of the New World,” Donato
explained. By 1767, the Jesuits were perceived as dangerous bastions of
corrupt religion by the French and as potential enemies by the Spaniards who
feared they might be plotting against the Crown to take control of the New
World. “That year, the King of Spain, Charles III, declared an official ban on the
Jesuit Order and expelled them from the New World. En masse, some 5,000
Jesuits left,” she explained. “All their notes, diaries and papers were destroyed.
But eventually, when the Spanish Crown realized the wealth of information that
the Jesuits possessed about the New World,
it began to offer pensions to the exiled Jesuits in exchange for their New World
memoirs.” These accounts were often first published in Italian. Since Italy was
the only place in Europe that would host the Jesuits post-exile, the majority of
the 3,000 Jesuits who survived reentry into Europe settled there. A case in point
is Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavigero, born in Mexico of a Spanish father and a
Criolla mother, who lived in Ferrara and Bologna post-exile. His history of
ancient Mexico was first published in Cesena, Italy, in 1780 as Storia Antica del
Mexico. Beatriz de Alba-Koch, a contributor to the volume whose essay deals
with Clavigero, expresses the unique position of Jesuits who had spent the bulk
of their lives in the New World, not only learning about the indigenous peoples
among whom they lived, but slowly identifying with them as well, “In Clavigero’s
narrative of the Conquest, a counterpoint is sustained not only between
Clavigero’s religious convictions and his engagement with the premises of the
“Age of Reason,” but also between an articulation of his identity as a Criollo and
an affirmation of his mexicanidad.