| From 1561 to 1568, shortly after the death of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order (Society of Jesus), a high administrator and spokesman for the General in Rome, Jerome Nadal, conducted visitations to all the European provinces outside Italy. For seven years, as he visited each house, he administered a complex questionnaire to its members, inquiring after origins, studies, careers, ambitions, illnesses, talents, and, in Portugal and Spain, on motives for entry. For Italy, only inspected Rome, as a supplement, the thesis uses two novice books (Rome and Novellara) with good serial data on age and social origins, and others from Tournai and Salamanca. Another precious source is a published volume of sixteenth-century biographies from the Polish Province. These materials allow a prosopography of the first and second generations of the expanding order. The thesis treats time and space, class and talents: thus it explores geography of origin, social station, schooling, work experience, place of entry, current occupation and place of residence, and, at the end, patterns of failure and departure. The thesis is a work of quantification, for a collective portrait. The thesis finds the Jesuits less aristocratic, less militant, less activist than older historiography would have them. Loyola's own noble origins seldom set the model; rather, in many places, Jesuits came from the professional and mercantile classes. After a first decade of recruiting grown men in mid-career, increasingly, the order found its conscripts in its own schools. These were younger and less experienced in work and life. The Belgian novice book, with its marginalia about quitters and the expelled, paints a picture of members' mental stress, as if the discipline of the novitiate and the strenuous Jesuit life in general could be hard on the order's members. |
