Introduction

This introduction situates the “Jesuit Digital Reformation” special issue within the long arc of Jesuit engagement with technology, beginning with Roberto Busa, S.J., and his pioneering Index Thomisticus , the first major digital humanities project. It highlights how Busa’s methodological insistence on comprehensive, computationally enhanced philology continues to inform current debates about data quality, responsible AI use, and the role of the human in digital humanities research. The issue’s contributions showcase cutting‐edge applications of digital methods to Jesuit sources, from AI ‐assisted archival reconstruction to network analysis and fine‐tuned language models for historical interpretation. Together, they demonstrate that rigorous humanistic inquiry and computational tools are complementary and, rather than making humanities scholars and their hard-won skills redundant, provide new ways to analyze Jesuit history at scale while honoring its deep scholarly traditions

Digital era · Digital humanities · Humanism · Index (typography) · Philology · Scale (ratio) · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies