Latin Scientific Poetry under the Shadow of the Jesuit Suppression

During their "long Suppression" (ca. 1755-1814) Jesuits recorded their emotional responses to the unfolding crisis and its aftermath: anxiety, bewilderment, indignation and dejection as priests and seminarians were expelled from Portugal, France, Spain and their overseas missions; shattering psychic shock as the papal brief "Dominus ac Redemptor" brought the curtain down on the Old Society in 1773; and, ultimately, dogged hope for the resurrection of their order. It is significant that many Jesuits continued to navigate this turbulent history in the Latin language, which seems to have served not just as a professional but also an emotional life-raft for them. The Latin literature of the Suppression, still largely unexplored, includes letters, diaries and histories in prose, devotional poems and allegorical elegies and epics celebrating the Society's heroic past and, in at least one case, prophesying its rebirth. Nikodemus Musnicki's De Christi ab inferis reditu [On Christ's return from hell] ( The sufferings and survival of the Society are also celebrated in the Heroum libri iv by suppressed Portuguese Jesuit, Emanuel de Azevedo, a Virgilian poem about the expulsion of the Jesuits from Ibero-America (the collective heroes of the title) and their journey to Italy. The classical subtext transforms the dishonour of the Suppression (which parallels the Fall of Troy) into a divinely-dictated ordeal; "destination Italy" naturally carries the implicit promise of a new and more glorious empire to come

Art · Literature · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Byzantine Studies and History · Historical and Literary Studies · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity