Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Jesuits and the Construction of Knowledge, 1540–1773

I'm pleased, but a little late in announcing that an exhibit I co-curated with Dr. Florence Hsia, Dr. Robin Rider, and Dr. Jim Lattis has opened in Special Collections at Memorial Library. As the title suggests, the exhibit focuses on Jesuit and knowledge production from the order's establishment in 1540 to its repression in 1773. The disciplines commonly associated with the early Society like astronomy and mathematics are well represented, however we wanted to demonstrate the richness of early-modern Jesuit scholarship. As it turns out, we have a ton of rare books that could have been part of this exhibit and we ultimately had to make hard choices of what to include and exclude. The final display features over 100 works and includes a long list of books in our collections that didn't make the cut.

In helping select books for the exhibit, I really got a feel for the panoptic nature of early-modern Jesuit scholarship. As has often been said, the Jesuits were everywhere in the early modern world and the fruits of this globetrotting can be seen in their studies on hydrography, natural history, and cartography. The Society was clearly proud of the global nature of their mission, which is evidenced by the motto "unnus non sufficit orbis." Meaning "one world is not enough," this motto is inscribed in many engraved illustrations on display.

One particularly striking image in which it appears is a large map of the Society in the form of a tree. The trunk of the tree represents Rome, while the branches of the tree are the major missions of the world. A sundial clock is associated with each region of the world where the Jesuits were stationed, allowing the viewer to calculate the time difference between Rome and its provinces. Another one of my favorite images is a large, detailed selenography that appears in Riccioli's Almagestum novum (1651). Produced forty years after Galileo's telescopic study of the moon, much of Riccioli's lunar nomenclature has stuck. (Nick Jacobsen and I are hoping to produce a new interpretation of this image, possibly for HSS next year...)

None of these images can be adequately described in words and I've purposefully omitted links to images in order to encourage people to check out the exhibit, if possible. It will be up through December. However, I will be posting again about another related project: The Jesuit Iconography visual culture database.

5 comments:

  1. I'm going to go see it on the 1st, with the concert!:
    Thursday, December 1, 2011 @ 4:30 pm
    Special Collections, 9th floor of Memorial Library
    This program reflects vocal and instrumental music one might have heard in the Society of Jesus' college in seventeenth-century Rome. Professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano and polymath, Athanasius Kircher mentioned these composers in his Musurgia Universalis (1650), a monumental encyclopedia of musical history, theory, and practice. The concert takes place in the exhibit area of Special Collections on the 9th floor of Memorial Library, where the current exhibit, "Jesuits and the Construction of Knowledge, 1540-1773," highlights (among other topics) Jesuit interest in music and includes a copy of Kircher's Musurgia (1650).

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  2. BTW, why does it say this was posted on Oct. 26? Something's funky with the blogger calendar...

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  3. Which reminds me:

    The Mellon Workshop on Science & Print Culture presents "Kircher's Rome: Music in the 17th-century Collegio Romano" as performed by Eliza's Toyes

    Thursday, December 1, 2011 @ 4:30 pm
    Special Collections, 9th floor of Memorial Library

    This program reflects vocal and instrumental music one might have heard in the Society of Jesus' college in seventeenth-century Rome. Professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano and polymath, Athanasius Kircher mentioned these composers in his Musurgia Universalis (1650), a monumental encyclopedia of musical history, theory, and practice. The concert takes place in the exhibit area of Special Collections on the 9th floor of Memorial Library, where the current exhibit, "Jesuits and the Construction of Knowledge, 1540-1773," highlights (among other topics) Jesuit interest in music and includes a copy of Kircher's Musurgia (1650).

    Program:
    Ecce sic benedicetur by Christóbal Morales (1500-1553)
    Dunque con stile by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (1580-1651)
    In lectulo meo per noctes from Kircher's Musurgia Universalis (1650)
    Historia di Jephte by Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674)

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  4. I says Oct 26th because that's when I started the post! That's embarrassing; it's called me out on my procrastination.

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