Ignatius of Loyola and the first Jesuits were itinerant preachers who ministered primarily to the poor of Europe. Ignatius's companion, Jerónimo Nadal, affirmed that “the world is our house” and famously declared, “We are not monks!” The Jesuits, founded in 1540, quickly established a global network of schools and missions. They became known for their rigorous teaching and scholarship, for their accommodation of indigenous religious and cultural traditions, and for their mastery of indigenous languages. To explain their approach to their ministries, the first Jesuits referred to the primitive church, and in particular to the words of Paul that Ignatius often repeated: “I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). The lasting influence of Ignatius on the men who followed him is one of several unifying themes of The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits.

The Handbook is the product of the erudition and broad vision of Ines Županov, a distinguished historian of the Jesuits in the early modern Portuguese world. Županov's approach is interdisciplinary, ranging from history, theology, and art history to mathematics and astronomy. The book consists of forty chapters divided into eight sections: Foundations and Administration; Spirituality and Economy; Education and Politics; Global Mission; Jesuit Aesthetics and Artistic Production; Scientific Projects; Anti-Jesuitism, Enlightenment, and the Suppression; and Restoration. All the contributors provide authoritative surveys of the scholarship on their topics. Many of the essays are also full of original insights.

As Paul Shore notes in his essay on historiography, scholarship on the Jesuits has expanded in exciting new directions during the last thirty years. The Handbook is the most recent of several collaborative efforts that include The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts and The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, edited by John W. O'Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy (University of Toronto Press, 1999 and 2006); the Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, edited by Charles O'Neill and Joaquín María Domínguez (Universidad Pontificia Comillas, four volumes, 2001); the Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, edited by Thomas Worcester (Cambridge University Press, 2008); The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, edited by Thomas Worcester (Cambridge University Press, 2017); the web-based Jesuit Online Bibliography; several volumes commemorating the bicentenary of the Restoration (1814) published by the Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico; and edited volumes about Ignatius, Claudio Acquaviva, Athanasius Kircher, and other key figures in the history of the Society.

At least twelve chapters in the Handbook address the educational ministries for which the Society of Jesus has been recognized since the time of Ignatius. These include Cristiano Casalini's superb analysis of the first Jesuits’ “unplanned” focus on education, which draws on John W. O'Malley's fundamental study, The First Jesuits (Harvard University Press, 1993). Casalini explains how this ministry developed over the next two hundred years. Yasmin Haskell, Anne-Sophie Gallo, and David R. M. Irving demonstrate that theater and music were central not only to the overseas missions but also to Jesuit pedagogy in Europe. Drawing on the pioneering work of Barbara Rosenwein on the history of emotions, Haskell argues that the Society sought to create an emotional community through “the cultivation of Latin letters, especially verse,” and that this shared Latin culture helped to sustain the exiled Jesuits after the Suppression in 1773 (553–555).

Before founding the Society, Ignatius hoped to travel to the Holy Land as a missionary, and he remained committed to the conversion of Muslims throughout his life. Ignatius's views about Islam, however, were ambiguous, as Emanuele Colombo argues in his excellent essay about the Jesuits and Islam. “On the one hand,” Colombo notes, “he consistently advocated a warlike approach. . . . On the other hand . . . [he] adopted throughout his life a strong missionary and pastoral attitude” (350). Ignatius encouraged the study of Arabic and of the Qur'an, and contemplated undertaking a mission to North Africa and leaving his position as Father General. Ignatius's sometimes contradictory views about Islam and Muslims continued to inform the views of many of his successors, most notably Antonio Possevino. Tirso González, who served as a missionary to Muslims in Spain, wrote the Handbook to Convert Muslims (1687) and became the thirteenth Father General of the Society.

Ignatius's views about Muslims contrast strikingly with his views about descendants of converted Jews, known as New Christians. During a period when Old Christian lineage (limpieza de sangre) was often a prerequisite for appointment to civil and ecclesiastical offices in the Iberian world, Ignatius insisted that admission to the Society be open to all. As a result, the Society attracted many New Christians, including some of the most distinguished Jesuits of the sixteenth century. Opposition to New Christians nearly led to a schism in the Society when the Fifth General Congregation passed a decree in 1593 prohibiting the admission of descendants of Jews and Muslims. Stefania Pastore's perceptive and wide-ranging essay places the Jesuits’ internal debate about New Christians within the larger context of Ignatius's relations with alumbrados (many of whom were of Jewish descent), which drew the attention of the Inquisition.

A brief survey can provide only a glimpse of the contributors’ comprehensive treatment of Jesuit artistic and scientific activities, of other fundamental ministries, and of the governance of the Society. The Jesuits, Gauvin Alexander Bailey writes in his essay about Jesuit art and architecture in China and Brazil, deployed religious images as “a practical way of communicating across linguistic barriers” (488). Bailey underscores the importance of indigenous artists in both missions and situates the artistic production of the Society in the context of imperial and interreligious rivalries. Fernanda Alfieri, Miguel de Asúa, Luís Miguel Carolino, Charlotte de Castelnau-l'Estoile, Romano Gatto, and Stuart M. McManus analyze the Jesuits’ contributions to mathematics, astronomy, natural history, philology, psychology, and anthropology. Like Jesuit artists and architects, many Jesuit scientists—especially those working on natural history and non-European languages—relied on indigenous collaborators.

Sabina Pavone addresses the multiple strains of “anti-Jesuitism in a global perspective.” Among the principal causes of anti-Jesuitism during the early modern period were Ignatius's suspect orthodoxy even before the founding of the Society; the Jesuits’ form of religious life, which dispensed with many of the rules that governed older religious orders; the proliferation of anti-Jesuit libels, most famously the Monita privata Societatis Iesu, “one of the most convincing fakes in modern history;” the Chinese Rites controversy; the Jesuits’ defense of the freedom of the Indians in Brazil; and the Society's battles with the Marquês de Pombal in Portugal, whose expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal was an important step toward the Suppression. The nineteenth century brought new attacks by Freemasons and others. Pavone convincingly demonstrates that “we are wrong in speaking of anti-Jesuitism: we ought rather to use the plural” (835).

One of the many strengths of the Handbook is its coverage—in the concluding essays by Frédéric Gugelot and Benoît Vermander, SJ, and in several of the preceding essays, including Casalini's—of the Society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Ignatian “way of proceeding” and the Jesuit commitment to inculturation have inspired Jesuits today to live among the poor and the illiterate, to share with them the poverty and uncertainty of everyday life, and to become similar to them in habits and way of life. At the same time, Jesuits have remained committed to their ministries as educators and intellectuals, guided by Nadal's instruction to keep the relationship between thought and action always in view.

The last section of the Handbook underscores the continuing relevance of the Society throughout the world. The Society's prophetic tradition has been made visible in the Jesuits’ courageous work rescuing Jews during the Holocaust and in their defense of the rights of working people, which draws on Catholic tradition and on the work of generations of Christian and non-Christian writers and activists. Henri de Lubac, Augustin Bea, and John Courtney Murray were among the Jesuits who played decisive roles in conceiving and implementing the reforms of Vatican II. Jesuits are working throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region and are advocates (through the Jesuit Refugee Service and other organizations) for people in conflict zones throughout the world. Jesuits have made important contributions to liberation theology and have been leaders in the struggle for justice in Latin America, in some cases at the cost of their lives (a paramilitary squad murdered six Jesuits in El Salvador in 1989). Finally, the Society nurtured the prophetic vocation of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope.