Although several Cambridge Companions have dealt with Christian topics, this is the first volume in the series devoted to a Roman Catholic religious order. That alone indicates the prominence of the Society of Jesus. But the volume is also the product of the burgeoning popularity of the history of the Society as a field of research. The focus of the essays is intentionally on the early modern period, from the Society's foundation in 1540 to its suppression in 1773. This makes eminent sense, given the scholarly attention that this period has attracted. At the end of the volume, Gerald McKevitt describes the origins of Jesuit schools in the nineteenth-century United States and their adaptation to currents in twentieth-century American society, while Mary Ann Hinsdale highlights ways in which modern Jesuits have embraced liberation theology and explored religious pluralism.

Readers should not expect, Thomas Worcester warns in his introduction, “a comprehensive survey of every country in Europe where Jesuits went.” What is on offer, however, is “a sampling of several important contexts and issues that shed light on Jesuit priorities, and the opportunities and difficulties their implementation faced” (5). Even with this reasonable caveat, the volume suffers from some remarkable omissions. Opening the volume with a discussion of the Spanish religious environment from which Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, emerged addresses one important context. Yet Lu Ann Homza's essay would have been more instructive if it had indicated to what extent Ignatius specifically shared desires for clerical reform, welcomed the publication of confessors' manuals, or participated in the various types of devotion promoted in Spain during his youth. Nicolas Standaert's nuanced essay on the Jesuit mission in China holds that the strategy of cultural accommodation was as much the result of encouragement from Chinese elites as of Jesuit initiative. Standaert unfortunately mentions the Chinese Rites Controversy only briefly and as if readers were familiar with it. But we should assume that a general audience, to which the volume presumably addresses itself, requires more specific and thorough information about this controversy. Most startlingly, despite occasional references to the Jesuit Constitutions, no essay devotes itself to presenting the Society as an organization with a precise structure and complex regulations, surely conspicuous characteristics to friend and foe alike as well as sources of strength and growth.

These criticisms aside, this Cambridge Companion can serve as a useful resource for university courses on the early modern Jesuits alongside the still authoritative masterpiece by John O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). The five-part structure of the volume aptly relays “important contexts” for understanding the Jesuits: Ignatius of Loyola, European foundations, geographic and ethnic frontiers, arts and sciences, and Jesuits in the modern world. Jonathan Wright's argument against a monocausal explanation for the suppression of the Society in the first essay of the fifth part remains relevant for early modernists.

Students of early modern history will discover several gems among the comprehensive essays, which not only inform but also reveal deeper points of significance. In what must be one of the clearest and most concise introductions to Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, Philip Endean deftly navigates the structure and terminology of this famous text. He alerts readers to two underlying tensions. The first is theological, namely the possibility that what the exercitant discovers in a direct relationship with God “may go beyond what is ecclesiastically sanctioned” (62). The second is historical. The rapid expansion of the Society not only “outpaced the ability of the new membership to absorb and pass on the spirituality of the Exercises” but hindered the development of that spirituality into a force that “could nourish the corporate identity of a relatively large international organization” (64).

Jacques Monet's reference to the “supernatural wisdom” (188) of Jean de Brébeuf, the martyred missionary in New France, is a rare hagiographical moment, for usually manifestations of and tensions within a corporate Jesuit identity constitute a recurring theme in the essays. Paul Murphy shows how, through urban colleges and confraternities and rural missions, Jesuits made their pervasive presence felt in Italy. In France, however, according to Worcester, they were regularly on the defensive, protesting their loyalty to the monarchy. Jesuits not only set out to refashion society. They were refashioned by society. In the case of Poland, as Stanisław Obirek argues, “the Jesuits became so deeply integrated in Polish society that we could speak of a syncretic process” (146). Their tendency to absorb the manners of the Polish gentry won the displeasure in the early seventeenth century of the superior general, Claudio Acquaviva. The Society's adamant refusal to permit a female branch, Gemma Simmonds rightly reports, did not prevent early modern Catholic women, such as Mary Ward, from trying to create religious institutes with an apostolate for women outside of convent walls based on the Jesuit Constitutions. Nor did it pose an obstacle for one loose cannon, Jean-Pierre Médaille, founder of the Congregation of St. Joseph, to “his conscious attempt to transpose the Jesuit Constitutions for the female condition” (131). Corporate tensions run deeper when we move from gender to ethnicity. A Jesuit certainly was not a woman, with the exception of the persistent Juana of Austria, the sister of Spain's King Philip II, who was admitted to the Society under the male pseudonym of Mateo Sánchez. But could a Jesuit have Jewish ancestry, or could he be a non-European? In a revealing essay charged with pathos, Thomas Cohen portrays Antonio Possevino's ultimately unsuccessful struggle to keep membership in the Society as inclusive as possible. Louis Caruana insists that, in the long wake of the Church's controversy with Galileo, Jesuits “engaged in genuine science” (255). While formally accepting the condemnation of Copernicanism, their discussion of it as a hypothesis enhanced its credibility.

The volume's sampling of Jesuit priorities and activities is impressive, even if not sufficiently complete. It sends readers beyond textbook generalizations about the Society to acquire a sense of its rich complexity. The essays not only inform but also have the potential of engendering new research into Jesuit history.