The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, edited by Thomas Worcester, SJ (the author of The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits [Cambridge University Press, 2008]) and his associated editors, Megan C. Amstrong, James Corkery, SJ, Alison Fleming, and Andrés Ignacio Prieto, is the very first publication of the kind in the English language. It is dedicated to the first Jesuit pope, Francis, who was elected in the year the Encyclopedia project officially began. Its older sisters are the Spanish-language, much larger four-volume Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, published by the Jesuits in 2001, and the German-language, concise one-volume Jesuiten–Lexikon: Die Gesellschaft Jesu einst und jetzt of 1934 (reprinted in 1962), edited by the Jesuit historian Ludwig Koch.

It contains about six hundred entries commissioned in 2013 from 110 authors—both senior and not a few junior scholars, more or less authoritative in the field of Jesuit studies, including a significant number of Jesuits. A bit more than one-third of the articles are of biographical nature (mostly Jesuits but also other historical figures of importance for the history of the Society, from Antoine Arnauld to the Wierix brothers to Juana of Austria to Descartes) and the rest “focus on Jesuit ideals, concepts, terminology, places, institutions, and events” throughout its half-a-millennium history since the foundation of the Society of Jesus in 1540 to the HIV/AIDS crisis to the sexual abuse by Jesuits. The entries are of different size—from 300 to 800 to 3,000 words. Most entries are followed by a limited bibliography. The volume is accompanied by some seventy black and white illustrations, a brief index, a list of contributors, and an alphabetical list of entries.

As Worcester explains in his ten-page introduction to the publication, “Though it may be self-evident to say that an encyclopedia is encyclopedic, in the sense of all-inclusive, in fact this one-volume reference work does not and cannot cover everything about the Jesuits. Even ten volumes or twenty volumes would not suffice for that.”