If the suppression of the Jesuits was, as Cardinal Newman put it, “one of the most mysterious matters in the history of the church” (85), this book goes far toward unraveling at least part of that mystery: namely, how hundreds of Jesuits of the Low Countries managed to persist and how many of them helped the order to revive after its official restoration in 1814. This highly informative and often insightful collection of articles, most of them presented first at a 2014 conference commemorating that restoration, adds new research to earlier studies to show just how messy and incomplete suppression was—despite the pain it caused and despite the seemingly iron-clad measures taken (such as having to inform authorities of their whereabouts, never living with more than two or three other Jesuits, never meeting or writing on subjects about the order, and the establishment of a “Jesuit Surveillance” to enforce it all). This incompleteness was partly because some royal officials worked to complicate the suppression and especially because individual Jesuits took initiatives to help keep at least the spirit of the order alive. In fact, the authors collectively argue, the restoration of the order can be said to have begun on the first day of the suppression itself, in 1773, so that it is better to think of the period under study as one of survival rather than suppression or even—mirroring the order's own stages of probation for its individual members—as a time of probation for the order as a whole. That probation was only finished when the two provinces of the Low Countries were reestablished, in 1832 in Belgium and 1850 in the Netherlands, explaining the end date of the volume.

A helpful introductory article (Marc Lindeijer, Jo Luyten, and Kristien Suenens) on the “quick downfall and slow rise” of the Jesuits in the Low Countries, added after the conference to help frame the papers, sets out the basic developments in one convenient place (13). Two chapters by Michel Hermans then trace the highly varied fates of the members of the Gallo-Belgian province just before the suppression and then in the decades afterward; a third (Joep van Gennip) discusses the equally varied fate of the members of the Flemish-Belgian province after 1773; while a fourth (Marek Inglot) treats the crucial role of Russia, which for surviving Jesuits was arguably the most important of the three countries (including Prussia and the Dutch Republic) that never promulgated the suppression order and became the major gathering point for refugees. Though the fate of all Netherlandish members is not known, these chapters gather, knead, and massage all the available quantitative information a reader could possibly hope for—individuals, colleges, cities, ages, dates, percentages, and more. Three case studies of Jesuits are a pleasure to read as they give some flesh and blood to the general and surprisingly varied trends in the form of the “Vicissitudes” of the sometime Jesuits Joannes Vrindts (Jo Luyten), Antoine Malou-Riga (Vincent Verbrugge), and the especially well-told story of Jan Roothaan, the “second founder” of the order (Marc Lindeijer). Another case study (Frank Judo) treats a perhaps surprising tract by the civic official Balthazar de Villegas calling for the restoration of the order as early as 1790, while three others helpfully explore what changed, or not, after the 1814 restoration in three selected areas of Jesuit life: relationships with female religious congregations in Belgium (Jo Luyten and Kristien Suenens), anti-Jesuit propaganda in the Netherlands (Joep van Gennip), and new Jesuit churches in the Netherlands (Peter van Dael). A final and second framing paper added after the conference by Pierre-Antoine Fabre reflects on the papers presented to wonder: were the Jesuits ever really suppressed? And were they ever really restored? Because it was not as if in 1832 or 1850, when the provinces were healthy again, that everything returned to the way it was. More research into that paradox will also help answer another: how could the Jesuits be at the forefront of modernity and at the forefront of anti-modernity, too? A handy appendix of Jesuits in and from the Low Countries, 1773–1830, plus an excellent bibliography and index, complete this interesting volume.