Despite recent developments in the field, there remains a tendency to isolate the experience of Early Modern Catholics in Britain from events in mainland Europe and even the world. If this is true of the historiography of Catholicism then it is arguably even truer of Early Modern British historiography more generally. The island mentality still holds a strong grip and, if anything, recent works on British and Irish Catholic exile communities have pioneered a move away from this.
It is for this reason that Silvia Mostaccio’s work is rather disorientating for someone working on British and Irish Catholicism. Not only does it address European historiographical debates but, when seeking examples to back up its arguments, it frequently neglects British examples that really showcase what is being suggested. Integration of the British and Irish experience into the overarching narrative is still, apparently, a long way off on both sides of the English Channel.
Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615) concentrates on the battle between the interior and the exterior, the subjective conscience versus objective outward obedience. Mostaccio argues that discussions happening within the Society of Jesus under the tenure of its fifth superior general, Claudio Acquaviva, are a means to exploring the growing awareness of the individual in the early modern period. It is the Jesuits’ reach, through the pulpit and university chairs, that underlines their importance to this developing sense of self-awareness, internal debate within the fledgling order reflecting deliberations in wider society, such as about the just authority of princes and the obedience due to the ruler by the ruled. In other words, it was the growth of dialogue between the self (or as it is frequently referred to by Mostaccio, the conscience) and an external authority, whether that be a ruler for the layperson or the multi-layered experience of the individual Jesuit, who also owed obedience to the pope, the superior general and the local superior.
This alternation between within and without found expression, Mostaccio suggests, in a way peculiar to the Jesuits: the frequently controversial policy of accommodation. Famously utilized by Matteo Ricci during his time in China, this was a Jesuit approach to evangelization that saw the missionaries adjust as necessary to their local surroundings, taking a general disposition but adapting it to the specific. The problem was, of course, that some viewed this as betraying fundamental truths of Catholicism. A prime example of the tangles such a policy could create is provided by the contrasting approaches to attendance at the state Church adopted by Jesuits in England and Scotland. In the former, Edmund Campion and Robert Persons promoted a rigorist approach to recusancy as a marker for Catholic behaviour (even if, in private, some flexibility was afforded to pressed laity). Yet in Scotland, at the very same time, the newly arrived Jesuits effectively sanctioned the outward conformity that they already found in place. The debates aired by Mostaccio should clearly not be the sole preserve of scholars working on mainland Europe.
Mostaccio sees the development of the Counter-Reformation Church as moving from a time of relative spiritual and theological experimentalism, as expounded by the spiritualii, to one of tightening control, where obedience to Rome became the hallmark of orthodoxy. This meant orders founded in that initial burst of creativity, such as the Jesuits and the Capuchins, found themselves having to adapt to this at the very time they were attempting to hammer out their own identities, which is why Acquaviva is frequently referred to as the second founder of the Society. Yet for Mostaccio, the Jesuits were not the papal storm troopers of popular Catholic imagination and, one would add, of Protestant nightmarish fantasy. As the author amply demonstrates, they were not a monolithic group and adopted a sometimes ambiguous and accommodated obedience. The important element was not to whom obedience was offered but to what.
Again, the British context abounds with examples. Both Campion and Persons knew that the issue of obedience was more pointed in England due to the nature of the entanglement between religion and politics following the Elizabethan Settlement. Equally, when it came to obedience to the superior, this could be offered reluctantly, as recently exposed by Gerard Kilroy in his work on Edmund Campion and the famed Jesuit’s apparent reluctance to head to near certain death in England.
The flow of the book and its arguments are hampered by a number of typographical and grammatical errors, which sometimes make the book feel episodic, a collection of essays rather than a fully integrated monograph. For example, in consecutive pages, the French Jesuit Vincent Julien is known by both his proper name but also Julien Vincent. Nevertheless, the subject and themes of this book are important if unmistakably complicated.
At the heart of Mostaccio’s argument is the tension that the individual Jesuit, through the Spiritual Exercises, discerned the interior movements of his soul (and, if performed correctly, the Holy Spirit), whilst simultaneously having to consider how externals could be accommodated to new situations. Such subjectivity was – and for that matter still is – something quite unusual in a major religion. This was a tension mirrored across Early Modern society: the growing belief in the discernment of the individual against the requirement for people to be obedient to religious or political masters.
It is frequently neglected that British Jesuits were part of a global order and, like lay Catholics, part of a supranational Church. Plugging the study of Early Modern British Catholicism back into that story will help both British-based and European scholars better understand the dynamics of that period. The question is: with the study of Early Modern British Catholicism only slowly being forced, blinking into the light of mainstream historiography, is anybody ready for such a move?
