Browsing by Subject "Society of Jesus"

This dissertation, For God and King: Jesuit Ephemeral Spectacles in France Under the First Bourbons, examines the contributions of the French Jesuits to the production, staging, and commemoration of festivals in the Assistancy of France. Members of the Society of Jesus produced the spectacles in this study and were the authors of the festival books that commemorated the events for posterity. Beginning with the nuptial entry of Maria de’ Medici into Avignon in 1600, and ending with the death of Louis XIII in 1643, the festivals analyzed were instrumental for cultivating the relationship between the Society and the Bourbon monarchy at a time when both entities were experiencing a rise in power and influence before arriving at an apogee in the second half of the seventeenth century. Crucially, this dissertation interrogates the use of ephemeral architecture and other apparatuses as a means of manipulating and transforming existing architectural spaces in order to construct new spaces that were agents in the transmission of the multi-layered messages on display in the festival’s iconographic programs.

Scholarship on the early modern Jesuits, Jesuit theater, and early modern festivals is extensive. The concentration of the literature on the Jesuits in Italy, Germany, and their missions outside the European continent belies the importance of the kingdom of France to the history of the Society and misrepresents the importance of the Jesuits to France and the Bourbon monarchy. The emphasis on Jesuit theater outside of France, or on French Jesuit theater under Louis XIV, disregards the important role played by Jesuit theater and ephemeral spectacles in promoting Jesuit colleges and reinforcing the Society’s standing in the kingdom in the early part of the century. Similarly, the perceptible trend in festival scholarship to eschew the early seventeenth-century, and the reign of Louis XIII specifically, discounts the function of festivals in asserting Louis XIII’s power and in cultivating an environment in which the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV could take root. A significant portion of festival scholarship present studies that either: a) analyze only part of the festival; or, b) fail to consider the implications of the sites and the architectural history of the built environment occupied by the festival.

Adopting a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach to the study and interrogation of early modern festivals and ephemeral spectacles that is reflective of the multifaceted, multimedia nature of the subject, this dissertation analyzes early modern festivals as complete, multimedia works of art using a combination of site-specific, textual, and visual analyses. It examines the Jesuit contributions to these festivals and redirects the attention of Jesuit and festival studies to the first half of the seventeenth-century in France.

This dissertation examines ethnographic writing in the Jesuit Relations, a set of annual reports from missionaries in New France to Society of Jesus authorities in France that were published and widely read from 1632 to 1673. Drawing on currents in cultural anthropological thought about the complex relationship between anthropologists, their subjects, and the texts they produce, I analyze how the Relations allowed Jesuit missionaries to define for French readers Amerindian cultures, European-Amerindian interactions, and the health and success of the colony and the mission for forty years, almost without competition, giving them extraordinary influence over perceptions of the Amerindian Other at the very moment that France's interest therein was being piqued by an increasing awareness of the world outside of Europe. The texts now are lauded as the première source of information on the Algonquian and Iroquoian groups with which the Jesuits were in contact in seventeenth century New France. In this dissertation, I examine the ways Jesuits conveyed information about Amerindian groups, focusing on the rhetorical aspects of their accounts that have been largely ignored by social scientists who have mined the texts for data. Instead of considering the Relations as a collection of facts recorded by diligent field workers, I seek to understand them as texts that reflect multiple points of view and the political, religious, and intellectual pressures acting on their French Catholic authors. Were Amerindians human? If so, were they created in Eden along with the ancestors of Europeans? How could one explain their presence in America, with little apparent knowledge of their origins? And if they were human and of the same stock as European Christians, how could one explain the fact that their beliefs and behavior were so different from those of their French Christian interlocutors? These questions, I argue, left an enduring mark on the Jesuits' descriptions of Amerindian cultures, making their texts less the work of proto-anthropologists than a form of intellectual colonization.