Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas: Intercultural Transfers, Intellectual Disputes, and Textualities <i>Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas: Intercultural Transfers, Intellectual Disputes, and Textualities</i> . Edited by M <scp>arc</scp> A <scp>ndré</scp> B <scp>ernier,</scp> C <scp>lorinda</scp> D <scp>onato,</scp> and H <scp>ans-</scp> J <scp>ürgen</scp> L <scp>üsebrink</scp> . (UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. x + 464 pp.

Reflecting the transnational reach of the Society of Jesus from the sixteenth century onwards, this collection surveys over two centuries of intensive Jesuit publication of letters, histories, and missionary accounts in the major European vernaculars and in Latin. The volume's contributors focus primarily on material in Spanish and French, and a division into three parts (‘Intercultural Transfers’, ‘Intellectual Disputes’, and ‘Textualities’) reflects the importance of the Society's textual output in the transfer of information about the Americas, and the mobility of Jesuit discourses that might even be marshalled in the service of nationalist debates. The title also hints at Protestant and Catholic resistances to the Jesuits' substantial influence, culminating in their expulsion from Spanish territories in 1767 — a pivotal date around which several of the articles turn. This collection is based on seminar proceedings, and there is some crossover of the material of at least four chapters with other studies undertaken by their authors (two of these were, however, originally written in languages other than English or French). Despite this, the book opens up an interesting range of interrogations on the diversity of responses to cultural difference. Explorations of Jesuit narrative and rhetorical strategies trace the evolution from an oral to a literate sacred rhetoric in the seventeenth century (Perla Pawling), or discuss oratory as the sign of the ‘optimistic anthropology’ of the Enlightenment (Marc André Bernier, p. 393). The ‘scientific’ value of Jesuit testimony to a Europe ‘[thirsty] for encyclopedic knowledge’ (p. 53) is discussed as proto-ethnology, following the work of Alfred Métraux, and the ‘anthropological’ as one of ‘various fragmentary discourses’ (Ute Fendler, p. 220). Indeed, certain contributors call for a reappraisal of the Enlightenment beyond ‘restrictive and Eurocentric definitions’ (Margaret Ewalt, p. 346) to encompass other ‘knowledge transfers’ from the Americas, in which the Jesuits were essential mediators (Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, p. 139). The studies that focus on strategies adopted by Catholic religious orders, when faced with unfamiliar Amerindian languages and cultures, explore an intriguing range of translation events that should be of interest to scholarship beyond French Studies. These interrogate the tactic of Jesuit adaptation through the ‘loss’ of an original identity and the transformation into a homo universalis, a step which ‘entailed a real intercultural transfer, between European culture and alien wisdoms and societies’ (Girolamo Imbruglia, pp. 32–33). Fendler's contribution characterizes the Jesuits as ‘mediators’, engaging in a process of ‘com[ing] and go[ing]’ between cultures (pp. 225, 239). Klaus-Dieter Ertler, in a study of the Jesuit Relations in French, analyses the tension between the empirical — the testimony of the Jesuit observer in situ — and the implementation of a narrative model informed by the Loyolan tradition. Lüsebrink's study of the changing fortunes of the comparative approach traces its evolution into an analytical tool conveying ‘une vision différentielle des sociétés et des cultures’ (p. 430). Overall, this volume is a stimulating introduction to the intense cultural production that was generated by the encounter of Catholicism with the Americas, by means of the supranational perspective that the study of early modern missionary orders and intellectual networks calls for.

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