Russell, Camilla. Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What was it like to be a Jesuit formed in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?To answer that question, Camilla Russell has investigated a rich collection of biographical records in the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus (ARSI).The Italian scene, historically, was worth the candle.One statistic reveals its prominence for the recruitment of Jesuits: "at the Society's most important novitiate, S. Andrea al Quirinale, in Rome, over 3,340 men and boys are registered as having entered between 1556 (when records began) and 1640 an average of thirty-nine per year" (6).Russel draws on various genres of primary sources to trace the Lebenslauf of Jesuits in Italy from entrance into the Society to their departure, mostly by death but also by other means.These documents comprise entrance records; vocational narratives; the increasingly studied Litterae indipitae or petitions for ministry in mission territories; reports on missionaries; personnel records of Jesuits who ministered in Italy; a catalogue from 1573 about Jesuits in the Society's province of Lombardy; the correspondence of superiors general along with the confidential soli; the autobiographical memoir of Giovanni Battista Eliano, a convert from Judaism; records of dismissal; death notices; and a record of "woeful outcomes" (169) of those who left the Society or who, despite their vocation, never entered it.Out of these records, with a nod to Brian Stock, Russel constructs "textual communities" (16) of Jesuits with individual and corporate identities.Research into the Litterae indipitae and related documents demonstrates Russel's analytical facility.Her focus is on Asian missions, where Italian Jesuits, although a minority, constituted a significant presence: "they became a byword for quality and the preferred choice for augmenting the much larger but stretched Portuguese cohort in Asia" (58-59).Temporal coadjutors (lay brothers) were especially in demand because of their skills.The impact of the Italian Jesuits owed much to Alessandro Valignano, who entered the Society in 1566 and received in 1573 the commission from Superior General Everard
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".