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The Spiritual Empire of the Society of Jesus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2016

Tobias Winnerling
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Abstract

The aim of this article is to throw the worldwide mission efforts of the old Society of Jesus—the order from its implementation in 1540 to its dissolution in 1773—into sharper relief by applying a new analytical frame to it. The approach taken will be to view the Society as trying to establish a form of dominion over its extra-European converts that may be described as spiritual empire-building.1 To this purpose it will first sketch the theoretical framework of a spiritual empire, and then evaluate whether the old Society of Jesus may be taken to fit it either on an organizational level or in its treatment of its converts.

Keywords

Catholic MissionSociety of JesusImperialism
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 40 , Special Issue 2: Spiritual Geopolitics in the Early Modern World , August 2016 , pp. 215 - 237
Copyright
© 2016 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

Tobias Winnerling is a Research Assistant with the Chair for Early Modern History at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. His main research interests are in early modern European-Asian contacts, social history of knowledge and learning, historical network analysis, and history in video games.

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