This chapter discusses the influence of Jesuit life and spirituality on Hopkins. It begins by sketching the history of the Jesuit order and of the English province more specifically in Hopkins’s time. The chapter proposes that while Hopkins’s Jesuit commitment shaped his daily life, and was rooted in a particular kind of relationship with God, it was not exclusive, and interacted with other factors. It goes on to observe that Hopkins’s Jesuit charism appears relatively marginal to his poetry, with the Ignatian spirituality that Hopkins is now often taken to exemplify only established in the twentieth century. What matters is instead Hopkins’s conviction that Jesuit life opened him to a particular kind of intimacy with God.

Chatper 5 examines the growing influence of the papal Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in the administration of the Custody after 1622. It argues that its intervention reflects the importance given to the Holy Land as both a frontier, and spiritual center, of an increasingly global Catholic tradition.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.

The chapter lays out the argument of the book: that Joyce’s texts elaborate a set of problems posed by Ignatius Loyola, working these problems into new approaches to narration, hermeneutics, and irony. It also situates this argument in wider contexts of Joyce studies, current theories of reading, negative theology, and the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein.

Chapter 1 examines recruitment, looking at questions surrounding a postulant’s choice of convent and how they managed to travel there. The very foundation of each exile convent was based on national identity: these were, after all, English convents. Yet this insistence on Englishness did not only emanate from the women religious themselves but was fundamental to their gaining permission to establish convents in the first place. Nevertheless, it is argued that particular religious identities affected the process of joining a convent. It takes as its case study convent recruitment from the county of Essex to argue that women chose particular convents based on an interplay between home and abroad, as well as clerical and familial patronage. It highlights the effect of one clerical movement – the Jesuits – on convent recruitment patterns, yet these issues of competing spiritualities were not, despite first appearances, solely products of particular national contexts but part of wider developments in Catholic Europe. They show the formation of the English convents as part of the European – and even global – Catholic Reformation rather than presenting them as isolated national enclaves.