Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters.

Mordechai Feingold, ed. Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters.

Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2003. xii + 484 pp. index. illus. $50. ISBN: 0-262-06234-8.

The aim of this volume is explicitly stated in the excellent introductory essay of its editor. As Mordechai Feingold avows, it is to reassess objectively the "scientific dimension" of the Jesuits' intellectual contribution. A reevaluation is deemed necessary on the background of three hundred years of aversion or ambivalence toward the Society of Jesus. A long list of case studies, mostly written by well-established scholars in the field, makes good upon the initial ambitious claim.

The complex relationship of the Jesuits to the founding fathers of modern science, especially Galileo and Descartes, are succinctly analyzed by W. A. Wallace and R. Ariew, who have dedicated much of their scholarship to these themes. Other cases range from the Jesuits' attitude toward the new cosmology (E. Grant) to a contextual study of the Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (A. Dinis). Three fascinating accounts of the social aspects of Jesuit science include the story of highly specialized academies for mathematics (U. Baldini), as well as scientific spectacles that catered to the needs of the patronage system in which the Jesuits became increasingly involved during the seventeenth century (P. Findlen and M. Baldwin). Jesuit science in the peripheries of Spain (V. Navarro) and the Spanish Netherlands (G. H. W. Vanpaemel), and the Jesuit contribution to scientific journals in eighteenth-century Italy (B. Dooley) are also discussed in this volume. All these cases combine into a rich and solid picture of Jesuit scientific activity in seventeenth-century Europe, namely the era of the scientific revolution.

Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters is a perfectly chosen title for such an enterprise that strives to avoid reduction of the multifaceted intellectual activity of a religious order to religious discourse. Rather, the Jesuits, the most prominent agents among Catholic educators, are positioned in a field that has not yet undergone the modern separation between cultural domains such as "science," "art," and "religion." No matter how traditional or conservative they were, by insisting on taking a position in the Republic of Letters, this group of educators, in fact, participated in the creation of the modern cultural field with an autonomous space for science within it.

The contents of most contributions to the collection exhibit and justify the revisionist conceptual framework explicitly formulated in the introduction. On the one hand, such a framework encourages the exposure of the yet-understudied patterns of scientific activity practiced by Jesuits, as well as the theories and results they produced, mainly in pure mathematics, astronomy, optics, mechanics, and natural history. On the other hand, careful attention is also paid to the mechanisms invented by the governors of the society to constrain and control the teaching, publication, and scientific contacts of its members.

The volume differs from previous collections concerned with the cultural history of the Jesuits in its emphasis on the practice and results of seventeenth-century science rather than on the rhetoric, ideology, and policies formulated in endless official documents that constituted the Jesuit educational project in the sixteenth century. Such focus has become possible thanks to the enhanced scholarly work done in the past two decades that has resulted in solid reconstructions of the environment created by the founding fathers of Jesuit science. It is still a big question whether enough information has been collected that leads to the definite conclusion that "by and large, the scholarly activities and aspirations of Jesuits were indistinguishable from those of other contemporary savants, secular or ordained" (2). Nor does it seem an adequate formulation to state that, "Jesuit scientific practitioners as a group seem to have resisted the temptation to yoke science to other ends" (2). The Jesuits, who never tired of stressing that all their activities were ad majorem Dei gloriam, considered science to be an aspect of their religious mission. This separated them from many other savants of the period. As historians we should be aware of these differences, no less than of the similarities, that enabled the Jesuits to become respectable participants in the Republic of Letters.

RIVKA FELDHAY

Tel-Aviv University