Narratives of Adversity

Download or read book Narratives of Adversity written by Paul J. Shore and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses the experience of Jesuit missionaries, teachers and writers along the peripheries of the Habsburg lands, which stretched to Moldavia, Ukraine, Serbia and Wallachia, and which was continually riven with ethnic tensions. The time scale of the study is from the "high tide" of the Society (often labeled "the first multinational corporation") in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, until its suppression in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV. The book examines several of the communities situated along the periphery and the records that they left behind about their interactions with the local populations. It constructs a vivid picture of Jesuit life on the frontier that is built up in mosaic fashion and livened by compelling anecdotes. The Jesuits of Royal Hungary exercised a baroque expression modeled after the larger western cities of the Habsburg lands, which was a fragile splendor in part defined by the need to defend Catholicism from the hostility of Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others.