Reframing Early Modern Society

Alongside present-day Austria, the early modern Habsburg Monarchy also included contemporary Czech Republic, Slovenia, and the once vast Kingdom of Hungary (consisting of modern Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and parts of Serbia, Romania, and the Ukraine). A large chunk of Hungarian territory was occupied by the Ottoman Empire since the Battle of Mohcs (1526), and was reconquered only at the end of the 17th century. In the Habsburg Monarchy, many nations and several denominations lived side by side, according to different laws in each province and country. Maintaining the unity of this composite monarchy was a challange for the Habsburg emperors and central government authorities. The early modern era was also a prequel for the development of national states, with rulers seeking cultural and religious homogenization in their countries; accordingly, the Habsburgs promoted Catholicism and hindered the religious practices of Protestants. The Society of Jesus, which became a religious order in 1540, was established originally for missionary purposes, seeking to spread Christianity in the newly discovered lands. However, the founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, soon recognized the possibility of a mission within Europe and the significance of education for this purpose. Thus, the first Jesuits beyond the Alps founded schools beside the houses of the order, and they became known as preachers, pastors, theologians, and university professors. These Jesuit houses and schools formed one administrative unit within each region, the so- called Jesuit provinces. The Austrian Jesuit Province was established in 1563. The Jesuit houses of Bohemia and Moravia cut loose from this province in 1622, while the rest of the Habsburg Empire, together with the Kingdom of Hungary, belonged here until the papal dissolution of the Society of Jesus in 1773. Jesuit houses, churches, high schools, academies, and universities played an important role in keeping the Habsburg Monarchy together: Hundreds of thousands of students studied in their free schools following a uniform curriculum, Jesuit priests reformed the Catholic religious practices across the monarchy, and they converted many Protestants. The organisational framework for these activities was provided by the Austrian Jesuit Province. Still, historical research has so far failed to appreciate their centralized institutional structure, and its versatile interactions with the diverse local societies, because it has confined itself to the boundaries of nation states. This project aims at countering this anachronistic fracturing of our knowledge through an on-line, open-access database of Jesuit institutions of the entire province with key information on each house, and a monographic synthesis, which will present the orders institutional history and main areas of societal engagement in the Austrian Province from the beginnings to 1773.

The early modern development of the Habsburg Monarchy had an influential impact on the later social formation of the Central European region. The role of the rival denominations (confessionalization), including the Roman Catholic Church, therein the Jesuit Order, is one of the keys to understand social, cultural and religious processes. The primary aim of the project was to provide a pioneering overview of the Austrian Jesuit Province: an overview of the institutional system and the main areas of Jesuit activity in the form of an on-line database ("Domicilia Provinciae Austriae Societatis Jesu") and an analysis (monograph). In the past, historical research on Jesuit houses and members was mainly carried out in the context of the present-day nation-state or regional context. My project yielded an overview and summary of these national studies, thereby laying the foundations for further research. The Jesuit institutional network provided a framework for the activities of the Order. The members (priests, teachers, lay brothers) lived in religious houses (colleges, residences, mission stations), to which educational institutions (grammar schools, academies, universities), boarding schools (seminaries) and cultural institutions (printing houses, libraries) were attached. In addition to education, a detailed picture was gained of the extensive pastoral and social role of the Order: religious congregations, spiritual exercise centres, and pharmacies. The role of preaching, religious education and festivities (processions, religious theatre performances) in the Baroque period should not be underestimated: in this era of wars and epidemics, the religious orders were the main disseminators of civil social norms. The project built on previous research and continued the deeper analysis of the already-known central documents of the Society of Jesus (annual reports, lists of members, collections of regulations, correspondence). New, previously unknown manuscript sources were also discovered and partly prepared for publication. The results of the project were presented at international conferences in Central Europe and at symposia organised by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies (Boston College, USA). The partial results are reported in published and forthcoming studies.