Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia, and the Americas
7-8 March 2014, Trinity College, Cambridge
Announcing the forthcoming Symposium at Trinity College, Cambridge: Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The early modern Society of Jesus excited and channeled emotion through sacred oratory, Latin poetry, plays, operas, art and architecture; it inflamed young men with holy desire to die for their faith in foreign lands; its missionaries initiated dialogue with and ‘accommodated’ to non-European cultural and emotional regimes. While Jesuits certainly didn’t have a monopoly on ‘feeling’ in the early modern period, they conducted, in all senses of the word, much of the emotional energy of their times. This workshop invites participants to reflect on the ways in which the passions and religious emotions were roused and represented by Jesuits of the Old Society to change hearts, both in Europe and abroad. We construe ‘performance’ in the broadest sense, from rhetoric to music, pageant to prayer, teaching to mourning, and we also moot a performative ‘residue’ in Jesuit artworks and poetry ostensibly designed for private reading and silent contemplation.
For further information, please download the conference flyer.
