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Recent Books 127
will provide interesting historical and scholarly details concerning Jesuit
history and spirituality, enriching the understanding of the global Jesuit
enterprise. While this book focuses on elements of Jesuit history from a
musicological perspective, it certainly reflects the historiographical change
that the study of Jesuit history and spirituality have undergone in the last
25 years. Scholars are now asking: what were the Jesuits like? How were
they similar or dissimilar to their contemporaries? One could describe
contemporary Jesuit historiographical method as vertical rather than
horizontal. For example, instead of looking at the Jesuits vis-à-vis the
papacy, the Counter-Reformation or ecclesiastical institutions, recent
studies—including this one—focus more on Jesuits as part of movements
associated with popular religion, confraternities and missions. Included are
the pious practices of the various localities Jesuits inhabited.
As more and more scholars who are not Jesuits write about the Society
of Jesus, these scholars are shaping Jesuit historiography. Scholars far from
traditional Jesuit disciplines such as theology, philosophy and spirituality
are now writing about Jesuits because they cannot help but encounter
them in researching the early modern period. These scholars now include
musicologists. In Music as Cultural Mission, Anna Harwell Celenza and
Anthony R. DelDonna are typical of the present trends in Jesuit
historiography. Their book is divided into two distinct parts. The first
consists of an introduction to the Jesuit mission in early modern Italy, while
the second shifts the focus of the study to North America. It also forms a
bridge from the pre-suppression, North American Jesuit missions outside
Europe to the restored Society of 1814 by means of exploring the musical
traditions of Georgetown University, founded in 1789.
The general reader, and especially someone interested in the history of
Western culture, may enjoy the studies of part 1. While it is not
kaleidoscopic in its presentation of music in the European context of this
cultural mission, several of the articles are thought-provoking and reflect
the depth of Ignatian spirituality underpinning the infrastructure of the
Jesuit missions. DelDonna’s text, especially, ‘The Society of Jesus and
Neapolitan Culture’, also reveals the many possibilities for rich
interdisciplinary work which the mission archives not only promise, but
indeed invite. Two other chapters in part 1 deserve mention, ‘The Musical
and Theatrical Activities of the Jesuits in the Kingdom of Naples:
Accounts from the Gazzetta di Napoli (1675–1768)’ by Ausilia Magaudda
and Danilo Costantini, and Emmanuele Colombo’s ‘“The Music Must
Serve the Poetry”: The Jesuit Oratorio in Eighteenth-Century Milan’. The
Gazzetta di Napoli is one of the few extant documentary sources in Naples