Yasmin Haskell: Loyola's Bees

The existence of hundreds of early modern didactic poems in Latin - poems teaching every conceivable branch of philosophical, scientific, social, and cultural knowledge - had intrigued me ever since I first read about the phenomenon in the introduction to James Naiden's edition of Buchanan's Sphaera, a sixteenth-century poem on astronomy. My doctoral thesis - written in Australia - dealt with the Italian Renaissance portion of this material, with poems that were relatively well known. It was only after I moved to Cambridge in 1995, and began exploring the libraries of England and Europe, that I had a presentiment of the untold treasures that lay submerged with the shipwreck of the Western didactic genre, a once proud vessel that had cruised the centuries from antiquity to Enlightenment, but had ultimately foundered on the rocks of Romanticism.

Over the next seven years I began collecting didactic poems (or, at least, records of them) and was blessed with some remarkable serendipities. A friend, a scholar and book-collector, whimsically suggested to me that if one desired a book long enough it was bound to turn up ... Not long after, another friend called me from Holland, announcing that my 'holy grail' had been spotted in the window of an Amsterdam bookshop: the three volumes of François Oudin's anthology of early modern Poemata didascalica! It was a nail-biting wait between the Friday afternoon and Monday morning, when the shop re-opened for business, and again, anticipating the call from the college porters to announce that my package had arrived safely. Here were poems in a classical language, in imitation of the ancients, Lucretius and Virgil, broaching the most contemporary of subjects, serious and not so serious. There were poets who taught the arts of conversation and preparing a good cup of coffee, and those who attempted to make the complexities of modern physics palatable to educated lay readers. It was refreshing to find the 'two cultures' co-existing so happily, to find writers who ranged confidently across topics from music to magnetism. As I worked my way through the relatively short poems in the Oudin collection - the longest, in four books, was Brumoy's 'Art of Glass', in which the science of lenses to magic lanterns is expounded via ingenious baroque myths - and then dived into the murkier depths of Stay's Philosophiae recentioris, ten books on Newtonian philosophy, I began to realize the extent to which a powerful group of men were driving the demand for didactic poetry in the early modern period, viz. priests of the Company of Jesus. Indeed, of the 331 sixteenth through eighteenth-century Latin poems in my database to date, over 250 were written by Jesuits.

This was the beginning of a new journey, as I strove to educate myself about the literary and scientific activities of the pre-suppression Society of Jesus. I discovered not only that the Jesuits were the leading educators of early modern Catholic Europe, and that their cultural empire stretched from Paris to Paraguay, but also that they were the original 'interdisciplinarians', driven by an optimistic, world-oriented, apostolic spirituality that valued labour, collaboration, and usefulness. As the editors of The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts have pointed out, a figure such as José de Acosta, SJ, 'might be studied as a naturalist by one historian, a theologian by another, and a missionary or playwright by others' (J. W. O'Malley, S.J., et al. (Toronto, 1999), p. xiii). The didactic genre seemed to me to epitomize the intellectual and cultural adventurousness of the Old Society. For example, the eighteenth-century Jesuit, Roger Boscovich, is a significant figure in the history of science (a precursor of Maxwell in field theory), but he also devoted many years to the composition of a Latin poem on astronomy, and to annotating the scientific poetry of his Croatian compatriot, Benedict Stay.

The Jesuits, prodigious in so many fields of literature, seemed to have cultivated the didactic genre like almost no other. But while considerable scholarly attention had been paid to their contributions to early modern emblematics and drama, no one had really attempted to account for their fascination with the didactic. Superficially, the didactic genre might look like an obvious choice for an order of teaching priests - and yet Jesuit poets often treated subjects that were not in their immediate area of expertise. And how were the Catholic Reformation aims of the Society of Jesus advanced by the writing of poems on scientific and secular themes? Was that writing just a bit of harmless academic 'r and r', or was it taken more seriously? To what extent did it reflect Jesuit training and ideology? Were Jesuits conscious of creating their own 'tradition' in didactic poetry? These are some of the questions I have set out to answer in Loyola's Bees: the answers bear not only on the history of an eclipsed literary genre, but on the history of early modern science and society, and on the ethos of a religious institution that strove to adapt humanist culture to the needs of the modern world.

Yasmin Haskell, 2004

Buy Your Copy Yasmin Haskell’s Loyola's Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry is available now from Oxford University Press.

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