Books in the Borderlands of the Iberian Worlds: Jesuit Libraries and Cultural Transformation in South America (17th and 18th Centuries)

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Society of Jesus played a key role in the evangelisation of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the borderlands of the Iberian empires, and contributed to the development of what may be called Catholic and Iberian globalisation.

One important aspect of this activity was the creation of libraries, which helped introduce writing and new media technologies to these regions.

Over the last thirty years, international research on the Jesuits has increased significantly, with global history-based perspectives analysing the Society of Jesus as a worldwide network for the circulation of science and art and as a key interlocutor with non-European populations.

By focusing on the books and libraries that existed in actual Jesuit missions, my project proposes that this image is biasedas it does not accurately reflect the religious objectives of the Jesuits, which were aimed at a complete transformation of culture and society.

JesLibSouth then suggests that books and libraries served simultaneously as tools of discipline and subjectification, influencing both Jesuits and Indigenous people.

Most of the books in these libraries were far from the types of knowledge that have interested recent Jesuit global history; instead, they largely consisted of pragmatic-normative content, focused on reinforcing Catholic behaviours while encouraging voluntary engagement through introspection, sensory training, and emotional stimulation.

The sources for the project include the inventories of the missions, which contain lists of the remarkable number of around 25,000 books in the libraries, as well as descriptive chronicles, histories, and the books themselves.

For analysing these documents, I have developed an original and innovative methodology inspired by book history, media studies, and digital humanities, which will involve using databases, statistical techniques, web publishing, data visualisation tools, and algorithmic information processing.