Latinitas Iesu: Neo-Latin writing and the literary-emotional communities of the Old Society of Jesus

This chapter argues that the “ludic” Latin culture of the early modern Jesuit classroom, as projected in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599 and evidenced through numerous pedagogical and literary works from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, was the matrix for a religious, ideological, but also emotional community. Aside from the contents of the curriculum, Jesuit teachers imbued their students with a set of cultural values and reflexes, via a set of literary and affective practices and performances, that bound them to one another and to the Society itself. The goal of the prodigious Latin literary activity of early modern Jesuits was not so much the cultivation of the personal or elite poetic voice as the initiation of new generations into the rites of a continuous Latin-writing community—one that was, in theory, coextensive with the global Society of Jesus, if in practice always rooted in local colonies and poetic “microtraditions.”