Ana Carolina Hosne

The book project aims to expand our understanding of the phenomenon of memory by approaching it from a transcultural and global perspective in the modern period. Defining "memory", its functions and purposes, which are forever changing across time and space, is a formidable challenge which can be analysed only in specific historical contexts. Within the growing field of memory studies, mission spaces—Jesuit mission contexts in particular—taking early modern Europe as a point of departure to later analyse the versatile role of memory in the overseas missions from a global perspective is an unexplored topic. Jesuit missions are particularly appealing to examine how religion and knowledge grew entangled, when production of knowledge became a purpose in itself. This can be explained, to a great extent, by the Jesuits’ humanist education, which contributed to complex processes of production, transmission and circulation of knowledge, in turn shaped by their interaction with the local contexts. Deeply rooted in that humanist Jesuit background, memory became a focus of interest for the members of the Society of Jesus right from its inception.

This study investigates the different roles and purposes of memory in the overseas Jesuit missions from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, with special focus on the following case studies: Peru and Mexico, two colonial mission spaces, and China and Tibet, two non-colonial mission spaces. Europe forms the background against which to gauge the cultural baggage the Jesuits carried with them to their missions, which in turn comprised a multi-faceted interest in memory and its different purposes. The need to indoctrinate the local populations made of memory, its different rules and techniques an indispensable tool for them to remember the new doctrine.

However, as the proposed study will show, this imperative goal generated multiple interactions with different local formulations and uses of memory, thus transcending the mission spaces themselves. In this regard, mission spaces lend themselves as fascinating "laboratories" to analyse these multi-layered interactions, when it was unpredictable whether the purposes the Jesuits assigned to memory in their overseas missions would be the same once Europe was left behind.