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+--- Thread: Voynich buys some Jesuit manuscripts (/thread-2618.html)
RE: Voynich buys some Jesuit manuscripts - ReneZ - 20-09-2023
Hi Marco,
I agree, and I also agree that it is subjective.
What surprised me a lot, while reading about this part of history, is that the Jesuits have been regarded with extreme suspicion, especially in Italy. This seems to persist to the present time.
RE: Voynich buys some Jesuit manuscripts - ReneZ - 21-09-2023
(19-09-2023, 09:09 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the same token, Voynich was not at all unusual in obfuscating the source of the VMS or any other manuscript. It was not at all uncommon for dealers during that period to refuse to say where they had acquired something.
I do not doubt for a second that this is correct, but ELV's letter, to be opened after her death, already shows that this is quite an extreme case.
RE: Voynich buys some Jesuit manuscripts - Bernd - 22-09-2023
(20-09-2023, 02:57 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What surprised me a lot, while reading about this part of history, is that the Jesuits have been regarded with extreme suspicion, especially in Italy. This seems to persist to the present time.Well Jesuits have always been regarded as a highly organized world-wide network, influential and wealthy. They held significant economic and political power and of course this frequently lead to scrutiny by authorities, be it state or church, right down to suppression in most of Europe in the 18th century. As so often, mostly for political and financial reasons, not religious ones.
Also don't forget there was a culture war between secularists and traditionalists raging in Risorgimento Italy since the mid- 19th century. Especially the elitist Jesuits were perceived as enemies of modern secular society and this led to a climate of anti-catholicism and especially anti-jesuitism in Italy that lasted at least until the church recognized the Italian kingdom in the Lateran treaty of 1929.
Quote:Anti-Jesuitism in Italy, 1843–1848Borutta, M. (2012). Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy. The Risorgimento Revisited, 191–213.
In the beginning, the Risorgimento seemed to live in harmony with Catholicism. [...] Many members of the clergy supported the project of national unification. The abbé Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843), a neo-Guelph vision of an Italian confederation under the presidency of the pope, was the most popular text of the Risorgimento. [...] Then, however, Gioberti’s Primato was criticised by prominent Jesuits like Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, and the nation became ‘the subject of a vigorous debate within Catholic intellectual circles [ ... ] about the respective roles of
Church and nation as the principal source of political sovereignty’. In this debate, Gioberti depicted the Jesuits as the most dangerous enemies of the Italian nation and Catholic religion. In the second edition of his Primato (1845), he described the Society of Jesus as a source of evil that negated bourgeois values and male virtues, incarnated the antithesis of friendship, marriage, family and fatherland, and destroyed the human species. [...] Outside the Church, Gioberti’s anti-Jesuit campaign had already been joined by journalists, novelists and cartoonists who depicted the Fathers as enemies of progress, civil society, nation and mankind. [...] After a series of anti-Jesuit manifestations and riots during the revolution of 1848–49, the Society of Jesus was expelled from most parts of Italy and formally banned from the kingdom of Sardinia. The anti-Jesuit law, extended to Italy in 1866 and to Rome in 1873, violated important principles of the Piedmontese constitution (religious freedom, inviolability of property). It was, however, both emancipatory and repressive at the same time. The banishment was also legitimated with ideals of individual freedom: it was depicted as a ‘liberation’ of the Jesuits from their strict obedience.
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One could argue the Jesuits became victim to their own success.
I also agree the VM probably was not overly interesting to Jesuit scientists. The question is rather why they chose to keep it at all. Simply because it was part of Kircher's belongings?