ABSTRACT
As I show in the first two chapters of this book, the global perspective of the English Jesuits, particularly their desire to view England as part of Christendom or an encompassing Christian commonwealth, was shared to a certain extent by conformist English writers such as Sir John Harington and even one of their avowed enemies, Anthony Munday, who served the crown as a “pursuivant” of renegade Jesuit priests and Catholic recusants.1 Moreover, this shared perspective, which I characterize as “cosmopolitan,” was actually opposed to an insular belief, shared by both the old Marian Catholic establishment and some English Protestants, in the purity of Welsh or British or English identity.2 My larger purpose here is to
1 For the global character of the Jesuit order, see Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York, 2008). As Markus Friedrich has shown in “Communication and Bureaucracy in the Early Modern Society of Jesus,” in Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions-und Kulturgeschichte 101 (2007): 49-75, the bureaucracy of the Jesuit order was structured hierarchically like a nation, and depended on a transnational republic of letters which emanated from the office of the General for orderly function. See the Regulae Societatis Iesu. Ad usum nostrorum tantum (Rome, 1935), 34-5, in which the rules for the Jesuit order confirm that members should “esteem and bear a special love in our Lord for those of other nations.” The rules go on to recommend that “no one at the expense of charity should make wars or dissensions between nations the subject of their conversation.” Similarly, in the 1550 version of the Formula, members of the order are to accept that they may be sent anywhere in the world: they vow “to go to whatsoever provinces they may choose to send us, whether they decide to send us among the Turks or any other infidels, even those who live in the regions called the Indies, or among any heretics or schismatics or any of the faithful” (The Formula of the Institute, with Notes for a Commentary by Antonio M. de Aldama, S.J., trans. Ignacio Echániz, S.J. [St. Louis, 1990], 9). For background on Munday’s interactions with Catholics, see Donna Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics 1560-1633 (Burlington, VT, 2005), 7-40.
