1st Edition
English Jesuit Education Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762-1803
Analysing a period of 'hidden history', this book tracks the fate of the English Jesuits and their educational work through three major international crises of the eighteenth century: · the Lavalette affair, a major financial scandal, not of their making, which annihilated the Society of Jesus in France and led to the forced flight of exiled English Jesuits and their students from France to the Austrian Netherlands in 1762; · the universal suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 and the English Jesuits' remarkable survival of that event, following a second forced flight to the safety of the Principality of Liège; · the French Revolution and their narrow escape from annihilation in Liège in 1794, resulting in a third forced flight with their students, this time to England. Despite repeated crises, huge adversity and multiple losses of personnel, property and educational goods, including significant libraries, the suppressed English Jesuits reconfigured themselves. Modernising their curriculum, they influenced the development of Jesuit education not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the nascent United States of America: in 1789, their influence contributed to the founding of Georgetown Academy, which later developed into the present-day Georgetown University in Washington, DC. English Jesuit Education is a unique story of educational survival and development against seemingly impossible odds, drawing on hitherto largely unexplored material in a wide range of archives.
Biography
Maurice Whitehead is Schwarzenbach Research Fellow at the Venerable English College, Rome, and Emeritus Professor of History at Swansea University, Wales. Since the mid-1980s, he has published widely in the field of Jesuit educational history, gradually moving back further in time better to comprehend its historical development.
A Yankee Book Peddler UK Core Title for 2013 '... the finest piece of scholarship yet written on any aspect of English Jesuit education and will long remain the definitive study of English Jesuit educational reform in the age of Enlightenment. The book is especially recommended to historians and students of European higher education, British Catholicism, the Catholic Enlightenment and the Society of Jesus. The author’s generous use of primary documents in his text, his analysis of the book culture at the Liège Academy, and his several appendices containing primary documents including the plan of studies for the suppressed Jesuit schools, all make this work an important tool for researchers.' H-France '... a good case ... one that is well-argued and referenced from original sources.' Recusant History '... this is an excellent and much-needed contribution to the internaÂtional literature on the history of education, well produced in both text and illustrations as well as in its general design. It combines the best attributes of traditional historical scholarship with the ambitious aspirations of new develÂopments in historical research in education, while also adding greatly to our historical understanding of the Jesuit movement as a whole.' Journal of Jesuit Studies
