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The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture 1573–1580 (review)

and perhaps including some means to depose “heretical” monarchs, was no longer related to political or ecclesiastical realities. In the same era, Jesuit efforts to articulate a theory of international law that would transcend the boundaries of rival nations and empires anticipated developments in twentieth-century legal thinking. Jesuit political thought ca. 1540–1640 was also very much a part of its own time. Approaches to the thorny question of when various degrees of dishonesty might be licit were closely related to the situation of Catholics experiencing persecution in places such as England. While Jesuit theorists did not justify outright lying, some of them did explain how equivocation, dissimulation, and mental reservation could be used against persecution. Thus, when a Jesuit in England is asked if he is a Jesuit, he may deny it, if he understands the goal of the question to be whether he is “engaged in subverting the English state” (144). This is an excellent book, well worth attention by a broad range of students and scholars. But at least three important topics regarding Jesuits and the state receive too little or no attention at all. Höpfl gives most of his attention to works written and published in Latin; he makes but a few comments on vernacular texts, and the ones he does treat are mostly from the British context. Jesuits published many works of political thought in French, Italian, and other languages. A good example of a vernacular, continental work ignored by Höpfl, but worthy of discussion, is Quel est le meilleur gouvernement? (Paris, 1636), by Etienne Binet, S. J. A second lacuna concerns local government. Jesuits devoted much of their energies to schools and other work in urban areas, yet Höpfl concentrates on Jesuit views of monarchy and gives us no information on attitudes toward city governments. Finally, the period Höpfl examines was also one in which the Society of Jesus became a worldwide organization, with missions in many parts of the world. By the early decades of the seventeenth century, “relations,” or reports sent back to Europe by the missionaries, were published in several languages. One would like to know how the Jesuit authors of these texts commented on the state theories and practices they encountered in China, India, Canada, or Brazil. Indeed, this question could well make the theme of a companion volume to Höpfl’s study. THOMAS WORCESTER College of the Holy Cross