Jeffrey Chipps Smith: Sensuous Worship. Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany

Abstract

Due to the efforts of Jesuit archivists and historians, the literature on the Jesuit order and its founder St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) is abundant. This holds true for the vast body of scholarly works on the period under study, the Catholic Reformation. By using the term Catholic Reformation, which was introduced by Hubert Jedin in 1946 in order to replace the one-sided term Counter-Reformation, Smith accentuates the autonomous force of the Catholic reform. This goes along with recent attempts by historians to portray the social-historical process of ‘reCatholicization’ within “The World of Catholic Renewal” (Ronnie Po-Hsia, Cambridge 1999) or as “The Refashioning of Catholicism” (Robert Bireley, Washington 1999).