Introduction

From antiquity, to the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, and to the early modern period, a genre of poetry flourished in the West that has fallen out of favour in the recent times. This is didactic poetry, poetry of instruction in astronomy, hunting, farming, philosophy, and in all fields of sciences, arts, and recreational activities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits produced a great quantity of Latin didactic poems. These poems revealed of the early modern Jesuits, local literary fashions, classical traditions, contemporary events and inventions, scientific developments, cultural knowledge, and social mores. Didactic poetry was the best literary genre for the cultivation of the Jesuits, the modern teaching order par excellence. The majority of Jesuit didactic poems were written by teachers, most of whom were writing in a radically transformed world of print and science, and in the scholarly language of Latin that was facing its gradual decline in the eighteenth century. Most of these poems were initially written for their fellow Jesuits and not for the proper literary classes of humanities and rhetoric. By the turn of the eighteenth century, didactic poems began to take a special place among the Jesuits, and a consciousness of contributions to the Jesuit tradition and microtradition ensued wherein the didactic poems took a special part.

Breaking Ground: Scientific Poetry in Enlightenment Rome

During the Enlightenment period, the French Jesuits were busy planting ornamental natural philosophy in the Virgilian soil; however, their counterparts in Rome were tilling rougher grounds and sowing Lucretius's seeds far below the surface. While, in general, French Jesuits are commended for leading Italy intellectually and culturally in the Enlightenment period, it was the Italian Jesuits who produced the most rigorous scientific didactic poems. Indeed, the best-known ‘Lucretian’ poem of the period was written by the Frenchman Cardinal Melchoir de Polignac; however, he was surpassed by the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit Tommaso Ceva with his Philosophia novo-antiqua, and moreover was debunked by Benedict Stay, a young prodigy who wrote his magnum opus, the Philosophiae recentoris libri x [= Pr]. This chapter discusses the development of scientific poetry in the age of the Enlightenment in Rome. Its focus is on the analysis of some of the exemplary works of Roman poets. The chapter also provides an overview of the contemporary Italian criticism on didactic poetry, particularly those related to scientific subjects.

Cultivating Science: French ‘Meteorological’ Georgic

In the eighteenth century, the publication of scientific books boomed following the switch to the vernacular. The decline of Latin and Greek, the availability of translations, and the adoption of novel ways of presenting scientific information increased the population of potential audiences during this period. This chapter explores some of the Jesuit Latin poems on scientific subjects before the transition to vernacular. It aims to determine the extent to which the Jesuits anticipated and participated in the vulgarizing mission of textbooks writers later in the century. In general, Jesuits were regarded as scientific educators owing to their contributions to the growing interest in science. During the eighteenth century, the trend was for the production of the facile side of science and illustrated books; however, French Jesuits did not adhere to the growing trend. Although they curbed their poetic powers on playful and topical objects like the secular science writers, their poems and works were devoid of instructive or diverting diagrams and pictures. They also capitalized on poems that were written in Latin at a time when the language rarely attracted noble and bourgeois readers, and in a genre that could be hardly described as novel.

Gentle Labour: Jesuit Georgic in the Age of Louis XIV

René Rapin, the father of Jesuit georgic poetry, manoeuvred his intellectual life between the ancients and the moderns with an instinct for conciliation and compromise that made him an effective apostle to the world. He is best remembered for his Horti, a classical-style didactic poem in four books that celebrated the victory of the moderns over the ancients in horticultural art. His poem, which is secular in appearance, is motivated by (mildly concealed) religion and Jesuito-political impulses, and cultural and literary impulses, particularly those of Virgil. This chapter discusses some of the developments in the Italian Renaissance georgic poetry to better understand Rapin's contribution to the early modern Latin georgic. It considers the latter Latin poems on horticulture and sericulture, which bear resemblance to the ancient model yet are considerably shorter than Virgil's. These latter georgic poems predicated on a Nature that is mild and marvellous, and centred on the artistic manipulation of Nature. In the Italian Renaissance, the ‘recreational georgics’ were dominated by pastoral ease, which is ironic, given the prominent thematic of labour in the original georgics. While the georgics were poems that celebrated nature and labour in gardens, by the turn of the eighteenth century, French Jesuits had identified the didactic genre of georgics as a flexible medium for exhibiting their modern Latinity and advertising their honnêteté.

Conclusion

National loyalties and literary tastes generally compete with institutional and ideological alliances, as was the case of the Jesuits, where there was an unspoken conflict of taste between the classicism and patriotism of Rapin and the mannerisms of his Neopolitan contemporaries. Although Neopolitan Jesuits were aware of the existence of a Rapinian model, they were more inclined to imitate local, non-Jesuit, Latin authors. As with the literary terms, the didactic poems of Jesuits also exhibit diverse aims as various as their geographical and chronological contexts. Although their poems were dominated by individual aims and intentions, Jesuit didactic poetry nevertheless exhibited uniform lineament. Most Jesuit didactic poems were tailored after Virgil's Georgics and the Virgilian form. There were also various mechanisms of internal imitation wherein a group of poems share thematic preoccupations and stylistic idiosyncrasies. Jesuit didactic poetry is also characterized by an emphasis on experience and usefulness, on orderliness, on difficulty embraced and surmounted, and on efforts divinely ordained and rewarded.

Marvellous Works: The Poetry of Wonder in Baroque Naples

This chapter examines how the French Jesuits influenced the didactic poetic practice of their Italian counterparts. It discusses Niccolò ‘Parthenius’ Giannettasio, an Italian Jesuit who, in spite of his admiration of Rapin, Fracastoro, and other French Jesuit contemporaries, opted to write Latin didactic poetry in a Neopolitan setting. The chapter also discusses Tommaso Strozzi, another Neopolitan Jesuit, who took inspiration from Girolamo Fracastoro's Syphlis. Fracastoro, who was the most famous Renaissance successor of Pontano, had a profound influence on the georgic poetry of his Tommaso, particularly his Praedium rusticum. The chapter also discusses Francesco Eulalio Savastano, a Neopolitan Jesuit didactic poet. His poems were a hybrid of French Jesuit and native Italian strains of neo-Latin georgic. Compared to Rapin and his Neopolitan colleagues, Savastano produced a didactic poem of more ambitious scientific pretensions. His Botanicorium, seu Institutionum rei herbariae libri iv sought to surpass the didactic poetry of Rapin. His Botanicorium was the harbinger of the more self-consciously difficult scientific poetry of the Jesuits working in Rome. It looks not only to Lucretius, Fracastoro, and Virgil but also to rivals such as Giannettasio and, above all, Rapin. This attempt to produce a scholarly difficult poetry was an opportunity for poetic, as well as competitive, display.

Arts of Life: The Poetry of Inner and Outer Refinement

In the ancient didactic poems, man is regularly presented as a product of cultivation or as an object of art. In the preceding chapters, Jesuit poets framed snapshots of ideal life in Virgilian terms. While there are no specific examples of classical verses and poems that dealt on the preservation of physical, mental and spiritual life, procreation, and child-rearing, Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris provided models for poets writing conventions of sexual and social relations. However, Ovid's immoral morality poems had to be handled with great care by the didactic poets of the Society of Jesuits. In Horace, whose satire of human foibles was more chaste, the Jesuits found a perfect model for the purpose of modern moralizing. In his Ars poetica, Jesuits began to cast life as art and art as life. This chapter explores the role of art as conceived by the Society of Jesuits, including its spiritual, social, and cultural poetry. It also discusses the paradox of the paucity of the Jesuit didactics devoted to the religious life. Although the Jesuits wrote a great quantity of Latin theological and devotional verses, they nevertheless succeeded because of their preservation of its secular interior. This approach was a perfect vehicle for winning the hearts of the Catholic public for disseminating Jesuit culture in a manner that was as inoffensive as it was invisible.