View source for Bibliography:AKC Bibliography 0396

{{AKC Bibliography entries
|Name(s)=Gorman, Michael John;
|Title=<i>From ‘The Eyes of All’ to ‘Usefull Quarries in philosophy and good literature’: Consuming Jesuit Science, 1600-1665</i>
|Year=2000
|Language=eng
|Contained in=O’MALLEY, J. W.; BAILEY, G. A.; HARRIS, S. J. ; KENNEDY, T. F. (eds.). The Jesuits: cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540-1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000, p. 170-189.
|Bibliographic level=Book chapter
|Catalogue description=http://id.sbn.it/bid/TO00829500
|Keyword(s)=Roman College; Science; Queen Christina of Sweden;
|Digitization=https://books.google.it/books?id=Hzbsz3TOsZAC&printsec=frontcover&hl=pt-PT#v=onepage&q&f=false
}}
"In this paper, I would like to raise some basic questions regarding the consumption of the scientific productions of members of the Jesuit order in seventeenth century Europe. Focusing on the case of the Collegio Romano, I would like to try to understand how the higher, apostolic goals of the order might have shaped the constitution of specifically Jesuit spaces for the prosecution of scientific work, and how the same goals might have conditioned the forms in which 'Jesuit science' (to use a convenient but anachronistic term) manifested itself, and was appropriated (or rejected) as a  commodity by those outside the order. [...] My principal focus here is on the visits made by Queen Christina of Sweden to the Collegio Romano in 1656, shortly after her abdication and conversion to Catholicism.2 The part played by Jesuit investigations of natural and artificial curiosities in the way the Collegio Romano represented itself to the convert queen is more thanjust a marginal aspect of some more hidden, invisible type of Jesuit scientific practice, a skin to be 'peeled away' to reveal what was 'really going on' among Jesuit scientific practitioners. Instead, it is of interest precisely as a form of cultural representation. It allows us to see the boundaries within which Jesuit scientific work was carried out and had to express itself to a member of an alien culture. The representation of Jesuit expertise on matters of  mathematics and natural philosophy to the queen, even before her departure from Stockholm, was an integral part of the process leading to her conversion, as I shall argue below." (Introduction, p. 170-171)