A new history illuminates the Society of Jesus in its first century from the perspective of those who knew it best: the early Jesuits themselves.

The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over.

Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society’s foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit’s personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole—an attitude that helps explain the Society’s widespread appeal from its first days.

Focusing on the Jesuits’ own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code—a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today.

"Describes Jesuit lives with verve and empathy…[Russell] follows these lives into India and China, two missionary fields in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where Italian fathers played prominent roles." - Times Literary Supplement

"Russell’s methodology merits emulation for other geographical and temporal contexts in Jesuit history…Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy has blazed a trail in Jesuit history." - Renaissance and Reformation

"A fundamental contribution to the field of Jesuit studies and an invitation to explore better and more deeply the biographies of the Jesuits of the early Renaissance." - ET-Studies

"Studies of the Society of Jesus during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have investigated Jesuit life-writing, its early history and practices, and the global missions at length. A synthesis of these topics, however, had been lacking, a lacuna now filled by this monograph…Russell’s scholarship here will serve as a template for successful monographs of historical writing and Jesuit studies alike." - Journal of Jesuit Studies

"So impressive…Russell’s aim is to provide a new view of the first century of the Society of Jesus, derived from within and not from outside or above as is often the case with institutional histories. Biographical detail, which in histories of the early Society might be cited as an example or illustration, is foregrounded: here the early Jesuits themselves tell the story." - Catholic Herald