tion from participation in the old Catholic ritualism, and this faction was
strong enough in Spain to defeat the new state-centered actors and choke off
movement toward all-out Reformation. Nevertheless, organizational resources
were shifting, especially during the great expansion of empire in the 1500s,
and the people closest to these organizational changes became open to new
ways of combining intellectual capital and new forms of generating emotional
energy. That these changes continued to be defined as “Catholic” meant that
there was no overt break from the papacy and no radical decentralization of
church authority. In most other spheres of content and practice, innovations
went far.
The Jesuits were the vehicle of much of this innovation. The movement was
organized by the nobleman Ignatius Loyala (López), invalided from the Spanish
army, who turned in 1522 to the traditional religious practices: pilgrimage,
conversion of infidels, zeal in caring for the sick, personal austerity. As his
reputation grew, Loyola began to transform the monastic life, abolishing choir,
prayers, seclusion, and distinctive uniforms. The Jesuits criticized magic, leg-
ends, and the worship of saints. Their initial purpose was to become mission-
aries in the world-system just then expanding under Iberian lead. But univer-
sities were undergoing a sudden boom in Spain, and Loyola followed the flow
of current excitement in seeking his recruits. Adopting the ideal that mission-
aries should be the best trained of the church, he studied at the elite Spanish
universities of Alcalá and Salamanca, and then at Paris, where in 1534 he
organized the Society of Jesus with a few companions. By Loyola’s death in
1556, it had 1,000 members; in the next century it had over 600 colleges and
academies and was the largest educational institution in Europe (Heer, [1953]
1968: 26–27; O’Malley, 1993: 200–242).
The timing of the Jesuit movement strikingly parallels the Reformation.
Loyola’s conversion was almost contemporary with Luther’s rebellion; the
launching of the Jesuits in Paris in the 1530s happened at the center of
controversy over the new doctrines, and overlapped the presence there of Jean
Caulvin (Calvin), who fled to Basel in 1536 to publish his Institutes of Chris-
tian Religion, and established his theocracy in Geneva in 1541, the year after
the pope approved Loyola’s order. In practice, these were both anti-monastic,
anti-ritualistic reforms, although they found different political and organiza-
tional niches in their relations to papal authority.
The Jesuits’ growth was largely shaped by exploiting a niche resulting from
reorganization of the medieval educational system. The medieval universities
had been guilds of teachers, licensing the higher professions of law, medicine,
and theology, and giving a formal degree structure to the arts course which
prepared for them. It was a two-tiered system with universities as the top rung,
while elementary literacy and grammar was provided in local schools attached
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