Patricia M. Ranum, Beginning To Be A Jesuit: Instructions for the Paris Novitiate circa 1685

BEGINNING TO BE A JESUIT is a unique contribution to the study and understanding of Jesuit life and spirituality in France during the seventeenth century, a time often called the 'great century' of French spirituality. The Jesuits contributed much to make it so. In 1540, the very year of the official approval of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola., its first superior general, sent a group of young Jesuit recruits to study in Paris. The Society almost immediately began to flourish in France. By 1630, within less than one hundred years after its establishment, there were 72 houses of the Society of Jesus in that country, 58 of which were colleges educating more than 30, 000 students.

Men who aspired to membership in the Society entered into novitiates or houses of formation that over an initial period of two years introduced them into how to begin to be Jesuits. The novitiate with which this book deals was founded in Paris in 1610 and over the years developed for life and activity of the novices and set of instructions or rules. The handwritten manuscript of those instructions set down not only such 'outer' regulations themselves but also the 'inner' attitudes to be cultivated and lessons to be learned by obeying them.

Three things make this book a special contribution to the study and understanding of Jesuit life and spirituality during that time. First, the book presents a 'primary source' text in its original seventeenth century French and in an English translation that faithfully reproduces the substance and nuances of that text. Second, the wide-ranging introduction to the work and the detailed notes serve to clarify the meaning and deepen the understanding of the novice's activities and of the inner dispositions that were to accompany them. Third, and perhaps most important, these instructions set forth not theory but practice, what men actually did in those first years that were to form them as Jesuits. Readers will find this to be an extraordinarily valuable work.

About $32.74 or €29.52 paperback; $41.25 or €37.19 hardback