The Chancery in the College: the production and circulation of Jesuit texts in the sixteenth century

Abstract

The circulation of letters, instructions, and news played an important role in the expansion of the Society of Jesus and in coordinating Jesuit endeavor across distance. Jesuit communication depended upon the replication of standardized norms of writing for the production and transmission of letters, instructions, and other documents. The article explores the cluster of organized social practices and techniques writing that structured Jesuit communication in the first decades of the order’s history. In this period the circulation and dissemination of hand-written newsletters played an important function in consolidating norms of communication. It is suggested that the flow of information within the Society was shaped by specific material, social, and cultural practices localized in a highly concentrated fashion within the Jesuit colleges.