| Description |
In this work, I present and analyze the manuscript Paraguay Natural Ilustrado, written by the Jesuit José Sánchez Labrador, between 1771 and 1776, while he was exiled in Ravenna, Italy. This work, located at the General Archive of the Society of Jesus (ARSI), is divided into four tomes, in which I found the author's perceptions about American nature from the Jesuitic Province of Paraguay, where he acted as a missionary between 1734 and 1767. This work focuses on the analysis of Sánchez Labrador's networks in the Italian exile, in a small-scale structure, trying to understand the importance of the communication between the exiled Jesuits even after the expulsions in the 1760s and the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. Seeing how the Jesuit long-distance networks have received so much attention from scholars, this work seeks to understand what happened with their complex system of communication after those transformations that affected the entire Society of Jesus. Another main goal of this investigation was to understand why those Jesuit networks kept existing, how they worked in Italy, and their relevance to the eighteenth-century scientific milieu. Through the study of the Paraguay Natural Ilustrado and the case of Sánchez Labrador, this work argues that the suppression of the Society of Jesus and the exile of its members in the Papal States did not end with the Jesuit networks; they were rather transformed and adapted to a new situation, losing their global reach, but becoming faster and more effective. The exile in Italy propitiated the concentration of information coming from Jesuits' experiences as missionaries in different localities, which they shared through what I called the Jesuit proximate networks, a new structure that contributed to their writings, especially on natural history. This concentration of information in Italy, a center of calculation and accumulation, allowed Jesuits to preserve their networks, which was determinant for maintaining the existence of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuit proximate networks during the exile in Italy enabled them to share information and to participate in the scientific discussions of the end of the eighteenth century in Europe. |
