The French historian François de Dainville S.J. (1909-1971), published in 1940 a book entitled La Géographie des humanistes. This work, despite its age, is still a reference in Jesuit historiography, at least in some aspects. Dainville argued that the vocation of the Society of Jesus, oriented as much to the moral, disciplinary and religious education of European societies as to the missionary enterprises in the distant lands of Asia and America, led to its assigning an important role to geography as a discipline for educating young people. Dainville’s thinking conceived the geographic discipline in a rather broad way. This approach, perhaps objectionable to the modern historian of science, nevertheless allows us a glimpse into the heterogeneity of the practices and contents of geographic knowledge in the early modern age.
What was stated by Dainville remains valid in more than one aspect. The slow rise of geography as an autonomous scholastic discipline from the embers of the medieval Quadrivium, despite the apparent natural vocation of the Society of Jesus to give to it a privileged role, did not experience an immediate acceleration within the Jesuit educational network. During the sixteenth century, this teaching remained hidden in the lessons of physics, mathematics, natural history, and astronomy. The texts that were used, at least until the publication of the Ratio Studiorum, remained mainly the classics of ancient science and erudition: Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny, Pomponius Mela, to which was added Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera, in a variety of commentaries and reprints.
Nevertheless, even through the use of these texts, geographic disciplines were increasingly identified with historical disciplines, and less and less with mathematics. This aspect is important in understanding the epistemological shift that led to modern geography as a subject of study. In this sense, Fr. Dainville’s book remains a classic founder of a strand of study, that of the teaching of geography in Jesuit schools. La Géographie des Humanistes thus deserves to be reread and appreciated by new generations of historians of science, culture, and of the Jesuits. [David Salomoni]
