Silvia Mostaccio is Associate Professor of Early Modern History (16th-18th Centuries) at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium.
'the book will ... prove immensely useful in making the English-speaking academic public more familiar with Silvia Mostaccio's take on Jesuit and, more generally, early modern cultures of obedience.' Journal of Jesuit Studies '... provokes further thought and research. ... This book’s rich footnotes and bibliography reveal the amount of recent innovative scholarship on the history of the Jesuits, especially in Italy.' Renaissance Quarterly ’...reads as a kind of theoretical handbook to complement the current flourishing state of Jesuit studies, helping fellow-scholars to locate some of the less visible, but essential, features of the Society in the early modern period. ... Another benefit of the book is that it prompts us to reflect that the irreconcilable tensions between conscience and obedience played out so vividly - even painfully - within the Society, might actually be the cause of crediting the Jesuits with having accommodated one of the most difficult tensions of the age.’ European History Quarterly