In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the public defense of academic theses entailed the publication of a written presentation of aspirant’s conclusions. They were printed in the form of decorated broadsides posted at the entrance of college halls or of booklets distributed to the audience. During the seventeenth century, these paratextual devices developed into increasingly complex images filling the entire broadsheet. They were intended to praise the applicants’ protectors. From the start, academic broadsides were regularly populated with personifications of Science, the Liberal Arts, Virtues, Wisdom, War and Peace, etc., which served to highlight key individuals, their heraldry devices and the accompanying texts. This article examines how, in thesis prints produced in the Southern Low Countries, these figures simultaneously play a cognitive and a laudatory role.

Jesuits of the early-modern period had, as a major aspect of their missions and ministry, encounters with prisoners and with those condemned to execution. The Jesuit experience of these encounters was profoundly influenced by the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, undertaken by every Jesuit. In these exercises the retreatant is required to visualise the physical sufferings of Christ. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were closely connected, from several perspectives, with the imprisonment and execution of scores of individuals. While many of the leading Jesuit theoreticians of the time, such as Roberto Bellarmino, supported the right of the secular state to exercise capital punishment, a tension persisted between the idea of common humanity expounded in the Spiritual Exercises and the role of the Jesuits as supporters of the Habsburg dynasty that conducted these public executions. This essay explores the Jesuit encounter along the eastern and northern Habsburg peripheries and on the ‘frontiers of faith’ with prisoners and the condemned, utilising archival materials, as a contribution to the intellectual history of the Jesuits and to the cultural history of the region.

I want to take a tour through the ways that language, culture and religious practice has shaped and is shaped by the dialectic between a redeemed promised land and the open-ended uncertainties of exile. I hope that this can help deepen our appreciation of the complexities and opportunities of contemporary Jewish life both in the Diaspora and in the Land of Israel.