Inventories of Ruin

J. Michelle Molina is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. Her most recent book is To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion, 1542–1767.

• Introduction: Disappearing Acts 1Act I. Arrest 24Scene I. Notarial Observation at the Colegio Espíritu Santo 31Scene II. The Action of Subtraction 37Scene III. Departures and Returns, Replications and Excisions 45Scene IV. Aramburu’s Desk 50Scene V. Madre Santísima de la Luz, Owner of the Means of Her Own Reproduction 53Scene VI. Counting the Silver 62Scene VII. Care for the Sacramental Silver on the Jesuit Hacienda 75Scene VIII. Charting Virtue, Enforcing Devotionalism 79Scene IX. Silver, Salvation, and Racialization 88Act II. Possibility? 98Scene I. The First Book 101Scene II. Shipboard Disputation 103Scene III. Off the Page, or, Things Thjülen Is Too Self-Absorbed to See 107Scene IV. Missing Books 114Scene V. The Virgin Mary Conquers Lutheran Heresy 119Scene VI. Chasing Spiritual Union across the Mediterranean 123Scene VII. Betrayal 126Act III. Ruination 134Scene I. The Transatlantic Culling of the Mexican Province 139Scene II. "True" Monuments: The Ruination of el Verdadero Jesuita 149Scene III. Off the Page: Bologna 161Scene IV. Displaced, or the Jesuit "College" in a New World 163Scene V. The Hacienda, Another Model 166Scene VI. "La América" and Nostalgia for Tepotzotlán 170Scene VII. To Live Dying: Mourning in an Etiological Mode 172Scene VIII. Necrocommunity, or a Mournful Mode of Sociability 179Scene IX. Verdadero Anchorites 182Concluded: The Mexican Province 189Acknowledgments 197Notes 203Bibliography 243Index 259

"Following inventories of objects, souls, and the dead, Molina offers us a beautiful meditation, cast as a tragedy in three acts, on the material, ritual, and affective scaffoldings of early modern societies. This is a relentless exploration of the sociological undoing of the Mexican Jesuit Order after its 1767 expulsion, a deeply imaginative probe into the performative dimension and origins of Jesuit power and charisma." - Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, co-author of The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World