Wiki Jesuit (WJ)

The Society of Jesus is a religious order originated in the 16th century with a main purpose of evangelization in a global perspective, and whose expansion coincided with the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. The order arrived in Portugal in 1540, and through their colleges and their networks of missions, they collected data on a vast diversity of aspects of natural and human history that helped to shape the medieval world and contributed to review scientific knowledge in various fields. The Jesuits contributed to the so-called first globalization, namely as missionaries, schoolmasters and researchers in the vast networks formed by the Portuguese and Spanish empires which reached all corners of world, bringing with them the best professors and scientists from all over Europe, effectively globalizing European culture and science for the first time in history. The Wiki Jesuit platform aims to be a collaborative and open access Internet reference point for the cultural influence of the Jesuits as transmitters of European cultural heritage and as privileged interlocutors in intercultural dialogue. It will be a functional database managing massive amounts of previously treated information and make it readable and useful for various audiences, from the general public to academia. Wiki Jesuit will organize a prosopographic (biographical and bibliographical) database of all the Jesuits who entered or worked in the provinces and vice provinces of the Portuguese Assistance from 1540 to 1773, given its priority as a port for the flow of missionaries from various European countries who travelled towards new cultural settings. Besides the survey of literary, religious, and scientific works by Jesuit missionaries and scholars, the Wiki Jesuit database will also include works of art and architecture. These works, both bibliographic and ichnographic and architectural, will be fully searchable in the Wiki Jesuit database, through detailed files and media.