Description:

Michelle Molina will present, 

"'I love the Jesuits!': Reason and Affect in an Early Modern Shipboard Conversion Narrative.”

In 1768, a young Lutheran Swedish merchant named Lorenzo Thjülen left the Spanish port of Cadíz on a boat destined for the French island of Corsica. He found himself among 200 Jesuits who, recently expelled from Mexico, were en-route to their exile in Bologna, Italy. In close confines with the Jesuits for the duration of his five-week journey, Thjülen came to embrace Catholicism and, shortly after arriving in Italy, he became a Jesuit. These choices removed him permanently from family and friends in Sweden, a fact that he described as profoundly painful. We might think him an odd bird, this Swedish Lutheran convert to Catholicism, yet he found birds of a feather in Italy, an exile among exiles. There Thjülen led a long a productive life. But this essay is concerned with his conversion and how he converted, not to Catholicism, but to the Jesuits and, more precisely, to remain close to a particular Mexican Jesuit named Emanuelle Iturriaga.