Salt and Solitude: Ilarione Sala and the Emotional Cost of Missionary Mobility (c. 1700)
Elisa Frei
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
1st July 2025, 10.00-12.00
University of Florence, SAGAS Department, Online Seminar
Mediterranean Emotions – A Global Research Hotspot
Seminar Series “Emotional Grammars of Globalization”
GMeet Link: https://meet.google.com/kgu-twby-vyn
Abstract
This presentation delves into the unpublished diary (c. 1700) of the Italian abbot Ilarione Bonaventura Sala, who was dispatched by the Congregation of Propaganda Fide to assist in the complex negotiations surrounding the Chinese Rites Controversy. While his final destination was the Qing Empire, much of Sala’s surviving narrative concerns the long and emotionally charged oceanic journey that brought him there. Throughout the voyage, Sala documented his experiences with meticulous care: from the daily rhythms of shipboard life to the interpersonal dynamics among religious travelers and sailors, from the unfamiliar customs and cultures encountered en route to reflections on his own sense of displacement.
Solitude is one of the most pervasive emotional undercurrents in the diary. Uprooted from his familiar world—culturally, spiritually, and relationally—Sala often found himself overwhelmed by distance and uncertainty. Yet his writing also reveals how vital food, companionship, and curiosity became as strategies for emotional survival. Meals shared, stories exchanged, and tastes discovered served as small but significant anchors amid the instability of travel.
By focusing on the emotional dimensions of Sala’s journey rather than its theological or political stakes, this paper offers a window into the fragile resilience of a Mediterranean religious subject negotiating a new global reality—one shipboard encounter, one bowl of rice at a time.
Speaker’s Bio
Elisa Frei is an Assistant Professor in Church History at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt. She also works as a project assistant for the Digital Indipetae Database, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, and as an assistant editor for the journal Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu. She is a research associate at the University ofYork, where she spent part of her PhD in History, after the BA in Archival Studies and Librarianship, the state diploma in Archival Studies, and the MA in Philology and Literary Hermeneutic. She studies the Society of Jesus during the early modern period, its missions in East Asia, and the formal path to reach them—through the so-called Litterae Indipetae, source material on which she has extensively written. In 2023 she published her first monographs: Early Modern Litterae Indipetae for the East Indies (Brill) and ‘Bussar ben forte per aprirsi la porta nell’Indie’. Negoziare la missione nella Compagnia di Gesù (XVII-XVIII sec.) (Edizioni dell’Orso). She also co-edited Profiling Saints. Images of Modern Sanctity in a Global World (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2023) and Istoria della Compagnia di Gesù. L’Asia by Daniello Bartoli (Einaudi, 2019).
Johann Baptist Klauber, “Inácio de Azevedo en Portugese jezuïeten vermoord door hugenoten op hun missie naar Brazilië”, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200466425, Public Domain.
This seminar is supported by PRIN 2020 ETFH3Y (EURIMPER, University of Florence node), financed by the Ministry of University and Research, Italy
Ultimo aggiornamento
19.12.2025