ABSTRACT
Catholic science, under various definitions, has become an important object of exploration for historians of science over the last generation, but the relationship between the early modern study of nature and a specific set of practices, identities or ideas we might think of as representative of the Counter-Reformation has yet to receive sustained treatment. Missionary orders, almost exclusively the Society of Jesus, have, with good practical and historical reason, provided the examples with which we have become accustomed to think through processes as diverse as scientific translation, universalization, standardization and hybridization. The emergence of Jesuit science studies as a valid subject within the history of science has, though, deracinated it from the broader and changing field of Counter-Reformation history; a reintegration would be beneficial to both fields.
