On a hunch, I went home after the DH events last September and typed “Jesuit” into the English corpus of Google Books’ Ngram Viewer. The tool is more powerful than what I used it for, but my search revealed how popular the word was in the English-language books that Google has digitized and made searchable. One result from 1524 (before the Society was founded) is the result of a wrong date (actually 1920). But things get really interesting in 1609, four years after the Gunpowder Plot to restore a Catholic monarchy failed and English Jesuit missionaries took a good chunk of the blame. Things more or less taper off as the corpus of extant books expands in later years, but with curious spikes in popularity, one of which occurs between 1840 and 1860.

Jesuits making seismic waves in English literature … or at least tremors.

This spike follows the…