When Ignatius of Loyola and his comrades first received papal recognition for their new religious order, one of the first things they did was to hire an archivist. At their founding moment, not only had the Jesuits already exchanged so many letters that they needed a specialist to organize them all: they also anticipated using this correspondence as a new kind of narrative record of their missionary exploits. By preaching the gospel at the ends of the earth, the Jesuits certainly hoped to make saints, but they also had to make saints’ Lives?hagiographies that would inspire the whole world with tales of conversion, devotion, and martyrdom to rival those of the early church. After all, it was romances of conquest that inspired Ignatius to become a soldier, and the Lives of the Saints that inspired him to become a saint, and the order he founded likewise became a kind of story machine.
