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Early modern transnational relations and personal encounters were influenced by interactions between Japan and the regions that had become connected to it through expanding global trade and missionary networks. Translation activities linked to Christian missionary activities, overseas trade, and political upheaval in these places all contributed to shaping these interactions. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this volume explores religion, translation, and transnational relations in the context of the colonial and missionary enterprises involving Japan, between 1550 and 1800. It focuses on the early Catholic mission to Japan, discussing both Protestant and local religious reactions to it, and the publications of the Jesuit mission press in Japan. A survey of the subsequent centuries of scholarly involvement with translational materials in Asian languages further suggests that translation had a formative influence on the intellectual world in the Early Modern period.
List of contents
Contributors.- Conventions.- 1 Introduction: Japan in the Early Modern World - Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations.- I. Reconsidering Language and Materiality in Missionary Translation.- 2. Revisiting Native Agency: Cultural and Material Translations of Christianity in Early Modern Japan.- 3. From Nanbanjin to Kabukimono: Portraying Iberians in Early Modern Japan.- 4. Translating European Punctuation into Japanese: Investigating the Printing of the Sanctos no gosagueô (Acts of the Saints).- 5. To Wish and to Pray in Jesuit Japanese Grammars.- II. Translocational Books and Their Histories.- 6. Translatio of the Sanctos no gosagueô (Acts of the Saints, 1591) Published by the Jesuit Mission Press in Japan: An Overlooked Copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.- 7. Bridging Religion, State, and Asian Trade in the Seventeenth Century: John Evans and the Bodleian Japanese Jesuit Missionary Print of 1596.- 8. Early European Owners of Jesuit Prints and Manuscripts from Japan: A View Based Chiefly on Book Sale Catalogues.- III. Crossing Legal, Political, and Denominational Boundaries.- 9. Women in Repudiation and Divorce Cases in the Christian Mission: Jesuit Translation Strategies and Normativities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan.- 10. Cultural Translations and Editorial Processes: A Study of the Translated Jesuit Texts Linked to the Japanese Mission Included in The Principal Navigations (Vol. 2, 1599) by R. Hakluyt.- 11. 'This Iaponian Palme-tree of Christian Fortitude' - Jesuit Letters From Japan in Early Modern England.- IV. Appendix.- 12. A Hand-List of Prints from the Jesuit Mission Press in Japan and Related Materials.- Japanese and Chinese Terms and Titles of Historical Works.
About the author
Katja Triplett is Affiliate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Leipzig University Institute for the Study of Religions.
Yoshimi Orii is Professor for Spanish Language and Culture at Keio University (Tokyo).
Pia Jolliffe is Research Fellow for Asian and Japanese Studies at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford.
Summary
Open Access. Early modern transnational relations and personal encounters were influenced by interactions between Japan and the regions that had become connected to it through expanding global trade and missionary networks. Translation activities linked to Christian missionary activities, overseas trade, and political upheaval in these places all contributed to shaping these interactions. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this volume explores religion, translation, and transnational relations in the context of the colonial and missionary enterprises involving Japan, between 1550 and 1800. It focuses on the early Catholic mission to Japan, discussing both Protestant and local religious reactions to it, and the publications of the Jesuit mission press in Japan. A survey of the subsequent centuries of scholarly involvement with translational materials in Asian languages further suggests that translation had a formative influence on the intellectual world in the Early Modern period.
