Following the pioneering work of Francis Xavier in establishing Christianity in Japan, his successor Alessandro Valignano, decided to send a legation to Europe representing the three Christian daimyo of Kyushu, southern Japan. It consisted of two Christian samurai boys who were chosen as legates, together with two teenage companions. The group set sail from Nagasaki in February 1582 and were to be away for eight years. The purpose of the mission was twofold: it would give Europeans the chance of seeing Japanese people at first hand and appreciating their culture, thereby publicising the work of the Catholic Church in Japan and so (it was hoped) increase much-needed financial support; and secondly on their return to Japan the envoys would give eyewitness reports of the splendours of Renaissance Europe, thus moderating Japanese notions about the outside world and foreign barbarians. The boys travelled through Portugal, Spain and Italy and were feted wherever they went. In Venice, the authorities even postponed the annual festival in honour of St Mark, the city’s patron, so that the Japanese might view the spectacle. More importantly, the boys met Philip II of Spain several times, as well as Pope Gregory XIII and his successor Sixtus V. This is the first book-length study in English of the mission and provides important new insights into the work of the Jesuits in Japan and the nature of the legation’s impact on late-sixteenth-century European perceptions of Japan.

In 1582 Alessandro Valignano, the Visitor to the Jesuit mission in the East Indies, sent four Japanese boys to Europe. Until the arrival of the embassy in Europe, the Euro-Japanese encounter had been almost exclusively one way: Europeans going to Japan. This book is an account of their travels, their long journeys out and back, and the 20 months in Europe being received by popes and kings. It was published in Macao in 1590 with the title De Missione Legatorvm Iaponensium ad Romanum curiam. The present edition is the first complete version of this rich, complex and impressive work to appear in English, and is accompanied with maps and illustrations of the mission, and an introduction discussing its context and the subsequent reception of the book.

In 1585, at the height of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan, which was begun by Francis Xavier in 1549, Luis Frois, a long-time missionary in Japan, drafted the earliest systematic comparison of Western and Japanese cultures. This book constitutes the first critical English-language edition of the 1585 work, the original of which was discovered in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid after the Second World War. The book provides a translation of the text, which is not a continuous narrative, but rather more than 600 distichs or brief couplets on subjects such as gender, child rearing, religion, medicine, eating, horses, writing, ships and seafaring, architecture, and music and drama. In addition, the book includes a substantive introduction and other editorial material to explain the background and also to make comparisons with present-day Japanese life. Overall, the book represents an important primary source for understanding a particularly challenging period of history and its connection to contemporary Europe and Japan.

This volume of essays contributes to our understanding of the ways in which the Jesuits employed emotions to “change hearts”—that is, convert or reform—both in Europe and in the overseas missions. The early modern Society of Jesus excited and channeled emotion through sacred oratory, Latin poetry, plays, operas, art, and architecture; it inflamed young men with holy desire to die for their faith in foreign lands; its missionaries initiated dialogue with and ‘accommodated’ to non-European cultural and emotional regimes. The early modern Jesuits conducted, in all senses of the word, much of the emotional energy of their times. As such, they provide a compelling focus for research into the links between rhetoric and emotion, performance and devotion, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

This book addresses different dimensions of cosmopolitanism in the Portuguese-speaking world which have caused much debate, such as migration and globalisation. The volume includes contributions from leading specialists in History, Musicology, Literary Studies, Anthropology and Political Sciences. It focuses on specific processes in Brazil, Portugal, West Africa, Angola, and other parts of the world, from the sixteenth century to the present. Central topics are intercontinental trading elites, the cultural impact of forced and voluntary migration, the republic of letters, the possibilities created by freemasonry and liberalism, the adaptation of the Azorean Holy Ghost Feast to the United States, international links of conservative politicians, the international projection of the new Angolan elite, architecture and urban planning. Contributors are: Vanda Anastácio, Cátia Antunes, Paulo Arruda, Francisco Bethencourt, Toby Green, Philip J. Havik, David R. M. Irving, João Leal, Giovanni Leoni, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, António Costa Pinto, and Phillip Rothwell.

This book explores the dynamic relationships between sites, peoples, objects, and images during the first age of globalization in early modern Europe. It investigates interactions, interconnections, and entanglements on both micro and macro levels, and aims to understand the specific dynamics of processes of translocal and transcultural intersection. Linking global perspectives with the history of material culture, Sites of Mediation highlights the potential of objects, artefacts, and things to connect (urban) cultures and imaginaries. Individual chapters focus on a number of European cities, which all operated on different levels of global and interregional connections and are presented here as sites of connectivity, encounters, and exchange. Contributors are: Tina Asmussen, Nadia Baadj, Benedikt Bego-Ghina, Davina Benkert, Daniela Bleichmar, Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, Christine Göttler, Franziska Hilfiker, Nicolai Kölmel, Ivo Raband, Jennifer Rabe, Antonella Romano, Michael Schaffner, Sarah-Maria Schober, Claudia Swan, and Stefanie Wyssenbach.

Monasticism has a special position in the history of pastoral care. It produced innovations in various aspects of pastoral care despite, or more precisely, because of its isolation in legal or social terms from the secular world. The thirteen papers contained in this volume will reveal that there was a great variety in the ways pastoral care continued to be practised by monasticism, depending on time, space, and the nature of each religious order. Adopting a comparative approach, their historical and geographical range of investigation is not limited to medieval Europe but expands to the Americas and even to Japan in the early Modern Age. This volume bases on a conference held on 1 and 2 March 2019 at Okayama University, Japan, as part of the close collaboration between a Japanese research group on Christian/Buddhist religious movements and the Research Project "Monasteries in the High Middle Ages: Innovation Laboratories for European Life Designs and Regulatory Models" of the Saxon and the Heidelberg Academies of Sciences and Humanities, as well as the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG, Dresden).