Thesis abstract:

«p»Books printed by the Jesuits in Japan and China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were heavily infused with Renaissance humanism. Cherry-picking the most useful and persuasive texts from a corpus used in Jesuit education, the missionaries produced books they believed would aid language learning and moral education, and, as a result, accelerate proselytisation. Among these texts were commonplace-books (florilegia), collections of wise sayings known as sententiae usually ordered by topic and attributed to authoritative classical philosophers and religious figures. The Jesuits employed the flexibility of sententiae and commonplace-books to produce several very different florilegia at their Japanese and Chinese missions, five of which will be analysed in this study. The Qincuxu, Jiaoyou Lun,Aphorismi Confessariorum, Ershiwu Yan, and Flosculi were produced in varying languages and formats by the Jesuits over a period of eighteen years during Japan’s “Christian Century”. This study will analyse why the Jesuits printed these commonplace-books, how they adapted and re-arranged existing local and European texts often from classical secular authorities to meet the missions’ needs, how the missions may have worked together to produce commonplace-books, and ultimately how well the texts survived in the following centuries. It will be argued that, along with the flexible, multipurpose, humanistic, and persuasive nature of Renaissance commonplace-books and sententiae, the Jesuits’ recognition of cultural similarities and local secular equivalents of commonplace-books and sententiae prompted them to print two types of commonplace-books in Japan and China: syncretistic florilegia that combined local and European book formats and content, and reproductions of Latin florilegia to be used by European missionaries. The study will add to recent scholarship on chreiai and exempla printed by the Jesuits in seventeenth century China, provide an analysis of three little-studied Kirishitan-ban, and illuminate the importance of cross-disciplinary research in discussions of Jesuit books produced in Japan and China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.«/p»