Religious Literature and its Institutional Contexts: Prelude to the Study of Spanish Accounts of Christian Martyrdom in Tokugawa Japan

The study of post-Tridentine religious literature has been eclipsed in modern scholarship by the study of baroque imaginative literature or the significant body of scientific or philosophical works produced during the period. Nevertheless, post-Tridentine religious literature accounts for a significant segment of works published in modern European languages over the same period of time. The present is a programmatic essay that puts forward a framework for the historiographical interpretation of a subset of post-Tridentine religious literature published in the course of the seventeenth century and beyond. Religious works written in Spanish dealing with the persecution of Christianity in Tokugawa, Japan, were published in locations as diverse as Manila, Mexico City, Seville and Madrid, and represent an intriguing literary ensemble.1 The following reflections are part of a larger project that seeks to describe, analyze, and explain this body of work as religious literature. The greatest trial to befall the Jesuit missions and Christianity in Japan was the political crisis of 1614. In that year, Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (r. 1603-1605, d. 1616), through his son Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (r. 16051632), proscribed Christianity and ordered all foreign clergy out of the country. Over 350 missionaries, local clergy, and influential Japanese Christians were expelled from Japan. European missionaries articulated a variety of responses to the crisis of Japanese Christianity. One of them was writing. In turning to the written dissemination of the stories of Christian martyrdom in Japan, missionaries were tapping into logistical resources that were