A History of Jesuit Missions in Japan: Evangelization, Miracles and Martyrdom, 15491614 [Hardcover]

?The book marks a significant contribution to the literature on the history of the Jesuits, Catholic missions and Christianity in Japan.

?

Introduction

????? I.???????? Preaching a foreign God

1.???? Missionary violence

2.???? Christs samurai

3.???? From persecutions to martyrdom

?

??? II.???????? Planting Crosses

1.???? The conquest of sacred space

2.???? Symbol of a suffering God

?

? III.???????? The Miraculous Tree

1.???? The cross in the trunk

2.???? Christianizing ancient cults

?

? IV.???????? The Wood of Martyrdom

1.???? Crosses of blood

2.???? The Japanese Roses of Nagasaki

?

??? V.???????? The Popes Samurai: Takayama Ukon

1.???? A martyr without martyrdom

2.???? The postmortem career: from failures to the altars

In the aftermath of the religious crisis triggered by the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church set out to conquer faithful in new territories. The first missionaries to arrive in Japan were the Jesuits who were forced to adopt a different type of evangelization, with a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. This volume shows that Japan turned out to be a land of experimentation and development of a global Catholicism, as well as an unprecedented laboratory of encounter between political, scientific and religious cultures in the age of the first globalization. It anal3