Japan on the Jesuit Stage offers a comprehensive overview of the representations of Japan in early modern European Neo-Latin school theater. The chapters in the volume catalog and analyze representative plays which were produced in the hundreds all over Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to present-day Croatia and Poland.
Taking full account of existing scholarship, but also introducing a large amount of previously unknown primary material, the contributions by European and Japanese researchers significantly expand the horizon of investigation on early modern European theatrical reception of East Asian elements and will be of particular interest to students of global history, Neo-Latin, and theater studies.
Haruka Oba, Ph.D. (2010, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich) is associate professor in the Faculty of Literature at Kurume University in Japan. Her field of research is early modern Europe, especially the history of the depiction of the Japanese people in the German-speaking areas.
Akihiko Watanabe, Ph.D. (2003, Yale University) is professor in the Department of Comparative Culture at Otsuma Womenâs University. His research interests are the Greco-Roman classics, classical reception, and Neo-Latin, especially when pertaining to Japan.
Florian Schaffenrath, Ph.D. (2005, University of Innsbruck) is director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies. He has published on regional Neo-Latin literature and epic poetry in particular. Since 2018, he is general editor of the Acta Conventus Neolatini (Brill).
"Japan on the Jesuit Stage offers an array of fresh avenues to scholars, from information networks to religious, social, cultural, and political dynamics between Europe and Asia. It recommends itself to scholars engaged in questions about early modern theater that cross nations, languages, and cultures." - Andrew S. Keener, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Fall 2023), pp. 1104â1106
List of Figures
Part 1: Preliminaries
Introduction
âMaria Maciejewska, Haruka Oba, Florian Schaffenrath and Akihiko Watanabe
1 Found in Translation: The Jesuit Japan Letters as a Source of Early Modern European Images of Japan
âPatrick Reinhart Schwemmer
2 Christianomachia Iaponensis: The Japanese Martyr on Stage
âMirjam Döpfert
4 Titus Iapon on the Jesuit Stage in the Provincia Flandro-Belgica: Neo-Latin Intertextuality and the Economics of Jesuit Drama
âNicholas De Sutter and Goran Proot
6 Traces of Japan in Croatian Latin School Drama, 1600â1800
âNina ÄengiÄ and Neven JovanoviÄ
7 Not Only Titus the Japanese: Japan and the Japanese on the Jesuit Stage in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
âMonika Miazek-MÄczyÅska
8 Early Christian Japanese Sources of Jesuit Theater in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
âJustyna Åukaszewska-Haberkowa
Part 3: Case Studies
9 Majesty and Silence: An Honorable, Bald Old Man Named Japan
âMargarida Miranda
10 The Development of Jesuit Drama on Japan in Bavaria: The Historical Context of the Play Victor, Staged in Munich in 1665
âHaruka Oba
11 The Japanese Senex Iratus: The Munich Victor Play
âAkihiko Watanabe
All those interested in early modern history, Neo-Latin, reception of classical Latin literature, Jesuit drama and theatre, Japanology, missionary studies and the history of Christendom.
Keywords: Jesuit theatre, early modern history, Japan and Europe, Catholic Mission, Catholic Reformation, and classical reception.