News in Jesuit Studies
The following are notices of significant events related to the field of Jesuit Studies.
The notices appear chronologically, and all entries are indexed into the Portal’s search capabilities.
To contribute news of significant publications and events, both recent and forthcoming, please contact the Portal’s editors (jesuitportal@bc.edu)
Nadine Amsler, of the Goethe University Frankfurt, has published Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China with University of Washington Press.
The title is a rare investigation of “the domestic and devotional practices of women” in early modern China, according to the publishing, presenting “a rich body of evidence that demonstrates how Chinese households functioned as sites of evangelization, religious conflict, and indigenization of Christianity.” Jesuit missionaries, dealing more closely with the male elite, had only limited access to women and their ritual spaces. Amsler’s research vividly demonstrates the “networks of religious sociability and ritual communities among women as well as women’s remarkable acts of private piety” in seventeenth-century China.
The titles of the chapters appear below. More information about this important publication is available at the website of the University of Washington Press: http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/AMSJES.html.
Clothes make the man: the Jesuits’ adoption of literati masculinity —
A kingdom of virtuous women: Jesuit descriptions of China’s moral topography —
A source of creative tension: literati Jesuits and priestly duties —
Strengthening the marital bond: the Christianization of Chinese marriage —
Praying for progeny: women and Catholic spiritual remedies —
Domestic communities: women’s congregations and communal piety —
Sharing genteel spirituality: the female networks of the Xus of Shanghai —
A widow and her virgins: the domestic convents of Hangzhou and Nanjing —
Fabrics of devotion: Catholic women’s pious patronage —
Women and gender in global Catholicism.
Ines G. Županov and Pierre-Antoine Fabre have edited a new collection of essays that examines the “debates concerning the nature of “rites” raging in intellectual circles of Europe, Asia and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” according to Brill Publishers. The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World consists of fourteen articles, tracing a controversy that began with the practices of accommodation in the Jesuit missions of Asia.
Contributors to this volume, in addition to Županov and Fabre, include: Claudia Brosseder; Michela Catto; Gita Dharampal-Frick; Ana Carolina Hosne; Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia; Giuseppe Marcocci; Ovidiu Olar; Sabina Pavone; István Perczel; Nicholas Standaert; Margherita Trento; and Guillermo Wilde.
More information is available at https://brill.com/view/title/34019.
The University of Montpellier 3 has issued a call for papers on its first international symposium on “Cross-cultural encounter as a mediatic enterprise.” The November 2018 in Paris event focuses on Japan’s first embassy to Europe (1582-1590) and subsequent publication of De missione legatorum iaponensium ad Romanam curiam.
After his arrival in Japan in 1579, Alessandro Valignano, visitor of the Society of Jesus to the region, sent four young Japanese men to Europe in order to, in the words for the symposium’s call, demonstrate the “importance of Japan’s mission to the Pope.” Their travels lasted eight years, covering “Portugal, Spain and Italy, with a final stop at the Roman Curia.” The men’s notes of their European visit become the basis of a book Valignano published for Japanese seminarians in 1590.
The symposium takes place November 8-9, 2018 at Université Paul-Valéry – Montpellier 3 (France) – Site Saint-Charles – Salle Kouros. It is part of a larger project to produce a French translation of Valignano’s text. According to the call for papers, the symposium seeks to encourage the study of the text in areas such as
1. Philology: the examination of the original Latin text, including the various xenisms due to the national identity and culture of the writer;
2. History: contextualization of the mission in relation to strategies and tactics of Jesuit predication around the world, as well as in comparison with other written treaties by the Jesuits (Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni, etc.) or other religious orders;
3. Imagology: the ideological and / or utopian representations of each of the countries visited, to be related to the image of this same mission as related by Fróis; the self-image of the Japanese envoys as Japanese and Christians;
4. Dialogism: the rhetoric at work, especially the polyphonic game, in the apologetic frame of mind;
5. Criticism: the reception of the work in Europe and Japan, in the history of failed or successful encounters between Japan and the non-Japanese world, as well as in the arts (painting, theatre, literature, sacred writings).
Organizers of the event are CRISES EA 4424 (Montpellier 3), IRIEC EA 740 (Montpellier 3), and UMR 8155 (Paris 7). Organizers may be reached at demissionelegatorum@gmail.com
The call requests for those interested to “send at demissionelegatorum@gmail.com by the 1st September, 2018 (1500 words in English and in their native tongue), and then, if their project is retained, the article or the draft of it by October 15, 2018, so that all participants can read the papers and discuss them on D-day.”