Martyrs of Japan

Rady Roldán-Figueroa, Th.D. (2005, Boston University) is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at that university. He is the author of The Ascetic Spirituality of Juan de Ávila (1499–1569) (Brill, 2010) and has published in leading European journals.

“Roldán-Figueroa explores their [i.e. Japano-martyrological texts] production, language context, and authors with a reference to the respective orders involved: The Jesuits, the Dominicans, and the Discalced Franciscans. Roldán-Figueroa stresses the fact that publishing was part of the missionary agenda in order to receive donations and in-kind contributions as well as preferential treatment by the European nobility. However, this was not the only aim: As he amply shows in Part Two of the volume, missionaries tended to portray the lives of martyrs as the culminating achievements of Christians who, being ready to sacrifice their lives, demonstrated their authentic faith. The heroism and zeal of Catholic missionaries, with their cult and veneration as saints, aimed at the recruiting of new missionaries.”Marzia Alteno, University of Vienna. In: Religious Studies Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2021), p. 560.“ ...el libro es un trabajo de calidad que nos acerca a un mejor conocimiento de las políticas de publicación dirigidas por las órdenes religiosas a través de las relaciones de los autores con sus instituciones. Por tanto, es un destacado aporte historiográfico a la cultura intelectual del clero y a los horizontes planetarios en los que actuaron.”Daniel Atienza-Atienza, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. In: Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, Vol. 31 (2022), pp. 671–672.“Stressing the popularity of religious literature in Spain and its overseas possessions, Roldán-Figueroa argues that one cannot neatly dissect these texts into decontextualized parts to meet current research needs. One must focus on their religious character, because religious men were their primary authors. This self-evident conclusion is often overlooked, especially the fact that Jesuit and mendicant writers were deeply influenced by their orders' spiritual practices and institutional cultures. Roldán-Figueroa rightly links the many tasks and responsibilities of missionary offices to the very act of writing itself and hence the content and narrative structures of religious literature.A major strength of The Martyrs of Japan is Roldán-Figueroa's qualitative analysis of Japano-martyrological texts. Drawing primarily on the Laures Kirshita [sic. Kirishitan, rrf] Bunko Database, he identified 382 publications that referenced Christian martyrdom in Japan between 1598 and 1700 (numbered and organized by date in a separate bibliography). Based upon the available bibliographic data, Roldán-Figueroa found that members of the religious orders—especially the Jesuits— were the primary authors of these texts; that they were printed in seventy-eight cities in Europe, New Spain, and the Philippines; and that they were published in nine European languages, with Spanish, Italian, and French being the most predominant. Unlike the other mission histories where missionaries are early modern ethnographers or scientists, in The Martyrs of Japan they are administrators, editors, promoters, carriers of manuscripts, and book distributors.”Jason Dyck, University of Western Ontario. In: Journal of History (University of Toronto Press), Vol. 57, No. 3 (December 2022), pp. 497–499.“The book presents a comprehensive and detailed analysis of hagiographic literature related to Catholic missions in Japan, especially in the context of the Spanish Empire. In both parts of the publication, the author pays great attention to the role of individual religious orders and order policies, which were a key factor in the history of early modern Christian missions in East Asia, as well as to the specifics of Japano-martyrological publications among individual orders. […]. The author’s work is valuable in that it illustrates the early history of Christianity in Japan and deepens our understanding of how the missionary activities of the Catholic Church were presented to the Catholic public in other countries, and how missionary activities were linked through hagiography with the life and spirituality of Christians in countries where Christianity was already established. His combined quantitative and qualitative research approach to analyzing the publication history of religious literature can be a methodological inspiration for other areas, not exclusively those focused on missions."Ondřej Pazdírek, Masaryk University. In: Studia Theologica, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2023), pp. 238–241 [translated from the Czech].