Finding Common Places: Sententiae, Kinku, and the Jesuits in Japan

Abstract

Books printed by the Jesuits in Japan and China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were infused with Renaissance humanism. Selecting the most useful and compelling texts from various corpora used in Jesuit education, the missionaries produced books they believed would aid language learning and moral education, and, as a result, accelerate proselytisation. Among these texts were commonplace books: collections of wise sayings or sententiae usually ordered by topic and attributed to authoritative classical philosophers and religious figures. The Jesuits employed the flexibility of sententiae and commonplace books in their missionary work in East Asia. In Japan, Xixo, Xixxo nadono uchiyori nuqi idaxi, qincuxǔto nasu mono nari (Compilation of Golden Words, Selected from Among the Four Books, Seven Classics, and Others, 1593) and Flosculi ex veteris, ac novi testamenti, s. doctorum, et insignium philosophorum floribus selecti (Blossoms Selected from the Old and New Testaments, the Holy Doctors, and Notable Philosophers, 1610), two Kirishitan-ban キリシタン版 (Christian edition) commonplace books, were produced in different languages and formats by the Jesuits at the turn of the seventeenth century. This study explores how and why the commonplace book genre was adapted by Jesuit missionaries in Japan through an examination of their characteristics. It will be argued that factors including the importance placed on language learning at Jesuit institutions in Japan, the manifest use of wise sayings from authoritative figures and collections of these sayings in educational traditions in Japan and Europe, and the Jesuits’ perception of moral beliefs prevalent among the Japanese people that parallelled their own, fuelled their desire to produce commonplace books in Japan.