How (not) to translate a Christian emotion. Fear, Consolation, and Joy in the Sixteenth-century Jesuit Mission to Japan
| Dates: | 4 March 2026 |
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| Times: | 10:00 - 12:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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Dr. Linda Zampol D’Ortia (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
This talk considers the rarity of mentions of fear in the literature composed by the Catholic missionaries of the Society of Jesus from Japan, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The mission, founded by future saint Francis Xavier in 1549, by the 1580s made accommodation to Japanese culture one of its policy tenets and based much of its work of evangelisation on emotional practices. However, the emotion of fear, which had a complex status both in Catholicism in general and in its specific Jesuit expression, was very rarely mentioned in the many letters sent from the archipelago and in the mission’s histories. A similar absence, moreover, marked spiritual texts translated into Japanese for the use of the local Catholic communities. I suggest that, far from being absent, fear was implied in Jesuit correspondence as part of the emotional sequence of consolation, and thus never mentioned explicitly. At the same time, as European spiritual literature was accommodated to Japan, a further step of distancing from fear was taken through specific strategies of translation of consolation itself. These processes help unveiling the complex tensions that surrounded the emotion of fear in early modern Catholicism, both in Europe and in Japan.
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