Abstract
The tsunami waves of Early Modern European colonial expansion and Christianization reached the shores of the East Indies under the Treaty of Tordesillas (1493), causing the dislocation of numerous women. The three Christian women of this chapter had to relocate from Ethiopia to Portuguese Goa; Tokugawa Japan to Spanish Manila; and Korea to Nagasaki. They testified to their Christian faith even while facing oppression, enslavement, misogyny, persecution, torture, and expulsion from colonial and xenophobic regimes. They became community leaders, preachers, evangelists, visionaries, and martyrs. Close reading of the Jesuit sources offers historians an insight into these women’s embodied understanding of the Christian gospel and mandate. These insights also guide historians to rewrite the history of Reformations in Europe and their contemporary Christian missions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, integrating voices of these dislocated Asian women, so that they might empower Asian American women in their frequent experiences of displacement today.
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Notes
- 1.
See The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, Trans. George E. Ganss (St. Louis, MO: The institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 262–63.
- 2.
On Catharina of Ferão, see Haruko Nawata Ward, “Good News to Women? The Jesuits, their Pastoral Advice and Women’s Reception of Christianity in the Portuguese East Indies; Goa and Japan,” in Jesuits in India: History and Culture, ed. Délio de Mendonça (Goa: Xavier Centre of Historical Research, 2007), 125–58; and also Haruko Nawata Ward, “Crumb-Gathering Wisdom Calls Out for Pacific Asian and North American Asian Women Historians,” in Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders, ed. Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 20–21. On Luís Fróis, see Thomas Worcester, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 315.
- 3.
The Jesuit records on Catharina of Ferão can be found in Documenta Indica [DI], ed., Josef Wicki (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1948), vols. 4, 5 and 6. See also António da Silva Rêgo, ed., Documentação para a história das missões do padroado português do Oriente (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar,1947–1958), vol. 10, 97.
- 4.
On the Portuguese colonial anti-“Hindu” ordinances and temple destructions in Goa, see Joseph Thekkedath, History of Christianity in India (Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 1982), vol. 2, 317–53.
- 5.
See the ordinances of Regent Queen Catharina of Austria in José Wicki, ed., O Livro do “Pai dos Cristãos” (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1969).
- 6.
See Fatima da Silva Gracias, Kaleidoscope of Women in Goa (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1996).
- 7.
See DI (Barthasar da Costa, 4 Decmber 1562), vol. 5, 607. On African slavery in Portuguese India, see Jeannette Pinto, “The African Native in Indiaspora,” African and Asian Studies 5, nos. 3 and 4 (2006): 383–97.
- 8.
On the African slave trade throughout Asia, see Richard Pankhurst, “The Ethiopian Diaspora to India: The Role of Habashis and Sidis from Medieval Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, ed. Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003); Also see Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973–1982), vol. 2, 91, n49.
- 9.
See Délio de Mendonça, Conversion and Citizenry: Goa under Portugal, 1510–1610 (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2002), 168–69 on the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian slave codes in Goa. On the Jesuit promotion of the “humane treatment” of slaves, see Charles J. Borges, The Economics of the Goa Jesuits, 1542–1759: An Explanation of their Rise and Fall (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1994), 48.
- 10.
In 1595, Visitor Alessandro Valignano to the India Province (1587–1596), instituted the office of the “Father of Christians” (Pai dos Christãos) in Goa. Father Pedro de Almeida’s duties included the reeducation of “heretic” Ethiopian Orthodox Christians to Catholicism. See some curious statements on the former slaves trained as teachers in religious schools in Goa in Jayasuriya and Pankhurst, “On the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean Region,” in The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, ed. Jayasuriya and Pankhurst, 11. These authors do not mention ex-slave women teachers.
- 11.
Fróis’ annual report dated December 13, 1596 in Hay, De Rebvs Iaponicis, 454. On Naitō Julia, and primary sources on Julia, see Haruko Nawata Ward, Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Haruko Nawata Ward, “Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650,” in Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, ed. Alison Weber (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 313–30.
- 12.
On the history of slavery in Japan, see Thomas Nelson, “Slavery in Medieval Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 59, no. 4 (2004): 463–92.
- 13.
Cristóvão Ferreira, “Letter to Mutzio Vitelleschi, August 10, 1631, Japan.” Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus). Jap.Sin. 62 f. 1r–77v.
- 14.
In the following, I am using John Bridges’ English translation from Juan Ruiz-de-Medina, The Catholic Church in Korea: Its Origins, 1566–1784 (Rome: Jesuit Historical Society, 1991), 321–25 (citation 323).
- 15.
Ruiz-de-Medina, The Catholic Church in Korea, 324.
- 16.
Ruiz-de-Medina, The Catholic Church in Korea, 324.
- 17.
Ruiz-de-Medina, The Catholic Church in Korea, 325.
- 18.
See an example of the oath of apostasy in C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960), 441.
- 19.
On the year-long parish-level dialogues of The Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, see From Conflict to Communion: Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017.
- 20.
See Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). This pioneering study does not deal with Asian religious refugees.
- 21.
Lúcio de Souza, Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves (Leiden: Brill, 2019) examines many anecdotes of Asian women in the Americas in the inquisitional records. Also see Birgit Tremml-Werner, Spain, China and Japan in Manila 1571–1644: Local Comparisons and Global Connections (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). See an analysis of hagiographies of Catarina de San Juan (d.1688), a “China” slave and Mexican popular saint, who was considered to have originated from China or India, and taken from Manila to Acapulco in 1619, in Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 8–31.
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———. “Good News to Women? The Jesuits, their Pastoral Advice and Women’s Reception of Christianity in the Portuguese East Indies; Goa and Japan.” In Jesuits in India: History and Culture, edited by Délio de Mendonça, 125–58. Goa: Xavier Centre of Historical Research, 2007.
———. “Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650.” In Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, edited by Alison Weber, 313–30, New York, NY: Routledge, 2016.
———. Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
Worcester, Thomas, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
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Ward, H.N. (2020). Dislocated: Early Modern Christian Women in Asia and Asian American Women in the United States. In: Kwok, Pl. (eds) Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36818-0_8
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