Lettera annua del Giappone dell’ anno M.D.XCVI.

Scritta dal P. Luigi Frois, al R. P. Claudio Acquaviva Generale della Compagnia di Giesù. Tradotto in Italiano dal P. Francesco Mercati Romano della stessa Compagnia. Rome : Luigi Zannetti, 1599. Duodecimo, later vellum-backed marbled papered boards; pp. 269, [1 colophon]; title with woodcut Jesuit device, stamp erased from lower margin of title leaf, colophon with printer’s device, decorated initials; occasional light foxing and browning; a very good example.

Rare 1599 Rome edition of this lengthy annual letter from Japan written by the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis, sent to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus in Rome, Claudio Acquaviva. The report, translated into Italian by Francesco Mercati, describes in detail the difficulties being encountered by the Catholic missionaries and Kirishitans in the face of rising animosity from the Japanese authorities which would culminate in February 1597 with the execution of 26 Christians (The Nagasaki Martyrs), on the orders of the daimyō Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Fróis arrived in Japan in 1563, and died Nagasaki in 1597, before this annual letter were published. He was the author of the important Historia de Iapam, a history that covered the progress of Christianity in Japan in the second half of the sixteenth century.

This edition of Lettera annua del Giappone dell’ anno M.D.XCVI, printed in Rome by Zannetti, is arguably the scarcest of the three Italian editions that were published in 1599. (The others were printed in Padua and Milan).

Cordier, BJ 198; Alt-Japan-Katalog, 540