Rerum a Societate Iesu in Oriente gestarum volumen primum.

Neapoli : In aedibus Decii Lachaei, 1573. Quarto, contemporary vellum, expertly recased, title in manuscript to spine, ff. 236, [2 index]; historiated initials; internally clean, a fine copy.

The earliest detailed account of the Jesuit missions in the East, of particular importance for its content relating to Japan. 

This is the third, expanded edition of this work, following two earlier editions printed in Dillingen (1571) and Paris (1572). This edition, the first printed in Italy, is complete despite the wording on the title ‘volumen primum’. Another issue with a variant title-page was also printed in Naples in 1573, by Orazio Salviani.

The third edition, as the earlier two, contains a history of the Jesuit missions based on unpublished letters from missionaries, by the Portuguese Jesuit Emanuel Acosta, a teacher at Coimbra. Acosta’s manuscript compendium and commentaries, Historia dos missiones do oriente ate o anno de 1568, was translated from the Portuguese into Latin and edited by Giovanni Maffei. An Italian Jesuit professor of rhetoric at Rome who moved to Portugal in the 1560s, Maffei added to Acosta’s account an appendix of letters from Japan, which he edited under the title De Japonicus rebus epistolarum libri IV. Among these are letters from Francis Xavier (Kagoshima, 1549) and the Japanese convert Paul (Goa, 1548 and Kagoshima, 1549).

The third edition contains significant additional material not found in the preceding editions. This includes a Liber quintus appended to the collection of Japanese letters (ff. 194-224), and, most notably, in woodcut facsimile, the characters of a Japanese document written by the daimyo of Bungo, granting the Jesuits permission to build a Christian church in the province of Yamaguchi (ff. 225-228); this facsimile is accompanied by a character-by-character translation into Latin.

The most desirable of the three early Latin editions.

Cordier, Japonica, 59-6; De Backer-Sommervogel V 295; Palau 2019

Provenance :

Martayan Lan, New York

private collection, Tokyo