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Readable flowers: global circulation and translation of collected saints’ lives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2018

Jonathan E. Greenwood
Jonathan E. Greenwood*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, Québec, H3A 2T7, Canada E-mail: jonathan.greenwood@mcgill.ca
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Abstract

This article argues that Flowers (flores sanctorum), collections of saints’ lives arranged by the liturgical calendar, were the first genre of devotional literature to have a global reach during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article begins with the medieval origins of Flowers before analysing their dispersion in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by the Franciscans and Jesuits. By taking a temporal long view and a transoceanic perspective, the article contributes to the scholarship on early modern evangelization, translation, global networks, and the historiographies of the Franciscans and Jesuits.

Keywords

evangelizationFranciscansglobalizationJesuitssaints’ livestranslation
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 22 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

In the two centuries after the Portuguese coastal navigation of Africa in the fifteenth century and the Columbian encounter of 1492, members of Catholic religious orders strove to evangelize Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The goal was to gain souls through conversions to Christianity. Texts, often in the form of printed books in non-European languages, allowed missionaries to engage with indigenous peoples by adopting local nomenclature. The use of catechisms, guides to the core principles of a religion and usually written as dialogues, is well documented in these missions. Translations, however, were hardly seamless. Catechisms often included European loanwords and terms that grafted languages apparently haphazardly. These translation problems were not unique to catechisms, as they also plagued other genres of religious writing, such as collections of sermons, discourses that expanded on the concepts found in catechisms, including salvation, virtue, and penance.

While catechisms and anthologies of sermons have been examined extensively in the scholarship, another format, that of flores sanctorum or ‘flowers of the saints’, has largely gone unnoticed despite their prevalence in Catholic cultures.Footnote 1 Flores sanctorum (henceforth Flowers) were a distinctly Iberian genre of compiled vernacular saints’ lives. But during the sixteenth century, Flowers became the first genre of devotional literature to go global, a process that made Christian paragons available for audiences in local vernaculars, which ranged from Spanish and Portuguese to Amharic or Ge’ez to Nahuatl and Kaqchikel to Japanese and Konkani. Devotional literature refers to works that concentrated on individual spiritual edification rather than what catechisms, dialogues, and sermon compilations prioritized, which were doctrine and theology.

Originating in late medieval Iberia (c.1300–1500), Flowers underwent globalization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when they appeared in African, Asian, and American languages. Franciscans and Jesuits were prolific Florists, constantly circulating and translating collections of saints’ lives. While there were some Dominican and Hieronymite contributions to the genre, Franciscans and Jesuits were the agents responsible for disseminating these works as manuscripts and books in the early modern world. This article contributes to our knowledge of early modern global religious cultures by looking at a neglected genre in the scholarly discussion, by examining a sphere in which different orders and overseas empires are interwoven, and by exploring the lives of Florists, Europeans and non-Europeans alike, operating in transoceanic missions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It builds on the work of scholars such as Luke Clossey, who has traced Jesuit global networks in which objects, money, and news circulated.Footnote 2 Flowers often survive only as fleeting references in correspondence, which makes it difficult to examine reception and use, which are problematic even when books and manuscripts are extant.Footnote 3 This article, however, is interested more in the producers of the Flowers than their materiality. It balances a broader pluri-continental scope and a closer examination of the individual disseminators of Christian exemplarity to non-European audiences.

The historiography on Florists operating outside Europe privileges Jesuits in Asia during the generalship of Claudio Acquaviva (r.1580–1615). In his study of the mission to China, Liam Brockey uncovered the efforts of Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) to prepare a Chinese Flower in 1583 at the behest of the Asian Visitor. As the subordinate to the famous Matteo Ricci, Ruggieri had started work on some vernacular texts, including a catechism, a confessional manual, and a Flower.Footnote 4 Another Jesuit discussed in the scholarship is Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), a Portuguese converso, or person of Jewish descent, active along the Pearl Fishery Coast in south-eastern India. He saw a need for works on Christian doctrine for the region’s Tamil speakers. For this reason, Henriques relied on non-Western characters in his collection of saints’ lives printed in 1586. While the Flower provided worthy examples from the Christian past, Ines Županov found that this work also included a repository of names to Christianize the Tamils: ‘Thus St. Lucy became su. uluciyāl; St. Matthew, su. Mattēcu’.Footnote 5 These names were untranslatable, and therefore required an unstable grafting of Portuguese names and Tamil declensions. Despite these linguistic problems, European Jesuits endeavoured to adapt saints’ lives into local vernaculars to aid in the Christianization of Asian cultures, as demonstrated by the work of Brockey and Županov. Ruggeri directed his attention to Chinese Confucians, while Henriques focused on the Hindus and Muslims of the Pearl Fishery Coast of India. Brockey and Županov, however, examined specific Jesuit missions, whereas this article provides a sense of transregional proselytization through comparative analysis of different geographical contexts. Inevitably, numerous missions go unmentioned, since I have focused only on those in which Flowers were produced.Footnote 6

Jesuits tend to dominate the historiography, but a multitude of Florists were Franciscans. Julia McClure, Federico Palomo, and Ângela Barreto Xavier have recently explored the transoceanic reach of the Franciscan order, from its medieval origins to its seventeenth-century manifestations in the Iberian world.Footnote 7 As Xavier has pointed out, scholarship on the Franciscans suffers from two problems: the fragmentary nature of the order’s documents, especially when compared with the Jesuits; and historians’ tendency to ignore the order because of its perceived archaism, despite the fact that it was the earliest Christian entity to have a global presence.Footnote 8 In light of this recent work, this article includes both of these orders to better explain the global network of Florists distributing and then reimagining saints’ lives.

The article begins by tracing the medieval origins of Flowers, followed by their transoceanic dispersion during the sixteenth century by the Franciscans and the Jesuits. The genre went into decline during the 1630s, the chronological endpoint of the article, which saw the end of the efforts to create non-European renditions of Flowers. Nevertheless, despite the importance of catechisms and books of sermons in early modern missions and in contemporary scholarship, Flowers had a central place in evangelization as a global genre of devotional literature.

Budding collections

Flowers had their origins in the Middle Ages as works that followed the established practice of incorporating multiple saints’ lives into a single text, which was part of the wider medieval compilatory genre.Footnote 9 These collections derived from the well-known Golden legend of Jacobus de Voragine (1228–98), which he composed around 1260 and supplemented regularly until his death in 1298. The Golden legend consisted of a fluctuating number of accounts about the lives, deaths, and miracles of saints, who were exemplary figures in Christianity. Jacobus arranged the entries according to the liturgical calendar, which started with Advent in December and ended with the feast days of November. The work’s presence was felt everywhere in medieval life. Priests mined the Golden legend for their sermons; writers and artists referred to it when representing the saints; and the accessible Latin made it easy for the devout to read about the paragons of the Christian past.Footnote 10

By 1492, there were more manuscript copies of the Golden legend in circulation than there were of the Bible. The Golden legend’s broad reach is also evident in its Iberian adaptations, which became known as Flowers (flores), a term used in other medieval genres to indicate that the contents included the best examples – in this case, saints.Footnote 11 The Latin label remained even after Flowers’ transition into Iberian vernaculars, including Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Portuguese.Footnote 12 Flowers remained in constant circulation first as manuscripts and then as books, with one of these compilations being among the earliest books printed in Spain, dated between 1472 and 1475. Those by the Hieronymites epitomized the transition to print first, with the manuscript by Gonzalo de Ocuña (fl. first half of the fifteenth century), which was then updated by Pedro de la Vega (d.1541).Footnote 13 A confrère, José de Sigüenza (1544–1606), described Vega’s contribution, based on Ocuña’s work, as ‘what they called a Flower. Spain, for many years, had nothing from this genre of History to rest its eyes upon.’Footnote 14 Although there were other Flowers by unknown compilers in Spain, the Hieronymite collaboration was the most prevalent and remained in print until 1580.

By the 1590s, a global network existed in which Franciscans and Jesuits penned and disseminated Flowers. While most of these works survive as fleeting references, there was a concerted effort to produce them, which started shortly after the Columbian encounter with the New World. The Franciscans initiated the circulation and local production of these collections, which was then pursued by Jesuits in their Asian and American missions. Capuchins, an offshoot of the Franciscans, had no known involvement in the production of these collections of saints’ lives. Other notable orders, such as the Augustinians, are also noticeably absent. Hieronymites and Dominicans, however, cannot be omitted from this history since they contributed significantly to the development of the genre. Although the Dominican and Hieronymite efforts started in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively, their Florists, with two exceptions in Guatemala, never left Europe, even after the fifteenth-century Portuguese navigation of Africa and the Columbian encounter of 1492.

Dispersal and dissemination

Shortly after the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Franciscans accompanying the fleets sought Flowers for the missions. In 1501, Spanish Franciscan Alonso de Espinar (d.1513) requested breviaries, bibles, grammars, and Flowers, which were to be sent to Santo Domingo, the capital of what is now the Dominican Republic, with the intent to help the friars teach locals how to read and write.Footnote 15 With Espinar’s request, thus began the dissemination of Flowers outside Europe. They were part of a broader group of works to be used by missionaries in teaching and services. The Bible would have been in Latin since its translation was forbidden. Despite that, some in the vernacular were produced, such as that in Valencian in 1478.Footnote 16 Breviaries are liturgical texts used to perform the Office, a series of prayers recited throughout the day. Some were in Latin, others in Spanish. Regardless of language, breviaries tended to be specific to regions and religious orders, with some of these liturgical works containing only the hymns used in the Office. The Franciscans had used their own since the thirteenth century.Footnote 17 Grammars sent from Spain in 1501 would have been in Spanish, such as the famous Grammar of the Castilian language (Gramática del la lengua castellana) by Antonio de Nebrija from 1492, rather than in Taíno, the indigenous language of Hispaniola. Spaniards often regarded translation as unnecessary and would make official proclamations in Spanish to Amerindians in the decades after the Columbian encounter.Footnote 18

Although Flowers were brought to overseas missions, by the 1520s Franciscans felt a need to produce adaptations in local languages. In their mission to Ethiopia, the friars wanted a Flower in ‘the Ethiopian language’ (la lengua etiopia), at least as recounted by Francisco Álvares (c.1465–1536/41), a Portuguese member of the order who later recounted his time in A true account of the lands of Prester John in the Indies (Verdadeira informação das terras do Preste João das Indias). A subsequent translation into Spanish, History of the things of Ethiopia (Historia de las cosas de Etiopía), had Álvares mentioning some of the Flower’s contents: lives of Sebastian and Anthony, and what might be an account of Barlaam and Josaphat.Footnote 19 The Flower probably had more content as, on average, these texts contained dozens of lives. Álvares, however, failed to say anything further about this Flower. For example, it is unclear what he meant by the ‘Ethiopian language’, since that could be either Amharic or Ge’ez.

He also gave no indication as to why he included these saints, or the accounts that he employed for the Flower. One likely source was the most recent Portuguese Flower of 1513, although its entries omitted any mention of patronage. Sebastian was a third-century martyr renowned for his miraculous ability to treat plague victims. In Portugal, one of his arms, a relic, (seu braço e reliquia) arrived in Lisbon in 1531, after which it reportedly saved the city from subsequent waves of plague.Footnote 20 Anthony (1195–1231) was a Franciscan during his life; after his death he became one of the patron saints of Lisbon, and his patronage eventually encompassed both Portugal and Brazil.Footnote 21

The account of Barlaam and Josaphat was a Christian rendition of the life of Buddha. Siddhartha and Josaphat were princes raised in the lap of luxury, but isolated from the outside world so that they would never know suffering. Eventually, the two princes ventured into the world outside their palace, and it was there that they first encountered human suffering in the form of the sick, the poor, and the dying. At this point, they turned their backs on their former lives, renounced all worldly riches, and led wholly ascetic lives. The narratives then diverged to correspond with Buddhist and Christian teachings on transcendence over suffering caused by earthly existence. Prince Josaphat had only converted to Christianity because of the influence of the Hermit Barlaam. In the Portuguese Flower of 1513, a woodcut depicted Barlaam with a tonsure and in the robes of a mendicant friar, suggestive of some association of these orders with pluri-continental evangelization.Footnote 22

Unlike the lives of Sebastian and Anthony, that for Barlaam and Josaphat had circulated in Ethiopia since the sixth century and persisted after the Franciscan departure.Footnote 23 Local Christians also collected lives in Ge’ez during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One compilation from the fifteenth century focused on the saints of the Ethiopian church, while another from the following century included accounts of Elijah, the life and miracles of George, and the martyrdom of Mercurius of Rome, in addition to homilies about the archangels Michael and Gabriel.Footnote 24 Although the fate of the Flower by Álvares is uncertain, there were compilers of vernacular saints’ lives in Ethiopia around the time of the Franciscan mission. Moreover, Álvares’ work is the only reported case of a Flower produced in Africa, despite the extensive presence of missionaries in the Kongo, Angola, and Mozambique since the late fifteenth century.

Soon after the translation in Ethiopia, editions in Portuguese travelled with their owners, including non-clerical ones. Baltasar Jorge Valdés (d.1546), for example, was a Portuguese nobleman who travelled to India in 1540 with a dozen books, one of which was a Flower.Footnote 25 More than a decade later, the Portuguese Jesuit Melchior Nunes Barreto (1520–71) was in charge of the order’s college in Goa. He left India for Japan in 1554 and compiled a list of the objects he was taking, which included a ‘catalogue of the saints’ (Cathalagus [sic] sanctorum).Footnote 26 One scholar contended that the catalogue in question was a Flower.Footnote 27 Although precise editions cannot be determined, the Flowers in Nunes Barreto’s and Valdés’ possession were likely in Portuguese, a claim based on the men’s origins. These concrete examples show that Flowers in European languages had a global dispersal by the mid sixteenth century.

Bouquet of Flowers

The second half of the century was when Flowers in non-European languages began to proliferate. Excluding Álvares’ text in Ge’ez, fifteen Flowers appeared across the early modern world prior to 1640 (Table 1). Franciscans contributed eight (five in the Americas and three in Asia), whereas Jesuits produced five (three in Asia and two in the Americas). Dominicans, meanwhile, in what is present-day Guatemala, reportedly produced two. Nahuatl and Japanese were the best-represented languages with three Flowers each, almost half the total number. Despite records and documents speaking about fifteen, only four have survived. Printed books in Tamil and Japanese were by Jesuits, whereas the remaining pair were manuscripts penned by Franciscans in Kaqchikel and Konkani.

Table 1 Flowers from the Iberian world

New Spain appeared to be the locus of Flower production. This Spanish viceroyalty, which included contemporary Mexico and Guatemala, had eight examples in six languages, specifically Nahuatl (three) and one each in Purépecha, Tehueco, Kaqchikel, Poqomchi’, K’iche’, and an unidentified language spoken in Guatemala. The first of these American Flowers appeared in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire. Franciscan Juan de Ribas (d.1562) had penned this Flower in the aftermath of the Spanish ‘conquest’ of Mexico (1518–21).Footnote 28 He was one of the twelve ‘apostles’ sent to evangelize Mexico at the behest of Hernán Cortes, arriving in Tenochitlan in 1524. In an unpublished ecclesiastical history of Mexico, his fellow Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604) attributed to Ribas ‘a catechism, Sunday sermons for the entire year, a brief Flower, and a dialogue on the Christian life’.Footnote 29

Unlike the earlier request for breviaries, bibles, grammars, and Flowers from Santo Domingo, Franciscan missionaries wanted different genres to use in their proselytization and elected to produce writings in local languages. The friars preferred practical genres useful for explaining the new religion and providing examples of its concepts. Catechisms are summaries used to introduce doctrine with simple diction in the vernacular. Dialogues, a popular and complementary format, used imagined conversations to illustrate and explain aspects of a religion. Sermons, which were often collected after their delivery, are lectures centred on some religious theme. These formats in addition to Flowers were well suited for disseminating Christian revelation since they were accessible. But texts in Spanish were an impediment to Nahua speakers, compelling Ribas and others to learn the local language and produce works in that idiom. Sermons were the most popular format in Nahuatl. Of the 122 works in that language produced before 1640, 26 were sermon compilations, 19 were catechisms, 5 were lives, and 4 were dialogues (see Table 2). These individual lives written by Franciscans focused mostly on saints affiliated with that order, such as the ever-popular Anthony of Padua.Footnote 30

Table 2 Missionary works by genre. These figures do not include Flowers. The table is comprehensive, but not exhaustive.

Sources: Laures, Kirishitan bunko; Irma Contreras García, ‘Bibliografía catequística mexicana del siglo XVII’, Boletín del Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, 2, 1988, pp. 61–107; S. Jeyaseela Stephen, Caste, Catholic Christianity and the language of conversion, Delhi: Kalpaz, 2008; J. M. Braga, ‘The beginnings of printing at Macao’, Studia, 12, 1963, pp. 29–137; Viñaza, Bibliografía española; Carlos de Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jesus, new edn, 4 vols., Brussels and Paris: Oscar Schepens and Alphonse Picard, 1890; Otto Zwartjes, Portuguese missionary grammars in Asia, Africa, and Brazil, 1550–1800, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011; Gomes, Old Konkani language and literature; Civezza, Bibliografia sanfrancescana.

Two of the lives were the handiwork of Juan Bautista Viseo (1555–1607), who penned a Nahua Flower at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Although precise details are not known, he was born in New Spain, took the habit in 1571, and preached in Nahuatl under the supervision of the ecclesiastical historian Mendieta. As Ribas had done, Viseo produced compilations of sermons and catechisms in Nahuatl. But Viseo expanded the range of works to include dictionaries and confessional manuals, as well as a translation of the Imitation of Christ, the purported devotional bestseller of the early modern period.Footnote 31 While tempting to imagine that missionaries adhered rigidly to a cadre of works – linguistic works, confessional manuals, catechisms, and lives – which were produced in succession, the reality was very different. Based on the known dates of religious works in Nahuatl, they were produced in an ad hoc fashion with the first known writing being a 1539 catechism by Juan de Zumárraga and not a dictionary or an art (arte), a guide to the grammar of a language, which were not produced until 1547. Catechisms outnumbered all other genres of missionary texts in Nahuatl. Flowers and lives more broadly were not some teleological endpoint for missionaries but part and parcel of evangelization.

In the other languages of New Spain which had Flowers, the balance of works shifted and did not follow a rigid procedure. Of the fourteen known works in Purépecha, for example, there were more arts than catechisms in that mission, with no other known lives penned before 1640. Almost half of these were the work of Franciscan Maturino Gilberti (1507/8–85), active in the mid sixteenth century, who completed a catechism (1555), an art (1558), a dictionary (1559), and a translation of the Gospels (1560). The only knowledge we have about Gilberti’s Flower comes from the revised edition of his Spiritual treasure for the poor in the language of Michoacán (Thesoro spiritual de pobres en lengua de Michuacan), which contains a dedicatory letter addressed to the new Bishop of Michoacán, Juan de Medina Rincón (r.1574–88). Colleagues reportedly ‘have pestered me that I arranged in the language of Michoacán [i.e. Purépecha] a Flower of all the saints, which they celebrate in New Spain’.Footnote 32 In the same letter, he claimed that his original source was Castilian, although he did not provide any additional information.Footnote 33 The first edition of the Spiritual treasure, printed in 1558, made no mention of the Flower, which helps date the non-extant work between 1558 and 1575, when the second edition was printed.

Although Franciscans predominated in the production of Flowers, they were not alone in their efforts. Dominicans, for example, produced works of this type in Poqomchi’ and K’iche’ during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, contributing to the oeuvre of these languages. Jesuits also participated in this culture of Flowers, starting with Guanhua, the language of the Chinese court and literati, by Michele Ruggieri (1581–83), Nahuatl by Juan de Tovar (c.1585), Tamil by Henrique Henriques (c.1586), and reportedly one in Tehueco (c.1612), another language of New Spain spoken in present-day Durango and Chihuahua, by an indigenous Jesuit convert identified only as the ‘the Discrete One’ (El Discreto).Footnote 34 Unlike most Flowers, that by Henriques, which has been analysed by Ines Županov, is extant. Lives formed only a small part of the twenty-six Tamil religious writings produced before 1640, a figure that excludes the Flower. Henriques penned a life of Christ prior to the Ascension, while his fellow Jesuit Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) would compose lives of Christ and Mary in that language during his lifetime. The Flower was a late work by Henriques, whose earlier works were a grammar-cum-vocabulary, a catechism, and a confessional manual written between 1578 and 1580.

Active on the Fishery Coast, Henriques listed Historia das vidas e feitos heroycos & obras insignes dos sanctos (History of the lives, heroic feats, and noteworthy works of the saints) by Diogo do Rosário (d.1580) as one of his sources.Footnote 35 Rosário spent most of his life as the prior of the Dominican convent in Guimarães, some 50 kilometres north-east of Porto.Footnote 36 Henriques left for India in 1546, which meant that someone had brought the book to India and then the Fishery Coast, where he was based from 1547 until his death in 1600. Since Rosário’s History was first printed in 1567 and Henriques had the Flower printed in 1586, his efforts to translate the lives of saints into Tamil had to have occurred at that time. Rosário’s Flower was no pocketbook. It was approximately 1,000 folio-sized pages (305 by 483 mm), a large possession to be carried from Portugal to India.

Henriques focused the majority of the seventy-three entries in his Flower on figures from the New Testament, giving accounts of the lives of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the apostles (see Appendix 1). His Flower was practical because it provided much of the content from the New Testament in Tamil, but it made no claim to be a translation of the Bible, which was prohibited. Henriques also featured popular saints, usually martyrs from the early church, who had a reputation for healing and providing protection against ailments and predicaments. In addition he included the founders of the more established religious orders, such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Benedictines, who bore their founders’ names. The noted theologians Augustine, Jerome, and Bernard of Clairvaux made appearances, as did the ever-popular Anthony of Padua. However, no exemplary Jesuit – be it their founder, Ignatius Loyola, or the noted ‘Apostle of India’, Francis Xavier – can be found in Henriques’ collection. Although his tome seems to follow the procedure of linguistic works, confessional manuals, catechisms, and lives in that order, it was a singularity. Florists did not adhere to rigid stages when developing vernacular religious texts. Instead, they responded to the demands of each mission. In addition to their ongoing production in Europe, by the time that Henriques completed his compilation in 1586, Flowers had surfaced in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, indicating the global reach of the genre.

The Flower by Japanese Jesuits

Although most Flowers left no material trace, a handful have survived into the present, such as that prepared by Henriques and Jesuits Yōhō-Ken Paolo (1508–95) and his son Hōin Vicente (b.1538–44, d.1609). In a 1593 roster for the Japanese mission, Yōhō-Ken and Hōin were among the ‘Japanese brother-students that never learned Latin, only Japanese letters’ (Hermanos Japónes estudiantes que nunca aprendieron latim [sic] mas solo las Letras de Japón). It started with Yōhō-Ken, who was a ‘native of the kingdom of Wakasa, eighty-five years of age, [and] very weak, thirteen years with the Order, which received a man so old, yet so distinguished in Japanese letters. He had spent more than fifteen years as a dojuqu in our houses and done a great service for the Order with his words.’Footnote 37 Born in 1508, Yōhō-Ken converted to Christianity in 1560, when he was fifty-two, an older man established in his community, who abandoned the Buddhism that predominated in sixteenth-century Japan.Footnote 38 Five years later, he embarked on fifteen years as a dojuqu or dojoku, an indigenous catechist, which involved preaching to audiences in Japanese to convert compatriots to Christianity. In 1580, he became a Jesuit.

The inventory then provided a brief biography of ‘the son of Yōhō-Ken Paolo and from the kingdom of Wakasa’. In 1593, Hōin was fifty-three and in good health (robusto y de buenas fuerças); he had become a Jesuit along with his father in 1580. The catalogue described Hōin as ‘a noteworthy and unique man among all of us [i.e. the Jesuits] in the Japanese language [and] an excellent preacher in his native tongue. He has compiled and translated into Japanese many of the spiritual and learned books written to this day in Japan.’Footnote 39 Although the entry made no reference to any time spent as a dojoku, he was held in high esteem within the order, both for his preaching and for translating books into Japanese. Conversion required books – simple catechisms written in Japanese characters, along with Flowers, which provided would-be converts with Christian paragons. To this end, Hōin, with the assistance of his father, started work on the Japanese Flower.

Helping them with this project was Gaspar Vilela (1526–72), the Portuguese Jesuit who had converted them to Christianity. A 1565 letter reports that Vilela ‘translated some devotional books and a good doctrinal text in the same language. Now he makes a Flower for the consolation of Christians.’Footnote 40 So it continued when Vilela ‘translated this year [1566] into the tongue [of Japan] a Flower and devotional books to profit souls’.Footnote 41 But the project stalled because of Vilela’s itinerant way of life, making collaboration with Yōhō-Ken and Hōin difficult. Vilela’s death in 1572 halted an already interrupted project, making father and son solely responsible for the Flower, just one of several planned adaptations of devotional works into Japanese. (By 1632, missionaries had produced some forty-one works that circulated in Japan, including six catechisms, seven dictionaries, four confessional guides, and a grammar – see Table 2.)

Apart from the aborted collaboration with Vilela and the demands of being preachers and catechists, there was the practical problem of book production when there was no local printing press in Japan before 1590. Bringing a press to Japan had been an ongoing effort spearheaded by the Visitor Alessandro Valignano, who had installed a European printing press in Macau in 1585. With this success, he hoped that he could obtain another one for Japan. Valignano’s interest in setting up presses was pragmatic, since importing books from Europe or India was costly and plagued with delays. In a letter from 1586, he bemoaned the costs of shipping books to the East. He disliked his other options even more, which required sending a manuscript to Lisbon or Goa to be printed. Either case was less than ideal because of the likelihood that the manuscript or the resulting books would not arrive.Footnote 42 The Japanese Jesuits elected to wait for their own press, despite the relative accessibility of the one at Macau, before printing the translations by Yōhō-Ken and Hōin. What was another six years for a Flower beset by so many deferrals?

The Flower, finally printed in 1591, contained thirty-seven lives (see Appendix 2), mostly those of the apostles and early Christian martyrs, in what is known as rōmaji (roman letters), Japanese written with Latin lettering. Europeans relied on roman letters, which allowed them to preach in the native tongue without learning the character-based script.Footnote 43 In a helpful twist, the two Jesuits provided the sources for their lives, which were often used in other Flowers. They relied heavily on Antonino of Florence’s Chronicle (1477), the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339), and the tenth-century Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes.

Martyrdom featured extensively in this compilation, with twenty-one of the thirty-seven entries focused on the topic. Yōhō-Ken and Hōin wrote about the persecutions under the Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian (r.284–305) and the lives of the virgin-martyrs Eulalia (c.290–304) and Martina (d.228).Footnote 44 For these narratives, the two Jesuits used their partial translation of Luis de Granada’s Introduction to the symbols of the faith (Introducción del símbolo de la fe), which was published in 1592 (though finished two years earlier).Footnote 45 The original Introduction began as an inventory of each of God’s creations before becoming an apologetic on redemption, that is, the deliverance of Christians from sin. Yōhō-Ken and Hōin had translated the final part of the Introduction, wherein Luis discussed miracles with the reader – miracles that were the result of blood spilt by martyrs and efforts to convert the world to Catholicism.Footnote 46 Such associations of miracles with conversion and martyrdom were common in European devotional literature during the sixteenth century, and Yōhō-Ken and Hōin transposed these ideas with the aid of Luis de Granada under the initial guidance of Vilela.Footnote 47 Reading the lives of martyrs provided some solace to the emergent Christian communities in Japan, where the danger of persecution – and possible execution – was a constant threat.

An exception to the usual fare in Hōin and Yōhō-Ken’s Flower was the life of Barlaam and Josaphat, which also featured in the Ethiopian Flower of the 1520s. This time, the account referred to the spiritual leader of Japan’s predominantly Buddhist population. Early modern Europeans who travelled to Asia noted the similarities between Siddhartha and Josaphat, something that carried over into the Society of Jesus, including one Japanese affiliate’s transmission of the life of Siddhartha from Japan to Europe during the mid sixteenth century.Footnote 48

Yōhō-Ken and Hōin needed to use familiar stories, such as the life of Buddha, as a way of introducing Christian teachings to their audience. It was also necessary to employ different types of Japanese throughout the narrative. For the account of Josaphat and Barlaam, Keiko Ikegami determined that the translators drew on three vocabularies: Christian, royal-cum-imperial, and Buddhist. Yōhō-Ken and Hōin retained Latin and Portuguese nomenclature for Christian concepts, such as church (Ecclesia), God (Deus), cross (Cruz), and blessed (beato). Yet they also relied on the language of the imperial court: Josaphat, for example, was a prince (voji) and heir to the imperial throne (taixu), who died like an emperor (foguio). Buddhist terminology was not simply cast aside in favour off its Christian counterparts: Barlaam was a doxinja, a monk or seeker of truth, whereas the narrative transformed the word fonzon, originally the veneration of Buddha, into a reference to pagan idols.Footnote 49

Latin masses and tales of obscure saints would be difficult to understand since most audiences were used to vernacular and local observances. But the story of Siddhartha, given a recognizable overlay, would be more approachable, as would be other adaptations made throughout the Flower by Yōhō-Ken and Hōin. In their hands, this collection of saints’ lives used Buddha to convert the Japanese. The Flower was also a repository that illustrated the apostolic church and its martyrs, which resonated with the Christian populations of Japan.

Transatlantic exchange

During the early seventeenth century, other Franciscans produced Flowers in what are now Guatemala and India, expanding the garden of Flowers planted by that order. In 1605, Juan de Mendoza (1539–1619) translated a Flower into Kaqchikel, which is spoken in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. One bibliographer described Mendoza as a native of New Spain and a theologian of high repute.Footnote 50 He seems to have travelled across the Atlantic at least once, as shown in a passenger manifest from Seville dated 15 April 1605.Footnote 51 A contemporaneous Kaqchikel chronicle reported that he led a religious procession in April 1584, said mass on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June) 1585, and named municipal magistrates (alcaldes) on the Feast of the Epiphany (6 January) 1586.Footnote 52 Mendoza listed in his Flower that he wrote the work in San Diego, Patzún (Paçum), a region in which the Minor Friars predominated.Footnote 53

In the Flower, Mendoza ordered the compilation by the liturgical calendar, starting with the feasts around Advent. Unlike the other Florists, however, he provided no preface that would help to contextualize the making and use of this text. Each of the sixty-eight entries ended with ‘Amen’, suggestive of use in preaching. As Henriques and Yōhō-Ken and Hōin had done, he focused on the saints of Christianity’s early centuries – martyrs, popes, and apostles – as well as entries for feasts celebrating Jesus and Mary (Appendix 3). The story of Barlaam and Jospahat, which had appeared extensively in many of the aforesaid Flowers, made no appearance in Mendoza’s manuscript. Another difference was the Minor Friar’s use of the compilation to celebrate his confrères. Apart from the inclusion of Francis of Assisi and the ever-popular Anthony of Padua, Mendoza had accounts of the Moroccan Martyrs (d. 1220), the cardinal-cum-theologian Bonaventure (1221–74), and the patron of Patzún, Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444).Footnote 54

The liturgical adherence and celebration of the Franciscans can be explained through another Flower associated with the Guatemalan Franciscans. An eighteenth-century chronicler of the order told of a Flower in an unnamed language assembled during the tenure of Provincial Juan de Martínez (r.1578–81). This work purportedly followed an unspecified breviary, a liturgical work, and the Franciscan constitutions.Footnote 55 Both Flowers followed the liturgy, as seen in the use of the breviary and placing the texts in the order of feast days starting with Advent.

Although the Franciscans have a rule, a legislative document penned by Francis of Assisi, there were also the constitutions, which differed by province and branch of the order. In Spanish editions, the constitutions frequently accompanied the rule. While the Guatemalan constitutions cannot be located, another set from 1601, printed in Lima, encouraged the observance of ‘offices [for] the saints of our order’ (los officios … de los sa[n]ctos de nuestra orden).Footnote 56 As mentioned earlier, offices are devotional rituals that involve prayers, psalms, and readings (often taken from the breviary). Thus the Flower, the breviary, and the constitutions had an intertextual relationship, which retold the history of the early church through the apostles and martyrs in addition to the lives of Franciscan luminaries. Mendoza, though he made no mention of the earlier Flower, must have drawn on the local traditions as practised by his confrères when preparing the Kaqchikel collection of saints’ lives.

Later Flowers

Two years after Mendoza’s Flower came another, in 1607, this time from Goa. The Franciscan Amador de Santana wrote in Konkani, the language of Goa, with a Kandavi alphabet rather than Latin letters. In a prefatory letter in Portuguese, he claimed that Flowers were indispensable for preaching as well as for the edification of those who read or heard the text.Footnote 57 Although he did not identify his sources, in a later letter attached to the manuscript a colleague wrote that Santana had translated this work from Spanish and not Portuguese.Footnote 58 In Asia, and as exemplified by the Jesuit Henriques, the tendency was to use Portuguese Flowers and not Spanish texts. But this unexpected admission shows the interwoven nature of Flowers by the seventeenth century, when Portuguese Franciscans used Spanish sources, which were then translated into Asian vernaculars.

The contents of this work, however, are beyond the abilities of this author since the table of contents does not appear in a Latin alphabet. Although Olvinho Gomes examined the text in the context of Konkani literature amid Portuguese expansion, more work is needed to uncover its place within some twenty-four writings produced by missionaries before 1640, including five catechisms, five grammars, three dictionaries, and two additional lives (see Table 2).Footnote 59 Prior to the completion of the Flower in Konkani in 1607, there had been two catechisms and two arts in that language, demonstrating that the rigid mechanical understanding of missionary texts as starting with linguistic and grammatical texts followed by catechisms and confessional manuals before culminating with Flowers is overly simplistic, as apparent in the missions in which Flowers were produced.

Santana’s Konkani Flower was the last publication in an Asian language other than Japanese. Reportedly, three Franciscans in Manila worked on Japanese Flowers between 1612 and 1634. It is unknown what came of these efforts except that the trio returned to Japan, where two died as martyrs and the other vanished from the historical record.Footnote 60 We have encountered numerous examples from across the globe of Flowers being translated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but crafting Flowers in non-European languages had largely stalled by the 1630s. There is no clear reason why this should have been so, however, especially since there were so many missions where these texts were produced.

Catechisms, polemical works, and guides to mastering the tones of Mandarin were among the works by missionaries issued in Chinese before 1640. Although most Jesuits in China wrote some sort of devotional literature, their ranks had difficulty catering to the growing Christian population. Ministry overwhelmed writings during the seventeenth century.Footnote 61 The chaotic transition from the Ming Dynasty to the Qing in 1644 probably further impeded any efforts to produce works intended to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Despite the political upheaval, European missionaries remained in China. Japan is easier to account for, since Christianity was banned in 1639 after the Shimabara Rebellion the year before, when Christians revolted against the shogunate. Despite early victories in battle, the rebels were routed and summarily executed.Footnote 62 But in the decade prior to the Rebellion, Dominicans produced many of the religious texts, including two dictionaries, an art, and a confessional manual. In Japan, the only other lives produced after the Flower were those of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, around the time of the pair’s canonization in 1622. In the Indian Peninsula, meanwhile, the Jesuit Antonio de Saldanha penned a life of Anthony of Padua in 1655, which recounted the saint’s miracles performed during his lifetime and after his death.Footnote 63 That saint’s popularity remained in place and was subject to ongoing efforts at writing his biography by missionaries.

Individual biographies of saints were easier to print and to circulate in manuscript rather than the larger and bulkier Flowers. Thus the reason for the decline in production of Flowers in Asia may have more to do with practicality. However, they remained in Asian libraries, such as the book collection of Jesuit Diogo Valente, who operated in Japan and China between 1618 and his death in 1633, when six Jesuits prepared an inventory of his library, which was made up of 286 items. Among them was a substantial accumulation of Flowers, including those in Spanish and Portuguese.Footnote 64 There are no known Asian Flowers produced after the 1630s, but the full extent of their circulation in Iberian vernaculars can only be known through an extended examination of the libraries of religious institutions, which is beyond the scope of this article.

Latin America, as we have seen, produced the largest number of Flowers during the sixteenth century, with Nahuatl being the most prevalent language, but the genre was abandoned in the seventeenth century. This could stem from the ongoing movement of Spanish Flowers into the Americas by way of the Fleet of the Indies.Footnote 65 The Kaqchikel work by Mendoza from 1605 was the last surviving American Flower. No others were produced until 1705, when reportedly a Guaraní Flower was printed. Jesuit José Serrano (1634–1713) had translated the early seventeenth-century Spanish Flower by his confrère Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527–1611) into Guaraní, which was spoken in what corresponds with present-day Paraguay.Footnote 66 While the Guaraní text has not survived, it is the only one of its type produced in South America.

Occasional individual lives of saints continued to appear in American vernaculars, although infrequently. For example, the Franciscan Agustín de Vetancurt (1620–1700) penned lives of Joseph and John the Baptist in Nahuatl during his lifetime.Footnote 67 Hispanization, the imposition of Spanish at the expense of indigenous languages, was made explicit in 1680, with the Compilation of the laws of the kingdoms of the Indias (Recopilación de leyes de los Reynos de las Indias).Footnote 68 Only in peripheral areas were indigenous languages allowed to be spoken, which could explain the appearance of the Flower in Guaraní. Despite the legislation against American languages, dictionaries, arts, confessional guides, and catechisms continued to circulate and be printed. Apart from the Guaraní Flower, the only other known collection of narratives about the saints in circulation was a work attributed to Pedro Moran (c.1685–1740), a Franciscan friar at the convent of Santo Domingo de Guatemala, who arranged these accounts as homilies written in the Mayan language of Poqomam.Footnote 69

Conclusions

Unlike the rest of the world, Flowers in Spain and Portugal remained in print into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, a reminder of their entrenched place in the Catholic culture of the Iberian Peninsula. Initially a vernacular response to the Latin Golden legend, Flowers became a conduit for multilingual and transregional exchange. Members of different orders and different ethnicities brought this form of religious literature to four continents. Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, and Hieronymites were all involved in their global dissemination, as well as Japanese converts, American mestizos, and Europeans from Spain, Portugal, France, and the Italian peninsula. Flowers were the first global form of devotional literature, pre-eminent during the sixteenth century but vanished by the 1630s. Equally scarce are surviving examples of these texts. Flowers in Tamil, Kaqchikel, Konkani, and romanized Japanese are all that remain of a genre in non-European languages that was once abundant in the early modern world.

Jonathan E. Greenwood is currently a sessional lecturer at McGill University. His work will soon also be published in the Journal of Early Modern History. He is completing a manuscript about global miracles during the Iberian Union (1580–1640) and starting a new project about Hispanophobia in early modern print culture.

Appendix 1: Contents of the Tamil Flower (1586) by Henrique Henriques

Henriques indicated that he relied on Diogo do Rosário, Luigi Lippomano, and Joachim Périon for his Flower. He did not, however, cite specific sources in the lives contained therein.Footnote 70

Appendix 2: Contents of the Japanese Flower (1591) by Yōh-ōKen Paolo and Hōin Vicente

Appendix 3: Contents of the Kaqchikel Flower (1605) by Juan de Mendoza

No sources for the accounts are given in the manuscript.

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the audience at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in Vancouver, Canada (October 2015), where I first presented a portion of this work. Their helpful questions aided me in developing this article as did those by the participants at the workshop ‘Translation in transit: interpreting culture in the modern world’, held at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy (May 2017). I am also grateful to Richard L. Kagan, Jorge Flores, Alyson Price, Paul Nelles, Audrey Millet, Justin Rivest and José Juan Pérez Meléndez, as well as to the Journal’s editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their vital interventions in earlier drafts.

References

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58 BNF, DM, Indien 779, Frey Francisco da Arruda to unknown recipient, Goa, 4 December 1610.

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Figure 0

Table 1 Flowers from the Iberian world

Figure 1

Table 2 Missionary works by genre. These figures do not include Flowers. The table is comprehensive, but not exhaustive.