End My Life on the Gallows: The Desire for Martyrdom in Early Modern Missionary Accounts
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Early modern missionary writings—relationes, letters, reports, and their later reworkings—often voice a desire for martyrdom. These ardent wishes to end one’s life on the gallows, as one missionary candidate stated in 1640, appear frequently in the indipetae letters and in accounts of martyrdom and other missionary texts. How should contemporary scholarship approach such expressions of desire? Are they merely rhetorical formulas, devoid of substantive meaning, or instances of religious propaganda intended to edify European audiences and promote evangelization in the Indies? And how should we understand the tension between the exalted ideal of martyrdom, on the one hand, and the lived experience of suffering, on the other? This paper examines the desire for martyrdom from a broader perspective, moving beyond both strict historiographical detachment and reductive interpretations in terms of propaganda. It focuses on late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Franciscan and Jesuit accounts from the Japanese and Chinese missions.
Early Modern martyrdom; missionary accounts; desire for martyrdom; suffering; Japan; China
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