Short assessments of new scholarship on Luso-Japanese history — journal articles, monographs, and exhibition catalogues: what is new, what it changes, and who should read it. Updated as new work appears; also available as an RSS feed.
The best study yet of the mission's most reviled superior: Zampol D'Ortia reads Cabral through Jesuit salvation theology rather than caricature, and this open-access monograph turns a stock villain into the key to understanding why Valignano's accommodation policy was needed at all.
A fresh angle on the decades after the expulsion: the Jesuits kept producing knowledge about a Japan they could no longer enter, through informant networks across East Asia and annual letters written from exile — essential context for the aftermath of 1639.
A collected volume that treats translation — of scripture, of objects, of Japan itself — as the machinery of the early modern encounter; the chapters on the Jesuit mission press and on Japanese agency in translating Christianity bear directly on how the Nanban century actually worked.