Japan on the Jesuit Stage: Transmissions, Receptions, and Regional Contexts

Japan on the Jesuit Stage offers a comprehensive overview of the representations of Japan in early modern European Neo-Latin school theater. The chapters in the volume catalog and analyze representative plays which were produced in the hundreds all over Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to present-day Croatia and Poland.

Taking full account of existing scholarship, but also introducing a large amount of previously unknown primary material, the contributions by European and Japanese researchers significantly expand the horizon of investigation on early modern European theatrical reception of East Asian elements and will be of particular interest to students of global history, Neo-Latin, and theater studies.

Haruka Oba, Ph.D. (2010), Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, is associate professor in the faculty of Literature at Kurume University in Japan. Her field of research is Early modern Europe, especially the History of depiction on Japanese in the German-speaking areas.

Akihiko Watanabe, Ph.D. (2003), Yale University, is professor in the Department of Comparative Culture at Otsuma Women’s University. His research interests are the Greco-Roman classics, classical reception, and Neo-Latin, especially as they relate to Japan.

Florian Schaffenrath, Ph.D. (2005), University of Innsbruck, is director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies. He has published on regional Neo-Latin literature and epic poetry in particular. Since 2018, he is general editor of the Acta Conventus Neolatini (Brill).