Maffei, Giovanni Pietro, and Emanuel Acosta:

$21,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

RERUM SOCIETATE IESU IN ORIENTE GESTARUM VOLUMEN PRIMUM. IN EO QUÆ CONTINEANTUR, SEQUENS PAGELLA DEMONSTRAT. From the collection of R. David Parsons. Third and best edition of the earliest detailed history of the Jesuit missions in the East, especially Japan. Included for the first time in this edition are five pages of Japanese characters in printed facsimile, "Specimen quoddam litterarum vocumque Japonicarum; desumptum e regis Bungi diplomate" (leaves 225-8), which reproduce a letter by the daimyo of Bungo (Kyushu), Otomo Sorin, permitting the Jesuits to build a church on his land in 1552. The previous editions (Dillingen, 1571; Paris, 1572) did not include this. As Alden notes, the present 1573 Naples edition also includes material on the martyrdom of Inácio de Azevedo and other Jesuits en route to Brazil. Some copies of this edition have a variant title-page with the imprint "apud Horatium Salvianum."Acosta, a Portuguese Jesuit, was taught at Coimbra, where he had unrivalled access to the letters from the Jesuits in the East that form the basis of his history. His manuscript, written in Portuguese, was sent to Rome and translated into Latin by Giovanni Pietro Maffei, a Jesuit novice and skilled Latinist, who had been selected by the Jesuits to prepare an official history of their eastern mission. Maffei added to Acosta's work what is the overwhelming bulk of the book, devoted entirely to Japan and entitled "De Japonicis rebus epistolarum libri quinque," which was based on

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