At the beginning of the 17th century, the frontiers of the Spanish Monarchy reached places as distant and strange to the common European as Tokugawa Japan. It was here where, at the same time, the Christian communities founded by the Jesuit Francis Xavier, so numerous that they were dangerous for the political order, began to be persecuted, generating a prolific martyrdom literature that answered to the baroque codes of the time. The revival of martyrdom stories, in the heat of the Counter-Reformation, coincides with the development of informative print genres that tried to satisfy a newshungry public. In the following pages, we will compile and analyze the reports of events with which the Sevillian printing press covered the current affairs of Catholicism in Japan.

Available in: https://romatrepress.uniroma3.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Martires_Libro.pdf