It is undeniable that violence, in its multiple forms, is a common issue across time and around the world. How this phenomenon got imbricated to other spheres of human societies has been the theme of innovative scholarship. Following this debate, the book Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Perspectives from Europe and Japan, edited by Fernanda Alfieri and Takashi Jinno within the FBK-Instituto Storico Italo-Germanico/Italienisch-Deutsches Historisches Institut, explores one of the most emblematic components of the medieval and early modern periods: the complex relations connecting violence and religion. The main justification for this approach is that both violence and religion are at the core of social organization in Europe. From exploring a broad and plural analysis of this discussion, the editors propose to bring together distinct case studies from Christian Europe during this period besides the particularities of the Catholic missionary activity in Japan (1).

This publication is one of the results of a series of three workshops on Medieval and Early Modern Religious Histories: Perspectives from Europe and Japan organized within the Research Project on the Multiplicity of Christian Societies in Medieval and Early Modern Times (FBK, 2013–17). The researchers involved approached different themes related to religion and society in the medieval and early modern Christian world, from the understanding that in Europe, violence and religion were closely connected (14–15). The decision to link this study with Japan intended to engage the perspective of the Japanese scholars involved in the project while bringing the country's experience with missionary Christianization, although the book's introduction makes clear that Japan's experience in this period had no direct correlation to the European one. Nonetheless, as the editors stress, even if not working specifically on Japan, “the Japanese contributors maintained a constant awareness of how the problems associated with religion and violence in the medieval Christian world compare to medieval Japanese society” (7).

The book is structured in three sections proposed to cover distinct aspects of the connections between violence and religion throughout the medieval and early modern periods. The first of them is dedicated to seminal ideas present in writing and speech, from biblical fragments and religious discourse (chapters 1 and 2) to violent actions and thought in the early modern period (chapters 3 and 4). In the second part, the authors approach how violence may be related to religion in other spheres, what is shown through publications on demonology (chapter 5) and distinct political writings (chapters 6 and 7). The third and last section is dedicated to violent practices grounded on religion, analysis that includes military actions in Iberia (chapter 8), the historical Christian thinking on violence in the New World (chapter 9), the Catholic missionary activity in Japan during the early modern period and the experience with martyrdoms (chapter 10), and the use of press for propaganda purposes (chapter 11). Among all the articles, the only one that specifically addresses the Christian experience in Japan is chapter 10, written by Atsuko Hirayama, which explores the forceful response of the Japanese government to the Jesuit-missionary experience in the archipelago. Besides that, the only other chapter that evokes more clearly the Japanese counterpart is the analysis of tyrannicide raised by Takashi Jinno in chapter 4.

The editors are successful in bringing a plural approach to the theme, even though the Japanese perspective is not much explored. As recognized in the introduction, Japanese society in this period had no experience with forced conversion by violence, which was a reality in other regions of European activity, nor with the imminent threat represented by a religious power that could intervene in state matters. One of the most interesting aspects to confront the two cases is precisely this lack of a clear relationship between religion and violence, even though there is an imbalance among the contributions that privileges the European scenario without a clearer correspondence to the Japanese particularities or distinctions.