Chapter 3 analyses why three warlords in the southern island of Kyushu in Japan converted to Christianity in the 1560s–1580s: Ōmura Sumitada, Arima Yoshisada and, most importantly, Ōtomo Yoshishige (or Sōrin) of Bungo. It begins by describing the complex religious scene and its relationship to political authority in the ‘warring states’ era of the sixteenth century. Religious diplomacy mattered more in Japan than anywhere else, given the association between access to Portuguese trade and receptivity towards the Jesuit mission. Most of the chapter, however, is spent on describing the way that immanent power mattered to these daimyo, plunged into existential competition with rivals. The attraction of appealing to a new source of supernatural assistance in battle or in possession and healing crises is shown in a detailed narrative of the conversion of elite families of Bungo generally and of Ōtomo Sōrin and his son Yoshimune in particular. However, the tumultuous context also meant that questions of loyalty, sacral authority and societal order were also on warlord minds when they pondered questions of religious allegiance.

Chapter 4 explains why Christianity did not become the faith of more than a small minority of warlords and why it was rejected and ultimately persecuted by the rulers who unified Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The plural religious scene – including competing sects of Buddhism, alongside Confucianism and Shinto – afforded an intellectual opening for Christianity. This mattered in particular to the conversion of certain elites in the Gokinai of the 1560s. However, the most emotional debates centred on the dynamics of immanent power noted in the last chapter, and here Buddhism, as a transcendentalist system, found ways of countering the force of Christian arguments. Indeed, on an institutional level, too, the sangha represented a formidable enemy for daimyo contemplating conversion. This chapter then proceeds to analyse the actions, diplomatic letters and anti-Christian edicts of Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu in order to identify the terms by which Christianity was identified as a subversive and unnecessary force. The transcendental elements of Japanese religion therefore played a decisive role in constraining the reach of the Japanese Christian movement. Lastly, the unifiers were intent on sacralising their authority, particularly post-mortem, and Christianity had little to offer in this regard.

Chapter 6 examines the ‘rediscovery’ of the Buddha when, during the ‘Age of Discovery’ in the sixteenth century, accounts from Catholic missionaries in China and Japan began to appear in Europe. Despite the inclination of the Jesuit missionaries to view all Asian idolatry as inspired by the Devil, they were instrumental in discerning that, while there were many idols referred to by many names, they were only local variations of a single figure: many idols, and many gods, but only one man – the Buddha. That said, it was a time of many imaginings, of multiple confusions, and numerous blind alleys – of the Hindu understanding of the Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu, of the Buddha as the equivalent of the patriarch Noah or the gods Mercury, Wod, and Oden, and of the African origins of the Buddha – as he was variously read into fanciful eighteenth-century readings of the origin of all religions in the time of Noah and the universal Flood.

The final chapter considers the fixed, devotional brainwork that early modern writers attributed to Catholic English girls in particular who were training to serve God. By turning their body-minds toward a life of perpetual virginity, these girls might retain the cognitive gifts of adolescence indefinitely. In this way, they challenged early modern ideas about cold, mentally inert female adulthood as well as Protestant-inflected trajectories of female development that culminated in marriage. The chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century life writings and paintings that chronicle the teenage years of Mary Ward, the Catholic Englishwoman who founded over a dozen, unenclosed religious houses on the Continent based on the Jesuit’s apostolic mission, which included educating England’s recusant daughters — a process that included teaching them theatrical skills necessary for defending their faith back home. In her writings, written during her 30s, Ward is keenly aware of her adolescent mind’s ability to turn toward God with intention. Through her memorial reconstructions, she explicitly figures herself as occupying and owning the stage of girlhood that extended from puberty to marriage — using it to enact a particular kind of cultural memory about English Catholicism while projecting hopes for its future.

The first principles behind the developmental idea are linear time, interiority and staged structure. ‘Development’ is one particular historical way of conceptualizing the primary principle of change; in it, human time is an attempt at successful ‘recapitulation’ (a term that would reappear with modern developmental psychology’s founder, G. Stanley Hall) of Adam’s initial failure. In monotheism, time constructs interiority as permanence, ‘the mind’, in contrast with the temporary visitations of pagan or shamanic religion. Medieval psychology saw a proliferation of its ‘faculties’ (memory, imagination, judgement) and ‘operations’ (abstraction, attention, consciousness, logical reasoning, information-processing), which penetrated both the monastic and the humanist idea of the individual. Augustine’s ‘six ages’ of man gave the lifespan a fixed structure. Following the Reformation, change in the elect minority was seen either as instantaneous or as a stadial sequence: Jansenists and Calvinists on the one hand, Jesuits and Arminians on the other, disputed the function of human agency in relation to divine determinism.

Chapter 3 argues that the classical rhetorical tradition was a powerful tool for both European and non-European Jesuit missionaries seeking to advance the cause of Iberianized Catholicism. To do so, it places the Jesuit spiritual conquest of the Americas within the context of the Society of Jesus’ parallel efforts in Asia. More precisely, it follows the career of a Japanese Jesuit, Hara Martinho (c. 1568–1629), from his early education in the Jesuit college at Arima in Japan, to his participation in the Tenshō Embassy to Rome and finally to the crowning achievement of his humanist career, the delivery of his Latin panegyric oration to his fellow Jesuit students at Goa. While no Jesuit sermons in Japanese survive, there are several surviving Chinese sermons, which reveal that the classical rhetorical tradition could influence public speaking in East Asian languages. When taken as a whole, the case of this Japanese Cicero shows that the classical rhetorical tradition in its Renaissance humanist garb was a valuable weapon for Jesuit missionaries seeking to expand the boundaries of Catholicism in a much more militaristic way than most recent scholarship suggests.

This chapter analyzes the language black interpreters helped produce about the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of blackness in the distinct missionary scenarios they led. In identifying and parsing this language in the context of its delivery and comparing it with other writings and images about black Christian conversion from the early modern Iberian world, the chapter argues that black interpreters circulated discourse about black beauty and black virtue that is seldom seen in other Spanish or Spanish American texts.

The collection of Jesuit texts describing black interpreters’ lives and labor in seventeenth-century Cartagena demonstrates that the black men and women employed as evangelical linguistic intermediaries before and after the publication of Alonso de Sandoval’s 1627 treatise were far from the invisible and easily replaceable assistants Sandoval suggests. In fact, the texts analyzed in this chapter provide rich details regarding the biographies and roles assigned to and adapted by the black interpreters in Cartagena. The interpreters’ stories, told in part through highly mediated accounts given by some of the black interpreters themselves, present them as linguistic and spiritual intermediaries who are leaders of black communities in the city and influential participants in the Jesuit mission. The sources demonstrate that the interpreters took advantage of the space of negotiation provided by the mission to acquire privileges unique to enslaved laborers during this period and became avenues for newly arrived black men and women to make some successful demands through their participation in the Jesuit mission.

Writings by and about Úrsula de Jesús from seventeenth-century Lima depict her as a black visionary and spiritual intermediary who conveyed messages between souls in purgatory, God, and the living. Úrsula de Jesús’s spiritual diary, in particular, develops a notion of beautiful and virtuous Christian blackness, framed as a corrective to the worldly hierarchies separating the poorer and darker-skinned slaves, servants, and donadas from the wealthier Spanish or criolla nuns in colonial Lima.

The chapter examines the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, the foundational text for Jesuit practice, and finds there a rich psychoanalytic dynamism between satisfaction and frustration, imagination and reality, and an insistent demand for a creative, affective response to the problems it forces the exercitant to face.