The Japanese Contemptus Mundi (1596) of The Bibliotheca Augusta: A Brief Remark On A New Discovery

journal of jesuit studies 5 (2018) 123-127
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The Japanese Contemptus mundi (1596)
of the Bibliotheca Augusta: A Brief Remark
on a New Discovery
Katja Triplett
Center for Modern East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany
[email protected]
Abstract
The duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, August the Younger (1579–1666), assembled one of

the largest collections of books and manuscripts in seventeenth-century Europe at
his residence in Wolfenbüttel, creating a world-renowned library that is today known
as the Bibliotheca Augusta. In about 1662, the duke purchased an unusual 1596 print
in Latin script of a religious work offered to him as Tractatus de contemptu mundi in
l ingua Japonica. It was included in the ethica and not, as one would expect, in the theo-
logica section of his collection, and this may be one of the reasons why the Jesuit print
has not been listed in the currently most complete bibliography of prints of the Japa-
nese Jesuit mission press compiled in 1940 by Johannes Laures, S.J., and later supple-
mented. Apart from the Augusta print only two other prints seemed to have survived.
The article introduces the new discovery and outlines possible reasons for the hitherto
relative invisibility of the print.
Keywords
book history – translation – Kirishitan-ban – accommodation – Japan – cultural

history – Japanese mission – Imitatio Christi – Thomas à Kempis
© Triplett, 2018 | doi 10.1163/22141332-00501007

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at the time of
publication.
124 Triplett
Among the many handwritten notes preserved at the Bibliotheca Augusta,

there is one addressed to the duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, August the Young-
er. The note, written carefully on a slip of paper, describes an unusual book
written in Japanese, but with Roman letters, and containing Latin quotations
from the Biblia vulgata. This may have been a commendation for the duke to
purchase the book from the unknown writer of the note, which is dated July 3,
1662. The note’s mention of the Biblia vulgata, quoted in Latin but found in the
main text of a book in Japanese, must have piqued the interest of the elderly
duke. He had not only amassed one of the largest collections of books and
manuscripts in seventeenth-century Europe at his residence in Wolfenbüttel,
the library now known as the Bibliotheca Augusta, but also worked on revis-
ing Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible, in itself an engagement
abhorred and strictly prohibited in the Catholic world and, at the same time,
not undisputed in contemporaneous Protestant circles.1 The duke included the
book in his collection in the ethica and not, as one could expect, in the theo-
logica section. This may be one of the reasons why the book is not listed in the
currently most complete bibliography of prints of the Japanese Jesuit mission
press, a bibliography compiled initially by Johannes Laures, S.J. (1891–1959),
at Sophia University in Tokyo in 1940 and subsequently supplemented by oth-
ers.2 The Tractatus de contemptu mundi in lingua Japonica, as the writer of the
note accompanying the duke’s volume calls it, was printed in 1596 and even the
most cursory comparison shows that it is indeed one of three known copies of
the Contemptus mundi jenbu: Core Youo itoi, Iesu Christono gočoxequio manabi
tatematçuru michiuo voxiyuru qiǒ, hereafter referred to as Contemptus mundi
jenbu. Both the standard Laures bibliography and the recently published ac-
count by Toyoshima3 mention only two copies: one copy held by the Bodleian
Library in Oxford4 and another kept at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan,
1 Wolf-Dieter Otte, “Religiöse Schriften,” in Sammler, Fürst, Gelehrter: Herzog August zu

Braunschweig und Lüneburg 1579–1666, ed. Paul Raabe (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Biblio-
thek, 1979), 193–205. I thank Dr. Matthias Roick (Wolfenbüttel/Göttingen) for this valuable
observation.
2 Johannes Laures, Kirishitan bunko: A Manual of Books and Documents on the Early Chris-
tian Missions in Japan, 3rd edition (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1957), no. 16 (12), 51–54. An
abridged version in Japanese script is listed as no. 32 (27). The Laures Kirishitan Bunko Data-
base is freely accessible online: http://digital-archives.sophia.ac.jp/laures-kirishitan-bunko/
(accessed August 4, 2017).
3 Masayuki Toyoshima, Kirishitan to shuppan [Japanese Christians and the (Mission) Press]
(Tokyo: Yagi Shoten, 2013), Appendix.
4 Current shelf no. Arch. B e.42. The most recent complete facsimile of the Bodleian print is
found in: Kōji Matsuoka and Takeshi Mitsuhashi, eds., Kontemutsusu munji: Kirishitan shiyrō
shūsei (Tokyo: Benseisha, 1979). A reproduction by Adam Matthew Publications can be found

A Brief Remark on a New Discovery 125
Italy.5 The early fifteenth-century Latin work that formed the basis of the Con-
temptus mundi jenbu was popular in Europe under the title De imitatione Chris-
ti et contemptu omnium vanitatum mundi, more commonly known as Imitatio
Christi, a devotional work that was ascribed by many to the French theologian
and scholar Jean Gerson (a.k.a. Jean Charlier, c.1362–1429) but was more likely
to have been compiled and authored by Thomas à Kempis (c.1380–1471).
The duke’s secretary decided to catalogue the Japanese work, possibly be-
cause of its theme of moral education, as an ethica volume. The spine on the
seventeenth-century vellum cover says “Tractatus de Contemptu Mundi Ja-
ponice sed typis latinis excusus, cura Societ. Jesu. 57.13 Eth.” After the death of
Duke August the Younger, the strange book seemed to have remained on the
shelf in Wolfenbüttel, not inciting much interest. Both as a Catholic mission-
ary book in the library of a staunch Protestant and as a work in a language no
one in Europe but the Jesuits themselves could read at the time, the Tractatus
de contemptu mundi Japonice faded into obscurity. No one may have touched it
for centuries; it is in supreme condition except for some worm damage.6 There
are also other, more general, factors for the lack of visibility of such books in
library catalogues. Quite some time ago, the print was entered, without flaw,
into the Bibliotheca Augusta’s digital catalogue by the diligent librarians who
also duly included a link to the Laures Kirishitan Bunko Database. As Yoshimi
Orii so aptly put it in her article on the diffusion of Japanese books from the
Jesuit mission press, “the twofold nature of the Kirishitan-ban (Japanese Chris-
tian prints)—they are neither fully European nor fully East Asian texts—has
proved an obstacle to bibliographical research.”7 Also, “because of language
and identification issues, there is a possibility that Kirishitan-ban books are
in their series East Meets West: Original Records of Western Traders, Travellers, Missionaries
and Diplomats to 1852 (Marlborough, Wiltshire: Adam Matthew Publications, 1998).
5 Former signature: S.Q#.v.iii.30; new signature: s.p. 20. For the facsimile of title pages and
last pages of both prints, see Tenri Toshokan [Tenri Library] and Makita Tominaga, eds.,
Kirishitan-ban no kenkyū: Tominaga sensei koki kinen [The Study of Kirishitan-ban: Festschrift
for Professor Tominaga] (Tenri: Tenri Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1973), 265–67, figs. 1–6, Bodleian
print; 268, figs. 7–8, Ambrosiana print. A facsimile of the damaged Ambrosiana print com-
bined with pages from the Bodleian print can be found in Arimichi Ebisawa, ed., Kontentsusu
munji: Nanō shozai kirishitanban shūroku [Catalogue of Kirishitan Literature in South Euro-
pean Holdings] (Tokyo: Yūshōdō Shoten, 1978).
6 Overall, the worm damage does not limit the readability of the text. For reasons of preserva-
tion the book cannot be digitized despite the ambitious digitization program of the Biblio-
theca Augusta.
7 Yoshimi Orii, “The Dispersion of Jesuit Books Printed in Japan: Trends in Bibliographical
Research and in Intellectual History,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2 (2015): 189–207, here 195,
doi: 10.1163/22141332-00202002.

126 Triplett
miscategorized in public libraries and archives in the West.”8 Indeed, a mi-

crofiche of the work in the microfiche facsimile collection Western Books on
Asia: Japan, which intends to provide printed materials in Western languages
about Japan from the sixteenth century to the advent of World War ii, lists
the Japanese Jesuit print,9 along with several other significant publications
in Japanese, but erroneously gives “Ainu” (the language of an ethnic minor-
ity in Northern Japan) as the language of the book. The collection consists of
thirteen thousand microfiches that are divided into twelve categories, among
them “religion” and “philosophy.” The categorization of the Kirishitan-ban Con-
temptus mundi jenbu as “philosophy” instead of the more appropriate category
of “religion” is perhaps a further obstacle to the study of such prints, a case that
proves Orii’s point well. The new discovery of another 1596 Contemptus mundi
jenbu in the Bibliotheca Augusta was not the result of systematic bibliographi-
cal research. Having found this unusual volume in the Wolfenbüttel collection,
Dr. Matthias Roick, an expert of European ethica, contacted me, a specialist in
Japanese religious history, to identify the book.10
The main reason for the extreme rarity of such prints is that, by 1640, virtu-
ally all copies of religious literature produced by the Jesuits in Japan had been
destroyed during a period of severe persecution. Those who fled to Macao or
to other places took few copies with them or sent these copies to Rome. The
urge to repeatedly revise the translations and experiment with both script and
technology in the heyday of the Japanese Jesuit mission press is well attested to
not only by testimony from Father Diogo de Mesquita (1553–1614)11 and others
but also by some of the preserved prints. According to Shigeo Wada’s survey,
the two known 1596 Contemptus mundi jenbu prints differ in one of the fairly
numerous Latin quotes. After a comparison of the two prints, the Ambrosiana
print can be surmised to be an emended edition of an earlier one, represented
8 Orii, “Dispersion of Jesuit Books,” 197.

9 The microfilm was taken from the Bodleian print.
10 I would like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to the Lichtenberg-Kolleg,
The Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study for providing a stimulating academic en-
vironment, and the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel with its team headed by Prof.
Peter Burschel, the Head of Rare Books at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford,
Dr. Sarah Wheale and her team, Prof. Yoshitsugu Sawai of Tenri University and the deputy
director of Tenri Central Library, Prof. emeritus Gen Miyata and his team including Mr.
Jun-ichi Kanzaki for their professional support in researching the Jesuit prints.
11 See quote in a letter from de Mesquita in Diego Pacheco, “Diogo de Mesquita, S.J. and the
Jesuit Mission Press,” Monumenta Nipponica 26, no. 3–4 (1971): 431–43, here 441–42, doi:
10.2307/2383655; translated from Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Jap. Sin. 36, 27v.

A Brief Remark on a New Discovery 127
by the Bodleian print. Wada, as reported by Arimichi Ebisawa, notes a passage

on page 6, lines 5–7 of the Bodleian print that reads:
OCVLVS non videt, nec auris audiuit, nec

in cor hominis ascendit, quae praeparauit Deus ijs,
qui diligunt illum. 1. Cor. 2. Manacova mi-
This quotation from Corinthians of the words of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah
64:4), “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of
man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him,” is followed
by the Japanese word for “eye” (modern: manako) leading into the Japanese
translation. The translation, however, does not correspond with the biblical
quote. Quite obviously, the translator(s) neglected to insert the correct biblical
quote into the text. Interestingly, in the Ambrosiana print, the three mistaken
lines appear to have been completely replaced and now read more consistently
with the main message of the medieval work:
NON SATVRATVUR OCV-

lus visu, nec auris auditu impletur. Ecclesia
stes capite primo. Fitono manacoua mi-12
This quote from Ecclesiastes, “the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear
filled with hearing” (Eccles. 1:8), is not found in the Augusta print, which incor-
porates the unconnected citation from the Corinthians like the Bodleian ver-
sion. We can understand from a comparison of this passage that the Augusta
print must be a copy of the earlier edition.
The citation from the Vulgata within the very first pages of this extraordi-
nary Jesuit book—however erroneous it turned out to be in the context of the
Contemptus mundi jenbu after close examination—must have pleased the un-
known writer of the note accompanying the Augusta print: He or she recom-
mended it highly and successfully to Duke August.
12 Presumably in order to avoid a disagreeable gap in the emended passage, the word for
“human” (fitono, modern: hito no) has been added to the word “eye,” indeed managing to
fill the line in a meaningful way, as already noted by Arimichi Ebisawa, “Kaisetsu” [Expla-
nation], in Nanō shozai kirishitanban shūroku [Catalogue of Kirishitan Literature in South
European Holdings] (Tokyo: Yūshōdō Shoten, 1978), 3–4.

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journal of jesuit studies 5 (2018) 123-127

News and Notices

The duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, August the Younger (1579–1666), assembled one of

book history – translation – Kirishitan-ban – accommodation – Japan – cultural

© Triplett, 2018 | doi 10.1163/22141332-00501007

Among the many handwritten notes preserved at the Bibliotheca Augusta,

1 Wolf-Dieter Otte, “Religiöse Schriften,” in Sammler, Fürst, Gelehrter: Herzog August zu

journal of jesuit studies 5 (2018) 123-127

journal of jesuit studies 5 (2018) 123-127

miscategorized in public libraries and archives in the West.”8 Indeed, a mi-

8 Orii, “Dispersion of Jesuit Books,” 197.

journal of jesuit studies 5 (2018) 123-127

by the Bodleian print. Wada, as reported by Arimichi Ebisawa, notes a passage

OCVLVS non videt, nec auris audiuit, nec

NON SATVRATVUR OCV-

journal of jesuit studies 5 (2018) 123-127

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