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Readable flowers: global circulation and translation of collected saints’ lives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2018

Jonathan E. Greenwood*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, Québec, H3A 2T7, Canada E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

This article argues that Flowers (flores sanctorum), collections of saints’ lives arranged by the liturgical calendar, were the first genre of devotional literature to have a global reach during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article begins with the medieval origins of Flowers before analysing their dispersion in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by the Franciscans and Jesuits. By taking a temporal long view and a transoceanic perspective, the article contributes to the scholarship on early modern evangelization, translation, global networks, and the historiographies of the Franciscans and Jesuits.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the audience at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in Vancouver, Canada (October 2015), where I first presented a portion of this work. Their helpful questions aided me in developing this article as did those by the participants at the workshop ‘Translation in transit: interpreting culture in the modern world’, held at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy (May 2017). I am also grateful to Richard L. Kagan, Jorge Flores, Alyson Price, Paul Nelles, Audrey Millet, Justin Rivest and José Juan Pérez Meléndez, as well as to the Journal’s editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their vital interventions in earlier drafts.

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21 Flos sanctorum em portugues, fols. CCXLRIII[r]–CCXLVII[r]. In addition to Sebastian and Anthony, Holanda listed Vincent and the martyrs Verissimus and his sisters as the patrons of Lisbon: Holanda, Da fabrica de Lisboa, p. 19. On the broader Lusophone context of the cult of Anthony, see Vainfas, Ronaldo, ‘St. Anthony in Portuguese America: saint of the restoration’, in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, eds., Colonial saints: discovering the holy in the Americas, 1500–1800, New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 101 Google Scholar.

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30 In addition to Anthony of Padua, Franciscans penned lives for the order’s founder, Francis of Assisi, and the noted missionary Bernardino of Siena. Another work, on the Mexican child-martyrs of Tlaxcala, focused on indigenous children converted by the friars. Apart from their confrères, Franciscans also produced a narrative on the life of the Augustinian Nicholas of Tolentino.

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33 Ibid., fol. 10v.

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36 Before 1650, the Flower was printed in 1567, 1577, 1585, 1613, 1622, and 1647. All of the editions originated from Lisbon, except those of 1567 (Braga) and 1577 (Coimbra). On the publication of the Flower during Rosário’s lifetime, see de Almeida, António-José, ‘A mobilidade do impressor quinhentista português António de Mariz (The mobility of the sixteenth-century Portuguese printer António de Mariz)’, in Natália Marinho Ferreira-Alves, ed., Artistas e artifices e a sua mobilidade no mundo de expressão portuguesa (Artists and artifices and their mobility in the Portuguese-speaking world), Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 2005, pp. 6061 Google Scholar.

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38 Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Japonica-Sinica 6, fol. 125v: Melchior de Figueiredo to the Society of Jesus, Kuchinotsu(?), 13 September 1566.

39 Valignano, , Primero catálogo de la Provincia de Japón, vol. 1, p. 321 Google Scholar: ‘Hermano Foin Vicente, Japón, hijo del mismo Yofo Paulo, del reino de Vacasa, de 53 años de edad, robusto y de buenas fuerças, de 13 años de la Compañía. Es hombre insigne y singular entre todos los Nuestros en la lengua de Japón, grande predicador en su lengoa, y tiene compuesto y tresladado en la lengoa japoa la major parte de los libros espirituales y doctos que hasta agora son echos en ella.’

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41 Luís Fróis to the Society of Jesus, Sakai, 30 June 1566, in ibid., vol. 1, fol. 206v: ‘tresladou este anno [1566] na lingoa o Flos sanctoru[m], & liuros deuotos pera proueitodas almas’.

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