Abstract
Abstract This chapter analyzes the inclusion of two Jesuit missionary documents about Japan and China in the second volume of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1599) (This contribution was presented at the international symposium “Religion, Translation and Transnational Relations: Japan and (Counter-) Reformation Europe”, at Leipzig University, in September 2022. It was conceived within the framework of the research project “Traduciendo la alteridad: experiencias, ediciones, manuscritos e impresiones ante el desafío del nuevo mundo (S. XV a XVIII)” (‘Translating otherness: experiences, editions, manuscripts and the New World as a challenge—fifteenth to eighteenth centuries’), FILOCyT FC19-024. This project was developed at the University of Buenos Aires, under the supervision of Dr. Carolina Martínez and Dr. María Juliana Gandini.). The first document is an epistle originally written in Portuguese by Luís Fróis (1532–1597), in 1565. The version included by Hakluyt was taken from an English translation by Richard Willes, which had, in fact, already been published. The second document, translated by Hakluyt himself, is an extract from the Latin dialogue De missione legatorum Iaponensium ad Romanam curiam (Macau, 1590), by Duarte de Sande. The inclusion of these documents in the most important English travel compendium of the sixteenth century introduced them to a readership and context that was dramatically different to that intended by the original authors. The paper will deal with the political and religious significance of these textual transformations.