“With Delight and Desire”: Gender and Emotion in the Conversions of Japanese Women in Sixteenth-Century Southern Japan

Abstract

This article examines the interplay of gender, emotions, and material culture in Jesuit conversion accounts in sixteenth-century Japan. I analyse the rhetorical strategies of missionaries like Luís Fróis to better understand how conversion narratives were crafted to advance the Jesuits' goal of propagating Christianity in Japan and beyond. Although we cannot access the emotional experiences of these women, their representation and description, offers some insight into the tensions and conflicts in conversion narratives and, taken together with other sources, may open up new avenues to access their agencies in religious encounter.