Christianization: Women’s Immolation in Europe, India, and Japan (1550-1650)

Abstract

During the European Reformation, European states were nations “with the soul of a church.” The Portuguese Jesuit Luís Fróis (1532-1597) of the Society of Jesus arrived in Japan in 1563; six years later, Fróis convinced the most powerful local warlord, Oda Nobunaga, to allow Jesuits to spread Christianity in Japan. Although the Bible does not explicitly deal with the concept of gender equality, Fróis did not discriminate between male and female converts. For example, one of Fróis’ devout converts, Hosokawa Gracia, became a Christian martyr by having her subordinate kill her and then burn her body. The immolation of her remains became a contributing factor to the conclusion of the long-time warring state era from 1467 to 1603. During this transition, Japan reversed from being a warring state to a bakufu state (a previously existing model of governance marked by a patrilineally inherited military dictatorship). In the same period, the practice of sati or suttee (widow-burning) and witch-hunts existed in India and Europe respectively. Since the European states at the time were under the control of the Church, the vast majority of witch-hunt scholars approach the subject from a Christian perspective to explain that those who performed witch-craft had to be punished in order to maintain a godly state. Conversely, Silvia Federici approaches the witch-hunts through a Marxist framework, arguing that witches’ protests had to be suppressed to enable Europe’s transition from feudalism to capitalism – a result of the witch-hunt in Europe and its extension to Central and North America. In this article, I use a postcolonial lens, based on an a posteriori model of