Magdalen College MS. 228 and the Kirishitan Bunko Library Guia do Pecador

―Further traces of Kirishitan Neo-Latin―

Abstract

　The so-called Kirishitan in early modern Japan lived in a multilingual environment. As part of an ongoing project documenting their use of the Latin language, the author recently inspected two manuscripts, one at Magdalen College, Oxford, and another at the Kirishitan Bunko Library of Sophia University, Tokyo. In the former, the author discovered more traces of the use of Western languages (Latin and Portuguese) than had been reported in published sources, and uncovered signs of erasures by scraping which likewise had not been previously noted. As for the latter, the author, having inspected the original manuscript, proposes some minor improvements over a preexisting transcript prepared by Harada, and otherwise vindicates Harada’s assertion that the text strongly suggests that the book to which the manuscript is attached was carried by the Japanese Kirishitan Thomas Araki himself from Japan to Italy. Together, these manuscript sources testify to the multilingual and transnational nature of the world in which the Kirishitan lived and through which the sparse and precious remains of their endeavor were to be scattered.