The Textual History of the Jesuit Compendia in Latin and Japanese as seen from the Newly Identified Manuscript at Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

抄録

In late 2019, the present author identified a hitherto unnoticed manuscript of the Japanese version of the Jesuit Compendia of philosophy, theology and cosmology among the holdings of Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. Unlike the single previously known manuscript witness it contains all three parts, allowing us for the first time to study the cosmological part in its initial Jesuit translation into Japanese. At the same time, we are now in a much more favorable position to elucidate the textual history of the Compendia by comparing the two manuscripts of the Japanese version and the single known manuscript of the underlying Latin version. This similarly applies to issues of authorship and the question of the European models behind the Compendia, for which the Wolfenbüttel manuscript offers us new insights to be discussed in this paper.