Tolerance, Peace and Otherness in Spanish Jesuit Thought of the Baroque Period
Narratives of Peace in Religious Discourses - Perspectives from Europe and the Mediterranean in the Early Modern Era - Ludovico Battista
David Martín López [+ ]
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
David Martín López is a Lecturer in the History Department at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. His research interests are: the Toledo province of the Society of Jesus, its territorial expansion and consolidation during the sixteenth century and its heritage after Jesuits were expelled from Spain in 1767; the University of Toledo in the early modern period; Hispanic political thinking and its relationship to ethics in the Baroque period.
Description
In the course of their travels across the world, Jesuits encountered a variety of cultures, modes of life, and conceptions of religion. In this chapter, I shall introduce the notion of tolerance developed by the Jesuits in their manuscripts and printed books through two lines of research. The first relates to the political sphere, where contact with other societies led these writers to advocate peace, just war and, where possible, coexistence of multiple religions within one state. The second explores the Jesuit image of “the other” embodied, on one hand, in Juan Azor’s depiction of Jews and Muslims, and on the other, in the perception of Japanese culture as conveyed by eyewitness accounts of the Tenshō embassy to Europe.