Between Languages, Genres and Cultures: Diego Collado’s Linguistic Works

Abstract

Dominican Diego Collado can be rightfully counted among the most influential missionaries of the sunset of the Christian Century in Japan. Although he spent only three years there, between 1619 and 1622, and never achieved the palm of martyrdom, it transformed the rest of his life. After his return to Europe, he fought vehemently against the Jesuit monopoly in Japan at the Roman curia and the court in Madrid. While severe Christian persecution was raging in the land of the rising sun, he prepared a plan for an ambitious and highly controversial project for a new Dominican congregation devoted only to the missionary activity in Japan and China. This endeavour failed bitterly. His literary activity was similarly focused on a single goal – to promote his mission. He wrote multiple reports disputing and fighting the Jesuits, finished and published a history of the Christianisation of Japan from the Dominican perspective, and – most importantly for this article – composed three linguistic works: a grammar of the Japanese language, a Latin-Spanish-Japanese dictionary and a Japanese-Latin model confession. This study understands these three influential works as a trilogy that should be treated together as mutually complementary. It recognises them not only as examples of missionary linguistics but as part of a long European (and, in particular, Latin) tradition of language description, language learning and pastoral care.