This monograph examines how Korean women and men came to engage with Catholic missions during Europe’s late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a profoundly volatile period in East Asian history during which political, cultural, and social disruption created opportunities for new interactions in the region. It analyzes the nature of that engagement, as women and men became both subjects for, and agents of, catechizing practices. As their evangelization, experience of faith, proselytizing, and suffering were recorded in mission archives, the monograph explores contact between Catholic Christianity and Korean women in particular. Broomhall demonstrates how gender ideologies shaped interactions between missionary men and Korean women, and how women’s experiences would come to be narrated, circulated, and memorialized.
- Front Cover
- Front matter
- Half-title
- Series information
- Title page
- Copyright information
- Table of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on The Text
- List of maps
- Timeline of Key Events
- Body
- Introduction
- The Power of the Body and the Text
- Structure
- Chapter 1. Encounter
- The Joseon Kingdom: “The Treasure Kept for the Man who Most Merits It”
- Korean Women’s Bodies and Kirishitan Masculine Performance
- “Fruit Well Taken from This War”: Evangelizing Koreans in Japan
- Gender and Mission Strategy
- Conclusions
- Chapter 2. Community
- Becoming Christian: Gender, the Body, and Affectivity
- Articulating Christian Belonging
- Contributing to the Christian Community
- Belonging and the Christian Orders
- Conclusions
- Chapter 3. Suffering
- Korean Women and Psychic Violence
- The Threat of Sexual Violence
- Physical Suffering as the Vulnerable Christ
- Fatal Violence
- Conclusions
- Chapter 4. Mobility
- Men, Mobility, and Missions to Joseon
- Exile as Gendered Opportunity
- Joseon via China: Knowledge Exchanges Between Learned Men
- Conclusions
- Conclusions
- Back matter
- Bibliography
- Manuscript Primary Sources
- Printed Primary Sources
- Secondary Sources
- index