ABSTRACT
The Japanese authorities quickly saw through the Jesuits’ Chinese disguise, and imprisoned and tortured Rubino and his four companions over several months, trying to extract a recantation. Seventeenth-century Jesuit writers like Alexander of Rhodes or the armchair biographer Alonso de Andrade were themselves in no doubt that Rubino died saintly. Rubino’s long and fascinating career as a missionary in India, Ceylon, China and Japan is indeed multi-faceted, and illustrative of some of the fundamental issues which the Jesuits faced in the seventeenth century. The rites controversy, with its questioning of the limits of cultural relativism within Christianity, was the one of the two legacies that the Jesuit missions left to the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. The European reader, by giving names to idols and explanations to their peculiar shapes, could now assess the existence of a tradition of beliefs which sustained the strange gentile customs, so often only observed as monstrous with a mixture of wonderment and disgust.
