Dr Pia Jolliffe

I am a historian of early modern Japan with a particular interest in:

1. the transition from Warring States to Edo period Japan (sixteenth and seventeenth century) through the microhistories of girls and young women. The archives of Buddhist temples as well as the oral histories of local communities are particularly relevant for this kind of research.
2. Catholicism and transnational relations between early modern Japan and Europe, through the microhistories of translated and globally circulated missionary letters.

At the moment I am working on a monograph with the provisional title Himegimi. Girls, Buddhist communities and the memory of political defeat in civil war Japan (1595-1630). Focusing on Buddhist temples and communities’ roles in protecting and transmitting the histories of the girls and women related to the household of Toyotomi Hidetsugu (1568-1595), I demonstrate how viewing the transition from Warring States to Edo period Japan through female experiences draws our attention to individuals and communities who lost their lives and livelihoods during Japan’s “re-unification” process and thus to alternative histories of the period. I argue that claiming history outside the remit of state control seems to be an important function of Japanese Buddhist temples and the communities attached to them.

I am also in the early stages of a project on the microhistories of girls who grew up in Imperial Buddhist convents (amamonzeki) in early modern Japan, currently working on a paper entitled “Meisho tenno and her tonsured siblings: Monastic and dynastic successions in seventeenth century Japan”. Moreover, I have a longstanding interest in the nineteenth century history of Ezo/Hokkaido and the various peoples moving around the Sea of Okhotsk.

A list of my publications can be found at my webpage at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.