Martín Santo Publishes Book
Romance Studies alumna Noemí Martín Santo has published a new book – a scholarly edition of the Account of the Kingdom of Nippon, by Bernardino de Ávila. The work was written in the 17th century and has not been published in its entirety since – two Franciscan historians began working on an edition in the 1930’s, but their work was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War and never finished. This new edition, with Clásicos Hispánicos, will be the first complete edition. It has been annotated with the aim of aiding both students and specialists in the field of Hispanic and Asia-Pacific early modern cultural contacts.
Martín Santo tells us:
“Bernardino de Ávila was a merchant who lived in Nagasaki between 1594 and 1619. His Account of theKingdomof Nippon is the only secular account in Spanish about the people of Nagasaki, their lives and customs. It narrates a history of the Japanese Unifiers Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the first martyrdoms of Nagasaki, which he witnessed.”
Noemí Martín Santo graduated from BU with a PhD in Hispanic Languages & Literatures in 2016. She is currently an assistant professor of Spanish at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.