Hospitality in Early Modern France and Tokugawa Japan: Concept and Practice

Objective

This project presents a historical investigation into the central role of hospitality in 17th-century France and Japan. Despite many differences, in the 17th century, both France and Japan were undergoing a similar political transformation with the development of a stronger, more centralised state after protracted periods of upheaval, conflict, and civil wars. Comparing ideas of hospitality as well as practice across two societies at a time when memory of civil war was fresh and the state was in a period of reconstruction will shed light on three interrelated questions. How do memories of civil war and inter-community conflict impact on people’s willingness to let others into their home? How did the state’s increasing reliance on forced hospitality for its travels affect the way people understood and practiced hospitality? And what functions did hospitality fulfil in court society at a time of increasing state power? By analysing these problems in concert, this project will interrogate hospitality’s role in promoting reconciliation and mending communities, and how the state’s assertion of its monopoly of violence and its greater centralisation altered the way people understood and practiced hospitality. The project will thus illuminate the crucial functions hospitality fulfilled for the early modern state, in early modern communities, and more generally in early modern people’s lives. In so doing, the project will emphasise the importance of hospitality to early modern societies beyond questions of charity and the rise of commercial forms of hospitality.