IN THE LATTER years of the reign of the Korean King Seonjo (r. 1567– 1608), Europe's late sixteenth century and the Momoyama period in Japan, violent events provoked the dispersal of Korean women and men throughout the Asian region, some even further. The invasions by Japanese forces of the Korean kingdom, then ruled by the I (or Yi) dynasty and known as Joseon, represented perhaps the most intense military conflict among East Asian peoples before the late nineteenth century. Through these invasions, the effective if not official leader of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had hoped to gain a strategic foothold from which he could conquer Ming China. When Seonjo refused to acquiesce to Hideyoshi's demands that the Joseon kingdom be used as a steppingstone for Japanese troops, in part because of Joseon's tributary relationship with the Ming emperors of China, Hideyoshi attempted to force access. Over six years, the Joseon kingdom suffered devastation to its lands and resources through violent conflict fought among Japanese, Joseon and Ming forces, and Joseon's people became spoils of war. Accounts of the experiences of Korean women and men in the conflict and diaspora were documented in many local sources as well as others that traversed the globe. Both Korean individuals, and the reports that narrated some of their activities within and beyond the borders of Joseon, travelled through organizations motivated by evangelism, the origins of which were in Europe. Chief among these were the Catholic mission orders.

This work analyzes evangelizing Korean women in both its meanings. It examines how Korean women came to engage with Catholic missions and the nature of that engagement, as both subjects for, and agents of, catechizing practices. It explores the interactions between Catholic Christianity and Korean women as these are recorded in mission archives. As such, it is also about the power of texts written by missionary men because it is through their reports that we have accounts about these women. The perceptions that authors presented in these texts about Korean women, their experiences and their activities were relational in nature. These were shaped in part by how missionary men understood themselves, in relation to each other, those whom they evangelized and those whom they sought to evangelize, variously, as Christian men, as European men (if they were), as Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese men predominantly, as elite men or otherwise.