Mansfield Prize 2021 – Makoto Harris TAKAO
The Mansfield Prize for the best article published in the Journal of Religious History for 2021 is awarded to:
Makoto Harris TAKAO for his article “Tokugawa Confucian Sermons as Popular Emotional Education: The Moral and Pedagogical Philosophy of Hosoi Heishū” Journal of Religious History 45:1 (2021): 50-67.
Makoto’s study offers a remarkably original presentation of how Confucianism was preached and absorbed in eighteenth-century Japan, through the lens of the history of emotion.
Makoto’s study of the preaching of Hosoi Heishu takes religious history into a new direction by considering Confucianism outside China in terms of its rhetoric and reception. He unpacks how terms of emotion can be reinterpreted in different contexts and reveal much about broader habitus in a pre-modern, non-Christian culture.
Constant Mews, chair, Mansfield Prize selection committee, 18 Feb 2022.