Jesuits and Matriarchs

"Jesuits and Matriarchs takes a novel approach to the history of the seventeenth-century Jesuit China missions by focusing on Chinese Catholic womens domestic religiosity, analyzing the gendered spatial relations in the Jesuits mission and connecting them with post-Tridentine perceptions and development in Europe. . . . [this book] will be an accessible and rewarding read for scholars and any interested readers who wish to gain new insights into womens religiosity in Chinese Catholicism." * Asian Ethnology * "Amslers meticulous archival industry, innovative analysis of a wide sweep of materials, and cogent narrative serve as an example of first-rate scholarship that shall remain the authoritative word on Catholic women in early China for years to come." -- Anthony Clark * China Review International: A Journal of Reviews of Scholarly Literature in Chinese Studies * "Jesuits and Matriarchs constitutes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Christianity in East Asia and complicates the state of ongoing debates about the situation of women in late imperial China. Amsler sheds light on the importance of gender as a novel channel to help reconsider the nature of Chinese Catholic communities and raises numerous questions for future research, for example by advocating for a comparative analysis of the global situation of women in the Catholic Church, which unequivocally makes the book thought-provoking and useful for a broad audience." * New Books Asia * "By seeking to fill a gap in scholarship on Chinese Catholics in the seventeenth century, particularly how women in China were introduced to Catholicism and contributed to its development and spread, Nadine Amsler makes crucial contributions to many different fields of study in this slim, tightly organized book." * Journal of the American Oriental Society * "In this important study, Nadine Amsler investigates the Jesuit mission to China from the late sixteenth through most of the seventeenth century, focusing on how Chinese customs and sensibilities shaped and constrained the Jesuit ministry to women." * Monumenta Serica *

Nadine Amsler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Goethe University Frankfurt.