Studies in the History of Christianity in East Asia – serie

China’s Old Churches, by Alan Sweeten, surveys the history of Catholicism in China (1600 to the present) as reflected by the location, style, and details of sacred structures in three crucial areas of north China. Closely examined are the most famous and important churches in the urban settings of Beijing and Tianjin, as well as lesser-known ones in rural Hebei Province.Missionaries built Western-looking churches to make a broad religious statement important to themselves and Chinese worshippers. Non-Catholics, however, tended to see churches as sociopolitically foreign and culturally invasive. The physical-visual impact of church buildings is significant. Today, restored old churches and new sacred structures are still mostly of Western style, but often include a sacred grotto dedicated to Our Lady of China--a growing number of Catholics supporting Marian-centered activities.

Giulia Falato’s work on Alfonso Vagnone S.J.’ s (1568-1640) Tongyou jiaoyu 童幼教育 (On the Education of Children) offers a systematic study of the earliest treatise on European pedagogy and its first annotated translation in English. In particular, it highlights the role of Tongyou jiaoyu as a cultural bridge between the Chinese and Western traditions. Drawing from archival materials and multi-language literature, Falato produces an insightful account of the Jesuit’s background, the pedagogical debate in late-Ming China, and the making and main sources of the treatise. Through the diachronic analysis of a selection of philosophical terms, this work also provides a fresh perspective on the Jesuits’ lexical innovations and contribution to the formation of the modern Chinese lexicon.

This book is the winner of the Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels Prize for Sinology 2023, awarded by the Academy for Overseas Sciences (ARSOM), Brussels.In John Fryer and The Translator’s Vade-mecum, Tola offers for the first time a comprehensive study of the collection of scientific and technical glossaries, with English-Chinese parallel translation, compiled by the English scholar John Fryer (1839–1928). Other than contributing to the history of modern Chinese lexicon and translation in late Qing China, Tola analyses the role of The Translator’s Vade-mecum in the diffusion of ideas and terms between China and the West, at the same time providing new insights on the connection between religious efforts by missionaries in late Qing China and their secular attitude towards translation. The great number of resources presented also show a new perspective on the transcultural flows of knowledge, China’s modernisation process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the history of nineteenth-century Protestant missions in China.

The True Record of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shilu, 1584) by the Jesuit missionary Michele Ruggieri was the first Chinese-language work ever published by a European. Despite being published only a few years after Ruggieri started learning Chinese, it evinced sophisticated strategies to accommodate Christianity to the Chinese context and was a pioneering work in Sino-Western exchange. This book features a critical edition of the Chinese and Latin texts, which are both translated into English for the first time. An introduction, biography, and rich annotations are provided to situate this text in its cultural and intellectual context.

The first scholarly work on the subject by leading scholars in the field, Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) and China examines the variety of ways in which MEP missionaries complemented and complicated Catholic Church and French engagement with Chinese society. Key players in the Church’s overseas missions in the Far East, many MEP missionaries spent their entire lives working with ordinary Chinese. This volume explores the proactive engagement of MEP missionaries in Bible translation and cultural accommodation, their evangelization efforts in local communities, and the interaction between MEP representatives and various local groups. Each study in this book responds to one or more of the major themes in the history of Christianity in China that include conflicts, accommodations, indigenization, imperialism, and nationalism. Contributors are François Barriquand, Jean Charbonnier, Yanrong Chen, Lina Guo, Zhijie Kang, Ji Li, Matthieu Masson, Jean-Paul Wiest, Qing Wu, Hongyan Xiang, Ernest Young, and Aidong Zhao.

This study is the first book that explores how the Catholic Mass was introduced and propagated in late Imperial China. Its dynamic exploration reveals the tension between localized and global forms of Catholic rituals, especially the tension faced by missionaries and Chinese Catholics, who were caught up between the Chinese tradition and the Catholic one. Drawing on rich primary sources, some of which are rarely noticed in the field, this book unfolds the intriguing interactions between the Mass and various cultural expressions of Chinese society, including traditional religion, architecture, art, literature, government, and theology.

The book contains the first annotated English translation of the Correct Explanation of the Tang “Stele Eulogy on the Luminous Teaching” (1644) by the Jesuit Manuel Dias Jr. and other late Ming Chinese Christian sources interpreting the “venerable ancestor” of the Jesuit mission, namely, the mission of the Church of the East in Tang China. Based on this documentation, the book reconstructs the process of “appropriation” by Jesuit missionaries and their Chinese converts of ancient traces of Christianity that were discovered in China in the first half of the seventeenth century, such as the Xi’an stele (781) and other Christian relics

How did Asia come to be represented on European World maps? When and how did Asian Countries adopt a continental system for understanding the world? How did countries with disparate mapping traditions come to share a basic understanding and vision of the globe? This series of essays organized into sections on Jesuit Circuits of Communication and Publication; Jesuit World Maps in Chinese; Reverberations of Matteo Ricci's Maps in East Asia; and Reflections on the Curation of Cartographic Knowledge, go a long way toward answering these questions about the shaping of our modern understandings of the world.