Download or read book Jesuit Letters from China 1583 84 written by M. Howard Rienstra and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1986-05-30 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesuit Letters From China, 1583–84 was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The first eight letters from Jesuit missionaries on mainland China were written in 1583–84 and published in Europe in 1586. M Howard Rienstra's translated marks their first appearance in English. The letters chronicle the patient efforts of Michele Ruggieri and the famed Matteo Ricci to learn Chinese, to gain acceptance in Chinese society, and to explain Christianity to a highly sophisticated non-Christian culture. They also described the China of the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a country whose immense size and population had excited the imagination of Europeans for generations. It was Francis Xavier's dream that this mighty kingdom and civilization be opened to the Christian gospel. His dream was at least tentatively fulfilled when Michele Ruggieri was granted residence first in Canton and then in Chao-ch'ing in 1583. Accompanied first by Francesco Pasio and later by Matteo Ricci, Ruggieri initiated the Christian mission in China. Their letters, published initially as an appendix to a volume of Jesuit letters from Japan, were abbreviated and censored by their European editor. In edited form, the letters appeared in 1586 in one French, on German, and three Italian editions. The China of Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci had remained, however, both suspicious of, and closed to, foreigners - a fact which the original letters do not gloss over. Rienstra was carefully compared the abbreviated and censored versions of these letters in their originals, still preserved in the Jesuit archives in Rome. The letters in general indicate how tenuous the Jesuits' situation was and note candidly that only two baptisms had been performed on the mainland during their stay. These results stand in marked contracts to the reports from Japan of tens of thousands of baptisms and to the reports from Portuguese Macao, where Chinese converts were compelled to wear European cloths and to take European names. Such Europeanization was thought to be inappropriate to a successful Christian mission in China. Though criticized at the time by their colleagues in Macao, Ruggieri, Pasio, and Ricci committed themselves to a program of cultural respect and accommodation. They learned both written and spoken Chinese, ingratiated themselves with the ruling classes by exhibiting their learning and courtesy, and appeared to have become Chinese themselves. When Matteo Ricci became Ruggieri's successor and his name became synonymous with the success of the Jesuit mission in China, it was to these methods that its success was owed. Unfortunately, the prevailing European ethnocentrism could not accept the concept of cultural accommodation. The editors thus censored the letters to convey the impression of a triumphant and culturally superior Christian mission in China. Jesuit Letters From China is a publication of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.
Download or read book Avvisi Della Cina Dell ottantatre Et Dell ottantaquattro written by M. Howard Rienstra and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Matteo Ricci and the Catholic Mission to China 1583 1610 written by Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here at last is the text that many college teachers of Chinese, Asian, and world history have been waiting for: an accessible collection of primary sources on the life of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci and the Catholic mission that he helped establish in China. Ricci's missionary career indeed constituted a key moment in modern history, for it was through his examples and recommendations that the Jesuits in China collectively adopted an accommodative approach to Chinese culture and embarked on various projects of cultural translation that resulted in the first wave of sustained interactions between Chinese and European civilizations. Instructors and students alike will benefit greatly from Hsia's lucid introduction, which sets Ricci's life story against the broader background of Portuguese Asia, Catholic renewal, and late Ming China; the pithy, informative introductory statements preceding each document; a chronological chart of major relevant events; and an excellent annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages. This is a very affordable text produced at the highest academic standards." —Qiong Zhang, Associate Professor of History, Wake Forest University
Download or read book Matteo Ricci and the Catholic Mission to China 1583 1610 written by R. Po-chia Hsia and published by Hackett Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portuguese Asia -- Catholic renewal -- Ming China -- Matteo Ricci -- Ricci in our time.
Download or read book A History of Christian Conversion written by David W. Kling and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 853 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming). However, when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion and no easily explicable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors-historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural-shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples, it also engages current theories and models to explain conversion, and examines recurring themes in the conversion process: divine presence, gender and the body, agency and motivation, testimony and memory, group- and self-identity, "authentic" and "nominal" conversion, and modes of communication. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling's book is the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history to date; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies.
Download or read book Strange Names of God written by Sangkeun Kim and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most precarious and daunting tasks for sixteenth-century European missionaries in the cross-cultural mission frontiers was translating the name of «God» (Deus) into the local language. When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) introduced the Chinese term Shangti as the semantic equivalent of Deus, he made one of the most innovative cross-cultural missionary translations. Ricci's employment of Shangti was neither a simple rewording of a Chinese term nor the use of a loan-word, but was indeed a risk-taking «identification» of the Christian God with the Confucian Most-High, Shangti. Strange Names of God investigates the historical progress of the semantic configuration of Shangti as the divine name of the Christian God in China by focusing on Chinese intellectuals' reaction to the strangely translated Chinese name of God.
Download or read book Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions written by Luke Clossey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first truly global study of the Society of Jesus's early missions. Up to now historians have treated the early-modern Catholic missionary project as a disjointed collection of regional missions rather than as a single world-encompassing example of religious globalization. Luke Clossey shows how the vast distances separating missions led to logistical problems of transportation and communication incompatible with traditional views of the Society as a tightly centralized military machine. In fact, connections unmediated by Rome sprung up between the missions throughout the seventeenth century. He follows trails of personnel, money, relics and information between missions in seventeenth-century China, Germany and Mexico, and explores how Jesuits understood space and time and visualized universal mission and salvation. This pioneering study demonstrates that a global perspective is essential to understanding the Jesuits and will be required reading for historians of Catholicism and the early-modern world.
Download or read book The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru 1570 1610 written by Ana Carolina Hosne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rulers of the overseas empires summoned the Society of Jesus to evangelize their new subjects in the ‘New World’ which Spain and Portugal shared; this book is about how two different missions, in China and Peru, evolved in the early modern world. From a European perspective, this book is about the way Christianity expanded in the early modern period, craving universalism. In China, Matteo Ricci was so impressed by the influence that the scholar-officials were able to exert on the Ming Emperor himself that he likened them to the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Republic. The Jesuits in China were in the hands of the scholar-officials, with the Emperor at the apex, who had the power to decide whether they could stay or not. Meanwhile, in Peru, the Society of Jesus was required to impose Tridentine Catholicism by Philip II, independently of Rome, a task that entailed compliance with the colonial authorities’ demands. This book explores how leading Jesuits, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) in China and José de Acosta (1540-1600) in Peru, envisioned mission projects and reflected them on the catechisms they both composed, with a remarkable power of endurance. It offers a reflection on how the Jesuits conceived and assessed these mission spaces, in which their keen political acumen and a certain taste for power unfolded, playing key roles in envisioning new doctrinal directions and reflecting them in their doctrinal texts.
Download or read book Encountering China written by Rachana Sachdev and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encountering China addresses the responses of early modern travelers to China who, awed by the wealth and sophistication of the society they encountered, attempted primarily to build bridges, to explore similarities, and to emulate the Chinese, though they were also critical of some local traditions and practices. Contributors engage critically with travelogues, treating them not just as occasional sources of historical information but as primary, literary texts deeply revelatory of the world they describe. Contributors reach back to the earliest European writings available on China in an effort to broaden and nuance our understanding of European contact with the Middle Kingdom in the early modern period. While the primary focus of these essays is the external gaze – European sources about China – contributors also tease out aspects of the Chinese world-view of the time, thus generating a conversation between Chinese literary and historical texts and European ones.
Download or read book The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ written by Roman Malek and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-12 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection in five volumes tries to realize the desideratum of a comprehensive interdisciplinary work on the manifold faces and images of Jesus in China, which unites the Sinological, mission-historical, theological, art-historical, and other aspects. The first three volumes (vols. L/1-3) contain articles and texts which discuss the faces and images of Jesus Christ from the Tang dynasty to the present time. In a separate volume (vol. L/4) follows an annotated bibliography of the Western and Chinese writings on Jesus Christ in China and a general index with glossary. The iconography, i.e., the attempts of the Western missionaries and the Chinese to portray Jesus in an artistic way, will be presented in the fifth volume of this collection (vol. L/5).
Download or read book The Chinese Language in European Texts written by Dinu Luca and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This detailed, chronological study investigates the rise of the European fascination with the Chinese language up to 1615. By meticulously investigating a wide range of primary sources, Dinu Luca identifies a rhetorical continuum uniting the land of the Seres, Cathay, and China in a tropology of silence, vision, and writing. Tracing the contours of this tropology, The Chinese Language in European Texts: The Early Period offers close readings of language-related contexts in works by classical authors, medieval travelers, and Renaissance cosmographers, as well as various merchants, wanderers, and missionaries, both notable and lesser-known. What emerges is a clear and comprehensive understanding of early European ideas about the Chinese language and writing system.
Download or read book A New History of Penance written by Abigail Firey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-02-12 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using hitherto unconsidered source materials from late antiquity to the early modern period, this volume charts new views about the role of penance in shaping western attitudes and practices for resolving social, political, and spiritual tensions, as penitents and confessors negotiated rituals and expectations for penitential expression.
Download or read book China s Saints written by Anthony E. Clark and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of China's Catholic martyr saints, this work recounts the cultural, religious, and economic conflicts that unfolded during China's Qing dynasty (1644–1911). China's Saints considers closely the personal and public lives of both missionaries and Chinese converts lived during China's late-imperial era.
Download or read book China Gothic written by Anthony E. Clark and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China struggled to redefine itself at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is evident in the twin biographies of North China’s leading Catholic bishop of the time, Alphonse Favier (1837–1905), and the Beitang cathedral, epicenter of the Roman Catholic mission in China through incarnations that began in 1701. After its relocation and reconstruction under Favier’s supervision, the cathedral—and Favier—miraculously survived a two-month siege in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Featuring a French Gothic Revival design augmented by Chinese dragon–shaped gargoyles, marble balustrades in the style of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and other Chinese aesthetic flourishes, Beitang remains an icon of Sino-Western interaction. Anthony Clark draws on archival materials from the Vatican and collections in France, Italy, China, Poland, and the United States to trace the prominent role of French architecture in introducing Western culture and Catholicism to China. A principal device was the aesthetic imagined by the Gothic Revival movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the premier example of this in China being the Beitang cathedral. Bishop Favier’s biography is a lens through which to examine Western missionaries’ role in colonial endeavors and their complex relationship with the Chinese communities in which they lived and worked.
Download or read book Art as a Pathway to God written by Susangeline Yalili Patrick and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book integrates history, theology, and art and analyzes the Jesuits’ cross-cultural mission in late imperial China. Readers will find a rich collection of resources from historical sites, museums, manuscripts, and archival materials, including previous unpublished works of art. The production and circulation of art from different historical periods and categories show the artistic, theological, and missional values of Christian art. It highlights European Jesuits, Asian Christians, transnationalism, and gives voice to Chinese Christian women and their patronage of art in the seventeenth century. It offers a rare systematic study of the relation between art and mission history.
Download or read book Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes written by Li Chen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity. Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.
Download or read book Christianity in China written by Xiaoxin Wu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-17 with total page 862 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now revised and updated to incorporate numerous new materials, this is the major source for researching American Christian activity in China, especially that of missions and missionaries. It provides a thorough introduction and guide to primary and secondary sources on Christian enterprises and individuals in China that are preserved in hundreds of libraries, archives, historical societies, headquarters of religious orders, and other repositories in the United States. It includes data from the beginnings of Christianity in China in the early eighth century through 1952, when American missionary activity in China virtually ceased. For this new edition, the institutional base has shifted from the Princeton Theological Seminary (Protestant) to the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural Relations at the University of San Francisco (Jesuit), reflecting the ecumenical nature of this monumental undertaking.
