Albert Chan, Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome: A Descriptive Catalogue: Japonica Sinica I-IV; in H-Net Reviews [2003] (original) (raw)
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Abstract
Albert Chan. Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome: A Descriptive Catalogue: Japonica Sinica I-IV. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. xliii + 626 pp. $145.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7656-0828-4. Reviewed by Eugenio Menegon (Department of Oriental and Slavonic Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) Published on H-Asia (February, 2003)
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Long viewed as a divinatory, religious, historical and philosophical work with roots in ancient Chinese culture, the Yijing has secured an idiosyncratic position in the Western academic sinology. This paper looks at the motives, strategies and ideologies with which the early Jesuit missionaries introduced the Yijing to the West, particularly with reference to the biblical exegesis tradition and how its derivative "Figurism" had influenced their interpretation and translation of this work. The present study purports to investigate how the Jesuit missionaries had appropriated the Yijing at multiple levels to facilitate the Confucian-Christian synthesis (following Matteo Ricci's Accommodation approach), in order to proselytize the Chinese gentry by mitigating the conspicuous discrepancies between Christianity and Ruism. With the acquiescence of the Roman Church and the patronage of the Kangxi Emperor, the Jesuit missionaries studied, interpreted and rendered the Yijing. Driven by an emic perspective based on Figuristic ideologies, a certain group of Jesuit missionary scholars penetrated and rewrote the Yijing to reduce the degree of passive resistance once this enigmatic Chinese canonical text encountered Christian civilization. What they did to a certain extent led to the reciprocal inter-culturation of China and the West. However, the Figurists' overly accommodating approach and their deliberate emphasis on the esoteric revelation of the "biblical truth" encrypted in the Yijing simultaneously prevented this text from being accepted by the reason-oriented European literati. Nontheless, the Figurists' translation and dissemination of the Yijing, did grant traditional Chinese cosmology, then in a peripheral position, access to the European literary polysystem as a challenge to the central Christian doctrines. Undoubtedly their efforts made a crucial contribution to the cultural communication between China and the West from 17th to mid-18th centuries.
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References (8)
- Smaller collections were also kept in some Fran- ciscan convents in Rome, and partly ended up in the Bib- lioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma "Vittorio Emanuele II" (BNCR);
- see Marina Battaglini, "Libri cinesi e giap- ponesi alla Biblioteca Nazionale [pp. 7-10 "I fondi di orig- ine ecclesiastica"], " in Pagine dall'Oriente. Libri cinesi e giapponesi della Biblioteca Nazionale, edited by Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II -Roma (Roma: Bardi Editore, 1996), pp. 7-14. On the library of the Colle- gio Romano, see Ricardo Villoslada, Storia del Collegio Ro- mano dal suo inizio (1551) alla soppressione della Compag- nia di Ges= (1773) (Roma: Universit= Gregoriana, 1954);
- Virginia Carini Dainotti, La Biblioteca Nazionale Vitto- rio Emanuele al Collegio Romano (Firenze: Olschki, 1956);
- on the Chinese materials in the Casanatense, see Euge- nio Menegon, "The Casanatense Library (Rome) and its China Materials. A Finding List, " Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal XXII (2000): pp. 31-55.
- An eighteenth-century catalogue of the Chinese books in the old Jesuit archives is still preserved in ARSI: Index librorum Sinensium juxta rerum classes distributus, Jap. Sin. 152.2, ff. 23r-38r; see Chan, Chinese Books, p. 436. A comparison of the Latin renderings of the ti- tles kept then in archives and the today-existing Chinese books and documents could help us reconstruct the his- tory of the collection.
- See Costanzo Bizzocchi, "Il 'ripostiglio' della Bib- lioteca del Collegio Romano, " Gesuiti della Provincia Ro- mana 2 (1971): pp. 17-21;
- Carini Dainotti, La biblioteca, pp. 68-71. The Library of the Collegio Romano appar- ently remained intact between the suppression of the So- ciety and its resurrection in 1814. In 1842, an erudite described the library as still rich with 80,000 volumes; see Moroni's Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica, as quoted in Villoslada, Storia, p. 193. On the present condition of the Chinese collection in the BNCR, see e.g. Battaglini, "Libri cinesi…, " pp. 7-10.
- A forthcoming article by Ad Dudink in the journal Monumenta Serica (2002 issue) explores the lay-
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