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[IHP Guest Lectures: Jesuit Science and Geography in Early Modern China]
Session (II) "The Renaissance Goes to China: Matteo Ricci's Projects and Transformations"

Organizers: Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Science; Research Center of Cultural and Intellectual History, IHP, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Contact: Research Center of Cultural and Intellectual History (cihasihp@gmail.com)

Abstract:
In 1583, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci went to China and stayed there for the rest of his life. He was one of the first missionaries to embark on the great impresa—"enterprise"—to save souls for the Kingdom of God. Unlike in the Americas, the Europeans arrived in Asia with neither an army nor a navy, so what was their form of persuasion? Classical philosophy, as it turns out.
What did he introduce to China, and what did China compelled him to invent? This talk explores how Ricci tapped into his humanist education in Rome in order to find strands of commonalities and resonances in both ancient Chinese and Greco-Roman thought. By the end of his life, Ricci translated—and transformed—a staggering amount of Western knowledge for his Chinese readers: geometry, Stoicism, dialogues, a treatise on friendship, astronomy, cartography. Although Ricci has been intensively studied by sinologists and specialists of the Jesuit mission, he remains oddly marginal to the history of ideas; this talk argues that his China project should be understood as a major, but unrecognized, experiment in global humanism. The Renaissance did go to China, but China also changed the Renaissance.

Remark: This lecture will be given in English, and no prior registration is required.