“Visiting Humanists” and Their Interpreters: Ricci (and Ruggieri) in China

All books speak about their authors, even if authors are not aware of it; even when, as it is the case with biographies, they intend to distance themselves from their object. This book does so in a special way.

Born in Hong Kong and trained in early modern European history, Ronnie Po-chia Hsia is today known as one of the leading experts in Counter-Reformation history, a field that was traditionally dominated by very conservative historiography. In his many contributions, Hsia availed himself of remarkable linguistic skills in major modern languages and an equal mastery of classical languages ranging from Latin to old German and Dutch. In so doing, he was able to access and make available to scholars an extremely broad range of hitherto unpublished sources. Enriched by a unique background, Hsia has gradually begun to explore new territories in the field of sinology and Chinese studies. Writing about Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit of the late Renaissance who spent most of his adult life in China, mastered the language, and interacted significantly with both the local and the court elite, may have induced Hsia to think back, on occasion, to his own intellectual accomplishments.

According to Paul Ricoeur in Soi-même comme un autre, the self (ipse) is not construed by a duplication of itself (idem) but by its relationship with the other. François Dosse has interpreted Ricoeur’s words as being particularly true in the case of biographical writing because

biographical writing is closer to this movement toward the other and the alteration of the self that is thereby transformed into the other. Such an endeavor entails some danger because the biographer must strive to maintain the right distance between the loss of his identity and the failure to render the singularity of the subject of the biography. This is not easy at all because the ship may frequently sink under the strength of the waves of passion or the need to maintain an objective distance, both as necessary as it is the permanent preoccupation not to go astray.¹

Although, on occasion, Hsia shows excessive appreciation for Ricci’s talents, he manages to counterbalance his esteem toward the Italian missionary by pointing out the external ingredients of his success, including Ricci’s cleverness in self-promotion, also at the expenses of his elder companion, Michele Ruggieri. We shall return to this point later.

Being an exercise in the art of biography, the book obviously focuses on its main character, Matteo Ricci, but tells the main episodes in the story of his life in connection with the places where they occurred and that may have exercised an influence on them. Thus, the book opens up with Macerata and Rome, where Ricci was born and spent his youth. Macerata in 1552, the year of Ricci’s birth, was an important city, situated in the Marche, a region so called because it stood at the margins of the Papal States.

Ricci had been sent to Rome by his father, a wealthy pharmacist, who had great plans for his son. He had Matteo enrolled at La Sapienza to study jurisprudence. Indeed, the study of law was not one of the faculties for which the university at Rome was renowned; it was “a significant second-line law school that produced a large number of graduates.”² Although Hsia is right in pointing out that “we know next to nothing about Matteo at the university” (p. 5), we can still make a few conjectures that may help us get a better understanding of his intellectual background. In this review, attention will be paid to the chapters in which Hsia discusses Ricci’s education in Rome and Lisbon, connecting it with the missionary’s textual production in China, thereby providing a few integrations that hopefully will enrich our understanding of Ricci as a “visiting...