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Reviewed by:
  • Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724
  • Jerry Dennerline
Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724. By Liam Matthew Brockey (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2007) 419 pp. $35.00

In this masterful study, Brockey proposes to tell "in the main a European story, even if the Jesuits' efforts in China have traditionally been set down as part of a Chinese tale (12)." The tale as previously told has enshrined Ricci's account of his journey from Macao in 1582 to Beijing in 1610 as defining the mission whereas the church's rejection of the Jesuit position on the performance of Chinese rites a century later ended it.1 New scholarship using Roman and Chinese sources leads to a much more complex story of Roman Catholicism in China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With his deft analysis of a surprisingly [End Page 162] underutilized source on the history of the Jesuit mission—Portuguese language letters and reports in ecclesiastical archives in Portugal and Rome—Brockey has constructed a new chronology and trajectory for the Jesuit mission itself, placing it in what he calls "a proper European context (17)." Intentionally or not, he also brings the Jesuits back into the increasingly complex history of Chinese religious life.

The first half of the book is a new chronological account of the mission, turning not on the charismatic founders and subsequent events in Beijing and Rome but on the organization of the Jesuits' Chinese vice-province under Niccolò Longobardo in 1619 and subsequent developments throughout China. Major political events—such as the Nanjing persecution of 1615, the Ming court's crackdown on elite intellectual and political associations in 1625, the Qing conquest of 1644/45, the confinement of the Jesuits to Canton in 1667, and the rise of the anti Jesuit French Vicars Apostolic—are all peripheral to the main trajectory. Controversially and persuasively, Brockey wants to show that by 1633, when Ming court factionalism and military defeats led to the execution of the Christian official Sun Yuanhua and the abandonment of his house in Jiading as the central residence for Jesuit learning and training, the Jesuits no longer needed literati protection. The mission was becoming a decentralized organization based on local catechists and devotional confraternities.

The second half of the book analyzes topically (1) Jesuit education, (2) Jesuit study of Chinese language and thought, (3) practices of conversion, (4) organization within the vice-province by priests, coadjutors, and catechists, and (5) the differences among devotional, penetential, and charitable confraternities. Meticulous attention to details and extensive quotations from the sources provide copious evidence for the author's argument. In the first topic, for example, the memoirs of José Monteiro describe his training at Elvora in 1665 alongside others whom he did not know would join him in China (211). In the second, the study notes and letters of Sicilian Jesuit Francesco Brancati in the 1630s and Monteiro's standardized Chinese textbook of 1700 help to demonstrate the effects of a shift in the order's ratio studorium from residence-based Chinese classical learning to abbreviated study and assignment to widely dispersed residences (273–286). In the fifth topic, Brancati's worries in 1661 that "the exercises of the secret congregations of Palermo and Naples," as performed by his fifty-three penetential confraternities in the Shanghai area, would not be understood by his successors from Elvora and Mechelen explain the subsequent standardization of confraternities into four types. If the book's structure sometimes leads to seemingly unnecessary repetition, it successfully manages to highlight the historical development of organization and practice.

Alongside fascinating details about forcing vegetarians to eat beef before administering sacraments, insisting that men who converted denounce their family ties to concubines, banning food at meetings of charitable associations, and monitoring excesses of self-mortification, [End Page 163] there emerges a clear argument of how the mission was able to thrive at a distance from court and literati centers; it counted 200,000 believers by 1700. For Brockey, "The indispensable cogs in the clockwork of the mission church were its organizational confraternities" (363), based on one of the hallmarks of the Catholic...

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