Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (review)

This is a study of microhistory (a local history) that challenges several widely accepted assumptions of macrohistory (Chinese history as a whole). The founding of the Fuan Catholic church in the early seventeenth century and its survival down to the present day contradicts a claim that has long pervaded Sino-Western history, namely, that Chinese culture is fundamentally hostile to a foreign faith like Christianity. In addition, Menegon challenges the widely held belief that the uncompromising tactics of the Spanish friars were always less effective than the accommodative approach of the Jesuits who cultivated a Confucian Christianity.

In 1632, several Christian literati from Fuan met the Dominican priest Angelo Cocchi in Fuzhou. They helped him to evade an expulsion order, and eventually brought him to their mountainous and remote region of Fuan in northern Fujian province. Admittedly, the Dominican missionaries can be credited with only part of the initial impetus in establishing this Christian community. Far more important were the Fuan Christians who embraced and transformed the faith and martyred themselves for it. In 1632, the Spanish bishop Diego Aduarte, from his base in the Philippines, wrote of a plan for a “spiritual conquest” (conquista spiritual) of China, a land with “room enough for thousands of conquistadores” (41). Although we tend to dismiss such a statement as chauvinistic, its application in Fuan was surprisingly effective.

A second area in which Menegon breaks new ground is in his presentation of the Dominicans’ unique ministry to women—a sphere to which the friars gave more attention than the Jesuits (304). Rather than build the model of Christian virginity upon native virgin goddesses or Buddhist nuns, the friars drew from other Chinese models of chastity (zhen) (316). In the Ming and Qing periods, the neo-Confucian ideal of chastity had become incorporated into a state-sanctioned system that used arches and shrines to honor women who committed suicide to protect their chastity and to honor widows whose loyalty to their deceased husbands led them to refuse remarriage or even to commit suicide. The Chinese ideal was blended with European models of female chastity called beatas, which had emerged in thirteenth-century Europe as a lay religious order (“third order”) of women and later evolved into a female religious community of the “second order” (250). These Chinese beatas belonged to more affluent families and resisted familial and Confucian pressure to marry. As such, they represented a feminist force. By 1816, Fujian province had 300 beatas out of a total Christian population of apparently 40,000 (148).

To assess its historical significance, microhistory must ultimately be related to macrohistory and Menegon’s failure to do so represents a serious weakness of this book. Was the Fuan Christian community a fascinating but isolated exception to the entire body of Christians in China, or was it a model of local church development that applied, mutatis mutandis, to other regions of China? Apart from this weakness, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars is a meticulously researched book and a work of unusual quality for a first book by a scholar.