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Reviewed by:
  • The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650–1785
  • Eugenio Menegon
The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650–1785. By David E. Mungello. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. 2001. Pp. xiv, 210. $70.00 clothbound; $26.95 paperback.)

Catholicism first reached China in the Mongol period, when Franciscan missionaries traveled through Central Asia to the court of the Khans. The early Catholic communities established by friars, however, had all but disappeared by the mid-Ming period (late fourteenth century). It was only in the late sixteenth century, with the arrival of the Jesuits in Macao, that missionary work resumed in earnest. The story of Matteo Ricci, S.J., and his confrères in the following generations has been told many times, and research on the encounter of Christianity and European knowledge as brought to China by the Jesuits, particularly within the upper echelons of Chinese society (literati and the imperial court), continues in full swing.

It is only in recent years, however, that scholars in the English-speaking world have started to pay increasing attention to the diffusion of Christianity in rural and "popular" contexts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing more on devotion and ritual than on science and fine arts, and examining also the work of orders and congregations other than the Jesuits, such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Propaganda Fide, and the Missions Étrangères de Paris [End Page 197] (on these missions, we already have a rich, although mostly dated, literature in European languages other than English).

David Mungello's latest monograph is a pioneering effort in this direction. Through a number of books and articles published over the years, Mungello has explored the transmission of Chinese thought and culture to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the "inculturation" of Christianity in China. In these earlier works, he has shown predilection for intellectual history, such as in his book on the native converted literatus Zhang Xingyao (1994), where he dissected Zhang's writings to prove how the new Christian creed was interpreted within prevailing Confucian intellectual context. Conversely, in The Spirit and the Flesh, Mungello directs his attention to the daily life of the Franciscan Christian communities in the northern Chinese province of Shandong between 1650 and 1785. He chronicles through the biographical experiences of Spanish and Italian Franciscans, belonging both to the Spanish Province of San Gregorio Magno and to Propaganda Fide, the difficult beginnings, the hard-won developments, and the eventual demise of the Shandong mission. On the one hand, the life of the mission was hampered by quarrels over the acceptance of Chinese rituality and over the contested missionary jurisdictions of Spain, Portugal, and the Papacy. On the other hand, Chinese government prohibitions of Christianity (starting in 1723) and waves of anti-Christian campaigns at the provincial level led to the extinction of the Franciscan presence at the end of the eighteenth century.

Mungello's main sources are the original reports published in the series Sinica Franciscana (1929-1997), and some manuscripts from the Propaganda Fide Archives in Rome and the National Library of Naples. The unequal documentary coverage of the Franciscan letters, as well as the hybrid chronological-thematic organization of The Spirit and the Flesh, yield a narrative that feels at times uneven, with numerous subsections opened by detailed biographical notes on personalities, especially missionaries. What emerges is a complex picture of ecclesiastical politics and religious controversy—the dominant themes—while other themes, such as the very interesting discussion of the writings of the Christian literatus Shang Huqing (chap. 3, "The Attempt to Blend Confucianism and Christianity"), or the local dynamics of "heterodox" religion in Shandong (in chap. 5) play a less prominent role. Precisely these two areas could have been given further space, offering a more integrated picture of the intellectual milieu of Christian literati to which Shang Huqing belonged (see a reference at p. 47 to mutual influences among late Ming—early Qing Christian literati), and providing a richer contextual local history of Shandong's society and religion in late imperial times.

The chief contribution of this work is to open up for examination by a larger public the little-known Franciscan...

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