Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623-1688) and the Chinese Heaven: The Composition of the Astronomical Corpus, its Diffusion and Reception in the European Republic of Letters (review)

The Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88) was one of the most important figures in the seventeenth-century Jesuit mission in Beijing, where he was the successor to Adam Schall von Bell at the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy. This monograph is a book-historical account of Verbiest's most significant written production, not so much a single work as a corpus of texts, in manuscript, print, and woodcut form, which set out to explain to European readers the activities of the Jesuits in promoting European astronomy to the Chinese. The corpus includes the printed book Astronomia Europaea (Dillingen, 1687), but also embraces a large number of manuscript books in libraries across the world. Alongside these, there is also the remarkable series of woodcuts depicting the construction of the instruments set up under Verbiest's direction at the imperial observatory in Beijing. This corpus represents a crucial primary source for the historian of the Jesuits' astronomical work in China, but it is also a fascinating document of the Jesuits' own efforts to promote and defend their missionary methods for readers in Europe.

Golvers is an authority on Verbiest, having previously published a scholarly edition of the Astronomia Europaea, the printed book that figures as part of the corpus studied here (The Astronomia Europaea of Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (Dillingen, 1687), Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 28; Nettetal, 1993), as well as numerous articles on other aspects of Verbiest's work. This volume forms the sequel to these earlier studies, in that it traces in detail the bibliographical history of the composition and reception of the Verbiest corpus. Golvers sets out the contents of the book and the relationship between the various segments in the various manuscript copies; he considers the public for which Verbiest was writing and his aims; he outlines the sources upon which Verbiest drew, and gives a detailed material bibliography of the corpus. There is even a chapter analysing Verbiest's Latin vocabulary. Perhaps most impressive of all, Golvers has tracked down over 220 copies of Verbiest's texts (manuscripts, printed books, and the woodcuts) in libraries around the world, and the book concludes with a thorough census of these extant copies (pp. 339–486), including forty-six illustrations and four maps. The longest chapter of the book, with perhaps a wider interest for intellectual historians of Europe (Ch. 9, pp. 175–317), describes the circulation and reception of Verbiest's work in Europe. This has valuable new information concerning the European career of Philippe Couplet (the Jesuit who brought many of Verbiest's texts to Europe), as well as sections on the links between the Beijing Jesuits and St Petersburg, and the reception of Verbiest's work in German-speaking lands, Portugal, France, the Low Countries, Britain, and Russia. This chapter forms a remarkable case study of the circulation of texts in manuscript (and in Latin) around the late-seventeenth-century Republic of Letters.

Throughout the book Golvers's scholarship is impeccable. The result of many years' work in countless libraries, this monograph is a highly technical and painstakingly thorough analysis of the book-historical aspects of Verbiest's major work. Since Verbiest is a figure of primary importance in the history of Jesuit science in China, Golvers's work will be an enduring and important resource for historians of Jesuit science, of the Jesuit mission in China, of the contact between 'Western' and 'Chinese' science in the early modern period, and of European knowledge of China in the early Enlightenment.