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  • Letters of a Peking Jesuit: The Correspondence of Ferdinand Verbiest, SJ (1623-1688) ed. by Noël Golvers
  • Liam Matthew Brockey
Letters of a Peking Jesuit: The Correspondence of Ferdinand Verbiest, SJ (1623-1688). Edited by Noël Golvers. Revised and Expanded. [Leuven Chinese Studies, Volume XXXV.] (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, University of Leuven. 2017. Pp. 962. €82,00. ISBN 978-908-2090-987.)

With the exception of Matteo Ricci, few figures loom larger over the history of the Jesuit mission to China than that of Ferdinand Verbiest. He stands as the exotic counterpart to the European court Jesuits of the early modern era, employing his skills as an astronomer and engineer in the service of the Kangxi Emperor at Beijing. Indeed, it is primarily due to the prestige of Verbiest, as well as of his immediate predecessor in the role of court astronomer Johann Adam Schall von Bell, that the Jesuit mission to China was for centuries considered a metropolitan affair; that is, one centered upon the Chinese imperial capital in the hopes of bringing about the conversion of the emperor himself. Scholarship in recent decades has revised this rather limited view of the Jesuit enterprise, thanks in no small part to the reconsideration of the missionaries at court whose role was understood by contemporaries to provide protection and, indirectly, patronage to missionaries in the far-flung provinces of the Qing Empire. This new volume of Verbiest's correspondence, painstakingly compiled by Noël Golvers over the course of two decades, is an essential contribution to that on-going project of reimagining the Jesuits in the court of the Chinese emperors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Letters of a Peking Jesuit. wholly supersedes an earlier edition of Verbiest's correspondence published by H. Josson and Léopold Willaert in 1938, a work that built on the research of H. Bosmans in the early twentieth century. The identification of a substantial number of other documents, as well as a number of errors in the previous edition, gave ample justification for Golvers' new volume. The result of his efforts—including his many other publications on the court Jesuits—is the most complete testament of Verbiest's work that will likely be possible. This volume of correspondence includes not only letters written by Verbiest, but also those sent to him by other missionaries and prelates around the globe. The volume therefore includes documents in several languages including Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch; a variety of tongues that demanded of Golvers a polyglottism on par with his subject. Letters of a Peking Jesuit. is also a triumph of bibliographic sleuthing: Golvers tracked down autograph and copied versions of Verbiest's correspondence in libraries and archives throughout the world, cataloging the extant copies in the edition's apparatus. And finally, the editor's depth of knowledge of late Renaissance culture, as well as his many years of studying neo-Latin literature and missionary writings on China, enabled him to provide invaluable annotations to the letters, replete with references to modern and early modern scholarship.

The letters included in Golvers's edition describe several of the iconic moments associated with the Jesuits at the Kangxi court. Verbiest's scientific endeavors are described in considerable detail, as well as his personal relationships with imperial officials and the emperor. Verbiest's work on behalf of the interests of the Society of Jesus, as well as his repeated interventions in favor of the Catholic [End Page 590] missions in China more broadly, are also documented throughout. The variety of topics discussed in the letters themselves are contextualized by a succinct biography of Verbiest, as well as by the numerous explanatory notes that accompany the texts and the comprehensive indices. This large volume will therefore be of great interest to specialists, primarily as a reference work and a source for future scholars working on the Jesuits in China, the early Kangxi period, and early modern missions.

Liam Matthew Brockey
Michigan State University
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