La Chine des Ming et de Matteo Ricci (1552–1610): Le premier dialogue des savoirs avec l’Europe (review)

La Chine des Ming et de Matteo Ricci (1552–1610): Le premier dialogue des savoirs avec l’Europe. Édition établie par ISABELLE LANDRY-DERON. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf/Institut Ricci, 2013. 242 pp. J20 (pb). ISBN 978-2-20409617 -1 The year 2010 marked the 400th anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci (Chinese name Li Madou 利瑪竇, 1552–1610), the first Jesuit to reside in Beijing. During that year, a large number of academic conferences took place around the world in commemoration of the man who is regarded as a pioneer of exchanges between China and Europe in the early modern period. The volume under review contains the proceedings of one such conference, organized by the Paris Ricci Institute, and held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. It was entitled ‘‘L’échange des savoirs entre la Chine et l’Europe au temps de Matteo Ricci’’ (The exchange of knowledge between China and Europe in Matteo Ricci’s time). Isabelle Landry-Deron’s introduction contextualizes Ricci’s life and itinerary, and highlights the main issues that are discussed in the three parts of the volume. Firstly, how did Ricci succeed in establishing residence in Ming China, taking into account the characteristics of Ming society and culture? Secondly, what religions were present in this empire in Ricci’s time, and what representations of these religions have been constructed in history and historiography? The third part of the book deals with the sciences in Ricci’s work and in the exchanges between Europe and China. The structure of the volume mostly follows the schedule of the conference. Part 1 opens with a synthetic note by Michel Cartier, discussing Ricci’s status in China: as there were no European residents in the Ming Empire at the time, it is indeed necessary to explain how Ricci succeeded in living there for more than two decades. As Cartier argues, the protection of local officials played a key role there; curiosity towards the foreigner, rather than interest in his religion, was the most frequent motivation among them. This explains the fragility of the mission’s status to the end of Ricci’s life and thereafter. The next two papers follow up this line in that they focus on those members of the Chinese literati elite who had contact with Ricci. Frédéric Wang discusses the scholars and officials who met Ricci during his time in Nanjing, which was the empire’s secondary capital at the time. There, Wang argues, Ricci drew the sympathy of a number of followers of the intuitionist philosopher Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529), who were also influenced by Buddhism; they seem to have formed a rather restricted network. Once in Beijing, on the other hand, Ricci befriended a number of strongly anti-Buddhist officials, a stand that was closer to Ricci’s own. This contribution gives some valuable insight into both the social and intellectual dimensions of the Chinese networks on which the founding of the Jesuit mission to China relied. Shenwen Li’s contribution follows an approach that is in a sense symmetrical to that of Frédéric Wang, by discussing Ricci’s two trips to Beijing from the missionary’s own standpoint, showing that they were linked to the need felt by the Jesuits for a Portuguese embassy to the Ming court, which in their view could alone secure the possibility of a long-lasting evangelizing enterprise in China. In the last contribution of this first part, Viviane Alleton discusses the knowledge and representations of the Chinese language and script in sixteenth-century Europe; she shows that Ricci contributed to the knowledge of linguistics in both China, where his work drew 230 BOOK REVIEWS scholars’ attention to the alphabet, and in Europe, where the relatively accurate account that he gave of the Chinese languages was reshaped, and somewhat distorted, by a search for a universal language, and the use of the grammar of European languages as a yardstick to assess other languages. Part 2 of the volume also comprises four contributions; only the first three are directly relevant to religion. Françoise Aubin offers a panorama of the various polities that surrounded the Ming Empire...