Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe by David Porter (review)

Reviews 173 modernize spelling and punctuation (except in the case of Elizabeth's holograph texts), and selectively list variants. Marcus's call formore theorists to become editors is a fitting place to end the volume: textuality must concern all literary scholars. This collection gives voice to a desire to edit texts in a way more attuned to our understanding of the collabo rative, multiple forms of Renaissance texts; it speaks thus both of possibility and of compromise. David Porter. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xiv+296 pp. $49.50. Reviewed by Robert Markley David Porter's Ideographia is among the most compre hensive studies to date of the European fascination with China and things Chinese in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Porter draws effectively on a wide range of sources: the accounts of Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci who sought to reconcile Confucianism and Christianity; the studies of sinophiles such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the defenses of a Chinese aesthetic in land scape gardening penned by William Chambers; the jeremi ads by eighteenth-century moralists who saw in chinoiserie, tea-drinking, and porcelain-collecting the enervation, ifnot emasculation, of English national identity; and the respons es of members of McCartney's embassy in 1793-94 to what they perceived as the political, cultural, and economic stag nation of the Qing dynasty. Arguing that Europeans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries found in the Chinese ideograph an all-purpose emblem of historical, rep resentational, political, and even religious legitimacy, Porter crafts an important and engaging study of European per ceptions of the Middle Kingdom and the artifacts by and through which it became known in the West. While taking into account recent work in postcolonial theory, Ideographia explores the "variations on the ideographic fantasy [which] have engendered not only exotic visions of the East but also reassessments of established ways of thinking within the 174 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies West" (242). Along with the recent and ongoing work of Jonathan Lamb, Bernadette Andrea, Ania Loomba, Jonathan Burton, Srinivas Aravamudan, Lydia Liu, Lionel Jensen, and Rajani Sudan, among others, Porter's book helps to re-envision encounters between East and West in the early modern period. Ideographia is composed of four sections which treat in more-or-less chronological order the vagaries of European attitudes toward China. In the seventeenth century, the influential work of Matteo Ricci, the head of the first long term Jesuit mission in China, produced a doctrine of accom modationism that sought to minimize differences between Catholicism and Confucianism. Crucial to a century of western celebrations of Chinese culture was the notion of genealogical legitimacy, which Porter identifies as a recur ring trope in discussions of the Middle Kingdom's cultural, philosophical, and sociopolitical authority. For the Jesuits and many of their European readers, the stability and wealth of China, seemingly symbolized by its "rational" lan guage, contributed to idealized visions of an empire that lacked only a formal conversion to Christianity to realize its promise as the most powerful and pious nation on Earth. Porter situates European (mis)understandings of the Chinese language within the seventeenth century's fascina tion for real characters and universal languages, and he con vincingly traces the fortunes of the "ideographic fantasy" from John Webb, through Leibniz, down tomid-century lin guists such as Gottfried Bayer. By the eighteenth century, the objects of consumer desire in western Europe?notably porcelain and tea? became synecdoches for a China reimagined as both wealthy and decadent, refined and effeminate, financially powerful and yet socially, politically, culturally, and economically stagnant. While Voltaire and Bayle use China as a satiric standard against which to judge the failings of Christendom, chinoiserie emptied or flattened the content, the "cultural value" (139), of Chinese artifacts in the West and reduced them and their land of origin to emblems of a self-indulgent fascination with exoticism, luxury, and conspicuous con sumption. By the time of McCartney's efforts to open trade to China, members of his embassy such as John Barrow Reviews 175 could complain about the boring sameness of the empire, its * 'atmosphere of dulness and...