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Friendship and Hospitality

Friendship and Hospitality PDF Author: Dongfeng Xu
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438484968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Book Description
The Jesuit mission to China more than four hundred years ago has been the subject of sustained scholarly investigation for centuries. Focusing on the concepts of friendship and hospitality as they were both theorized and practiced by the Jesuit missionaries and their Confucian hosts, this book offers a new, comparative, and deconstructive reading of the interaction between these two vastly different cultures. Dongfeng Xu analyzes how the Jesuits presented their concept of friendship to achieve their evangelical goals and how the Confucians reacted in turn by either displaying or denying hospitality. Challenging the hierarchical view in traditional discourse on friendship and hospitality by revealing the irreducible otherness as the condition of possibility of the two concepts, Xu argues that one legacy of the Jesuit-Confucian encounter has been the shared recognition that cultural differences are what both motivated and conditioned cross-cultural exchanges and understandings.

The Concept of Friendship and the Culture of Hospitality: The Encounter Between the Jesuits and Late Ming China

The Concept of Friendship and the Culture of Hospitality: The Encounter Between the Jesuits and Late Ming China PDF Author: Dongfeng Xu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124798516
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
This dissertation discusses the China-West encounter in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, an encounter initiated by the Jesuit priests who took their apostolic missions from the Post-Reformation Europe to the Middle Kingdom. Of the issues raised and contended during this encounter, which cover virtually all concerns that the human race has ever had such as culture, religion, ethics, moral philosophy, arts, literature, science, technology and many more, the dissertation chooses for examination some topics related directly and closely to the concepts and practices of friendship and hospitality. Divided into two parts, with the first devoted to the friendship presented and promoted by the Jesuits in China and the second, to the Confucian hospitality displayed or denied to the missionaries, the dissertation contains seven main chapters, each approaching from its own perspective an issue related to the subjects of friendship and hospitality. Chapter One investigates the thinking of friendship in the Society of Jesus, discussing what friendship as determined by and elaborated in the Ignatian spirituality means to the Jesuits. Chapter Two continues the discussion on the Jesuit view of friendship by focusing on one specific example of work, A Treatise on Friendship, written in classical Chinese by Matteo Ricci (1552--1610), an early Jesuit missionary to China. Treating friendship as a concept concerning alterity, the discussion looks to dismantle the effort of assimilation in Ricci's friendship. Indeed, Ricci elaborated vigorously on friendship, hoping to establish some cultural analogy between, and eventually a Christian assimilation of, the West and China. His rhetoric and his very act of speaking to the Chinese audience, however, not only show that the difference could not be erased, but also prove that alterity is the absolute condition of possibility under which friendship--friendship between two individuals or a friendly relation between two cultures--happens. Chapter Three argues that Ricci's effort and practice in translating the term or concept of Deus or God into Chinese enacts both the impossibility and necessity of translation. Convinced by his theology that the name of God, the most proper of all proper names, had been from the beginning innate in all cultures and languages, Ricci argued that, a ready phrase Shangdi or Lord-on-High that he found from the Confucian classics, was the indication that the ancient Chinese had faith in God. The discussion will argue that Ricci's intention to use his translation, that is, his "rediscovery" of God in ancient China, to assimilate China under the Christian God as a universal and absolute reference could not succeed for the simple reason that he could not keep the same signified while adorning it with other signifiers. With Chapter Four, an introductory chapter on the Derridean and Levinasian theories of hospitality and the Chinese traditional Rite of Hospitality, the dissertation moves into Part II, the part tackling Ming China's Sino-centrism through examining from different angles the Confucian response to the Jesuits. Chapters Five and Six deal with a related problem: the impact on the Confucians and their ideologies left by modern science and technology such as cartography and astronomy of the West introduced by the Jesuits. With the world map showing the Chinese that the earth was a globe and the missionaries' calculation through modern mathematics being more accurate in the prediction of eclipse, the Confucians were forced to rethink and restructure their worldview and their dichotomy of the self and other. Chapter Seven takes this rethinking and restructuring further by looking at the Confucian effort to restore or return to the primitive Confucianism, a form of Confucianism supposedly free from and immune to foreign influences. But this attempt of restoration, an effort to separate the self from the other, the discussion will show, is already an assured sign that the other is nowhere else but in the self.

Friendship and Hospitality

Friendship and Hospitality PDF Author: Dongfeng Xu
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438484968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Book Description
The Jesuit mission to China more than four hundred years ago has been the subject of sustained scholarly investigation for centuries. Focusing on the concepts of friendship and hospitality as they were both theorized and practiced by the Jesuit missionaries and their Confucian hosts, this book offers a new, comparative, and deconstructive reading of the interaction between these two vastly different cultures. Dongfeng Xu analyzes how the Jesuits presented their concept of friendship to achieve their evangelical goals and how the Confucians reacted in turn by either displaying or denying hospitality. Challenging the hierarchical view in traditional discourse on friendship and hospitality by revealing the irreducible otherness as the condition of possibility of the two concepts, Xu argues that one legacy of the Jesuit-Confucian encounter has been the shared recognition that cultural differences are what both motivated and conditioned cross-cultural exchanges and understandings.

Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia

Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004370714
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 494

Book Description
Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia broadens the scope of the Western Classical tradition by offering pioneering insights (of leading scholars from Europe, East Asia, and North America) into East Asian receptions of Greco-Roman Antiquity.

Jesuits and Matriarchs

Jesuits and Matriarchs PDF Author: Nadine Amsler
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295743816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
In early modern China, Jesuit missionaries associated with the male elite of Confucian literati in order to proselytize more freely, but they had limited contact with women, whose ritual spaces were less accessible. Historians of Catholic evangelism have similarly directed their attention to the devotional practices of men, neglecting the interior spaces in Chinese households where women worshipped and undertook the transmission of Catholicism to family members and friends. Nadine Amsler’s investigation brings the domestic and devotional practices of women into sharp focus, uncovering a rich body of evidence that demonstrates how Chinese households functioned as sites of evangelization, religious conflict, and indigenization of Christianity. The resulting exploration of gendered realms in seventeenth-century China reveals networks of religious sociability and ritual communities among women as well as women’s remarkable acts of private piety. Amsler’s exhaustive archival research and attention to material culture reveals new insights about women’s agency and domestic activities, illuminating areas of Chinese and Catholic history that have remained obscure, if not entirely invisible, for far too long.

Chinese Sympathies

Chinese Sympathies PDF Author: Daniel Leonhard Purdy
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501759752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—German-speaking writers and thinkers in particular—identified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo's Travels. This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that framed China as being fundamentally similar to Europe. Analyzing key German literary texts—theological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cycles—Chinese Sympathies traces the paths from baroque-era missionary reports that accommodated Christianity with Confucianism to Goethe's concept of world literature, bridged by Enlightenment debates over cosmopolitanism and sympathy, culminating in a secular principle that allowed readers to identify meaningful similarities across culturally diverse literatures based on shared human experiences. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Commonplace Reading and Writing in Early Modern England and Beyond

Commonplace Reading and Writing in Early Modern England and Beyond PDF Author: Hao Tianhu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003813550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Approaching from bibliographical, literary, cultural, and intercultural perspectives, this book establishes the importance of Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden, a largely unexplored manuscript commonplace book to early modern English literature and culture in general. Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden is a seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book known primarily for its Shakespearean connections, which extracts works by dozens of early modern English authors, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Milton. This book sheds light on the broader significance of Hesperides that refashions our full knowledge of early modern authorship and plagiarism, composition, reading practice, and canon formation. Following two introductory chapters are three topical chapters, which respectively discuss plagiarism and early modern English writing, early modern English reading practice, and early modern English canon formation. The final chapter further expands the field to ancient China, comparing commonplace books with Chinese leishu, exploring Matteo Ricci’s cross-cultural commonplace writing, and re-reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in light of Ricci’s On Friendship. The solid book will serve as a must read for scholars and students of early modern English literature, manuscript study, commonplace books, history of the book, and intercultural study.

Shaping Virtuous Friendship

Shaping Virtuous Friendship PDF Author: Ana Carolina Hosne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Missionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 11

Book Description
Taking as a starting point his first treatise in Chinese, 'On Friendship' (Jiaoyou lun, 1595), this paper aims to analyze the process by which the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1583-1610) shaped the concept of virtuous friendship in late Ming China, specifically among the Confucian literati. 'On Friendship' is a treatise that reflects and is part of the Renaissance and humanist culture brought to China. It is, in part, a translation into Chinese of maxims by authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Herodotus, Augustine and Ambrose, juxtaposed with ideas derived from the Confucian tradition, especially those on virtuous friendship. In recent years, cultural historians have begun to recognize how important friendship was as a topic of great interest to late Ming intellectuals, which suggests that Ricci was attempting to participate in, and to benefit from, a discussion that was already taking place in China. This paper aims at analyzing the way Ricci shaped virtuous friendship in his Jiaoyou lun by taking both paths, the European and the Chinese, but also focusing on the more or less 'winding' nature of these paths. Indeed, Ricci's treatise was nurtured from different sources, which in turn implied selections and omissions. In a first section I address the less problematic aspect of Ricci's Jiaoyou lun: its humanistic hue; in a second section I focus on the adaptation to - but also the manipulation of - Confucian values and precepts; in a third section I address a key - and debatable - aspect, that is, the idea of Ricci's treatise as 'secular'. Last but not least, a fourth section is dedicated to concluding remarks.

A Jesuit in the Forbidden City

A Jesuit in the Forbidden City PDF Author: R. Po-chia Hsia
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191625116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
A 16th century Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci was the founder of the Catholic Mission in China and one of the most famous missionaries of all time. A pioneer in bringing Christianity to China, Ricci spent twenty eight years in the country, in which time he crossed the cultural divides between China and the West by immersing himself in the language and culture of his hosts. Even 400 years later, he is still one of the best known westerners in China, celebrated for introducing western scientific and religious ideas to China and for explaining Chinese culture to Europe. The first critical biography of Ricci to use all relevant sources, both Chinese and Western, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City tells the story of a remarkable life that bridged Counter-Reformation Catholic Europe and China under the Ming dynasty. Hsia follows the life of Ricci from his childhood in Macerata, through his education in Rome, to his sojourn in Portuguese India, before the start of his long journey of self-discovery and cultural encounter in the Ming realm. Along the way, we glimpse the workings of the Portuguese maritime empire in Asia, the mission of the Society of Jesus, and life in the European enclave of Macau on the Chinese coast, as well as invaluable sketches of Ricci's fellow Jesuits and portraits of the Chinese mandarins who formed networks indispensible for Ricci's success. Examining a range of new sources, Hsia offers important new insights into Ricci's long period of trial and frustration in Guangdong province, where he first appeared in the persona of a foreign Buddhist monk, before the crucial move to Nanchang in 1595 that led to his sustained intellectual conversation with a leading Confucian scholar and subsequent synthesis of Christianity and Confucianism in propagating the Gospels in China. With his expertise in cartography, mathematics, and astronomy, Ricci quickly won recognition, especially after he had settled in Nanjing in 1598, the southern capital of the Ming dynasty. As his reputation and friendships grew, Ricci launched into a sharp polemic against Buddhism, while his career found its crowning achievement in the imperial capital of Beijing, leaving behind a life, work, and legacy that is still very much alive today.

Male Friendship in Ming China

Male Friendship in Ming China PDF Author: Martin Huang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047419588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
This is the first interdisciplinary effort to study friendship in late imperial China from the perspective of gender history. Friendship was valorized with unprecedented enthusiasm in Ming China (1368-1644). Some Ming literati even proposed that friendship was the most fundamental relationship among the so-called “five cardinal human relationships”. Why the cult of friendship in Ming China? How was male friendship theorized, practiced and represented during that period? These are some of the questions the current volume deals with. Coming from different disciplines (history, musicology and literary studies), the contributors thoroughly explore the complexities and the gendered nature of friendship in Ming China. This volume has also been published as a special theme issue of Brill's journal NAN NÜ, Men, Women and Gender in China.

Giulio Aleni, Kouduo richao, and Christian–Confucian Dialogism in Late Ming Fujian

Giulio Aleni, Kouduo richao, and Christian–Confucian Dialogism in Late Ming Fujian PDF Author: Song Gang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429959206
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 455

Book Description
Christian dialogic writings flourished in the Catholic missions in late Ming China. This study focuses on the mission work of the Italian Jesuit Giulio Aleni (Ai Rulüe 艾儒略, 1582–1649) in Fujian and the unique text Kouduo richao 口鐸日抄 (Diary of Oral Admonitions, 1630–1640) that records the religious and intellectual conversations among the Jesuits and local converts. By examining the mechanisms of dialogue in Kouduo richao and other Christian works distinguished by a certain dialogue form, the author of the present work aims to reveal the formation of a hybrid Christian–Confucian identity in late Ming Chinese religious experience. By offering the new approach of dialogic hybridization, the book not only treats dialogue as an important yet underestimated genre in late Ming Christian literature, but it also uncovers a self–other identity complex in the dialogic exchanges of the Jesuits and Chinese scholars. Giulio Aleni, Kouduo richao, and Christian–Confucian Dialogism in Late Ming Fujian is a multi-faceted investigation of the religious, philosophical, ethical, scientific, and artistic topics discussed among the Jesuits and late Ming scholars. This comprehensive research echoes what the distinguished Sinologist Erik Zürcher (1928–2008) said about the richness and diversity of Chinese Christian texts produced in the 17th and 18th centuries. Following Zürcher’s careful study and annotated full translation of Kouduo richao (Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, LVI/1-2), the present work features a set of new findings beyond the endeavours of Zürcher and other scholars. With the key concept of Christian-Confucian dialogism, it tells the intriguing story of Aleni’s mission work and the thriving Christian communities in late Ming Fujian.