Author: Hao WANG, Associate Professor, College of Liberal Arts, Shanghai University.
Abstract:
This is a summary of the author’s doctoral dissertation finished in 2017 at Fudan University, which focuses on the interaction between the modern Society of Jesus and modern scholarship both in China and in Europe. Compared with either the Jesuits during the Ming-Qing transition or Protestant missionaries in the late Qing and Republican eras, the new Society of Jesus has received little attention from scholars of Chinese history and remains peripheral. Taking as its case studies the three fields of Meteorology, European Sinology, and Chinese Historical Studies, this essay analyzes the position and role of Jesuit scholarship in both Chinese and European contexts and demonstrates how the periphery influences the center as well as the different types of interactions. The meteorological activities of the new Society of Jesus, for example, stimulated the formation of local academic centers of meteorology in China. The new Jesuits’ Sinology provided European Sinology with its primary research foundation and constituted the upper links of the chain of academic production. In return, the Sinology of the new Jesuits, as used and critiqued by Chen Yuan, played an essential role in establishing the paradigm of historical studies of religions in modern China.
Keywords:
Periphery, Centre, Society of Jesus, Jesuit History, Modern China
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