The first Catholic missionaries of the early modern period arrived in mainland China in 1582, but the first Catholic Bible did not appear until 1968, long after Protestant missionaries already had published several versions. The mystery behind the four-hundred-year gap is not a why question but instead involves many how questions--primarily, how did communication of the Bible take place in the Chinese context without a written text in the Chinese language? This book uncovers narrative form...

A renewed attention to visual culture is one of the recent developments in the study of cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The subject of this book is the illustrated Life of Christ presented to the Chinese emperor in 1640 by the Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell S.J. (1592-1666). The origin of the work is a small parchment booklet with coloured miniature paintings based on a wide variety of prints by well-known European engr...

When European missionaries arrived in East Asia in the sixteenth century, they entered ongoing conversations about cosmology and world geography. Soon after, intellectuals in Ming China, Edo Japan, and Joseon Korea selectively encompassed elements of the late Renaissance worldview, leading to the creation of new artifacts that mitigated old and new knowledge in creative ways. Simultaneously, missionaries and their collaborators transcribed, replicated, and recombined from East Asian artifa...