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.
Tabella dei contenuti
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Friendship and the Jesuits
1. Striving for Divine Union: The Wholly Other and the Jesuit Vocation
2. Other Rhetoric: Reading Matteo Ricci’s
On Friendship
Part II: Hospitality and the Confucians
3. The Subject of Hospitality and Sino-centrism: Theory and Chinese Cultural Background
4. Situating the Middle Kingdom: Matteo Ricci’s World Map, the Wobbling Center, and the Undoing of the Host
5. Reforming the Calendar: The Ming Empire’s Stairway to Heaven through the Jesuits
6. The Confucian Hospitality: Responding to the Jesuits
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Circa l’autore
Dongfeng Xu is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Colgate University.
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