Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Historical on Chinese Christianity (of both Catholic and Protestant varieties) has been enjoying a veritable boom in recent years. In the immediate post-WWII era (up until the 1970s) on Christianity in China were primarily about the missions and missionaries and the role Christian missions played in China's opening up to the modern world. Then a whole generation of China historians turned to greener pastures because of new trends in historical research (such as social history, gender, urban history, Subaltern Studies, cultural history, and so forth). Some consciously turned away from studies because of personal political orientation (for instance, those who were sympathetic to the official Chinese perception of Western missionaries as the handmaiden of Euro-American imperialism). For a while anything to do with Christianity in China became so much taboo as not cool for most Western historians of China (including those Chinese scholars working in Western academia). Things have changed in the past decade or so. Informed by new sensibilities and disciplinary orientations (for example, a China-centred approach, microhistory, history, global history, or post-Western Christianity), aided by new archival materials and a greater degree of international scholarly collaboration (especially between Chinese and Western scholars), and spurred by a renewed international interest in better understanding the ongoing Christianity saga in an increasingly open and prosperous China, a new generation of China historians have re-embraced the topic of Christianity in China and produced some astonishingly refreshing and illuminating results. For them, the most crucial question is how Christianity became Chinese .Eugenio Menegon's Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China only exemplifies but sets an even higher standard for this new and expansive scholarship. It has just won the prestigious Joseph Levenson Book Prize (Pre-1900 Category) from the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (2011). This book is a masterful account of the intricate process of how post-Reformation Catholicism was brought to some very remote corners of dynastic China and eventually was made into a local religion. The temporal focus of the book is primarily on the period from the arrival of the first Dominican friars in China in the 1630s to right before the First Opium War (1840-42). The geographical focus is on Fuan (pronounced as Fu An), a county within the larger region of northeastern Fujian Province known conventionally as Mindong (Eastern Fujian), which became one of the earliest strongholds of Catholic missionary activities and convert activism. The diversity of sources mobilized by Menegon to tell this story is impressive. Menegon visited archives and libraries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas and pored over materials in Chinese, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and German (almost none in English except secondary sources, understandably, given the period and locale of his focus).Besides the introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into two sections. The first section, chapters 1-4, is largely a diachronic account of the different phases of the localization of Catholicism in Fuan. The second section (chapters 5-8) is thematically arranged, examining the characteristics of the Fuan Catholics, their institutional arrangements (priestly work, communal and exorcistic rituals, lay devotional organizations such as the Third Order and the Confraternity of the Rosary and the community of Christian virgins known as beatas ). The first generation of Fuan converts, most of whom were degree holders and government-sponsored students preparing for the civil service examinations, sought out and brought the first Dominican friar Angelo Cocchi from Fuzhou (the prefectural seat on the coast) to mountainous and remote Fuan in 1632 to set up the first parish in the area

Archaeology · China · Christianity · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Westernization · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · china · Church history · Fujian Sheng · Missions