Global Entanglements of a Man who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and his Conflicted Worlds, written by Dominic Sachsenmaier

Henrietta Harrison

doi:10.1163/15700658-12342020-17

Abstract

Global Entanglements of a Man who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and his Conflicted Worlds, written by Dominic Sachsenmaier

Highlights

This book is a study of Zhu Zongyuan, a member of the Chinese provinciallevel elite who wrote several texts about Christianity in the mid-seventeenth century
Sachsenmaier does not posit Europe versus China, but instead shines a light on the newly global Catholic Church and the collapsing Ming government. His focus is on the groups of men that made up these two institutions, their factional conflicts, and the way they aligned themselves in relation to their own domestic or institutional agendas. This allows him to articulate more clearly than I have seen elsewhere the implication of most the recent scholarship on the Jesuit mission to China: that what used to be known as the method of accommodation was, at least in the Chinese context, not so much a Jesuit policy as the interaction of European ideas around natural theology with the Chinese late Ming elite’s syncretic approach to religion and philosophy
The result was a way of thinking and a set of texts by authors like Zhu Zongyuan which philosophize the interactions and differences between Confucian and Christian thought

Summary

Introduction

This book is a study of Zhu Zongyuan, a member of the Chinese provinciallevel elite who wrote several texts about Christianity in the mid-seventeenth century. Whilst the detail is careful and accurately done, Sachsenmaier’s interests are in the grand topics of global history and in particular the issue of conflict.

Results

Conclusion