Abstract
The Spanish clergymen Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza and Domingo Fernandez Navarrete are two of the most significant western commentators on China from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both are considered modern historians, though they exalt Chinese civilisation while simultaneously seeking to replace Chinese religious practice with Christianity. Mendoza, author of one of the most widely read treatises on China of all time, favours a peaceful process of evangelisation, but implicitly privileges the West over China through a subtle configuration of race, gender, and sexuality. Navarrete, a leading figure in the Chinese Rites Controversy, travelled extensively in China and as a result came to adopt a bi-cultural perspective that led him to criticise the West. Mendoza and Navarrete together elucidate a proto-Orientalism, yet they also reveal the fluidity of East/West relations and the mutability of cultural identity.Los clerigos espanoles Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza y Domingo Fernandez Navarrete son dos de lo...
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