Enlightened by China : representations and myths in 18th-century Europe / Michela Catto

Available thorugh Viella Editrice

Synopsis:

What did Europe see when it looked at China? In the 18th century, it saw a laboratory of civilization and a testing ground for its own ideas. Enlightened by China. Representations and Myths in 18^th-Century Europe reconstructs the birth and decline of the myth of China: from the Confucian model celebrated by the Jesuits to censorship by the Roman church; from the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses and Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description de la Chine to the Chinese presence in Europe; from Paolo Mattia Doria to Oliver Goldsmith and the Neapolitan reformers, from the representation of Europe for the Chinese to the visual motifs that shaped the collective imagination. What emerges is an intertwined history of religion, politics, economics, and visual cultures, in which admiration and dominion, science and propaganda, universalism and empire challenge one another. It is a book that helps us to understand how the Enlightenment also constructed itself through China, and how Europe shaped its own modernity.

Index:

• Michela Catto, Introduction
• Irene Gaddo, The Fragile Empire of Faith. Representations and Realities of the Jesuit China Mission (17^th-18^th centuries)
• Monica De Togni, Are Ghosts Haunting Europe? Chinese People in 18^th-Century Italy
• Michela Catto, Jesuit China Challenges Rome. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description de la Chine between Jesuit Knowledge and Roman Condemnation
• Pierre Antoine Fabre, Sabina Pavone, China in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (18^th-19^th centuries). New Approaches to a Famous and Little-known Publishing Phenomenon
• Francesco Borghesi, Daniel Canaris, Paolo Mattia Doria’s Image of China in La vita civile and his Neapolitan Manuscripts
• Daniel Canaris, François Noël’s Scholastic-Aristotelian Reading of Chinese Ethics: Critiquing Stoicism Through Neo-Confucianism
• Bento Machado Mota, The Confluence of Atheisms: Early Theological Debates on the Supposed Atheism of the Natives from China and Brazil
• Valentina Bottanelli, Anna Giazzon, Chinese and the Enlightenment’s Linguistic Studies. Philippe Masson, Justus Heurnius, and the Hebrew Origin of Chinese
• Paolo De Troia, Images and Representations of Europe in China: Missionaries Narrate the West
• Chen Cui, The Jesuit Translation of China and its Echoes in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1762)
• Niccolò Guasti, The Image of China in the Neapolitan Enlightenment: from Genovesi to Filangieri
• Giulio Talini, “Le plus laborieux de tous les peuples”. China, France, and the Haitian Revolution in the Views of Two Caribbean Planters
• Paolo Bianchini, Cultural Policies and Survival Strategies: French Jesuits and the Chinese Mission During the Suppression
• Guido Abbattista, Visual Representations of China. Institutions, Society, and Nature in Western Illustrations (c. 1700-1840)
• Index of Names
• Contributors