Summary
This article surveys European information and other extant sources pertaining to Tibet in the early modern period, when the region was still relatively unknown to Europeans and, like Cathay (with which it tended to be associated), was thought to be home to Christian communities. The article is organized into three major themes that focus on discerning, mapping, and exploring Tibet. The first part examines the features of what was for Europeans an uncertain association between Tibet and Cathay. The second part of the study, concerned with mapping, analyses the Jesuit cartographical work in China, partly using Chinese sources, that eventually gave Tibet a location independent from Cathay, even though cartographers in Europe continued to depict Cathay as sharing the spotlight with Tibet. Finally, the third section examines mid seventeenth-century Jesuit explorations in central Asia that provided fresh first-hand information for the likes of Athanasius Kircher in his China Illustrata (1667), one of the main sources of European knowledge about Tibet in those times. This research shows an undecided European attitude towards the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it was expressed in a double movement that generated new knowledge while embracing an imaginary past in central Asia, “dragging” Tibet with it.
Summary also in Spanish.

Local access dig.pdf. [Hosne-Tibet.pdf]

A tale of dynastic change in China : the Ming-Qing transition through Athanasius Kircher SJ’s China illustrata (1667) / Yuval Givon.
Extract from Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu vol. lxxxviii, fasc. 175 (2019-I)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 92-100) and glossary.

Summary:
The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher SJ is among the prominent writers of seventeenth-century Europe, and his China illustrata (1667) was one of the most celebrated and influential works on China of the period. The present essay examines the contexts and sources for Kircher’s description of the fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by the foreign Qing dynasty, a monumental event of global significance which attracted the attention of European scholarly circles and foreign powers alike. Strangely, while Kircher’s network of social contacts provided him access to the best sources available on the matter, including eye witnesses, as this essay outlines, his presentation of the events in China is odd, inaccurate, and, at times, misleading.

However, a closer examination of Kircher’s sources — especially the first-hand accounts of events from fellow-Jesuits visiting Rome — reveals tensions, disagreements, and conflicting narratives that existed within the Jesuit China mission during the transition period and might have influenced the author. Kircher’s intellectual enterprise was always intertwined with his religious piety and promotion of the Society of Jesus. Thus, this essay proposes that his ‘mistakes’ can be seen as an attempt to reconcile contradictory voices among the Jesuit missionaries and to offer a unified narrative to European readers, reshaped to fit the author’s devout vision of history as well as the religio-political needs of the Society of Jesus and its China mission.
Summary also in French.

Local access dig.pdf. [Givon-Kircher.pdf]