2024/12/16 by Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Japanese History and Culture #Chinese history and philosophy
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/9783111610863-012
This chapter retraces the deployment of Chinese astral sciences in early modern European popular literatures.It suggests that Jesuit missionaries' accounts of the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasties, which privileged "Heaven" as an agent of historical change, helped establish a trope connecting East Asia to the celestial realm in European popular culture.The chapter thus explores the many reinterpretations of the Ming-Qing transition in European literatures, focusing on the deployment of celestial rhetoric and language.It first situates the emergence of astral motifs in Jesuit accounts of Chinese cultures of knowledge by examining the central role of "Heaven" and astronomy in the imperial politics of the Ming-Qing transition in mid-seventeenth-century China.It uncovers the ways in which Jesuits took advantage of the empire's Heaven-centred politics to promote themselves as indispensable allies to China's new powerful Manchu rulers.Then, the chapter moves to Europe, where it investigates the reception and appropriation of Jesuit accounts of China in a variety of different literary genres.It retraces these texts' references to astronomy, the Heavens, and the stars, and proposes that China and its politics became intimately connected to astral language in European literatures.As such, the chapter shows that the Manchu conquest of China had a resounding impact on European literary conceptions of China, its sciences, and politics in the early modern period.