Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
From the renowned historian and author of The Death of Woman Wang , a vivid and gripping account of the 16th-century missionary's remarkable sojourn to Ming China
In 1577, the Jesuit Priest Matteo Ricci set out from Italy to bring Christian faith and Western thought to Ming dynasty China. To capture the complex emotional and religious drama of Ricci's extraordinary life, Jonathan Spence relates his subject's experiences with several images that Ricci himself created--four images derived from the events in the Bible and others from a book on the art of memory that Ricci wrote in Chinese and circulated among members of the Ming dynasty elite. A rich and compelling narrative about a fascinating life, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci is also a significant work of global history, juxtaposing the world of Counter-Reformation Europe with that of Ming China.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Kirkus Book Review
For his latest depature from conventional literary forms, Yale historian-of-China Spence (The Death of Woman Wang, The Gate of Heavenly Peace) follows the example of his subject, 16th-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci--who not only introduced Christianity into China, but ""taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace"": a mental construct of myriad images, used from ancient times through the Middle Ages, Spence tells us, as a mnemonic device. To the illustrious Chinese who flocked to him for instruction, it was akin to alchemy or other arcane knowledge: ""We must remember if at one level Ricci's career makes sense only in the context of an aggressive Counter-Reformation Catholicism, as part of an 'expansion in Europe' in the late sixteenth century. . . it also makes sense only in a far older context. . . reaching back through the Middle Ages to a world where the priests of the Christian religion shared the tasks of consoling mankind with the 'cunning men' who dealt in magic, alchemy, cosmography, and astrology."" Thus, the scope, the diversity and fludity of Spence's remarkable text: from the four memory images that Ricci devised for his Chinese pupils (in Chinese ideograph form), and the four religious pictures he left them, Spence ranges through Ricci's childhood and youth and travels, the vagaries of his life in China (from which, by Chinese edict, no Westerner could depart), the conditions of his time--and beyond, within. The picture of ""the Apostle of the Waves,"" Peter floundering in the Sea of Galilee, invokes the hazards of 16th-century seafaring, the contemporary views of pilots (in travel writings, in Cervantes' Don Quixote and Shakespeare's Macbeth), Ricci's initial voyage from Lisbon to Goa (""the ship was a microcosm of the life ahead, with its mixture of dangers, hitherto unexperienced social relations, physical discomforts, and opportunities for austere or public devotion""), the teeming life of China's waterways, the near-loss of Ricci's precious Plantin Bible in a flood, the drowning of his cherished young novice and friend. ""The Road to Emmaeus"" brings discourse on Christian and Chinese concepts, the methodology of conversion, and the pressures on Ricci; it ends in his delirium and death. The final image and picture are a pair: a Chinese servant girl holding a child in her arms, and a Virgin and Child. Spence takes his leave of Ricci in their presence. Exceptional. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Author notes provided by Syndetics
Jonathan D. Spence was born in Surrey, England on August 11, 1936. He received a B.A. in history from Clare College, Cambridge University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from 1993 to 2008. As a historian specializing in Chinese history, he wrote several books including The Search for Modern China, The Death of Woman Wang, and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. The Gate of Heavenly Peace won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Henry D. Vursell Memorial Award of the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.
(Bowker Author Biography)
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