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Os estudos sobre a contribuição dos Jesuítas para a ciência durante o primeiro século da Companhia de Jesus estão a aumentar em número e em qualidade. Todavia, eles ainda separam os aspectos gerais, isto é, o contributo específico dos Jesuítas na Europa, por um lado, e o seu papel na difusão da cultura Europeia e - especialmente - no estabelecimento de contacto entre as tradições cientificas do Ocidente e do Oriente. Como consequência, estudos sobre missionários. tais como Ricci. Rho ou Schall, só muito em geral têm em conta a tradição cientifica dos Jesuítas e, ainda menos, as dos colégios nos quais eles foram formados como "cientistas". Nem sequer tem sido prestada muita atenção ao que parece ser uma contradição. As missões dos Jesuítas no Oriente eram as mais qualiflcadas cientificamente, mas faziam parte da Assistência de Portugal, a qual, depois da de Espanha era a mais cientificamente "debilitada". Acresce que os mais famosos cientistasmissionários no Extremo Oriente raramente eram Ibéricos, quer por nascimento. quer por formação. O presente artigo estabelece algumas conexões entre os colégios Europeus e as missões do Extremo Oriente, discutindo o estatuto das disciplinas matemáticas nos colégios Ibéricos, bem como o modo como isso podia afectar a actividade científica dos missionários e a sua transmissão para a Europa. /// Studies on Jesuit contributions to science during the Society's first century are increasing in number and quality. But they still show a division between the general aspects, or the specific contributions by Jesuits in Europe, and their role in spreading European culture and – specially – in establishing a contact between scientific traditions of the West and the East. Owing to this, studies on missionaries, as Ricci. Rho or Schall consider only very broadly the Jesuit scientific tradition and, even less, those of the colleges in which they were formed as "scientists". Nor a much larger attention has been paid to what seems a contradiction. Jesuit missions in the East were the best scientifically qualified, but they were a part of the Portuguese Assistence which, after the Spanish, was the most "depressed" scientifically. In addition, the best reputed scientists-missionaries in the Far East were rarely Iberian, by birth or training. This article draws some connections between European colleges and Far East missions, discussing the mathematical disciplines' status in the Iberian colleges, and the way it could affect the missionaries' scientific work and its transmission in Europe.

Macau’s status has never been a pacific topic even inside Portuguese historiography. Departing from Montalto de Jesus (1863-1932)’ controversial proposal to summit Macau’s administration to the League of Nations in the revised edition of his Historic Macao, 1926, the author aims to discuss the construction of the discourse on the autonomy of Macau, identify the roots of this concept, and explore its different meanings in works of some of the most relevant Portuguese and Macanese historians and authors on the topic during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Jesuit Historiography Online (JHO) is an Open Access resource offering over seventy historiographical essays written by experts in their field. Aimed at scholars of Jesuit history and at those in all overlapping areas, the essays in JHO provide summaries of key texts from the earlier literature, painstaking surveys of more recent work, and digests of archival and online resources. Crucially, the scope of the essays is global: they cover both Anglophone and non-Anglophone sources and scholarship from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The result is much more than a bibliographical check-list: authors explore trends in Jesuit historiography and provide a nuanced, systematic, and in-depth analysis of what has been written—when, why, and by whom—about arguably the most prolific, diverse, and wide-ranging religious order within the Roman Catholic tradition. JHO is available in Open Access thanks to generous support from the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College.

Abstract New encounters in America, Africa, and Asia facilitated the "discovery" of non-Biblical religious traditions that were distinct from the ancient paganism known to Christian humanists and antiquarians from classical sources and patristic literature. Although Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism did not exist as concepts in the early modern period, the three articles in this special issue illustrate the learning process by which a number of influential and pioneering Catholic missionaries came to distinguish these various traditions from each other. We argue that they did not simply "invent" new religions arbitrarily: instead, on the basis of the very broad categories of true religion and idolatry, they engaged in some close interaction and "dialogue"-albeit usually polemical-with local religious elites and their writings, including Eastern Christians. In addition, in the case of the Jesuits in particular, we note that these various engagements were often connected events...

Abstract In modern scholarship, much ink has been spilled over the significance of St. Augustine in the history of Western philosophy and theology. However, little effort has been made to clarify the legacy of Augustine in East Asia, especially his contribution to China during the early Jesuit missionary work through the Maritime Silk Road. The present article attempts to fill this lacuna and provide a philosophical analysis of the encounter of Chinese indigenous religions with St Augustine, by inquiring into why and how Augustine was taken as a model for the Chinese in their acceptance of the Christian faith. The analysis is split into three parts. The first part reflects on the contemporary disputations over the quality of the paraphrasing work of the early Jesuits, analyzing the validity of the allegedly careless inaccuracies in their introduction of Augustine's biography. The second part analyses some rarely discussed Chinese translations of Augustine, which I recently found in the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, with particular focus on their ideological context. In particular, the paraphrased text concerning Augustine's theory of sin and the two cities will be highlighted. The third part goes a step further in exploring the reason why Augustine was considered an additional advantage in dealing with the conflicts between Christian and Confucian values. The primary contribution this essay makes is to present a philosophical inquiry into the role of Augustine in the early acceptance of Christianity in China by suggesting that a strategy of “Confucian-Christian synthesis” had been adopted by the Jesuit missionaries. Thereby, they accommodated Confucian terms without dropping the core values of the orthodox Catholic faith. The conclusion revisits the critics’ arguments and sums up with an evaluation of the impact of Augustine's religious values in the indigenization of Christianity in China.

The author analyzes the 125 articles published in The Catholic Historical Review between 1915 and the centennial. The first part contextualizes the individual contributions against landmark scholarship in the field of Catholic missions to colonial Latin America and Ming China. The second part presents statistical analyses of the articles by sub fields and decades, showing the preponderance of publications in Latin America (48 percent), North America (30 percent), and Asia (12 percent). It concludes with a succinct comparison of the profile of this journal in the field of missions history against other scholarly venues

Keith explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. Much like the revolutionary ideologies and struggles in the name of the Vietnamese nation, the revolution in Vietnamese Catholic life polarized the place of the new Church in post-colonial Vietnamese politics and... Formerly CIP. Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 2008.

IN ENGLISH: Studies of church connections to commercial interests in pre-nineteenth-century Southeast Asia have focused on the Catholic venture in the Spanish Philippines. This article uses a broader and more ecumenical framework to incorporate eastern Indonesia into this discussion by comparing the economic involvement of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch missionaries and church personnel. It contextualizes differences in church resources, secular oversight, and motivation, but also argues that clerical involvement with European economic ambitions helped to mark out a path toward the domestication of local Christianity. The perception of foreign priests and ministers as conduits for exploitation encouraged many Southeast Asian Christians to differentiate between the teachings of the religion they had adopted and the ways these teachings had been distorted in support of European control. // IN FRENCH: La recherche de l'Asie du Sud-Est pré-moderne touchant au rapprochement des relations de l'Église d'avec les intérêts commerciaux porte habituellement sur l'enterprise catholiques des Philippines espagnoles. Cette contribution par contre, a un cadre spatial plus vaste et au point de vue religion plus oecuménique. L'étude y inclut l'Indonésie orientale et elle compare la participation économique des missionaires et du clergé, tant espagnols, tant portuguais, tant hollandais. D'un part les différences des ressources ecclésiales, la supervision des laïques et la motivation cléricale sont étudiées d'après leur contexte, d'autre part la participation du clergé imbu d'ambitions économiques européennes est aussi explorée parce qu'elle a favorisé les modes locales du christianisme. C'est que l'image des prêtres et des pasteurs rapaces auprès les populations de l'Asie du Sud-Est stimulaient ces peuples à distinguer entre la religion adoptés par eux et la déformation de l'instruction religieuse du clergé qui visait à faciliter le contrôle européen. Reprinted by permission of Brill Academic Publishers