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This dissertation examines the role of urban real estate in the finances and networks of the Jesuit missions in China. Starting in 1612, when Jesuit missionaries working in China envisioned for the first time a strategy for making the missions financially independent from Europe, I will investigate how and why it took until the second half of the eighteenth century for the Christian communities in China to become financially self-sustaining. The procurators and their subordinate treasurers, the Jesuits primarily in charge of the financial management of the missions, are the subject of this dissertation. How did they combine the resources and personnel extracted from Europe, India, and China to establish an autonomous financial foundation for the missions in China? This dissertation argues that their most reliable source of income was revenue from investments in urban real estate. The arc of this dissertation spans both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries examining the Portuguese and the French Jesuit missions in China. Through a close analysis of Jesuit procurators’ activities and personal networks this dissertation will assert that while they realized the necessity of economic integration in the global missions early on, procurators encountered great problems in realizing this goal. As such, this dissertation recognizes the limitations of global networks by exploring the role of global contact and the circulation of missionaries, money, and mail and by looking at the Jesuit search for financial opportunities in the local and regional economy to become self-sustaining communities. Only by studying the Jesuit finances in China over a time-span of 166 years does the relationship between Longobardo’s strategic planning for financial independence in 1612 and the French Jesuits’ budget for their missions in Beijing in 1778 become fully clear. This dissertation’s most important contribution is in charting the growing importance of revenue from investments in urban real estate. Ironically, just as the missions in China had begun to galvanize local resource networks largely independent of the central organization of the Society, European monarchs expelled the Jesuits from their realms and Rome finally dissolved the Jesuits as a Society.

A Filmoteca Ultramarina Portuguesa (FUP) foi criada com o objetivo de reunir em microfilme os principais núcleos de documentação relativos à ação dos portugueses no mundo, provenientes de diversos arquivos e bibliotecas nacionais e estrangeiros e que informam sobre diferentes povos e culturas da Europa, de África, da Ásia e ainda da América do Sul. Em franco desenvolvimento entre as décadas de 50 e 60 do século XX, é constituída por cerca de 500.000 imagens. O projeto DigiT FUP - Digitalização e Tratamento da Filmoteca Ultramarina Portuguesa. Imagem Digital na dupla função de transferência de suporte e restauro documental, financiado pela Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian entre 2013-2014, visa dar continuidade ao tratamento digital sistemático da FUP, no seguimento de investimentos realizados pela Fundação Jorge Álvares, e proceder à sua disponibilização no ACTD. Para o efeito tem sido efectuado trabalho de conversão e recuperação das imagens, além de investigação associada nas áreas da conservação e da ciência da computação. Nesta sequência, procede-se à disponibilização de ca. de 6000 imagens digitais realizadas a partir dos microfilmes de documentos do anterior Arquivo Histórico do Estado da Índia, actual Arquivo de Goa (Directorate of Archives and Archaelogy, Government of Goa). De notar que existe uma relação de causa e efeito entre a imagem disponível e as condições envolventes, dependendo a sua legibilidade de aspectos como o estado de conservação do original em papel, a captura da imagem em microfilme nos arquivos de origem nem sempre realizada nas melhores condições, e o estado de conservação actual do microfilme, sobre o qual incide a investigação em curso, no sentido de o restaurar, de recuperar a informação e conservar o material subsistente nas melhores condições para memória futura.

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.