Professor Menegon Organizes Panel on Jesuits in China at Boston College
On November 29, 2016 Professor Eugenio Menegon organized a panel entitled “Four Centuries of Jesuit History in China” on behalf of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies (IAJS) and the Asian Studies Program at Boston College. Professor Menegon received a Senior Fellowship at IAJS last Spring and was recently named Affiliated Scholar at the Institute.
The panel presented new editions from IAJS’s Institute of Jesuit Sources and other recent work on the deep engagement of the Jesuits with China, from the early modern to the modern period.
Professor Menegon presented on “Matteo Ricci SJ’s Dialogue with Chinese Scholars: The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603),” an introduction to the new revised English edition of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s Chinese dialogue with Confucian scholars.
Greg Afinogenov (Harvard University, Russian and Eurasian history), introduced “A Russian View on the Jesuits in Beijing (1740s),” his new translation of Notes on the Jesuits in China, a text by a Russian Orthodox priest that provides a rare outside source on the life of the eighteenth-century Jesuit mission and daily life in the Qing capital.
Finally, Steven Pieragastini (Brandeis University and Brooklyn College, French and Chinese history), discussed his recent dissertation “Between Empires: The Jesuits in Modern Shanghai (1842-1957)” and the Catholic Church’s relations with a succession of Chinese and foreign governments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.