Recent Publications on China and the West by Prof. Menegon
In the past academic year, Professor Eugenio Menegon (Chinese and World History) concluded several publication projects. In December 2018, the prestigious national publishing house in Beijing, Shangwu yinshuguan 商务印书馆 (Commercial Press), issued the second volume of the Chinese translation of the Italian works by the famous Jesuit missionary in China, Matteo Ricci (Letters – Li Madou shuxin ji 利玛窦书信集), a book completed in collaboration with Prof. Wen Zheng 文铮 (Department of Italian, Beijing Foreign Studies University). The first volume (Ricci’s “Diary”) was published in 2014.
At the same time, the Boston University Travel Literature Faculty Reading Group, under the editorship of Prof. Roberta Micallef (BU World Languages and Literatures, Turkish), issued a collective volume entitled Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age (Ilex Series, Harvard University Press, 2018). Menegon, a member of the Faculty Group, contributed an essay on maritime travel to China in the early modern period: “Desire, Truth, and Propaganda: Lay and Ecclesiastical Travelers from Europe to China in the Long Eighteenth Century,” (pp. 11-41).
In March 2019, a long introductory essay by Prof. Menegon opened a new collection of primary documents on the Qing court and the court missionaries in Beijing. The anthology contains seventy-five letters in Italian sent to Italy by the Discalced Augustinian Sigismondo Meinardi da S. Nicola (1713- 1767; Chinese name Xi Chengyuan 席澄源), a missionary in Beijing and a clockmaker for the Qianlong Emperor. The volume was recently printed and presented to the local public in Druento, the native town of the Meinardi family at the outskirts of Turin, Piedmont, Italy, visited by prof. Menegon in 2016. The essay is “Globalizzazione ante litteram? Sigismondo Meinardi da S. Nicola tra Druento e la Cina,” (Globalization ante litteram? Sigismondo Meinardi da S. Nicola between Druento and China) in Il mondo di Sigismondo. Un druentino nella Cina del XVIII secolo. Lettere dell’agostiniano scalzo Padre Sigismondo Meinardi da S. Nicola (Sigismondo’s World. A Druento native in 18th-century China. Letters of the Discalced Augustinaian Fr. Sigismondo Meinardi da S. Nicola) Druento (Torino): Comune di Druento – Assessorato alla Cultura, 2019, pp. 5–49.
Finally, in April 2019, Menegon published a critical edition with photographs of a manuscript related to his research on the Qing court Europeans, an auto-biographical essay by China art historian George Robert Loher Jr. (1892-1974). Loehr was chair of the Department of Languages at Yenching University in Beijing in the 1920s-40s, and a pioneer in the study of European artists at the Qing court.