Prof Menegon Details Summer Research and Publications
This summer, Professor Eugenio Menegon spent six weeks in Europe for workshops and lectures. He co-organized two research meetings, presenting on “Center and Periphery: Propaganda Fide’s Accounting Practices in the Eighteenth-Century China Mission” at the workshop “Managing the Missions in East Asia,” Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, Lisbon (Portugal), on May 23; and on “Chinese Assistants in the Old China Mission: The Roles of the Xianggong (相公 Catechist-Secretaries) in Primary Sources and Recent Scholarship,” at the workshop “Christian Missions in China: the Role of Chinese Assistants and Converts,” Department of Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice (Italy), on May 30.
On June 3, he lectured on the holdings of the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (the Central Jesuit Archives) for the Third Summer School “The Archives of the Religious Orders: New Perspectives for a Global Catholicism,” organized by the Sangalli Institute for Religious History and Cultures, and held at the Convent of San Carlo ai Catinari in Rome (Italy).
He then offered four lessons on his recent research as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Program in the Department of Humanistic Studies of the University of Macerata (Italy), June 5-13, and started a new collaboration there for the study of the documentary and art collections of the American China scholar Robert George Loehr Jr. (1892-1974), a pioneer historian of early modern Sino-Western cultural relations and artistic exchange. Macerata is the birthplace of Matteo Ricci SJ (1552-1610), the famous missionary to China, and Menegon helped acquire the archives from the Loehr heirs for that University and Confucius Institute last year. The European tour was concluded by participating in the conference “The Translation of Gender Roles in Early Modern Christian Missionary Context,” organized by the Research Group “Early Modern Translation Cultures (1450–1800),” at Bielefeld University (Germany) on June 21-22, and an invited lecture at the Confucius Institute in Leipzig (Germany) on June 25.
During the summer, moreover, his extensive chapter “An Invisible City: Urban Life and Networks of European Missionaries and Christian Converts in Qing Beijing,” was published in Daniel Greenberg and Yoko Hara, eds., From Rome to Beijing: Sacred Spaces in Dialogue, series East and West: Culture, Diplomacy and Interactions, vol. 17, Leiden: Brill, 2024, pp.15-70.
Read more on Professor Eugenio Menegon and his research interests here.