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A forum for experiments in science and apostolic ministry, the Jesuit mission in China encompassed several distinct approaches to constructing Jesuit commitments to natural philosophy and the mathematical sciences, to construing their apostolic efficacy, and to justifying the propriety of activities associated with these commitments. The first part of the dissertation is devoted to an examination of just such an experiment as it was instantiated in the French Jesuit mission to China. I try to make sense of both the plausibility and the novelty of a group of French Jesuits, sent by Louis XIV to China as mathematiciens du roi an members of the Paris Académie des Sciences. I address the question of how this particular combination of scientific and religious objectives was viewed by critics of the Jesuits and by the Jesuits themselves. I then examine the declining fortunes of the French Jesuit “Académie de la Chine” and the dissolution of a laboriously constructed alliance between the Compagnie de Jésus and the Académie des Sciences.
Jesuits in China were also eager witnesses to Chinese language, dress, customs, laws, government, religions, daily life, Chinese philosophy, cosmology, astronomy, medicine, natural history and botany. In the latter part of the dissertation, I pursue the intertwined strands of scientific and humanist concerns into the Enlightenment, focusing on the ‘historical turn’ taken by French Jesuits in China towards the indigenous tradition of natural knowledge. I remap the tortuous terrain of European learned approaches to the subject of Chinese astronomy, focusing in particular on the work of the French Jesuit Antoine Gaubil during his more than 30 years on the China mission. The historical research he and his interlocutors carried out reveals a collaborative process whereby shared intellectual habits, rooted in the tradition of technical chronology, made possible an increasingly rich cultural history of the origins and progress of the sciences. This study should serve as a corrective to historical evaluations of the Jesuit legacy—or, rather, legacies—to the history of Chinese science, and, more generally, as a contribution to the history of what we now view as the discipline of sinology.