The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci

Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140080988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
From the renowned historian and author of The Death of Woman Wang, a vivid and gripping account of the 16th-century missionary’s remarkable sojourn to Ming China In 1577, the Jesuit Priest Matteo Ricci set out from Italy to bring Christian faith and Western thought to Ming dynasty China. To capture the complex emotional and religious drama of Ricci's extraordinary life, Jonathan Spence relates his subject's experiences with several images that Ricci himself created—four images derived from the events in the Bible and others from a book on the art of memory that Ricci wrote in Chinese and circulated among members of the Ming dynasty elite. A rich and compelling narrative about a fascinating life, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci is also a significant work of global history, juxtaposing the world of Counter-Reformation Europe with that of Ming China.

Matteo Ricci

Author: Michela Fontana
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442205881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the first of the early Jesuit missionaries of the China mission, is widely considered the most outstanding cultural mediator of all time between China and the West. This engrossing and fluid book offers a thorough, knowledgeable biography of this fascinating and influential man, telling a deeply human and captivating story that still resonates today. Michela Fontana traces Ricci's travels in China in detail, providing a rich portrait of Ming China and the growing importance of cultural exchanges between China and the West. She shows how Ricci incorporated his ideas of "cultural accommodation" into both his life and his writings aimed at the Chinese elite. Her biography is the first to highlight Ricci's immensely important scientific work and that of key Christian converts, such as Xu Guangqi, who translated Euclid's Elements together with Ricci. Exploring the history of science in China and the West as well as their dramatically different cultural attitudes toward religious and philosophical issues, Michela Fontana introduces not only Ricci's life but the first significant encounter between Western and Chinese civilizations.

The Question of Hu

Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307793818
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
This lively and elegant book by the acclaimed historian Jonathan D. Spence reconstructs an extraordinary episode in the early intercourse between Europe and China. It is the story of John Hu, a lowly but devout Chinese Catholic, who in 1722 accompanied a Jesuit missionary on a journey to France--a journey that ended with Hu's confinement in a lunatic asylum. At once a triumph of historical detective work and a gripping narrative, The Question of Hu deftly probes the collision of tw ocultures, with their different definitions of faith, madness, and moral obligation.

The Search for Modern China

Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393307801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1054

Book Description
This work chronicles the history of China for over four hundred years through the spring of 1989.

Mission to China

Author: Mary Laven
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571225187
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
An epic history of the clashes of cultures between Jesuit missionaries in China.

The Memory Palace

Author: Mira Bartok
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439183325
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
A gorgeous memoir about the 17 year estrangement of the author and her homeless schizophrenic mother, and their reunion.

The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci

Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140080988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Treason By The Book

Author: Jonathan Spence
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241959144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
In 1728 a stranger handed a letter to Governor Yue calling on him to lead a rebellion against the Manchu rulers of China. Feigning agreement, he learnt the details of the plot and immediately informed the Emperor, Yongzheng. The ringleaders were captured with ease, forced to recant and, to the confusion and outrage of the public, spared. Drawing on an enormous wealth of documentary evidence - over a hundred and fifty secret documents between the Emperor and his agents are stored in Chinese archives - Jonathan Spence has recreated this revolt of the scholars in fascinating and chilling detail. It is a story of unwordly dreams of a better world and the facts of bureaucratic power, of the mind of an Emperor and of the uses of his mercy.

The Death of Woman Wang

Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014005121X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
“Spence shows himself at once historian, detective, and artist. . . . He makes history howl.” (The New Republic) Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T’an-ch’eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at his hands. Magnificently evoking the China of long ago, The Death of Woman Wang also deepens our understanding of the China we know today.

Art Of Memory

Author: F A Yates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136353615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 445

Book Description
First Published in 1999. This title is the third volume in the ten-volume set titled the Selected Works of Frances Yates. Greyscale illustrations and figures are included throughout - alongside the related descriptive work where applicable. The art in this volume seeks to memorise through a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on memory. It has usually been classed as 'mnemotechnics', which appears an unimportant branch of human activity. However, the author discusses in this title that the manipulation of images in memory must always, to some extent, involve the psyche.