BOOK REVIEWS 875

urban in appeal. Hernán Menéndez Rodriguez and Ben Fallaw focus on “The
Resurgence of the Church in Yucatan,” bridging the time of shortly after inde-
pendence from Spain to the revolution of the early-twentieth century,
when—especially following the French Intervention of the 1860s—
Yucatecan liberals were split. The moderate branch established closer ties
with the Church, encouraged by a pair of bishops of the late-nineteenth cen-
tury. The economic position of the Church was improved by the de facto
renewal of tithe collection, which had been officially outlawed in Mexico
since the mid-nineteenth century. In the final paper of part II Fallaw traces the
slow increase in church influence between 1915 and 1940—even under
socialist governors of the state—as the dovish but persistent efforts of
Archbishop Martín Tritschler y Córdoba encouraged a Yucatecan retreat from
the anticlericalism then strong in Mexico.

One of the “Final Thoughts” in conclusion (Gilbert Joseph) is that “good

regional history cannot be insular” (p. 254). But from the reader’s viewpoint,
with each of the diverse papers referring to conditions across national bound-
aries, there is little in the volume to explain an essential part of the story—
the sweep of Mexican history in which an anticlerical liberalism has shifted
in strength from period to period, in a counterdance with a proclerical con-
servatism.This conflict provides a crucial backdrop to every paper in the col-
lection, but nothing is provided to give this larger scale. Although the national
sweep is not the subject of this collection, it is crucial—for it is this that
Yucatan has modified in one degree or another.

University of Oregon DON E. DUMOND

Asian

Ancestors, Virgins, & Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late

Imperial China. By Eugenio Menegon. [Harvard-Yenching Institute
Monograph Series 69.] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2009.
Pp. xxii, 450. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-674-03596-6.)

Eugenio Menegon’s Ancestors, Virgins, & Friars: Christianity as a Local

Religion in Late Imperial China is a path-breaking contribution to scholar-
ship on Christianity in China. Drawing on Chinese and European archival
and published materials, Menegon examines the Chinese Catholics of Fuan
county in Fujian, an area evangelized by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Spanish Dominicans, and shows how Chinese Catholics made Christianity a
Chinese religion.

Christianity may be universal, equally true in all places and at all times, but
it also is a historical phenomenon, a product of a particular time and place. In
China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures (New York, 1982),
Jacques Gernet argues that
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everything that goes to make up Christianity—the opposition in substance

between an eternal soul and a perishable body, the kingdom of God and the
earthly world, the concept of a God of truth, eternal and immutable, the
dogma of the Incarnation—all this was more easily accessible to the inher-
itors of Greek thought than to the Chinese, who referred to quite different
traditions.

Christianity and China were incompatible, Gernet suggests, because of “funda-

mental differences between two mental universes.”1

Menegon effectively refutes this view. He demonstrates that Chinese

Catholics transformed Christianity from a foreign religion into a Chinese one
with “a new religious identity, both Chinese and Catholic, local yet universal
in aspiration” (p. 8, emphasis in original). He shows as well what the localiza-
tion of Christianity in this part of southeast China reveals about the relation-
ship between late-imperial Chinese society and religion. Although proscribed
in 1724 and thereafter regarded as a heterodox sect, Christianity, like other ille-
gal popular religions, generally enjoyed local de-facto toleration. Menegon
shows that it functioned much like indigenous lay devotional groups in popu-
lar Buddhism and Daoism such as the Non-Action Sect and the cult of the Lady
of the Water Margins.

Chapters 2 to 4 offer a chronological overview of Catholicism in Fuan.

Chapter 5 shows how Christianity embedded itself within kinship networks
and found a place for itself in local society. Chapter 6 deals with the role of
priests, both Chinese and Europeans, in pedagogical and catechetical instruc-
tion, as healers and exorcists, and as enforcers of control and discipline over
Christian communities. Incidentally, Menegon’s assertion that marriage,
although a sacrament,“remained outside the purview of missionaries in China”
(p. 221n22) is questionable. This may have been the case in the Dominican
Fuan mission, but evidence from eighteenth-century Sichuan shows that
European missionaries and Chinese clergy labored, persistently but often
unsuccessfully, to enforce canon law on marriage, even though Catholic norms
often conflicted with Chinese custom. Church practice in late-imperial China
varied from time and place, and no place was completely representative.

Menegon is particularly insightful in examining the religious life of Chinese

Catholics. Chapter 7 offers fresh perspectives on the issue of Chinese rites,
showing how the Dominicans tried and largely succeeded in redefining the
central Chinese virtue of filial piety in a way that would not conflict with the
Church’s prohibition of ancestral rites. Chapter 8 deals with the beatas,
women who took vows of celibacy as members of the Third Order of
Dominicans. Chinese culture valued female chastity but rejected virginity as

1
Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures (New
York, 1982), pp. 3–5.
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an ideal. Menegon examines how the beatas’ embrace of religious virginity

gave them agency and gradual acceptance, challenging patriarchal authority
both in their society and the Church.

Ancestors, Virgins, & Friars is superb. Grounded in Chinese and European

missionary materials and informed by Menegon’s training in Chinese social
history, it is well written and analytically rigorous. It is an important original
contribution to both Chinese history and the history of Christianity.

St. Olaf College ROBERT ENTENMANN

Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late

Imperial China. By Florence C. Hsia. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. 2009. Pp. xv, 273. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-226-35559-7.)

There is no shortage of books, in several languages, on the Jesuit mission-

aries in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, and on the European sci-
ence that a few of these Jesuits taught in China. If any subject in the history
of late-imperial or early-modern China has attracted enough scholarship to do
it justice, it would probably be this one. But much of the more recent schol-
arship on this subject rather neglects the European audience and background
of the scientific mission of the China Jesuits (just as Robert A. Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land [New York, 1961] does not tell us much of what
we might like to know about Valentine Michael Smith’s Martian background
and support network).

But whereas Heinlein does tell us quite a bit about Smith himself, Hsia’s
account of the China Jesuits is cast more as a “biography in a collective
mode” (p. 7) in which individual personalities do not stand out as clearly or
vividly as in the Jesuit historiography of an earlier generation. Although Hsia
demonstrates an admirable competence in the field of spherical astronomy
(starting on p. 100), neither does the book focus on the science that Jesuits
taught in China or even much on the Chinese reception. Hsia’s niche in this
comparatively oversubscribed field is, rather, “the historical emergence and
fortunes of this puzzling figure” (p. 2) of the Jesuit missionary scientist in sev-
enteenth- and eighteenth-century China—an individual who transmitted
European science and personal discoveries to the Chinese literati, European
savants, and other interested parties of the European proto-Enlightenment.

But what is really mystifying about this book is Hsia’s own apparent puz-
zlement about the figure of the Jesuit “missionary scientist,” “saintly mathe-
matician” (p. 147), and “missionary as a man of scientific expertise” (p. 2) and
her presentation of such phrases as if they were evidently oxymoronic. Had
Hsia read more carefully John L. Heilbron’s The Sun in the Church
(Cambridge, MA, 1999), which is included in her bibliography, she might have
been struck by the first sentence: “The Roman Catholic Church gave more
financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries,
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