Carlo Tommaso - Mémoires sur la religion Chrétienne dans la Chine - 1709

Memoirs for Rome, on the state of the Christian religion in China — [S.l.: s.n.], 1709–1710. First edition of this collection of texts relating to the famous Chinese Rites Controversy.

Complete in 1 volume, duodecimo.

General title page dated 1709, supplemented with successive texts and decrees dated 1710 (including the Second Decree of Our Holy Father Pope Clement XI on the China affair, dated September 25, 1710, and The Declaration Made by Our Holy Father the Pope on the True Meaning of His Decrees, dated October 11, 1710).

Contemporary full brown mottled or marbled calf. Spine richly decorated with raised bands and gilt compartments featuring floral and vegetal motifs. Red morocco title label with gilt lettering (“MEMOIRE / DE LA / CHINE / TOM. I”). Speckled or red edges.

A copy in satisfactory and authentic condition. The contemporary binding has a warm patina, with slightly rubbed corners and headcaps. The interior retains fresh, crisp paper, alongside superb contemporary handwritten notes on the endpaper and in the margins, attesting to an earlier scholarly provenance. A few small stains and scattered foxing.

This volume lies at the heart of the fascinating and turbulent Chinese Rites Controversy, a major theological conflict that pitted the Jesuits against the Dominicans and the popes at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jesuits, led by Matteo Ricci in China, advocated a tolerant approach that allowed Chinese converts to continue practicing the veneration of ancestors and Confucius, which they regarded as civil and social rites.
Confronted with accusations of syncretism and idolatry from the mendicant orders, Rome eventually ruled harshly. This collection brings together the crucial papal decrees of Clement XI, who formally condemned the Chinese rites, sending shock waves through diplomatic and religious relations between the West and the Celestial Empire of Emperor Kangxi.

Rome’s intransigence in this matter was perceived by Emperor Kangxi as an intolerable interference in China’s cultural sovereignty. In retaliation, he banned Christian missions in China, closing the door to Western influence for many decades and shattering the fragile intercultural dialogue fostered at the court in Beijing by Jesuit mathematicians and astronomers.