Making the new world their own : : Chinese encounters with Jesuit science in the age of discovery / / by Qiong Zhang.

• Superior document: Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, Volume 15
• VerfasserIn: Zhang, Qiong, 1964-
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands ;, Boston, [Massachusetts] : : Brill,, 2015.; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: History of science and medicine library. Scientific and learned cultures and their institutions ; Volume 15.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (455 pages) :; illustrations.

In Making the New World Their Own , Qiong Zhang offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars in the late Ming and early Qing came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits. These encounters formed a fascinating chapter in the early modern global integration of space. It unfolded as a series of mutually constitutive and competing scholarly discourses that reverberated in fields from cosmology, cartography and world geography to classical studies. Zhang demonstrates how scholars such as Xiong Mingyu, Fang Yizhi, Jie Xuan, Gu Yanwu, and Hu Wei appropriated Jesuit ideas to rediscover China’s place in the world and reconstitute their classical tradition. Winner of the Chinese Historians in the United States ( CHUS ) "2015 Academic Excellence Award"

Table of Contents

Introduction: Globalization, localization, and cultural resilience -- Mapping a contact zone -- Divergent discourses on the physical earth in premodern China -- The introduction and refashioning of the terraqueous globe -- Translating the four seas across space and time -- Taking in a new world -- Conclusion: Jesuit science and the shape of Chinese early modernity.