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An exquisite collection of rare books that chronicles the scholarly work of Jesuit missionaries in China from the 16th through the 18th centuries has been digitized for the web through the year-long effort of a Jesuit historian and scholar working with the Jesuitica Collection in Burns Library.
Australian Jesuit Jeremy Clarke, SJ, an assistant professor of history, has launched Beyond Ricci, www.bc.edu/beyondricci, a searchable website that provides scholars and researchers access to books containing historical narratives, maps, correspondence and musical compositions in five languages that depict life in China in early modern history and the East-West exchanges initiated by the early Jesuit missionaries.
The website focuses on books from the Jesuitica Collection by or about Jesuit missionaries including Matteo Ricci, Philippe Couplet and Alvaro Semedo, as well as Roman-based Jesuits Christopher Clavius and Athanasius Kircher, who made use of the information sent back by the missionaries in China. It was written by Fr. Clarke, who selected the books and images from the library’s collection of 2,500 volumes, all of which were published prior to the order’s suppression in 1773.
Among the many people involved in the project throughout Boston College, Fr. Clarke credits Tim Lindgren, Jeanne Po and Cristina Joy of Instructional Design and eTeaching Services, William Donovan and Elizabeth McKelvey from Digital Services, Bridget Burke from Burns Library, and Kerry Burke from Media Technology Services with helping to produce the website, which they hope will serve as a model for digital humanities.
“This website takes knowledge and information that is rare and beautiful and puts it into the academic domain, providing an interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of disciplines ranging from history and geography, to Latin and Chinese,” said Fr. Clarke, whose project was funded through a grant from the Academic Teaching Advisory Board and the Office of the Provost.
“It was a labor of love, and an act of homage to my Jesuit brothers and their Chinese counterparts whose remarkable scholarship is preserved in these rare books that will now be available to visitors from Chestnut Hill to Canberra, San Francisco to Shanghai.”
Among the many notable digitized items from the rare book collection are a 1735 translation of a French encyclopedia of China; an extensively detailed 18th century atlas; melody lines from the Chinese Imperial Court that were transcribed by Jesuits in the mid-18th century; and a translation of Confucian texts by the Jesuit missionaries that represented the first introduction of Confucius to the Western world.