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Demonstrates the gradual interweaving of Chinese and European ritual practices at all levels of interaction in seventeenth-century China

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Chinese and European Funerals

2. Missionaries' Knowledge of Chinese Funerals

3. The Gradual Embedding of Christian Funeral Rituals in China

4. Funerals as Public Manifestation

5. Funerals as Community Practice

6. Christian versus Superstitious Rituals

7. Imperial Sponsorship of Jesuit Funerals

8. Conclusion: The Metaphor of Textile Weaving

Appendix

Notes

Chinese Glossary

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Nicolas Standaert is professor of Sinology at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China: His Life and Thought and editor of Handbook of Christianity in China: Volume 1, 635-1800.

Reviews

"This book is an outstanding work of original scholarship. Standaert uses a huge range of published and unpublished materials in many European languages as well as in Chinese. Several of the texts he discusses, such as the set of Chinese Christian funeral instructions from Guangdong Province, will be new to nearly all China scholars and are likely to be of great interest in themselves for the study of Chinese rituals and practices. The interpretation is original and the scholarship is so strong that one would be hard put to disagree with the conclusions." Henrietta Harrison, Harvard University "The Interweaving of Rituals is one of the most surprising books on Chinese history that I have ever read. The author's command of sources in Chinese, Latin, and vernacular European languages is exemplary. It is a book of immense erudition, worn lightly." Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia "Nicolas Standaert's impressive research on funerary rites in China and Europe in the seventeenth century shows again that we cannot use a universal recipe in the study of cultural exchanges. The Interweaving of Rituals also provides a theoretical and methodological framework that may trigger a fruitful debate between East- Asia specialists." - European History Quarterly, Vol. 43 No. 3, 2013