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Autore
Romano, Antonella

Titolo
La prima storia della Cina. Juan Gonzales de Mendoza fra l'Impero spagnolo e Roma
Periodico
Quaderni storici
Anno: 2013 - Volume: 142 - Fascicolo: 1 - Pagina iniziale: 89 - Pagina finale: 116

Within a horizon that took in both the West and the East Indies - the former justdiscovered and the latter extending to the edge of Asia -, the Catholic world founditself at the centre of a process of identification of China as a paradigmatic space ofthe «other», conceivable as «same», and hence potentially open to evangelization.The article explores the spatial logic that gave rise to a social and intellectual processof knowledge production in relation to China, examining the work that fosteredsuch a change in Europe in the 1580s - the Historia... del gran reyno de la China.Published by the Augustinian monk Juan Gonzales de Mendoza in 1585, and quicklytranslated into various languages, the Historia is seen here as the expression of acommunicative process in which the book is situated at the centre of the productionof new knowledge about geography, nature, men and customs. The elaboration ofsuch knowledge was underpinned by the material, social, political and symbolicresources of Rome, the capital of a Catholic Church wrestling with Spain and Portugalfor control over the spiritual undertaking of reconstructing Christian universalism.Mendoza's undertaking places the missionaries firmly in the centre of the stage, in thatthey were gatherers of information and producers of new knowledge, engaged in thecompetition that pitted the orders they belonged to against each other and divided bydifferent loyalties (also insofar as they were subjects of temporal sovereigns), whichconditioned their own «making» of China and the coordinates within which theyperformed this operation.



SICI: 0301-6307(2013)142:1<89:LPSDCJ>2.0.ZU;2-O
Testo completo: http://www.mulino.it/download/article/10.1408/73480
Testo completo alternativo: http://www.mulino.it/doi/10.1408/73480

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