The French Jesuit missionaries shaped by the Chinese.

The arrival of the french Jesuit missionaries in China in 1688 meant a significant change in the early Sino-European contacts. First, they were not sent as missionaries by the Pope but as "Mathématiciens du Roy" by Louis XIV and they were corresponding members of the newly founded Académie Royale des Sciences. Next, their background was no longer that of Renaissance as it was in the case of Matteo Ricci or Ferdinand Verbiest, but they originated from a France that was in the midst of a transition period between Renaissance and modernity. Finally, their Western writings about China were not limited to proto-ethnographic descriptions, but they engaged in in-depth studies of a wide variety of aspects of Chinese culture, sciences, and arts that eventually influenced Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau or Leibniz. The present project wants to take a new and fresh look at this topic by focussing on the Chinese side of the story: How did the Chinese interact with the French Jesuit missionaries and how did they eventually shape the information that the missionaries sent to Europe? The project will select three interconnected themes through which the interaction appears: 1) 'History and medicine' concentrates on the scientific interaction as it mainly took place in Beijing; 2) 'Religiosity' focuses on spiritual interaction as it took place both in the capital and the provinces; 3) 'Controversy' concentrates on tensions and conflicts as they appeared in the networks in which missionaries and Chinese were involved.

Keywords:Spirituality, History of sciences, China, Early Qing, Missionaries, Jesuits