Translating Christianity in Late Imperial China

An early companion of Ignatius of Loyola, the Spaniard Jeronimo Nadal (1507-80), oversaw production of an illustrated book on the life of Jesus intended for training novices. The Evangelicae Historiae Imagines was published in Antwerp in 1593, fourteen years after Nadal’s death. Its engravings, produced in the workshop of the Wierix brothers, united Flemish craftsmanship and Jesuit piety, making this one of the most important early Jesuit publications. More than forty years later across the globe, the Italian Jesuit missionary Giulio Aleni (1582–1649) published two works in China on the life of Christ, a book of fifty-seven woodcuts and a larger work in Chinese. Both were “translations” of Nadal, although not in strict correspondence. The woodcuts selected by Aleni represented only a fraction of the original engravings in Nadal’s work, and Aleni’s Chinese text was also more condensed than Nadal’s Latin text. This chapter compares these works as a case study in religious translation as cultural adaptation: what is left out, what is emphasized, and how visual images are translated from one technique (copper engraving) to another (woodcut). The chapter then draws certain comparisons about book-printing in sixteenth-century Netherlands and China at the end of the Ming dynasty.