While the study of Catholicism in late Ming and early Qing China has attracted increasing attention in recent decades – partly due to Jacques Gernet's China and the Christian impact (1982) – from China studies scholars, the gender perspective has been to a large extent absent from the extant scholarship. Nadine Amsler's new book fills a historiographical gap by considering the seventeenth-century Jesuits’ adaptation to Chinese Confucian masculinity, their views and practices about interactions with Chinese women and, crucially, the role that Chinese Catholic women played in shaping what the author terms ‘domestic Catholicism’. Foregrounding the role of Catholic women mainly in urban centres – such as Nanjing, Shanghai, Songjiang and Jiading – located in China's Jiangnan (‘South of the Yangzi River’), a region which witnessed ‘the densest Catholic presence’ and was ‘the most prosperous and culturally advanced region of seventeenth-century China’ (p. 11), the book sheds light on the household or domestic sphere as a religious space, where women had been traditionally assigned to undertake the gendered division of ritual labour required of Chinese religious culture (p. 4).
Organised thematically into nine substantive chapters, the book begins the story in Chapter i, ‘Clothes make the man: the Jesuits’ adoption of literati masculinity’, by discussing the ways the Jesuits’ change of dress from Buddhist monks’ garbs to Confucian literati robes had significant ramifications on their views and practices about interactions with Chinese women. Whereas Jesuits wearing Buddhist monks’ garb ‘had relatively unrestricted access to Chinese women’, the author argues, their adoption of ‘literati masculinity’ through wearing the literati robe ‘required them to largely refrain from direct contact, especially with gentry women’ (p. 35). Chapter ii, ‘A kingdom of virtuous women: Jesuit descriptions of China's moral topography’, shows how the Confucianised Jesuits internalised the Chinese scholarly elite's gender segregation ideal – that is, the gender-based spatial distinction between inner/women and outer/men. They not only adopted Confucian discourse on ‘the idolatrous temple as a site of sexual indecorum’ (p. 40) but also lauded Chinese women's seclusion within the inner quarters and its positive influence on ‘female virtuousness and chastity’ (p. 41).
Given the ‘inner/outer’ binary code that segregated literati Jesuits from access to Chinese women, how did Jesuits in China ‘evangelize non-Catholic women’ and ‘tend to Catholic women's religious needs’ without breaking the gender boundary (p. 47)? This question is addressed by Chapter iii, ‘A source of creative tension: literati Jesuits and priestly duties’. Jesuits’ creative ways of performing their priestly duties included (1) indirect evangelisation reliant on intermediaries such as male relatives, children, servants of rich households and eunuchs; (2) gendered devotional spaces such as house oratories specifically for female Catholics or women's churches; and (3) adaptation to sacramental ceremonies such as omitting certain ceremonies that required physical contact when performing baptism and extreme unction.
Chapter iv, ‘Strengthening the marital bond: the Christianisation of Chinese marriage’, examines the varying degrees to which the Jesuits were involved in Christianising Chinese marriage practices. While Jesuits dispensed with the sacrament of matrimony by permitting Chinese converts to wed according to Chinese custom with only minor alterations of those practices deemed superstitious or idolatrous, they strictly prohibited both divorce and polygyny. The Jesuits’ prohibition of polygyny and advocacy for monogamy implied their ‘lack of interest in the fate of concubines’ and thus ‘how they concentrated their evangelical efforts on the much-honored and politically influential male literati elite’ (p. 85), as the author insightfully suggests.
Chapter v, ‘Praying for progeny: women and Catholic spiritual remedies’, shifted its attention to Chinese Catholic women's fertility devotions. Women's devotions to either the Blessed Virgin Mary as a son-granting deity or St Ignatius as a foetus-protecting deity point to Chinese Catholics’ historical continuity with traditional efficacy-based religiosity (pp. 88–9).
Chapter vi, ‘Domestic communities: women's congregations and communal piety’, offers an analysis of the construction of female devotees’ communities. Catholic women's community construction may likely be modelled on lay Buddhist congregations for women, according to the author, thanks to the ‘“elective affinities” between Buddhist and Catholic congregations’ (p. 102). The distinctiveness of Catholic women's congregations lay in their predominant domesticity (‘with the house oratory as its center of gravity’, p. 111) and considerable female agency (due to ‘ the absence of a strong priestly presence’, p. 112).
Chapter vii, ‘Sharing genteel spirituality: the female networks of the Xus of Shanghai’, zooms in on Shanghai by exploring the female networks surrounding the Xus – one of the most prominent Catholic gentry families dating back to the conversion of the famous patriarch Xu Guangqi (1562–1633). Emphasising the maintenance of faith through matrilineal contacts and faith transmission through relationships established by marriage, the author complicates our understanding of Chinese Catholicism as a ‘family religion’ beyond the previous interpretation of patrilineal, filial piety. Turning our gaze away from Shanghai and directing it toward Hangzhou and Nanjing, Chapter viii, ‘A widow and her virgins: the domestic convents of Hangzhou and Nanjing’, provides a rare glimpse of two Chinese Catholic ‘domestic convents’ established around 1630 by Agnes Yang, a daughter of another prominent scholar-official convert named Yang Tingyun (1557–1627). These cases in point illustrate a Catholic notion of religiously motivated female virginity ‘under the guise of Confucian womanly ideals’ (p. 137), which echoes the author's argument of Chinese Catholics’ historical continuity with the Chinese past (whether Buddhist or Confucian). The final chapter, ‘Fabrics of devotion: Catholic women's pious patronage’, takes up the case of Chinese Catholic women as patronesses to showcase the ways in which Catholic women's domestic religiosity was connected with the larger Catholic networks on the national and global levels.
Overall, this book is illuminating and well-argued, and it makes unique contributions to our understanding of Chinese Catholicism from a gender perspective. It will be of great value to scholars in the fields of Jesuit studies, history of Christianity in China, world Christianity and gender and religion.
