TY - JOUR
AU - Renate, Dürr,
AB - Abstract This article focuses on the Chronology by the Graz Jesuit Joseph Stöcklein (1676–1732), published in 1729. Since late antiquity, intellectuals have been crafting chronological works with a view to making apparent God’s actions in the world. These attempts were primarily based on the Old Testament, which was seen as a historiographical narrative and thus counted as a record of factual truth. New chronographical insights from China, which had been reaching Europe since the beginning of the seventeenth century, contradicted this exegetical tradition, however. Whoever attempted to relate the new findings arriving from China to the Bible had no choice but to give up certain truths in order to save others. Seen in this light, the tight framework of biblical truth led directly to creative hypotheses such as Stöcklein’s Chronology, which demonstrated two main shifts in the conceptualizing of universal history: first, Stöcklein emphasized the significance of the Old Reich and therefore decentred his universal history from western Europe to (mainly) Augsburg and Nuremberg; secondly, he envisaged the Far East rather than the Middle East and Europe as the geographical centre of Christian universalism and of the beginning of universal history. One crucial step was his relocation of Paradise to the immediate vicinity of China. Discussing the manifold Buddhist, Muslim and Christian sources with which Stöcklein was playing, I argue that Stöcklein’s turned the biblical story of salvation into a Chinese story of salvation. Was Adam Chinese? Is it possible that Noah and his Ark ended up not on Mount Ararat but instead somewhere in the Far East? As a result, did the patriarchs of the Old Testament perhaps speak classical Mandarin instead of Hebrew? And if so, should the language of Confucius be seen as the primeval language of humanity? This is merely a small sample of the questions and (controversial) hypotheses formulated by some European scholars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 These scholars attempted to find a solution to the discrepancy between the highly sophisticated chronologies they encountered in China, on the one hand, and the book of Genesis, on the other. The Jesuits in particular, from the seventeenth century onwards, grappled with new insights gleaned from Chinese historiography and tried to bring their observations about the age of the world into harmony with their own exegetical traditions. They translated classical Chinese works into Latin, granting the European Republic of Letters a first glance behind the curtain of Chinese philosophy, historiography and astronomy.2 In the process, they discovered a historical past that could be reliably dated to before the biblical Flood. The Chinese empire, with all its institutions and sciences, had therefore, in their opinion, not only emerged well before the Flood but also somehow managed to survive it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, only a few European scholars took their observations to this logical extreme. Among them was the Graz Jesuit Joseph Stöcklein (1676–1733), whose Chronology, a history of the world from creation to the 1720s, is the focus of this article. As far as I know, Stöcklein was the first to situate Paradise itself on the borders of China, where he equated it with a mythical lake in the Tibetan Highlands. Ever since late antiquity, intellectuals had crafted chronological works with a view to making apparent God’s actions in the world, from Creation until the birth of Christ. Their attempts were based primarily on the Old Testament, which was seen as a historical narrative and thus counted as a fact-based record of truth. The new chronographical insights gleaned from China contradicted this exegetical tradition, however. For instance, according to biblical lore, it took several centuries after the Flood for civilizations to emerge that had centralized governments and sufficiently sophisticated educational systems to enable, among other things, the development of both writing and mathematics. Moreover, biblical geography showed that these early civilizations were all located in the Near East—relatively close to Europe and certainly not as far away as China. To complicate matters further, a vital feature of the Old Testament as a whole was the Covenant between God and the Jewish people, which not only elevated the Hebrew language to a central element in the story, but also prefigured the salvation history of mankind, culminating in the story of the birth and sacrifice of Christ. What effects did it have, therefore, when Stöcklein asserted that Adam was the same person as the first emperor of China? Would this not turn the biblical story of salvation into a Chinese story of salvation? All of this means that the lack of research into Stöcklein’s Chronology (as into German-language chronologies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more generally) is not the only factor that makes the text so interesting.3 Rather, the Chronology appears as a highly unconventional attempt at decentring world history, which is demonstrated by two distinctive characteristics of Stöcklein’s account. First, he emphasizes the Old Reich and therefore shifts the focus from western Europe to (mainly) Augsburg and Nuremberg.4 Secondly, he radicalizes some ideas developed by Jesuits and other scholars in the seventeenth century and envisages the Far East rather than the Middle East and Europe as the geographical centre of Christian universalism and of the beginning of universal history. The intellectual autonomy of this attempt emerges very clearly if Stöcklein’s main hypotheses are compared to those contained in the first few volumes of George Sale’s Universal History, which was published in Britain at about the same time.5 By including several explanatory models for the origin of the world, Sale relativized the certainty of the biblical story, although he still considered it the only authentic and coherent explanation.6 At the same time, however, the approach taken by Sale in these volumes strengthened the Eurocentric perspective on universal history, an idea which was to influence historiography for the next two centuries.7 In what follows I will examine Joseph Stöcklein’s Chronology in the spirit of the recent approaches of global intellectual and global microhistory to better understand how new knowledge about and from the wider world transformed European self-perceptions.8 The Graz Jesuit’s work was published as part of his periodical the Neue Welt-Bott, which made available in print missionary reports from all over the world. The Chronology itself therefore needs to be understood as an explicit result of Stöcklein’s reading of these letters and treatises, especially the ones from China and elsewhere in Asia. Time and again, Jesuit writings presented China as a well-organized empire, a wealthy country with a temperate climate and full of extraordinarily beautiful landscapes.9 Like India in the Middle Ages, the Middle Kingdom came to be regarded by many Europeans as an ideal place in this world.10 Indeed, enlightened scholars consistently referred to Chinese administration as an example of ideal government.11 Such a positive appraisal of China, however, became dangerous for the Jesuits after the final defeat of the Society of Jesus in the so-called Chinese Rites Controversy over the extent to which Confucian philosophy was compatible with Christianity.12 Stöcklein, too, was well aware of the pitfalls of this topic. In his preface to the reader included in the first volume of the Neue Welt-Bott, he took great pains to emphasize that he would not comment on questions of politics in China.13 Instead, he compiled a Chronology in which he postulated parallels and connections between Chinese and Christian-European history. Anyone who attempted to relate the new findings arriving from China to the contents of the Bible had no choice but to give up certain truths in order to save others. Seen in this light, the tight framework of biblical truth led directly to the development of creative hypotheses such as those mentioned above. Stöcklein’s answer to the problems posed by his way of reading the Bible can be seen as another example of what Martin Mulsow calls the ecosystem of ideas.14 Time and again, Mulsow has shown that radical and orthodox ideas were much more intertwined with each other in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than the clear-cut divisions imposed by some scholars tend to suggest. Radical ideas did not simply appear but were often deeply rooted in orthodox debates. When we study early Enlightenment debates, paying closer attention to who abandoned which ideas for the sake of which assumptions can help overcome some of the difficulties encountered in defining who did and who did not belong to the Enlightenment.15 The advantage of this approach is that it brings into view the entire discursive space and its structures through their defining questions, rather than through the answers they produced. In what follows, I will first introduce Joseph Stöcklein and his periodical Der Neue Welt-Bott. I will then discuss the place of chronologies in Christian conceptions of universal history, before moving on to Stöcklein’s chronological work and its place within this tradition. In conclusion, I will argue that Stöcklein felt the need to master the challenging mathematical and astronomical skills required for doing chronology in order to recast the Chinese past in the light of salvation history. I: Joseph Stöcklein and the Neue Welt-Bott Joseph Stöcklein’s interest and expertise in chronology reflect the intellectual fashions of his day. The editor of the missionary journal Der Neue Welt-Bott was neither highly proficient in astronomy nor thoroughly trained in mathematics.16 He also cannot be described as a specialist in Chinese history. But he was part of the broad scholarly movement that gave momentum to the early Enlightenment as well as an active political player. At any rate, he had made a name for himself whilst serving as an imperial military chaplain during the War of the Spanish Succession, which in turn prompted several courts to try to acquire his services as a political advisor. Georg Ludwig, Protestant prince-elector and later king of England, was among them, as was the Protestant duke of Württemberg Eberhard Ludwig. The Polish king August II offered Stöcklein a position as royal chaplain, as did several other Catholic rulers. Stöcklein, who had received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna, turned them all down and chose the relatively modest position of librarian at the Jesuit College in Graz. There he had not only access to the fantastic book collection of the college, but also enough leisure time to pursue his studies. In Graz, he occupied himself with the publication of the Neue Welt-Bott, reconstructed the forty years of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and issued his Chronology, in which he attempted to reconcile the Judeo-Christian history from the creation of the world until the 1720s with its Chinese counterpart. The latter two of these works, each comprising between ninety and one hundred finely printed folios, appeared as single issues of the Neue Welt-Bott.17 Stöcklein was planning to publish his Chronology in a more extensive Latin version to make it available to the European Republic of Letters when he died, unexpectedly, in 1733.18 The Neue Welt-Bott was without a doubt Joseph Stöcklein’s most prestigious project, and it made him famous beyond the confines of his order and the Catholic confession.19 Inspired by similar collections appearing in France, Stöcklein launched an appeal to his fellow Jesuits to send him letters and notices about their missions in the 1720s. He complemented their works with translations from his French examples, most notably the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses and the Nouveaux mémoires des missions de la Compagnie de Jésus.20 Mission reports were a genre that would thrive for decades. The Neue Welt-Bott, for example, appeared—with a few interruptions—from 1726 until 1758. In total, the journal consists of more than 4,500 folios. Due to the way in which it combined educational and scientific objectives, the journal had a broad audience that crossed confessional boundaries. Nearly every large library in Germany, Austria and Switzerland owns at least the first three volumes—or the first twenty-four issues, published between 1725 and 1735—of the Neue Welt-Bott, sometimes in several copies.21 Furthermore, copies can be found in many other European countries, such as Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark and Finland. This clearly shows that the audience for this collection of Jesuit missionary reports was cross-confessional. Quite a few of the issues were published in two editions.22 Catalogues of book fairs show that one volume of eight issues sold for about seven thalers.23 Members of the European Republic of Letters sometimes owned these expensive books, for example the Hamburg pastor and free thinker Herman Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768).24 With the money of Philipp Wilhelm, count (Reichsgraf) of Boineburg, regent for the elector of Mainz, the University of Erfurt purchased the first three volumes and positioned them within the category of travelogues rather than alongside Catholic theology or religious literature.25 They were also valued as representative objects and given as gifts. Augusta Dorothea of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, for instance, gave the first eleven issues to her younger brother, Duke Ludwig Rudolph of Brunswick and Lüneburg (1671–1735), as a birthday present.26 The beautifully laid-out volumes of Der Neue Welt-Bott reflect Stöcklein’s ambitions. Through collecting these letters about missionary activities he was able to organize an information fair, a Jahrmarkt as he called it, which allowed readers to pick and choose according to their individual interests and inclinations.27 Stöcklein suggested, for example, that theologians would be able to appreciate even (supposedly) pagan practices as essentially virtuous, that European lawyers could see how justice existed even among heathens, that pharmacologists would read about new medicines and that natural philosophers could discover new phenomena.28 This was self-promotion of the highest order. For Stöcklein, the Neue Welt-Bott was intended not only to bring knowledge from all the corners of the world to Germany, but also to help create a proper Catholic-German identity. This was why he endeavoured to translate the missives and letters into a form of German that was understood from northern Germany to South Tyrol. Consciously distancing himself from the Lutheran German language—which was already well developed by the eighteenth century—Stöcklein set out to create a distinctive form of the German language.29 To achieve his goal, the Jesuit consciously avoided all Latin loan words, using Mittag-Reiff (midday ring) instead of Meridian, for example. He also opted to place the prime meridian at the longitude of the south German imperial city of Nuremberg and used this zero meridian to calculate the time difference between European and Chinese cities. Moreover, distances on printed maps were given in German sea-miles.30 As a result, the entire world was presented from an unequivocally German perspective.31 The surviving volumes show signs of having been used, indicating that Stöcklein’s Chronology was indeed read.32 For instance, on the title page of one copy of the twelfth issue of the Neue Welt-Bott of 1729—which also focused on Chinese history33—it is possible to discern a faint mark left by a page of additions to the Chronology dating to 1732.34 It appears that this page had been resting on the title page of the 1729 issue, quite possibly because a reader cross-referenced the two parts or re-read older passages. Sometimes improvements can be found: in the copy of the Neue Welt-Bott in Munich, for instance, one reader recalculated and corrected several tables.35 Stöcklein stated that he had received quite a few critical letters with mathematical corrections. These must have encouraged him to publish an improved version of his calculations as an appendix to the Neue Welt-Bott in 1732. He even cites the controversy he caused, mentioning that ‘the most learned among them, whose honour and calling is known throughout the whole of Europe’ had been involved—albeit without giving the name of this illustrious correspondent.36 Stöcklein received three critical letters from this person and accepted some of the author’s suggestions. In other cases, the Jesuit was less willing to respond to criticism, leading to hostile reactions to his writing.37 The whole appendix to the 1732 issue should be seen as a response to the letters received by Stöcklein. The very fact that such a response was needed shows that his work was widely read. The efforts made by some readers to make the many complicated tables more comprehensible point in the same direction. Some emphasized certain lines in order to bring specific rows to the fore, for example in a copy in the Herzog August Bibliothek annotated with brown ink and in two copies currently in Tübingen and Stuttgart annotated in red (see Fig. 1 for the Stuttgart example).38 It stands to reason that people wanted to understand properly the calculations contained in this table, as here Stöcklein attempted to prove that any discrepancies between the Julian and the Chinese calendars were not the fault of the Chinese. ‘This error cannot possibly be attributed to the Chinese’, he wrote in an accompanying commentary, noting they had kept track of leap years for millennia.39 The implications of these calculations for Christian history are emphasized in the names of the columns: the ‘true year of Christ’ (Rechte Jahr Christi) at the top of one column turns into the ‘Chinese year of Christ’ (Sinische Jahr Christi) at its bottom. Comparing this column with the final column, ‘European year of Christ’ (Europäische Jahr Christi), we can see a two-year discrepancy. Nevertheless, according to this table, it was Chinese historiography that proved the Bible true—and not the other way around. Furthermore, this table also shows the political impact of the whole undertaking. Stöcklein continued his calculations into the future. Specifically, he hinted at the anticipated expiration in 1742 of the Treaty of Passarowitz, which had been concluded between the Ottoman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire and Venice on 21 July 1718 (Ende des Frids von Passarowitz). This treaty—geographically and politically worlds away from the Middle Kingdom—thus became part of Chinese history. Figure 1: View largeDownload slide One of the crucial tables for Stöcklein’s recalculation of Chinese and Judeo-Christian chronologies of world history. A reader has highlighted columns in this copy, probably in order to be able to read the table more easily. Source: J. Stöcklein, F. Keller and P. Probst (eds), Der Neue Welt-Bott, 5 vols (Augsburg/Graz, 1726–58), vol. 2, issue 16, after p. 48, copy in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart. Figure 1: View largeDownload slide One of the crucial tables for Stöcklein’s recalculation of Chinese and Judeo-Christian chronologies of world history. A reader has highlighted columns in this copy, probably in order to be able to read the table more easily. Source: J. Stöcklein, F. Keller and P. Probst (eds), Der Neue Welt-Bott, 5 vols (Augsburg/Graz, 1726–58), vol. 2, issue 16, after p. 48, copy in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart. II: Chronologies between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy The American historian Anthony Grafton, one of the foremost experts on early modern chronologies, has argued that ‘chronology threatened orthodoxy—indeed it threatened certainty’.40 Grafton has dedicated many books, chapters and articles to what at first glance seems a surprising conclusion. He shows that it was, in fact, the logic of precise information and the implicit logic of time tables that challenged established chronological orthodoxies.41 Chronological tables had been in use since the time of the fourth-century bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (260/4–339/40) and had been made popular by Saint Jerome (347–420), who had translated parts of Eusebius’s Histories and who continued Eusebius’s chronological table back to the creation of the world. It should be noted that no two chronologies were ever exactly alike, but it is to Jerome’s table, combined with insights from the Hebrew Bible, that we owe the idea that the world was created around 4000 BC, and that the Flood happened around 2500 BC. On the one hand, chronologies undoubtedly reflected a need for certainty. They fall under the category of religious knowledge, in which biblical exegesis, mathematics and astronomy are combined with historical knowledge and visions of the future.42 On the other hand, however, uncertainty remained an intrinsic quality of chronological works. First and foremost, this was a consequence of the fact that the information given in the book of Genesis is very much open to interpretation. To make matters worse, there exists a 500 to 1,000-year difference between the data from the Hebrew versions and those contained in the Greek Septuagint. Last but not least, the truths contained in the Bible, which were once thought to be unassailable, came increasingly under fire as knowledge about the ages of Egypt and China grew. Thus, those concerned with chronology always ran the risk of inflaming one of the sore spots of early modern Christianity. In 1658 the first overview of Chinese history appeared in a European language. Its appearance caused shockwaves that spread out in at least three directions.43 First, referring to ancient Chinese historiography, the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini (1614–1661) argued that reliable Chinese annals based on astronomical observations went back to the year 2952 BC. This meant, however, that mathematics and astronomy would already have existed in China before that date, which is to say before the Flood—even if, following the Septuagint, the Flood took place around 3000 BC.44 Martini thus exacerbated a problem that had existed for decades, namely how to deal with the reality of Chinese civilization and history against the model presented by the Vulgate. The Church had given the Jesuit missionaries license to use the Septuagint for their mission in China in 1637 in the hope of navigating this challenge (even if this permission went against the decisions of the Council of Trent).45 The second challenge was posed by another Great Flood mentioned in Chinese historiography. While this event could be interpreted as part of the Flood, it might equally well have been a regional phenomenon. This latter reading would account for the continuation of mathematical knowledge beyond that point in time, but at the expense of the universality of the biblical Flood. Although Martini explicitly steered clear of this particular question, he did introduce into the public discourse the possibility of multiple floods at several points in space and time.46 The third challenge consisted of reassessing all this newly acquired data. As it turned out, it was all but impossible to reconcile Chinese history with the biblical record without straying into the realms of heterodoxy. Martini himself began the discussion with the conjecture that Jao (or Yao), the seventh Chinese emperor, might have been identical to the Roman God Janus, on account of the similarities between their names and their appearances in the record. Janus, according to traditional interpretation, was often equated with Noah.47 Although Martini was very careful in formulating these hypotheses, subsequent publications tended to present these and other observations as fact and built upon them to make even more daring claims. The Leiden theologian Georg Horn (1620–1670), for example, was apparently the first to continue the list of Chinese emperors from Jao back to the mythical first emperor, Fuxi, which allowed him to equate Fuxi with Adam.48 Only a few years later, John Webb (1611–1672) posited that the long scientific tradition existing in China indicated that Noah must have built his Ark there.49 Stöcklein himself devoted a whole chapter to finding parallels between the Chinese emperors and the biblical Patriarchs. It starts with a simple statement: ‘The Chinese mention several patriarchs in their annals / who have lived before and after the Flood; they have even turned them into kings / And here they are’.50 Stöcklein then goes on to find a patriarchal counterpart for each of the so-called ‘antediluvian’ Chinese emperors, starting with Adam as the first emperor, with Noah the fourteenth in his list. Chronology posed the challenge of working out how these new insights from all over the world—but especially China and Egypt—fitted into the scheme laid out in the book of Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament. Everywhere in Europe, people were trying to explain the discrepancies. Their answers generally fell into one of three categories—although eclectic mixtures of argumentation also emerged. First, one could simply play down the age of Egyptian and Chinese civilizations, discredit their astronomical findings and give the last word to the narrative of the Bible.51 Secondly, one could try to recalculate the numbers given in the different Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Bible so as to arrive at a longer history of civilization after the Flood. Thirdly, one could question whether it was even necessary to reinterpret the Judeo-Christian tradition in light of new information from China. While the various discussants thus took positions vis-à-vis the Bible that ranged from ‘orthodox’ to ‘critical’, these should in no way be understood according to modern categories of ‘religious’ versus ‘secular’. Everyone who participated in these debates agreed a priori that the Bible did in fact contain the word of God and had a revelatory character. Therein lay the explosive nature of these questions. The problem was not so much doubting the authenticity of the many available narratives, but rather ensuring that the biblical version of events fitted with recorded history. This in turn implied that the philological methods employed to shape the emerging discipline of biblical criticism as well as the new mathematical and astronomical methods used to calculate time were common to all parties in the debate.52 III: Biblical Exegesis and Astronomical Calculations Joseph Stöcklein called his Chronology a ‘reconciliation’ (Ausgleichung) of Chinese and European history.53 This is an interesting term because it emphasizes his effort in proving rather than assuming parallels between Chinese and Judeo-Christian history. Like scholars before him, Stöcklein divided the history of the world into a ‘prehistoric-mythical’ age, useful information about which was contained only in the Bible, and the age of civilizations, knowledge of which was transmitted both by artefacts and through historical narratives.54 Unlike many of his intellectual contemporaries, however, he deemed the Chinese record to be the most trustworthy.55 The sources he used in his endeavour were, on the one hand, the book of Genesis and the historians of antiquity, and on the other, the Chinese annals and chronicles made available through the works of the Jesuit missionaries Martino Martini, whom we encountered earlier, and Philippe Couplet (1623–1693).56 Moreover, Stöcklein also emphasized time and again that he had completely recalculated his chronology, referring to the most recent and most sophisticated mathematical and astronomical debates of his age (taking into account the geographical implications of their conclusions) and using insights gleaned from the emerging discipline of numismatics. Four environmental phenomena that had affected the history of the entire world were essential to Stöcklein’s main goal, which was to establish parallels between Chinese and Judaeo-Christian history. The first of these was the seven-year famine described in Genesis 41 (the famous ‘seven lean years’); the second and third were the two solar eclipses said to have occurred in the years of the birth and death of Christ, a widely discussed topic since Philippe Couplet’s Chronology of 1687;57 the fourth was an eclipse which had occurred in 1706 and which had been accurately observed and described by observers on all the known continents. Stöcklein himself had observed—and meticulously documented—the solar eclipse of 1706 while he was a prisoner of war in Hagenau.58 In order to establish the connections between these phenomena, the Jesuit had to identify the sources of all the errors he encountered in calendars old and new and then correct these in lengthy tables. To ensure that his version would be correct, he kept in touch with several mathematicians throughout the process.59 The phenomena chosen by Stöcklein, which he assumed had affected the entire world, served both as a reality anchor and as a touchstone for the precision with which various chronologies had been made. They allowed him to gauge the compatibility of the different calendar systems in Europe and China—in spite of the numerous inconsistencies he found. Stöcklein reasoned that the eclipses surrounding the birth and death of Christ were well-documented in both Judeo-Christian and Chinese records, and he went to considerable effort to prove that these were indeed the same events.60 These two eclipses allowed him to examine the trustworthiness of Chinese astronomy and chronology. Stöcklein concluded that they were off by only a small margin of error—which, he admitted in his later addendum, was a few years larger than he had initially thought.61 From there, Stöcklein followed the Chinese records backwards until he reached the description of a seven-year famine, which he equated with the lean years in Egypt described in Genesis 41. By converting the Chinese calendar, he arrived at a date of 1765 BC. Using the Bible to go ever further back, Stöcklein then counted another 2,235 years back until Creation, so that the birth of Christ fell on exactly the 4,000th year since the creation of the world. From this observation, he then drew the conclusion that the end of the world would take place in the year 8000.62 IV: Paradise in the Far East between Myth and Experience Stöcklein’s universal history appears fairly orthodox at first glance. It still has a clear beginning and a defined end. Moreover, the Jesuit used the Vulgate, whereas most critical scholars at the time relied on the Septuagint. When scholars like Isaac Newton referred to the Vulgate, they often did so to prove Chinese astronomy wrong.63 For Stöcklein, though, the use of the Vulgate was a bold decision, because, as noted above, in his Chronology it is Chinese historiography that proves the truth of the Bible and not vice versa. What is more, whenever the discrepancies between the Vulgate and Chinese historiography became too visible, the Jesuit abandoned the Latin Bible. With regard to the initial question about which kind of knowledge is sacrificed to save which truths, Stöcklein tried to save universalism at all costs. Since his idea of a common history of all humankind relied on a common starting point, Stöcklein’s search for Paradise has to be interpreted as the central element of his conceptualization of history. So, if Adam was Chinese, then where was Paradise? Joseph Stöcklein tried to answer this question by using astronomical calculations, empirical experience and the long-standing Judeo-Christian debate on the earthly Paradise.64 He devoted a detailed chapter to this question, which opens with the words: ‘Now is the time to bring the European calculation of the years in accordance with the Chinese so that one complete work will emerge from both’.65 For the empiricist Stöcklein, the location of Paradise would help to determine whether China had already been settled before the Flood.66 We will see that he radicalized his conception of earthly Paradise in the years between 1729, the publication of the Chronology, and 1732, when its appendix appeared. I argue that he was well aware of the heterodoxy of his statement, which he therefore concealed in tables and presented in an ironic manner. The Bible gives only a few hints regarding the location of Paradise. It supposedly lay in the East (Genesis 2:8) and on a mountain (Ezekiel 28:11–19). Moreover, Genesis mentions four rivers (2:10–14) which, at least from the time of the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, were seen not only as metaphorical, but also as an indication of the location of Paradise on Earth.67 Ever since the time of Saint Augustine (354–430), the rivers Perat and Hidekel had usually been identified as the Euphrates and the Tigris, Gihon as the Nile, and Pischon as the Ganges.68 As such, the centre of the world before the Flood was understood to be located in the Middle East, including Egypt, far away from China. Stöcklein, however, inferred that if China was indeed inhabited before the Flood, Paradise should be located somewhere between the Ganges and (modern-day) China.69 It should be found, he proposed, ‘at such a place / where four large rivers sprout from a single lake / namely Lake Kia’,70 which bordered on Tibet to the north, on the Kingdom of Pegu (present-day Bago) to the south, on China to the east and on the Kingdom of Lhasa to the west (see Fig. 2). In a feat of philological sophistry, Stöcklein defended his thesis against the whole of Jewish and Christian tradition, which is to say (mainly) against Flavius Josephus.71 Figure 2: View largeDownload slide Philippe Couplet, map of China (1687). On the far left is Lake Kia with its four prominent south-flowing rivers. This map was inserted into Der Neue Welt-Bott. Source: Der Neue Welt-Bott, vol. 2, issue 12, opposite p. 1, from copy held by the Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen. Figure 2: View largeDownload slide Philippe Couplet, map of China (1687). On the far left is Lake Kia with its four prominent south-flowing rivers. This map was inserted into Der Neue Welt-Bott. Source: Der Neue Welt-Bott, vol. 2, issue 12, opposite p. 1, from copy held by the Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen. To go against such a redoubtable interpretation, Stöcklein provided precise empirical evidence to support his case. In fact, Stöcklein wrote about Paradise as if it were a place like Paris, Nuremberg or Beijing. From the Nuremberg prime meridian, he calculated, there was a time difference of 5 hours, 27 minutes and 24 seconds to ‘Paradise or Lake Kia’; from there to Beijing, the difference was only a little over an hour.72 He thus pushed further his statements about the proximity of Paradise to China in terms of longitude and geographic accuracy. At the same time, he also stressed his claim to be a reliable mathematician by using irony, which becomes even clearer from another table used to prove that his parallax calculations were correct. Here Stöcklein concluded that the solar eclipse of 1706 would have been visible ‘im Paradeiß’ (in Paradise) at 3 hours, 42 minutes and 24 seconds after solar noon.73 These tables clearly were meant to refute criticism and to prove the Jesuit’s mathematical prowess. Yet even a stubborn Jesuit would not seriously name Paradise as a place for precise calculations. Instead, this particular statement can more fruitfully be read as an ironic comment on the small-minded know-it-alls who had written so many letters and corrected his calculations. These tables are wonderful examples of the empirical approach in the emerging biblical criticism—and also a comment on its limitations.74 But where did Stöcklein get the idea of identifying Paradise with this so-called Lake Kia? The answer to this question goes well beyond the simple identification of a place on Couplet’s map (see Fig. 2) and provides a good example of what makes the study of knowledge transfer so complicated.75 For some time now, we have been used to understanding knowledge transfer as a dynamic process, which means above all that the simplified idea of knowledge being transferred from A to B has been abandoned. Instead, the idea of a dynamic process which changes all those concerned, people as well as information, is now dominant. James Secord has suggested the term ‘knowledge in transit’, which can be used both to describe the circulation of knowledge and to illustrate the fact that knowledge itself is (continuously) in transit.76 The idea of a transfer of knowledge is still, however, based on the notion of a starting point and a ‘destination’ of some sort. Yet in many cases it is no longer possible to reconstruct where a particular body of knowledge or particular ideas originated. With reference to recent debates about ‘travelling concepts’, it is perhaps possible to speak of travelling ideas as well.77 Travelling ideas are not easily retraceable and the term can therefore help scholars describe the phenomenon whereby similar ideas sometimes become important in different parts of the world without clear connections existing between them. Without doubt, travelling ideas, too, are based on multiple acts of transfer, but they are so various that one does not really know where to begin. In the case of Stöcklein’s Chronology, the idea of identifying Paradise with Lake Kia was surely not an accident, but Stöcklein himself was apparently unable to explain how he came up with it. This explains why on the one hand he searched for and even invented evidence, while on the other he picked up different traditions of interpreting earthly Paradise. Even if he was the first to explicitly identify Lake Kia with Paradise, this idea did not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, Stöcklein’s creative approach was the result of a highly complex process of knowledge transfer in which European, Chinese and Arabic interpretations mutually influenced each other before ending up in the Austrian scholar’s crucible. As is so often the case, it is of lesser importance to determine whether Stöcklein fairly and accurately portrayed the knowledge with which he was toying. Indeed, he did not—not least because the lake in question does not actually exist.78 Instead, I would like to highlight the dynamics that underpinned and released this creativity in order to understand why this Jesuit from Graz, who never left Europe himself, expended so much energy on proving that the Garden of Eden was a lake on the border of China. In the eighteenth century, proof for new hypotheses was still first and foremost provided by referring to (older) authoritative texts. We can imagine Stöcklein and his library assistant working through the huge Graz library without finding any texts to support their arguments.79 In the end the Jesuit found suitable evidence mostly in Muslim and Arabic sources, of all places. Stöcklein writes, somewhat enigmatically, that ‘Guilielmus’, the famous bishop of Paris, agreed with Arabs, Syrians and other peoples in the Near East that Paradise was located on the other side of the Ganges.80 If this reference was to the thirteenth-century bishop Guillaume d’Auvergne (1190–1249), who had written a treatise entitled De Universo, it was a daring interpretation at best. Guillaume d’Auvergne wrote only about the pleasant climate in India and Egypt, from which he drew the conclusion that Paradise on Earth might be a possibility, but he never went as far as actually stating where this Paradise would be located.81 Stöcklein’s second reference was the medieval Muslim scholar Al-Idrīsī, whose geography had become accessible to Stöcklein through the translation made by the Maronites Gabriel Sionita (1577–1648) and John Ezronita.82 According to Stöcklein, these two Christian Arabs had written ‘that Paradise was to be found nowhere but in China’.83 Eastern Christians—especially those in Syria—were often regarded by Europeans as well informed about the Holy Land and biblical stories.84 This is true in particular with respect to Sionita and Ezronita, who for years had been entrusted with translations for the Paris Polyglot Bible. Thus, by referring to these two Maronites, Stöcklein could demonstrate how well read he was, since his reading matter included literature from the Orient, and, additionally, his argument was probably strengthened by the circumstance that Syrian Christians—who came from a region where Paradise was usually supposed to lie—of all people claimed that Paradise was located in China. However, his attribution of this statement to their work is incorrect. In their Geographia Nubiensis of 1619, the Maronites actually put Paradise in their home region, somewhere in Syria or Lebanon.85 Moreover, Sionita was also known for his Arabic and Latin edition of the text referred to as the Testament of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad (1630), which Pierre Bayle had discussed extensively in his Dictionnaire Critique.86 Al-Idrīsī, who was a geographer at the court of Sicily in the twelfth century, does not even make reference to Paradise.87 He instead mentions Adam’s footprint on the island Sarandîb, where Adam would have descended to earth after the banishment from Paradise.88 The legend of ‘Adam’s footprint’ was an important Brahmin and Persian-Arabic narrative in the Middle Ages which connected Ceylon and India with Paradise without localizing Paradise at a specific place on earth. Thus, in contrast to Christian medieval world maps, Al-Idrīsī’s map of 1154 does not depict Paradise. According to Al-Idrīsī, who relied heavily on Ptolemy, the world is divided into seven climes, each of which consists of ten sections of equal size. In the third zone, section nine, we find the area between Tibet and the far west of China.89 Featuring prominently on the map is a large lake from which four rivers flow in each of the cardinal directions. This lake cannot be found in Ptolemy. Al-Idrīsī must have received information about it from travellers. If we compare the position of this lake with Lake Kia on Philippe Couplet’s map, they seem to be in roughly the same area. I have not been able to find out for sure whether Stöcklein ever saw Al-Idrīsī’s world map in its original form. Only eight copies of the manuscript map from 1154 survive, but research into the reception of Al-Idrīsī has shown its wide influence throughout the Arabic-speaking world and, indirectly, in Christian Europe.90 Al-Idrīsī did not describe this lake in his Geographia, nor, as mentioned earlier, did he claim that Paradise was located on earth, but the position of this lake at the gates of China might explain why Stöcklein mentioned the Muslim geographer in the first place. Al-Idrīsī’s map and description of the world are compilations that draw on many different sources, including the stories provided by Turks as well as medieval Arabic travellers to Asia.91 Through them, Al-Idrīsī would have learned of the Buddhist narratives about a sacred lake in the Tibetan Highlands which was considered to be the centre of the world according to Buddhist traditions. Some Buddhist maps show this place in a way similar to Al-Idrisi’s map: a big lake from which four rivers spring in each direction.92 In the myths, this lake is described in the most wonderful terms. The water is so clear that it shines like a mirror. Its shores are coloured in gold, silver, lapis lazuli and crystal.93 In some versions of the narrative, the rivers first circle the lake before continuing in their respective directions. In others, the lake is furnished with four gates, from which the water spouts; these are described as taking the shapes of a lion, a horse, an elephant and a bull.94 As late as the seventeenth century, European voyagers recounted the story of the Ganges arising from a cow’s head found in Buddhist narratives.95 In fact, there were many more tales about this sacred space in the Tibetan highlands, and European travellers eagerly lapped them up. Fernão Mendes Pinto (1509–1583) is considered one of the earliest sources for the location of the lake in the Tibetan Highlands that became known as Lake Kia, Chiamay or Chiang Mai.96 There must have been rumours about it before, because when Mendes Pinto travelled to Asia in the 1540s, he explicitly questioned the locals about this lake and they told him of an inaccessible place where wild animals, such as lions, elephants and buffalos roamed free. They also mentioned that large deposits of silver, copper, tin, and lead could be found on its shores, and that the inhabitants of the lake traded these for gold, diamonds and crystals.97 In a letter to Europe from 1571, Mendes Pinto described this lake as the largest known in the universe.98 Myths thus blended with stories of everyday life, often incorporating what appeared to be precise empirical information: when asked, the inhabitants of Siam explained that it would take about two and a half months to reach this lake. It is information like this that was used by European cartographers to draw the lake into the maps they made. The first depictions of the lake can perhaps be found in the world maps of Martin Behaim and Martin Waldseemüller, but with the empirical approach to cartography, the location of Lake Kia became increasingly accurate.99 It is already prominent in Giacomo Gastaldi’s (c. 1500–1566) map of Asia (Fig. 3).100 Between 1559 and 1561, the Venetian cosmographer drew a comprehensive tripartite map of Asia in which he combined Ptolemaic geography with the new data brought to Europe by Portuguese travellers. As far as Lake Kia is concerned, this appears to be a transitional phase in which the rivers in four cardinal directions were combined with the more pronounced southerly direction of rivers on later maps.101 Incidentally, the display of many parallel rivers flowing in a north–south direction had been a staple of Chinese cartography for many centuries (Fig. 4).102 From the moment the large Ortelius Atlas appeared in the 1570s, Lake Kia was included in most European maps of Asia.103 This tradition persisted for about 150 years, even if European cartographers did not agree on exactly where this lake was. Initially, it would usually be situated somewhere in the south—as was the case with Gastaldi’s map (Fig. 3)—more or less on the Tropic of Cancer. Later versions tended to locate it further north, around the thirtieth parallel as in the map printed in Stöcklein’s Neue Welt-Bott (Fig. 2). Sometimes, the lake was moved to the west, for example in the 1667 China Illustrata by Athanasius Kircher.104 Most frequently, however, the lake marked the entryway to China. The lake eventually even started to appear on Chinese and Japanese maps through European influences, most notably through the maps of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610).105 It is ironic that this mythical lake appeared first in those Chinese, Japanese or Korean maps which sought to integrate new empirical knowledge of mapmaking from Europe.106 Figure 3: View largeDownload slide Giacomo Gastaldi, map of China (1559–1561), edition of 1580: one of the first depictions of Lake Kia in a European map. This lake appears in the middle of the image, with rivers flowing from it in the four cardinal directions and prominent rivers running south. Source: Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, Fh III 19.4, published with permission. Figure 3: View largeDownload slide Giacomo Gastaldi, map of China (1559–1561), edition of 1580: one of the first depictions of Lake Kia in a European map. This lake appears in the middle of the image, with rivers flowing from it in the four cardinal directions and prominent rivers running south. Source: Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, Fh III 19.4, published with permission. Figure 4: View largeDownload slide On the left side of this sixteenth-century Chinese map are many rivers flowing south, a concept that was combined with Lake Kia in European cartography from the second half of the sixteenth century century onwards. Source: W. Fuchs, The ‘Mongol Atlas’ of China by Chu Ssu-Pen and the Kuang-Yü-T’u with 48 facsimile maps dating from about 1555 (Peiping, 1946), fig. 1, after p. 32. Figure 4: View largeDownload slide On the left side of this sixteenth-century Chinese map are many rivers flowing south, a concept that was combined with Lake Kia in European cartography from the second half of the sixteenth century century onwards. Source: W. Fuchs, The ‘Mongol Atlas’ of China by Chu Ssu-Pen and the Kuang-Yü-T’u with 48 facsimile maps dating from about 1555 (Peiping, 1946), fig. 1, after p. 32. Given all this, it should come as no surprise that the Jesuit Martino Martini also added Lake Kia to his maps of China.107 Following its inclusion in the Theatrum Orbis terrarum sive Atlas Novus in 1655 by the Dutch publisher Blaeu, who would re-issue it in 1663 in his Atlas Maior, Martini’s map became tremendously influential throughout Europe.108 It also became the direct model for Philippe Couplet when he prepared his own map of China, which in turn was used by Stöcklein. Martini always claimed to have made his map purely from his own observations and by referring to trustworthy Chinese sources.109 The explicit use of Chinese cartographic knowledge is also evident from Martini’s implementation of a dual system of longitudes, one of which was based on Beijing as the zero meridian.110 In the description accompanying his maps, he went beyond providing purely geographical and topographical details by adding explanations of the meaning of places sacred to Taoism and Buddhism.111 With regard to Lake Kia, Martini wrote only that it was supposedly located in ‘Sifan’, the name used by Chinese people for all the lands to the west of China. Many rivers flowed from this lake, all of which found a spot on his map, he wrote, the Ganges being one of them.112 As far as I can discover, Martini was thus the first European to describe the Ganges as one of the rivers springing from Lake Kia. In doing so, he latched onto one of the Buddhist narratives of the sacred lake in the Tibetan highlands. It is quite possible that Martini knew the account by Juan González de Mendoza (1545–1618), a member of the Order of Saint Augustine, about the Muslim king of Bengal who sent people up the Ganges to find Paradise.113 He certainly must have heard of the Jesuit Antonio Freire de Andrade (1580–1634), who left the Mughal court with a companion in 1624 to find his way into the Himalayas because ‘he had some revelation from God about his journey’ which implied that he would be certain to find a Christian community in the lands of Tibet.114 The significance of Lake Kia to Martini’s views is illustrated by the title page of his Novus Atlas Sinensis (Fig. 5), where the lake and its rivers are enlarged to the point of covering over half of the small map, even though the lake is actually outside the Chinese empire. Its prominence in this illustration reflects the importance and the exclusively positive associations that this place doubtlessly had for Martini. In the accompanying description, he emphasizes that the people living in this region were held in high regard by the Chinese.115 And elsewhere he contends that the nearby province of ‘Xensi’ was the oldest province of China, settled by the Chinese only shortly after the Flood.116 It is conceivable that Martini entertained the thought that Lake Kia was Paradise, though he never made this explicit. That honour belongs to Joseph Stöcklein, who officially declared Lake Kia to be the Garden of Eden and thereby integrated a Buddhist sacred space into a Judeo-Christian universal history. Figure 5: View largeDownload slide The importance of Lake Kia to the Jesuit Martino Martini can be discerned from the title page of his Novus Atlas Sinensis. Although it was considered to be outside the boarders of the Chinese empire, the oversized lake with its rivers flowing south is depicted prominently on the left side, where it is almost a third the size of all of China. Source: M. Martini, Novus Atlas Sinensis […], Amsterdam 1655, in Opera omnia, edited by Giuliano Bertuccioli, vol. 3, 1/2 (Trent, 2002), title page (detail) Figure 5: View largeDownload slide The importance of Lake Kia to the Jesuit Martino Martini can be discerned from the title page of his Novus Atlas Sinensis. Although it was considered to be outside the boarders of the Chinese empire, the oversized lake with its rivers flowing south is depicted prominently on the left side, where it is almost a third the size of all of China. Source: M. Martini, Novus Atlas Sinensis […], Amsterdam 1655, in Opera omnia, edited by Giuliano Bertuccioli, vol. 3, 1/2 (Trent, 2002), title page (detail) V: Stöcklein’s Chronology and Christian Universalism—Some Conclusions As long as the Bible was seen to be of epiphanic character as the word of God—and this was a matter of course for more or less all Europeans far into the second half of the eighteenth century—only very few scholars dared to draw and express conclusions such as those discussed in this article. In historiography, hypotheses such as those described here are mainly associated with free thinkers; the authors of works of this nature are seen as heterodox or, to use Martin Mulsow’s productive term, as bearers of ‘precarious knowledge’.117 But do those terms fit the Society of Jesus? What exactly was precarious about Stöcklein’s ideas? According to the depiction in contemporary polemics—polemics that continue to have a strong influence on our academic discourses today—the Jesuit order represented everything against which eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers stood.118 Joseph Stöcklein was probably both at the same time: he was firmly embedded in Christian tradition in some respects, but he also departed from it in other, significant, ways. For this reason, an exact classification of outlooks (as orthodox, moderate or radical) seems less interesting to me than the question of the dynamics of knowledge, including the question of how far knowledge itself was precarious. By declaring Lake Kia to be situated in Paradise, Stöcklein moved Paradise several thousand miles to the east. But the solution offered was more exceptional than merely asking where the Garden of Eden had actually been located. The common approach when constructing such maps was to combine readings from and commentary on the Bible with new empirical and mathematical methods.119 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries biblical stories were considered historical accounts. They could therefore be verified empirically. The basis of this attempt was a literal interpretation of the Bible, the so-called sensus literalis or sensus historicus, which had gained new currency during the Reformation.120 But trying to explain every single feature of a biblical story only created more problems; such endeavours unearthed inconsistencies which required further explanation and thus gave rise to the fundamental question of how old stories could be correlated with all sorts of new knowledge. Rather unintentionally, this literal interpretation gave new momentum to the developing historical-critical approach to biblical exegesis, especially from the late seventeenth century onwards. Most Protestant and Catholic authors at the time had no intention of criticizing or even contradicting the Bible. Quite the contrary. But since efforts to prove the Bible true only raised further questions, previously held certainties shifted unexpectedly. The resulting efforts to explain the ‘inexplicable’ sometimes ended in highly creative attempts to rescue those ideas and beliefs that were deemed most important at the expense of abandoning others. This is apparent in the work of Joseph Stöcklein. For him, it was Christian universalism more than anything which needed rescuing, because the growing number of accounts about different cultures and different religions arriving from abroad in his day made the idea of a single, united humankind appear more and more threatened. Stöcklein therefore in many ways tried to convince his readers of the importance of Christian universalism which he, like other Jesuits, interpreted in a very general way. Nevertheless, claims of Christian universalism ever since have been essentially Christo-centric and, more significantly in the long run, Eurocentric. By assigning such importance to Chinese history, by trusting Chinese astronomy more than European calendars, by referring to Chinese annals more than to ancient historiography and—in a way which is emblematic of his outlook—by locating Paradise close to China, Stöcklein almost paradoxically decentralized Europe within the concept of Christian universalism. Stöcklein was not just fully aware that his endeavour required him to depart from the otherwise unassailable text of the Vulgate; he even incorporated this departure into his argument. For instance, when critics pointed out inconsistencies between his Chronology and that compiled by his renowned fellow Jesuit Denis Petau (1583–1652), Stöcklein explained that Petau had opted to stay relatively close to the biblical narrative in order to avoid the risk of censorship.121 In the addendum to his Chronology, Stöcklein self-confidently claimed that Petau ‘without a doubt [would] have departed from the calculations of the Vulgate’ and would even have followed Stöcklein’s argument, ‘if he had been allowed to do so’ and if he had known about Chinese chronography, which he did not because he had lived a century earlier.122 For Stöcklein, knowledge of China and its history therefore changed interpretations of the Bible explicitly and with it, perspectives on the (history of the) world. Stöcklein, too, had already run into problems with the censors. One instalment of the Neue Welt-Bott, for instance, had been kept back for more than a year because it included a letter that was critical of the pope.123 Less than a column of text of the original five-page, narrowly spaced letter written by Ignatius Kögler, provincial in China, was published in the Neue Welt-Bott. Content-wise, the fragment was so inconsequential that, without knowing the original, readers must have wondered why this short message from China had been published at all. In addition, to the best of my knowledge, this letter is the only text in the entire Neue Welt-Bott in which Stöcklein indicated his omissions by ellipses—ellipses which must have sent as clear a message then as today’s censor bars in documents which have been redacted. Not only was this letter banned from publication, but Stöcklein also had to vow not to include any more opinions on China in the Neue Welt-Bott, which he did meekly in the preface to the first volume. My hypothesis is that his Chronology can be interpreted as a response to this experience of censorship. As Stöcklein wrote his Chronology, and thereby tried to establish a connection between Chinese and European history from Creation until the 1720s, he argued against the idea that world history could be split up into several individual histories. More importantly, he sought to bolster his position by applying the empirical methods of his age. His mathematical and astronomical approach was intended to prove that the convergence of the Chinese and Judeo-Christian calendars was not merely an a priori assumption. His ideas about the trustworthiness of Chinese historiography rested on ‘objective’ criteria such as solar eclipses that had been observed all over the world. Additionally, his meticulous calculation of the precise position of Paradise on the borders of China was meant to prove that the ‘comparison between Chinese and European history’ was empirically viable. However, all these steps were eventually intended to verify the hypothesis that the narrative of the Flood in the Old Testament was compatible with Chinese historiography—that Chinese history, too, in fact, bore witness to divine revelation. Stöcklein already noted as much in his preface to the Chronology: ‘God has decreed it in such a way / That from this pagan people / Who in previous ages had heard nothing about our Bibles and books / His uncorrupted words would be confirmed’.124 Christian universal history, therefore, had actually always been Chinese history, even before people in China had heard of God and of Christ. That is what I would call ‘provincializing Europe’ avant la lettre. Footnotes * This article is a revised version of three papers I gave, in Newcastle at the 2017 German History Society, in Hamburg at the German Historikertag and in Oxford at the Early Modern History Seminar organized by Lyndal Roper in the same year. I am very grateful for the opportunity to discuss different aspects of a completely new research topic and thank especially Mario Cams (Macao), Theodor Dunkelgrün (Cambridge), John-Paul Ghobrial (Oxford), Tobias Graf (Oxford), Martin Mulsow (Erfurt), Ulrike Strasser (San Diego), and Carine Van Rhijn (Utrecht) for important advice on specific topics I knew nothing about before. I would also like to thank Rutger Kramer (Vienna) for the wonderful translation. 1 A. Grafton, ‘Dating History: The Renaissance and the Reformation of Chronology’, Daedalus, 132 (2003), pp. 74–85; A. Grafton, ‘The Chronology of the Flood’, in M. Mulsow and J. Assmann (eds), Sintflut und Gedächtnis: Erinnern und Vergessen des Ursprungs (Munich, 2006), pp. 65–82; A. Grafton, ‘Isaac Vossius, Chronologer’, in E. Jorink and D. van Miert (eds), Isaac Vossius (1618–1689) between Science and Scholarship (Leiden and Boston, 2012), pp. 43–84; W. Poole, ‘Heterodoxy and Sinology: Isaac Vossius, Robert Hooke, and the Early Royal Society’s Use of Sinology’, in S. Mortimer and J. Robertson (eds), The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy, 1600–1750 (Leiden and Boston, 2012), pp. 135–53. 2 E. Van Kley, ‘Europe’s “Discovery” of China and the Writing of World History’, American Historical Review, 76 (1971), pp. 358–85; D. F. Lach and E. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3: A Century of Advance, book 4: East Asia (Chicago and London, 1993); D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Stuttgart, 1985); J. Heyndrickx (ed.), Philippe Couplet, S.J. (1623–1693): The Man Who Brought China to Europe (Nettetal, 1990); R. Malek and A. Zingerle (eds), Martino Martini S.J. (1614–1661) und die Chinamission im 17. Jahrhundert (St. Augustin, 2000); F. C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago and London, 2009). 3 B. Steiner, Die Ordnung der Geschichte: historische Tabellenwerke in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2008); R. Dürr, ‘Das Paradies im fernen Osten: die Chronologie Joseph Stöckleins S.J. (1729) als Kommentar zur Zeitgeschichte’, in R. Dürr, A. Gerok-Reiter, A. Holzem and St. Patzold (eds), Religiöses Wissen im vormodernen Europa: Schöpfung, Mutterschaft, Passion (Paderborn, 2018), pp. 183–209. In my article I discuss the Chronology as an argument in the Rites Controversy after the Jesuits had been forbidden by papal bull to integrate Confucianism into Christian belief. Some explanatory passages here rely on this article. 4 G. Borja González and U. Strasser, ‘The German Circumnavigation of the Globe: Missionary Writing, Colonial Identity Formation, and the Case of Joseph Stöcklein’s Neuer Welt-Bott’, in M. Friedrich and A. Schunka (eds), Reporting Christian Missions in the Eighteenth Century: Communication, Culture of Knowledge and Regular Publication in a Cross-Confessional Perspective (Wiesbaden, 2017), pp. 73–92. 5 An Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present: Compiled from Original Authors And Illustrated with Maps, Cuts, Notes, Chronological and Other Tables, vol. 1 (London, 1736), vol. 2 (London, 1737). 6 Universal History, vol. 1, preface, pp. vi, xlix; p. 35. 7 T. Griggs, ‘Universal History from Counter-Reformation to Enlightenment’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), pp. 219–47, here pp. 219, 234. 8 S. Moyn and A. Sartori (eds), Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013); M. Mulsow, ‘Elemente einer globalisierten Ideengeschichte der Vormoderne’, Historische Zeitschrift, 306 (2018), pp. 1–30; F. Trivellato, ‘Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?’, Californian Italian Studies, 2 (2011), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq; J.-P. A. Ghobrial, ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory’, Past & Present, 222 (2014), pp. 51–93. 9 C. von Collani, ‘Miracles, Death and Devil: Natural and Supernatural Events between the Worlds as Described in Der Neue Welt=Bott’, in D. Van Overmeire and P. Ackerman (eds), About Books, Maps, Songs and Steles: The Wording and Teaching of the Christian Faith in China (Leuven, 2011), pp. 200–27, here pp. 223–4. 10 K. Siebenhüner, Die Spur der Juwelen: materielle Kultur und transnationale Verbindungen zwischen Indien und Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2018), chap. 2. 11 Van Kley, ‘Europe’s “Discovery” of China’, p. 371; J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London and New York, 1997), chap. 3; J. Israel, ‘Admiration of China and Classical Chinese Thought in the Radical Enlightenment’, Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, 4 (2007), pp. 1–25; G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2010), chap. 7; S. Richter, Pflug und Steuerruder: zur Verflechtung von Herrschaft und Landwirtschaft in der Aufklärung (Cologne, 2015). 12 N. Standaert (ed.), Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. 1: 634–1800 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 668–88; N. Standaert, Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments (Rome, 2012). 13 J. Stöcklein, F. Keller and P. Probst (eds), Der Neue Welt-Bott mit allerhand Nachrichten deren Missionarien Soc. JESU Allerhand So Lehr= als Geist=reiche Brief/ Schrifften und Reis=Beschreibungen/ […], 5 vols (Augsburg/Graz, 1726–58) (henceforth NWB), vol. 1, ‘Vorbericht an den Leser’, p. XIII; Dürr, ‘Das Paradies im fernen Osten’. 14 M. Mulsow, ‘Radikalaufklärung, moderate Aufklärung und die Dynamik der Moderne’, in J. Israel and M. Mulsow (ed.), Radikalaufklärung (Berlin, 2014), pp. 203–33, here p. 215. See also M. Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland 1680–1720 (Hamburg, 2002). 15 R. Dürr, ‘Mapping the Miracle: Empirical Approaches in the Exodus Debate of the 18th Century’, Past & Present, 237 (2017), pp. 53–91. 16 C. von Collani, ‘Joseph Stöcklein’, Bio-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 10 (1995), cols 1516–1517. The printed obituary of Joseph Stöcklein can be found in NWB, vol. 4/2, no. 572. 17 NWB, issues 16 and 20. 18 See NWB, issue 20, appendix, pp. 1, 29, 30. 19 R. Dürr, ‘Der Neue Welt-Bott als Markt der Informationen? Wissenstransfer als Moment jesuitischer Identitätsbildung’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 34 (2007), pp. 441–66; R. Dürr, ‘Wissen als Erbauung—zur Theatralität der Präsentation von Wissen aus aller Welt im Neuen Welt=Bott’, in N. Roßbach and C. Braun (eds), Theatralität von Wissen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Wolfenbüttel, 2013), <http://diglib.hab.de/ebooks/ed000156/id/ebooks_ed000156_article11/start.htm>; and further: B. Hausberger, ‘El padre Joseph Stöcklein o el arte de inscribir el mundo a la fe’, in K. Kohut and M. Cr. Torales Pacheco (eds), Desde los confines de los imperios ibéricos (Mexico City, 2007), pp. 631–62; U. Strasser, ‘Die Kartierung der Palaosinseln: geographische Imagination und Wissenstransfer zwischen europäischen Jesuiten und mikronesischen Insulanern um 1700’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 36, 2 (2010), pp. 197–230; G. Borja González, Jesuitische Berichterstattung über die Neue Welt: zur Veröffentlichungs-, Verbreitungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte jesuitischer Americana auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Göttingen, 2011), pp. 124–66. 20 Ch. Le Gobien, J.-B. Du Halde and L. Patouillet (eds), Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères par quelque missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus, 34 vols (Paris, 1703–76); Th. Ch. Fleuriau D’Armenonville, N.-L. Ingoult and P. Roger (eds), Nouveaux Mémoires des Missions de la Compagnie de Jésus dans le Levant, 9 vols (Paris, 1715–55). 21 In Germany, Austria and Switzerland there are around fifty copies across university libraries, state libraries and even school libraries, which can be found via the Karlsruhe Virtueller Katalog. 22 NWB, issue 2 was printed in 1725, 1726 and 1728; issues 1 and 3–8 can be found in two editions, from 1726 and 1728. 23 Borja Gonzalez, Jesuitische Berichterstattung, pp. 295–304. 24 Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Nachlass Familie Reimarus: A 7—Hermann Samuel Reimarus, fol. 43. 25 Universitätsbibliothek Erfurt, NWB, vols 1–3, signature: 1 G 1416, 1–3. The three volumes show a handwritten, early catalogue entry of ‘Reißewerke fol. 15, fol.16 or fol. 17’. For the Boineburg funding see K. Paasch, Die Bibliothek des Johann Christian von Boineburg (1622–1672): ein Beitrag zur Bibliotheksgeschichte des Polyhistorismus (Berlin 2005), pp. 298–9. 26 The dedication reads as follows: ‘Pour marque de mon Estime et affection inviolable, que je portte pour Son Altesse Monseigneur le Duc Louis Rodolphe Mon tres cher et tres honoré frere je luis fais present de ces deux volumes pour Sa Bibliotheque Augustenburg le 20me Sebtembre 1728. Auguste Dorothe princesse Doueriere de Schwartzenbourg, née Duchesse de Brousviv et Lüneburg.’ See NWB, exemplar owned by the Herzog August Bibliothek, sig. M: Tq 4° 11. 27 Dürr, ‘Der Neue Welt-Bott als Markt der Informationen?’. 28 NWB, vol. 1, Preface. 29 Borja Gonzalez, Jesuitische Berichterstattung, pp. 159–64. 30 Dürr, ‘Wissen als Erbauung’, 2.1.: Das Wissen in den Karten. 31 Borja Gonzalez and Strasser, ‘German Circumnavigation’, pp. 73–92. 32 Since the Neue Welt-Bott was an expensive book printed in folio, readers would surely have treated the collection carefully. Nevertheless, I have found annotations in the margins in eight of the copies I have checked so far. 33 Stöcklein stresses that himself in NWB, issue 16, no. 369, p. 69; Chinese history was discussed in issue 12, nos 286–296, esp. nos 286, 287, 290. 34 NWB, issue 12, 1729, front page of the exemplar in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart. 35 NWB, issue 16, register, p. 5; no. 346, p. 25, 32; no. 348, p. 36, no. 351, p. 45; no. 370, p. 71; issue 20, appendix, pp. 6, 9, 11, 12. Copy held by the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek München. 36 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 1. 37 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 17. 38 NWB, issue 16, after p. 46 in the copy held by the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel; after p. 48 in the copies of the Evangelisches Stift Tübingen and the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart. The table is called ‘Taffel über die alte und mittler Weile versetzte neue Schalt=Jahr’. 39 NWB, issue 16, p. 49. 40 Grafton, ‘Chronology of the Flood’, p. 68. 41 A. Grafton and D. Rosenberg, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton, 2010), pp. 15–16, 26; Steiner, Die Ordnung der Geschichte. 42 Dürr, ‘Das Paradies im fernen Osten’, pp. 186–7; A. Holzem, ‘Die Wissensgesellschaft der Vormoderne: die Transfer- und Transformationsdynamik des “religiösen Wissens”‘, in St. Patzold and K. Ridder (eds), Die Aktualität der Vormoderne: Epochenentwürfe zwischen Alterität und Kontinuität (Berlin, 2013), pp. 218–51. See also the debates in the Tübingen Graduate School, ‘Religious Knowledge’: DFG GK 1662, Religiöses Wissen im vormodernen Europa (800–1800), http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/forschung/forschungsschwerpunkte/graduiertenkollegs/gk-religioeses-wissen.html (accessed 30 June 2017). 43 Martino Martini, Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima (1658), 2 vols, edited by F. Masini and L. Paternicò (Trent, 2010). The reception of this work is discussed in Masini’s introduction, pp. V–XIII, and in C. von Collani, ‘Theologie und Chronologie in Martinis “Sinica Historiae Decas Prima” (1658)’, in R. Malek and A. Zingerle (eds), Martino Martini S.J. (1614–1661) und die Chinamission im 17. Jahrhundert (St. Augustin, 2000), pp. 147–83; N. Standaert, ‘Jesuit Accounts of Chinese History and Chronology and their Chinese Sources’, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 35 (2012), pp. 11–87, here pp. 33–9. 44 Martini, Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima, vol. 1, pp. 59, 65. 45 D. E. Mungello, ‘A Study of the Prefaces to Ph. Couplet’s “Tabula Chronologica Monarchiae Sinicae” (1686)’, in J. Heyndrickx (ed.), Philippe Couplet, S.J. (1623–1693): The Man Who Brought China to Europe (Nettetal, 1990), pp. 183–209, here p. 192; Standaert, ‘Jesuit Accounts’, pp. 41–7; C. Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 1700–1762 (Oxford, 1991), p. 121; von Collani, ‘Theologie und Chronologie’, p. 151. 46 Martini, Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima, vol. 1, pp. 53–4. 47 Ibid., pp. 88–9. 48 G. Horn, Arca Noae/ Sive Historia Imperiorum et Regnorum a condito Orbe ad nostra Tempora (Leipzig, 1674), pp. 14–16. Cf. Van Kley, ‘Europe’s “Discovery” of China’, pp. 364–5; E. Jorink, ‘Noah’s Arc Restored (and Wrecked): Dutch Collectors, Natural History and the Problem of Biblical Exegesis’, in Sven Dupré and Christoph Lüthy (eds), Silent Messengers: The Circulation of Material Objects of Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries (Berlin, 2011), pp. 153–84. 49 Van Kley, ‘Europe’s “Discovery” of China’, pp. 365–6; Mungello, Curious Land, pp. 174–246; R. Ramsey, ‘China and the Ideal of Order in John Webb’s “An Historical Essay …”‘, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001), pp. 483–503; Poole, ‘Heterodoxy and Sinology’, pp. 136–8. 50 NWB, issue 16, no. 362, pp. 66–7. 51 F. C. Hsia, ‘Chinese Astronomy for the Early Modern European Reader’, Early Science and Medicine, 13 (2008), pp. 417–50. 52 Dürr, ‘Das Paradies im fernen Osten’, pp. 189–96; Dürr, ‘Mapping the Miracle’. 53 NWB, issue 16, title page. 54 NWB, issue 16, register, p. 6; no. 361, p. 62; no. 369, §5, p. 70 and more often. 55 NWB, issue 16, no. 358, p. 60 and more often. 56 NWB, issue 16, preface, p. 2v; the explanation of his sources can be found at the end of the preface, on the page prior to p. 1. 57 K. Lundbaek, T. S. Bayer (1694–1738): Pioneer Sinologist (London and Malmö, 1986), pp. 31–8. I would like to thank Martin Mulsow (Erfurt) for this information. 58 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 18. 59 Cf. his obituary, NWB, vol. 4/2, no. 572, p. 148. See in general A. Grafton, ‘Some Uses of Eclipses in Early Modern Chronology’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), pp. 213–29. 60 NWB, issue 16, no. 345. 61 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 24. Here, Stöcklein admits that there is a time difference of one to five years between the Chinese and the Judeo-Christian accounts of the eclipse. 62 NWB, issue 16, no. 361, p. 63. 63 J. Z. Buchwald and M. Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton and Oxford, 2013). 64 A. Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (London, 2006), pp. 284–342, esp. pp. 306, 309–10; Ph. C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 65–109. 65 NWB, issue 16, no. 361, p. 62. 66 NWB, issue 16, no. 361, pp. 63–4. 67 Scafi, Mapping Paradise, p. 197. 68 Ibid., p. 46. 69 NWB, issue 16, p. 6; no. 361, § 9. 70 NWB, issue 16, no. 361, p. 64. 71 Ibid. 72 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 15. 73 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 18. 74 Dürr, ‘Mapping the Miracle’. 75 M. Espagne, ‘Der theoretische Stand der Kulturtransferforschung’, in W. Schmale (ed.), Kulturtransfer: kulturelle Praxis im 16. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck, 2003), pp. 63–75; G. Dharampal-Frick, ‘Zur Problematik von Transkulturation und Wissenstransfer zwischen Europa und Indien’, Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte, 8 (2007), pp. 17–32; P. Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? (Oxford, 2015). 76 J. Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’, ISIS, 95, 4 (2004), pp. 654–72. 77 M. Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto, 2002). 78 Hobson-Jobson, A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical. Geographical and Discursive (London, 1903), p. 190; S. Hedin, Southern Tibet, vol. 1: Lake Manasarovar and the Sources of the Great Indian Rivers from Remotest Antiquity to the End of the 18th Century (Stockholm, 1917); D. F. Lach, and Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3/4, figs 286, 289–91, 325 after p. 1730; Th. Suárez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1999), pp. 107–19. 79 NWB, issue 20, preface, p. 3: Stöcklein describes how his assistant went through all imaginable books in search of evidence relating to the Exodus. A similar approach can be assumed here. 80 NWB, issue 16, no. 361, p. 65: ‘Besser hat es getroffen der brühmte Bischoff von Pariß Guillielmus, welcher mit denen Arabern, Syrier und anderen dort herum gelegenen Völckern lehret/ das irrdische Paradeiß seye in dem äussersten gegen Sonn=Aufgang befindlichen Welt=Theil/ mithin jenseits des Ganges gewesen. Eben dieser Meynung ist auch der Welt=Messer aus Nubien, ins gemein Nubiensis genant/ samt seinen zwei Dollmetschen oder Maroniten, Gabriele von Sion und Joanne von Ezron, welche ausdrücklich schreiben/ das Paradeiß seye in keinem andern Land/ als in China gestanden.’ 81 P. Gautier Dalché, ‘Le paradis aux antipodes? Une distinction divisionis terre et paradisi delitarum (XIVe siècle)’, in D. Barthélemy and J.-M. Martin (eds), Liber largitorius: Études d’histoire médiévale (Genève, 2003), pp. 615–37; here p. 627; William of Auvergne, The Universe of Creatures: Selections Translated from the Latin with an Introduction and Notes, edited by Roland J. Teske (Milwaukee, 1998). 82 Geographia Nubiensis id est accuratissima totius orbis in septem climata divisi descriptio, continens praesertim exactam universae Asiae, et Africae, rerumque; in ijs hactenus incognitarum explicationem. Recens ex Arabico in Latinum versa a Gabriele Sionita Syriacum, et Arabicum literarum Professore, atque Interpret Regio, et Ioanne Hesronita, earundem Regio Interprete, Maronitis (Paris, 1619). On Al-Idrīsī see J. Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (London, 2012), chap. 2. Information on Gabriel Sionita and John Ezronita can be found in R. Vollandt, Arabic Versions of the Pentateuch: A Comparative Study of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Sources (Leiden and Boston, 2015), pp. 118–28. I owe this reference to Dr Theodor Dunkelgrün (Cambridge). Although the Latin translation did not give the name of this Arabic geographer, European scholars had known since the middle of the seventeenth century that the author of the ‘Geographia nubiensis’ was Al-Idrīsī; see G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), p. 23. 83 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 15. 84 I would like to thank Dr John-Paul Ghobrial (Oxford) for this information. 85 Gabriel Sionita and Johannes Hesronita, ‘De Nonnullis orientalium urbibus, nec non indigenarum Religione ac moribus tractaturs brevis’, in Geographia nubensis, appendix, chapter III: ‘Damasci nomina, Descritpio, Ubertas terrae atque Viri illustres’, p. 10. 86 Cf. the German translation of the testament in Des Grossen Propheten und Apostels Mohammeds Testament […], 1664; Gabriel Sionita was mentioned at least twenty-two times in P. Bayles, Dictionnaire historique et critique (5th edn, Amsterdam, 1740), cf. full-text search ‘Sionita’ at http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/node/60 (20 Sept. 2018); for the discussion of ‘Mohamed’s testament’ cf. ‘Art. Mohamed, esp. fn. AA.’, in vol. 3, p. 272. 87 C. Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions (Cambridge, 2016), p. 246. 88 H. Yule, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, 3rd edn by H. Cordier (London, 1903), vol. 2, pp. 320–2, 328; Saiyid Maqbūl Ahmad, India and the Neighbouring Territories in the KIT ĀNUZHAT AL-MUSHT ĀQ FI’ KHTIRĀQ AL-’ĀFĀQ of Al-Sharīf Al-Idrīsī (Leiden, 1960), pp. 27–8; A. Abeydeera, ‘The Knowledge of Sri Lanka as Possessed by the Arabs and the Persians during the Islamic Middle Ages and Al-Idrîsî’s Representation of the Island of Sarandîb’, in F. Herrera Clavero, A. W. Rus, J. L. Ruiz García and J. A. Alarcón Caballero (eds), El mundo del geógrafo Ceutí Al Idrîsî (Ceuta, 2008), pp. 263–77, here pp. 269–71. 89 The map can be found in a suitable reproduction: K. Miller, Weltkarte des Arabers Idrisi vom Jahre 1154. Neudruck des 1928 erschienenen Werkes (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 15: section 29; for a complete edition and translation of the accompanying text see F. Sezgin (ed.), P. Amédée Jaubert, Géographie d’Edrisi traduite de l’arabe en français, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/Main, 1992), esp. pp. 490–6; for recent discussions about the authorship of the world map see Brotton, History, pp. 79–81. 90 R. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, vol. 3: A History of Exploration and Geographical Science from the Middle of the Thirteenth to the Early Years of the Fifteenth Century (c. A.D. 1260–1420) (New York, 1949), pp. 531–53; S. Maqbul Ahmad, ‘Cartography of al-Sharif al-idrisi’, in J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. 2/1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 156–74; C. Drecoll, Idrísí aus Sizilien: der Einfluss eines arabischen Wissenschaftlers auf die Entwicklung der europäischen Geographie (Frankfurt/Main, 2000); M. A. Tolmacheva, ‘Geography’ and ‘Idrisi’, in J. W. Meri (ed.), Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia (New York and London, 2006), pp. 284–8, here p. 286, and pp. 379–80 respectively; T. Gatani, L’opera di al-Idrīsī geografo arabo-siciliano des XII secolo (Palermo, 2012), p. 72; J. Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2013), p. 168; less convinced about Al-Idrīsī’s influence on early modern scholars is Brotton, History, p. 79. 91 Maqbul Ahmad, India, p. 9; and in general: F. B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton, 2009). 92 C. D. K. Yee, ‘Traditional Chinese Cartography and the Myth of Westernization’, in J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. 2/2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 174: Chinese Buddhist map of Jambudvipa. 93 Hedin, Southern Tibet, vol. 1, p. 81; Suárez, Early Mapping, p. 153. 94 Hedin, Southern Tibet, vol. 1, pp. 84, 108–9; J. Klaproth, Mémoires relatifs à l’Asie, 2 vols (Paris, 1826), here vol. 2, pp. 418–19. 95 E. Terry, A Voyage to East India […] (London, 1655), p. 88; in the second edition of this travelogue the cow’s head is even depicted on a map: see E. Terry, A Voyage to East India […] (London, 1777), p. 83. 96 Hobson-Jobson, Glossary, p. 190. 97 F. Mendes Pinto, The Travels of Mendes Pinto, ed. and translated by R. D. Catz (Chicago and London, 1989), p. 74; for a short discussion of Pinto’s account see J.-P. Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Aldershot and Burlington, 2007), article VI, pp. 24–43, here pp. 31–2; earlier rumours are to be found in Tomé Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515 […], vol. 2 (London, 1944), p. 302; cf. Suárez, Early Mapping, p. 107. 98 R. Catz (ed.), Cartas de Fernão Mendes Pinto e outros documentos (Lisbon, 1983), pp. 114–16, 149–52. 99 E. G. Ravenstein, Translations and Commentary on Martin Behaim’s ‘Erdapfel’ (London, 1992), p. 30 (who estimates the lake is in Tibet); J. W. Hessler and Ch. Van Duzer, Seeing the World Anew: The Radial Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps (Delray Beach, 2012), p. 39. 100 D. F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 2: A Century of Wonder, book 3: The Scholarly Disciplines (Chicago and London, 1994), pp. 462–3; Suárez, Early Mapping, pp. 130–57. 101 See also F. Bertelli, ‘East Indies, 1565 (Lago Chiamay)’, in A. E. Nordenskiöld, Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing-Directions (Stockholm, 1897), p. 155, fig. 72. 102 W. Fuchs, The ‘Mongol Atlas’ of China by Chu Ssu-Pen and the Kuang-Yü-T’u with 48 Facsimile Maps Dating from about 1555 (Peiping, 1946), fig. 1, after p. 32. 103 A. Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum […], edited by U. Schneider (Darmstadt, 2007), pp. 106–7; Hedin, Southern Tibet, vol. 1, p. 234. 104 A. Kircher, China monumentis […] illustrata […] (Amsterdam, 1667), part 1, pp. 29–30. 105 F. Mignini (ed.), La cartografia di Matteo Ricci (Rome, 2013), esp. pp. 123–35 and the details of his world map on pp. 178–9; Ch. Hui-Hung, ‘The Human Body as a Universe: Understanding Heaven by Visualization and Sensibility in Jesuit Cartography in China’, Catholic Historical Review, 93, 3 (2007), pp. 517–52; A. Cattaneo, ‘World Cartography in the Jesuit Mission in China: Cosmography, Theology, Pedagogy’, in A. K. Wardegy (ed.), Education for New Times: Revisiting Pedagogical Models in the Jesuit Tradition (Macau, 2014), pp. 71–85; Q. Zhang, Making the New World their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery (Leiden and Boston, 2015), chaps 2 and 3; for a critical view on the Ricci’s impact on Chinese cartography see R. J. Smith, Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography, and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times (London and New York, 2013), pp. 62, 65. 106 Good examples can be found: F. Zhang (ed.), Shi ku quan shu tu jian, 10 vols (Beijing, 2004), vol. 5, p. 590; Zhang, Making the New World Their Own, pp. 256–8; see also V. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, ‘Mapping a “Spiritual Landscape”: Representation of Terrestrial Space in the Shanhaijing’, in D. J. Wyatt and N. di Cosmo (eds), Ethnic Boundaries and Human Geographies in Chinese History (London and New York, 2003), pp. 35–79. 107 M. Martini, Novus Atlas Sinensis, 2 vols, in M. Martini, Opera Omnia, vols 3–4, edited by G. Bertuccioli (Trent, 2002). 108 A. Koller, Weltbilder und die Ästhetik der Geographie: die Offizin Blaeu und die niederländische Kartographie der Frühen Neuzeit (Affalterbach, 2014). 109 Martini, Novus Atlas Sinensis, vol. 1, prefazione, pp. 237–8; Mungello, Curious Land, pp. 106–33; M. Castelnovi, Il primo atlante dell’Impero di Mezzo: Il contributo di Martino Martini alla conoscenza geografica della Cina (Trient, 2012). 110 Castelnovi, Il primo atlante, p. 32. 111 Ibid., pp. 51–2. 112 Martini, Novus Atlas Sinensis, vol. 1, pp. 290–1. 113 Juan González de Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof / Now Reprinted from the Early Translation of R. Parke, 2 vols, edited by George T. Staunton (Farnham, 2010), vol. 2, pp. 322–3. 114 L. M. Brockey, The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2014), p. 159. 115 Martini, Novus Atlas Sinensis, vol. 1, p. 291. 116 Ibid., p. 397. 117 M. Mulsow, Prekäres Wissen: eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main, 2012). 118 Chr. Vogel, Der Untergang der Gesellschaft Jesu als europäisches Medienereignis (Mainz, 2007). 119 See, for example, Pierre Daniel Huet, Situation du paradis terrestre (Paris, 1691); John Bedfort, The Scripture Chronology Demonstrated by Astronomical Calculations (London, 1730); Scafi, Mapping Paradise. 120 Dürr, ‘Mapping the Miracle’. 121 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 6. 122 NWB, issue 20, appendix, p. 32. 123 Hauptstaatsarchiv München, Jes. 607/171 (1717, 18.10.); NWB, issue 7, no. 157, p. 23; Dürr, ‘Das Paradies im fernen Osten’. 124 NWB, issue 16, preface, 3r: ‘Gott hat es also verhänget/ damit von disem Heidnischen Volck/ so voriger Zeiten nichts von unsern Bibeln und Büchern gehört hatte/ sein unbetrogenes Wort bestättiget werde.’ © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. 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TI - Locating Paradise in China: Joseph Stöcklein’s Chronology (1729) in Context
JO - German History
DO - 10.1093/gerhis/ghy098
DA - 2018-11-14
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/locating-paradise-in-china-joseph-st-cklein-s-chronology-1729-in-l5Ua0G5O7C
SP - 497
VL - 36
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -