Alfonso Vagnone's Tongyou Jiaoyu is a fascinating text, and Giuliana Falato has done a fine job of presenting it to Anglophone readers. Falato's book is divided into two roughly equal sections: her introduction, which places Vagnone in the context of both Jesuit and Ming dynasty Chinese pedagogy, and a translation of the text itself. Her introduction provides a good discussion of the problems the Jesuits faced not only in translation but also in writing about Christianity itself. The linguistic problems were formidable. Falato tells us that in the late Ming and Qing dynasties, missionaries coined 1,000 neologisms.

Vagnone (1568–1640) was one of a number of Jesuits who wrote and published texts in classical Chinese as part of the missionary enterprise. This genre of texts aims at explicating Western thought to an educated Chinese audience, using terms and concepts that would resonate with that audience. While conversion to Christianity was of course the ultimate aim, there was also interest in simply explicating the thought of men (and they were by and large men) of the west to a Chinese audience. Falato uses the term “transwrite” (as opposed to translate) to describe what it is Vagnone is attempting in this and other texts. It is an apt term. What the Vagnone is doing is not a simple translation; it is an explication of texts in terms that he hopes will make sense to a Chinese audience. It perhaps had mixed results. The Ming dynastic history chronicles his contributions thusly: “He devoted himself to confusing people through the Doctrine of the Lord of Heaven” (4).

Vagnone arrived in Nanjing in 1605; his work there was interrupted by a persecution known as the Nanjing incident (1616–1617), in which a number of Chinese Christians were imprisoned and Vagnone and other missionaries were arrested and expelled. He went to Macao, where he spent eight years. The exile to Macao had its benefits: Vagnone was able to make use of a fine Jesuit library there as he composed On the Education of Children.

On the Education of Children is a serious attempt by an erudite man to explain the way his culture thought about the education of children. The text itself is written in fairly straightforward classical Chinese. We know that the book was “proofread” by two Chinese literati—Han Lin (1598–ca. 1649) and Duan Gun (d. 1641) Collaborating on texts written by Jesuits seems to have been a family occupation of the Han and Duan families. Falato tells us that during the time Vagnone was in Jiangzhou (Shanxi Province), the home of the Han and Duan families, his productivity increased, suggesting that the “proofreading” might have been a more substantial contribution to the work (60). Not only did Han Lin provide the proofreading for the text but he also wrote the preface. In the preface, he asks, given that Chinese texts on elementary education are “so numerous that one cannot read them all in a lifetime,” why should one bother to read a text written by a “man from Western lands?” He answers his own question: the teachings of the wise men from the west are consonant with the teachings of Zhu Xi, the famous Song dynasty philosopher. Thus, for Han, the Valagnao text shows the ways in which the truths of Confucianism are universal truths: if they were not universal, then how would westerners have known about them? This positing of the congruence of some of the teachings of Chinese and Western sages was in the interests of both Chinese interested in Christianity and Jesuit missionaries in the late Ming. But, of course, Han Lin is aware of the missionary's ultimate goals. After delineating the congruence between the two ways of thinking, he writes, “The Westerner's primary aim is to foster respect and awe of the Lord of Heaven, which is quite a different concept from Huiweng's [Zhu Xi] works on self-reverence [jing shen]” (136–138).

The text itself is not aimed at children; it is aimed at their parents and their tutors. It is clear that what Vagnone means by childhood education begins with the marriage of the child's parents. When one selects a spouse, one is mindful that one is selecting a parent for one's children. Although the text is derived from European sources, one cannot help but imagine he chose sources that described Chinese customs that he found to be particularly reprehensible. They were reprehensible when they occurred in Europe as well; that is one aspect of cultural commonality. Vagnone has no patience with fortune tellers; prognostication of all sorts was very common in Ming China. In fact, one of the aspects of the marriage ceremony was the exchange of the precise date and time of birth of the bridal couple to be sure that there were no cosmic antagonisms between them. Education of Children also rails against the practice of wetnurses, another practice that was common among elite families in China as well as in Europe. Vagnone stresses the importance of discipline and talks at some lengths about controlling lascivious behavior. Apparently Pythagoras had developed a reputation for maintaining a school where students were attentive to their work and were oblivious to the charms of other young people (199–205). This is well in concord with Chinese ideas of chastity.

This book is an important contribution to our increasingly nuanced view of what it is early Jesuit missionaries did and of how they perceived their mission. Falato has done diligent research to uncover the impact that the work may have had in China. The most important influence may have been indirect. In a note that prefaces the fifth and final chapter, Vagnone writes, “This draft was concluded seventeen years ago and has not been printed. My confrere considered it good and revised it to have it published.” Falato explains that Vagnone is referring to Giulio Aleni's well-known 1623 text Xixue fan (Summary of Western Learning). Falato argues that Vagnone is claiming paternity to Aleni's text, which was “quite successful and influential on Chinese pedagogy and lexicology” (58, 238).

The book is part of a new series published by Brill, Studies in the History of Christianity in East Asia, edited by M. Antoni Urceler, SJ, and Wu Xiaoxin of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the University of San Francisco. It is an important contribution to our understanding of the cultural complexity of the late Ming dynasty and the ways in which Jesuits participated in that complexity.