Historical studies on Chinese Christianity (of both Catholic and Protestant varieties) has been enjoying a veritable boom in recent years. In the immediate post-WWII era (up until the 1970s) studies on Christianity in China were primarily about the missions and missionaries and the role Christian missions played in China's opening up to the modern world. Then a whole generation of China historians turned to greener pastures because of new trends in historical research (such as social history, gender, urban history, Subaltern Studies, cultural history, and so forth). Some consciously turned away from “missionary studies” because of personal political orientation (for instance, those who were sympathetic to the official Chinese perception of Western missionaries as the handmaiden of Euro-American imperialism). For a while anything to do with Christianity in China became not so much taboo as “not cool” for most Western historians of China (including those Chinese scholars working in Western academia). Things have changed in the past decade or so. Informed by new sensibilities and disciplinary orientations (for example, a “China-centred” approach, microhistory, local history, global history, or “post-Western Christianity”), aided by new archival materials and a greater degree of international scholarly collaboration (especially between Chinese and Western scholars), and spurred by a renewed international interest in better understanding the ongoing Christianity saga in an increasingly open and prosperous China, a new generation of China historians have re-embraced the topic of Christianity in China and produced some astonishingly refreshing and illuminating results. For them, the most crucial question is how Christianity became Chinese.

Eugenio Menegon's Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China not only exemplifies but sets an even higher standard for this new and expansive scholarship. It has just won the prestigious Joseph Levenson Book Prize (Pre-1900 Category) from the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (2011). This book is a masterful account of the intricate process of how post-Reformation Catholicism was brought to some very remote corners of dynastic China and eventually was made into a “local religion.” The temporal focus of the book is primarily on the period from the arrival of the first Dominican friars in China in the 1630s to right before the First Opium War (1840–42). The geographical focus is on Fuan (pronounced as Fu An), a county within the larger region of northeastern Fujian Province known conventionally as Mindong (Eastern Fujian), which became one of the earliest strongholds of Catholic missionary activities and convert activism. The diversity of sources mobilized by Menegon to tell this story is impressive. Menegon visited archives and libraries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas and pored over materials in Chinese, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and German (almost none in English except secondary sources, understandably, given the period and locale of his focus).

Besides the introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into two sections. The first section, chapters 1–4, is largely a diachronic account of the different phases of the localization of Catholicism in Fuan. The second section (chapters 5–8) is thematically arranged, examining the characteristics of the Fuan Catholics, their institutional arrangements (priestly work, communal and exorcistic rituals, lay devotional organizations such as the Third Order and the Confraternity of the Rosary and the community of Christian virgins known as beatas). The first generation of Fuan converts, most of whom were degree holders and government-sponsored students preparing for the civil service examinations, sought out and brought the first Dominican friar Angelo Cocchi from Fuzhou (the prefectural seat on the coast) to mountainous and remote Fuan in 1632 to set up the first parish in the area. Despite many obstacles, which included conflicts and clashes with pre-existing power structures represented by lineages, local cults, and the Confucian literati elite, the Catholic community of Fuan took root and expanded. But two issues proved to make the differences between the converts and non-converts intractable: the potential for Christian women to subvert traditional Confucian gender hierarchy (for instance, by vowing not to marry so as to devote their lives to spiritual pursuit) and, which was far more serious, idolatry. Indeed, it was in Fuan where, in 1635, the Dominican and Franciscan friars were first alerted to the local converts' continuing practices of ancestral veneration, heretofore tolerated by the Jesuits, and launched what became known as the “rites controversy” that not only helped bring about the papal prohibition on converts participating in any ancestor or Confucian cult worship and the eventual demise of the Society of Jesus but had lasting impact on how the Chinese state and elites perceived the Teachings of the Lord of Heaven (as Catholicism was known in China). The Catholics in Fuan and elsewhere in China had to endure many rounds of anti-Christian campaigns which led to arrests, expulsions, prohibitions, and sometimes even executions. But these suppressions also brought about unintended consequences such as the increasing reliance on native Chinese priests and the closer contact between the foreign missionaries and women converts (as the convert households hid the friars from the authorities). What is most striking about the entire narrative is how much native agency and voices can be recovered and reconstructed from triangulating missionary writings (reports, letters, hagiographies, and so forth), Chinese dynastic records (such as memorials to the emperors, edicts, diplomatic exchanges, and the like) and the writings of prominent converts and their enemies. At more than 450 pages and covering almost four hundred years, this book is dense with a wealth of people's names, place names, and dates. A chronology of major events and a dramatis personae in the appendix would have facilitated navigating through the text (though this is not at all to say that the text is not clearly written).

This book is meticulously researched, richly referenced, imaginatively structured and beautifully written, and it deserves a wide readership, especially for those interested in studying processes of inter-cultural encounters and global-local dynamics in a comparative framework. The only issue I would like to raise is the author's “strong argument” of Fuan Catholicism as a “local religion.” To the extent that Catholicism became fully enmeshed in the social fabrics of local society in Fuan it was indeed a local religion. But Menegon's book also provides the clearest evidence of how it was ineluctably a translocal and transnational religion: friars from Europe (mostly coming through Spanish America and the Philippines); saints' stories from Europe and the New World (especially those of Saint Rosa of Lima); Fuan natives receiving training and assisting the missionary enterprise in Manila and Europe; churches built with New World silver channelled through Europe and Manila; the wide circulation of books, letters, and other objects (for example, rosaries made from tropical wood in Goa and the Philippines and imported through Macau); not to mention debates in Beijing and other far-flung places; and indulgences granted by the Vatican.