Themes of religion and science, encounters between the West and China, and the adaption of Christianity to Chinese culture are woven into Michela Fontana's biography of Matteo Ricci. Interest in the life of Matteo Ricci, sixteenth century Jesuit missionary to China, has increased recently, as evidenced by the publication of several new works, including the 2011 English translation of Italian science journalist Michela Fontana's Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court. Other recent publications include A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) by R. Po-chia Hsia and Mission to China (London: Faber and Faber, 2011) by Mary Laven. These new works join Jonathan Spence's study of Ricci, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking), published in 1984. Unlike Spence's use of religious images and Ricci's mnemonic techniques to tell of his life and mission in China, Fontana's biography shares with Hsia's book a traditional, chronological account of the life and influence of Matteo Ricci. Fontana and Laven both offer insight into the western and eastern contexts that facilitated connections but also produced cultural clashes. Fontana's distinctive contribution to our understanding of Ricci's mission in China involves the role of science in Ricci's evangelization of China's literati. Fontana traces Ricci's journey from Italy via Portugal to Macao, then from several tumultuous stops in South China before reaching Beijing. She captures his longing to meet the emperor to share the Christian gospel, which he never fulfilled.

Fontana's story of this complex and ambitious man begins with Ricci's birth in 1552 to a family of lesser nobility in Macerata, a town in the Papal States. Ricci's family life was marked by his father's disapproval of Ricci's calling as a missionary and the failure of his father to respond to any of the correspondence that Ricci sent during his thirty-two years of missionary life. Upon departing for China, Ricci chose not to return to his family for a farewell visit, although he knew that he would never return to Italy.

His early years were characterized by his love for learning and his remarkable memory, which served him well as a student at the Roman College and later as he acquired fluency in speaking and writing Chinese. For all the brilliance with which Matteo Ricci encountered Chinese culture, he also displayed limited understanding of the history, philosophies, and ways that shaped Chinese life. For example, when Ricci and his colleagues first arrived in China, they made the mistake of dressing as Buddhist monks as an accommodation to Chinese culture, only to create confusion about Christianity. As Ricci became more and more associated with Chinese intellectuals, his own transformation was marked with the assumption of a new name, Li Madou, Xitai, and with a change of dress to that of a mandarin. More significantly, Ricci often betrayed his ignorance of Chinese science and mathematics as he assumed the superiority of western knowledge, for example in his failure to recognize that the Chinese were more advanced than the West in cataloguing the stars and mapping the heavens.

Ricci did gain tremendous respect for the men who succeeded in passing the various levels of imperial examinations, and he envisioned mathematics and science as ways to evangelize Chinese intellectuals, finding few conflicts between religion and science despite the controversies within the Church over scientific findings. In introducing European mathematics and science, particularly astronomy and geography, to the literati with whom Ricci established significant relationships, he depended upon his memory of his collegiate studies, which prepared him with a foundation in natural philosophy and mathematics, since he had few books with him in China. Ricci did have gifts with which to greet the Chinese, such as sundials, maps, clocks, prisms, and other objects that fascinated the Chinese and opened doors for Ricci to teach inquirers about the science and mathematics of the West. In time, he met Chinese intellectuals who became collaborators in such projects as translating Euclidean mathematics, teaching trigonometry, and creating new world maps, which enlarged the scope of the world by decentering China. The reform of the Chinese calendar and the supervision of the imperial astronomical office in the latter years of the Ming Dynasty, by request of Emperor Wanli, occurred because of Ricci's influence.

In introducing the Christian gospel to the Chinese, Ricci's colleagues who worked among the poor surpassed him in winning converts to the faith. However, unlike other Jesuit missionaries, Ricci envisioned mathematics and science as the means by which he would interest Chinese thinkers in the Christians' God, the Lord of Heaven. In his attempts to communicate with the Chinese about the Lord of Heaven and the Christian way of life, he found in Confucius, but not in Neo-Confucianism, much to appropriate, such as the veneration of the past, the respect for tradition, and the virtue of the just and constant mean. Ricci even discovered within Confucius's words a language for speaking about the Christian God as Shangdi, Lord on High. Adapting Christianity to Chinese life and culture brought a number of literati into the Christian faith, although others could not overcome obstacles, such as the insistence upon monogamy. By the end of his life in 1610, elite Chinese had grown to respect Ricci so much that the emperor gave Matteo Ricci the greatest honor bestowed upon a foreigner in China, a plot of land in a populated area for his burial. According to Fontana, the legacy of Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit mission in China continued until the Catholic Church's eighteenth century controversy over Chinese Christians' observance of traditional rites, such as the honoring of ancestors, and the eventual imperial banning of Catholicism in 1724, ending the Jesuits' role within the Ming Court's and their presence in China.

Michela Fontana's Matteo Ricci will be insightful to scholars interested in several different areas of study. Her expertise as a science journalist shines in her discussions of the ways that western science and religion interacted, sometimes to broaden Ricci's influence in China and sometimes to limit his understanding. She offers detailed discussions of the books that Ricci translated into Chinese and their significance. For those interested in missions history, Fontana portrays Ricci's understanding of and challenges in the evangelization of China's most highly educated population through the appropriation of science, mathematics, and philosophy, as well as scripture and theology. Finally, her biography adds to our knowledge of the life and influence of this Jesuit missionary, who ascended to the highest levels of sixteenth and early seventeenth century Chinese society.